Beyond the Horizon Line / Bill Lasarow

Raphael, “The School of Athens,” 1511, fresco, 18 x 25’. Courtesy of The Vatican.

The horizon is necessarily one of the most venerated symbols in the long history of visual art. It is unavoidable because of its reality and ubiquity; as soon as you depict a landscape you must deal with it. Make no mistake, its common appearance does not render it a trivial element or a dull subject or an exhausted metaphor. The landscape represents the inevitability of history unfurling relentlessly into the future rather than settling into some static post-historical “utopia” despite the likes of Hegel and Fukuyama.

Art’s task manifests on one level with time and the organic give and take of aesthetic thinking and intuition. Theories are worth spinning, but the individual creativity of many thousands of artists offers enormous weights of evidence both for and against. As artists, we observe the most intimate minutiae, up close. Lift you eyes just a few inches from that patch of dirt, that bug or flower … and you encounter the horizon, off in some distance, sometimes dramatically there and other times shrouded into near invisibility. Without looking directly, what is there to visualize in that space beyond the horizon?

I can’t help myself, my physical eye and mental imagination cannot stay away from the horizon because I feel a need to wander beyond it. The close and the familiar are of interest, but more for relief than for sustained attention. Besides, I did that for about 20 years. I’ve been applying what those years taught me ever since, and, trust me, I stopped fearing the proverbial blank canvas a long time ago. With age fear either melts away or it rules your every waking hour.

J.M.W. Turner, “Rain, Steam and Speed,” 1844, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 48”. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

I understand that some of us are born one way, some another. But it is fungible. How you are raised, the always accumulating sum of one’s experience, naturally shapes and reshapes that raw material. But I also say, the vast majority of our species continues to waste its opportunity at life. We get, at most, about a century on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years, in a universe that has been around for 14.5 billion. What is the meaning of that slice of time? I pray that we never stop wrestling with that question.

Most of us who are privileged to lead a life of comfort and security understandably keep our eyes on the visible path to prosperity, and some also seek the recognition of our fellows. But how many focus on, truly pay attention to the horizon? Artists are disproportionately drawn, sucked into the never-visible realm beyond the horizon.

Georgia O'Keeffe, “Sky Above Clouds IV,” 1965, oil on canvas, 96 x 288”. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I have long subscribed to the school of art that says, risk is inherent in that tendency. But that is exactly where the pungency of the well-lived life takes place. It is where we fully awaken. It is where most of the great adventures take place, in that Great Unknown. If you happen to be hungry for it, you must first have a thirst for freedom and autonomy, and above all you must have a tolerance, if not a taste, for risk and mystery.

Trevor Paglen, “Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground, Dugway, UT: Distance approximately 42 miles, 11:17am,” 2006-07, C-Print, 40 x 40”. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

And that, dear friends, is why the art world matters so much today. The calculations of ordinary politics are secondary to the aesthetics of the creative life well lived. Without those principles and the mental fortitude to maintain them, we would live in a land filled solely with high-end trinkets.

The images I have included here are some of the most consequential that our culture has produced. They serve to demonstrate the role the horizon plays, in all of its many variations, in some of visual art’s highest achievements. Serious artists know their art history, or are hungry to learn about it if they come late to the game, and so do their homework with hunger rather than duty. They pick and choose their visual mentors mostly (not solely, and that’s important) in the context of our great museums. Those museums must lead the way because they have the goods. But the path to get where we need to go, inspired as it is by their public leadership, is not straight and sure. That latter point is so very important; both people and institutions, if intellectually and morally resilient, will ultimately benefit from a shakeup and questioning of assumptions.

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain.  In 2025 he launched Square Cylinder with Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.