ABSTRACT
Landscape has long formed a topic of artistic interest, rising to real prominence in the western art world in the eighteenth century when it was finally accepted as an appropriate subject for ‘academic’ painting, and more recently coming to be a topic of engagement for artists working in a range of different media – from sculpture to performance and land art (Clarke, 1999; Andrews, 1999). Visual arts practices, and especially painting, have long played a crucial role in the development of our ideas and understandings of ‘landscape’.1 Indeed, to grasp the significance of artistic engagements with landscape it is important to examine how it is they have become enrolled within studies of the social, economic, cultural and political significance of landscape, and its theorizations. For landscape scholars the value of art lies in the relationship that aesthetic practices develop
between the ‘really real’, of the physical and cultural landscape, and those things ‘really made up’ – representations, signs, experiences, pictures – gathered together inside our heads (Olwig, 1996; Daniels, 1989). Instead, then, of a separation between the physical material world and our experiences and imaginations of that world – that is, a thoroughly Cartesian divide – studies of landscape art practices point us towards the myriad different ways in which the imaginary and the material are connected. This allows us to explore and appreciate, for example, the ways in which the scenes pictured in landscape painting can have real material consequences for what that landscape looks like, and for those people who live in it (Daniels, 1989; Lowenthal and Prince, 1964). In order to make sense of such a large field of art practice, this chapter introduces just three
examples of the relationship between landscape and art, to: illustrate the scope of the ideas about landscape that art has purchase upon; provide a critical framework for the analysis of landscape art; and indicate future directions for study. Throughout, the discussion will emphasize an expanded field of art and the visual cultures of landscape that encompass everything from large oil paintings, of the sort found in galleries, to quick sketches, maps and photographs, as well as scientific and computer generated visualizations.2 The first framing of landscape and art relations considered here is an exploration of the visualizations of landscape that are produced by a combination of artist and scientific approaches to landscape in the ‘Tropical Visions’ produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second focuses on a similar period of painting, but examines how landscape oils of this era have become enrolled in
discussions around the politics of landscape. To end, the third examination of landscape-art relations will focus on future directions, pointing towards, the possibilities that landscape art offers for thinking about embodied and performative acts of landscaping, examining how artistic practices can help us to think about our multi-sensory relationships to the landscapes that we inhabit. Alongside an ongoing preoccupation with politics and ethics, one of the principal coordinates
for the analysis of landscape art is vision. Landscape is often understood as something that is looked at, over or upon, with landscape painting associated with a ‘god’s-eye trick’, a seeing subject, and an artist, who engage the landscape from positions of power. Here I want to explore how landscape art opens us up to a range of ways of seeing and of sensing, from the ‘gaze’, to the veiling of unwanted sites, as well as reinforcing landscape as something we experience and engage with through all our senses, not just something we look at. The three framings of landscape and art presented here are by no means exhaustive, and,
despite their approximate chronological ordering, the three sections should resist being read as an historical progression, or indeed a geographical circumscription. For whilst attempts have been made to engage with literatures that explore landscape painting made in countries other than the UK, Europe and the US, the focus of the conceptual engagements with landscape art that form the focus of this discussion have tended towards work originating from these countries. Whether this can be interpreted as indicative of there being something peculiarly English about landscape, as Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) suggest, is something that still warrants further exploration, as recent theorists have, for example found much value in the non-representational traditions of non-western landscape visualizations (Grosz, 2005). Across the three sections, then, there are similarities and differences to be found: between the
ways in which the artists are engaging with landscape as they make their works, between the different ways the art works develop our understandings and experiences of landscape, and, in how it is that art is enrolled within landscape studies. Crucial across these sections are issues of power and politics, together with, in the final section, questions around the place and value for art in relation to an ethical conduct towards our landscapes and environment.
