Page 98 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon
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as a platform for military operations remained a strategic secret.
FDR jokingly claimed the planes took off from Shangri-La, lead -
ing to the actual aircra carrier to be so-named. e presi dent
also named his rustic retreat in Maryland Shangri-La before
Eisenhower changed it to Camp David.
e perspective of utopian films or utopian space, especially in
the West, is one that accords with perspectival painting, cartog-
raphy, sublime and, of course, military targeting and con trol.
It is a view predicated on the vanishing point of the horizon that
led to a Western culture capable of controlling space and move-
ment. A horizon gained, if perhaps violently so, not lost.
Contrast this perspective—the one with the vanishing point,
which is another kind of loss—with that of monochromatic
painting. Consider for example the Korean artist Ahn Gyeon’s
exquisite A Dream Journey to Peach Blossom Paradise or Chinese
landscape paintings on scrolls. Monochromatic paintings and
vertically-tilted landscapes do not yield to the lust of the eye to
control all that it surveys, leaving that perspective of the world
to the side. ey elide the horizon of perspective.
In Simon Morley’s stunningly varied monochromatic vision,
the Lost Horizon proves lost and found at every turn, every fold,
