Stephen Alexander: When the Moon Hits Your Eye (2017)
Caspar David Friedrich: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)
For me, whilst Stephen Alexander's amusing photograph entitled When the Moon Hits Your Eye has a surreal aspect provided by its incorporation of a big pizza pie [1], it is clearly rooted in German Romanticism, nodding as it does to the mid-period work of Caspar David Friedrich [2] which typically features a contemplative figure seen from behind and silhouetted against an allegorical landscape.
This compositional device - known as a Rückenfigur - is often used to convey man's insignificance before the vast expanse of nature; that is to say, his sense of isolation and existential anxiety when confronted with the sublime (i.e., inhuman beauty on an overwhelming scale).
As one commentator rightly notes, in using this anonymous and indistinct figure seen from behind, artists are able to create "a metaphorical bridge for the viewer" [3] by which they are able to insert themselves into the image. The Rückenfigur functions thus as an avatar, as well as symbolising the heroic archetype of Man Alone.
Alexander makes clear, however, that the figure in his image should primarily be conceived as a wanderer - a key term in his philosophical lexicon, as it is for many artists, poets and thinkers who work in a post-Romantic tradition. One recalls the words of Nietzsche, for example, with which I would like to close this short post:
"He who has attained freedom of spirit to any extent cannot regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveller towards a final destination, for such does not exist." [4]
Notes
[1] I have since discovered that Alexander's picture does not, in fact, make use of a pizza; the 'moon' is actually a pancake. It remains a witty and surreal use of food in order to create a work of art.
[2] Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a
19th-century German landscape painter, generally considered the
most important artist of his generation. His work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional
response to the natural world coupled to a Gothic sensibility.
It has been suggested by the American art critic Thomas Bonneville, that Alexander's image actually owes more to the work of the English painter (and visionary) Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), who certainly loved a moonlit landscape. However, whilst this might be the case, I can find no evidence to support this claim.
[3] Laura Thipphawong, 'The Mysterious Appeal of the Rückenfigur' (2021) on artshelp.com: click here.
[4] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I. 638. It's important to note, however, that Nietzsche's wanderer is not some kind of hypercultural tourist. Indeed, paradoxical as it sounds, his form of existence is what Heidegger terms dwelling.
