Landscape (Art)

The present paper examines artistic actions realised in the natural environment in the 1970s and 1980s in Slovakia. Within the framework of ecologically-themed performances realised in the nature, it focuses on acts that emphasise the natural environment and its specific ephemeral, poetic or aesthetic elements.
The common motif is the act of walking, hiking or pilgrimage. It focuses on actions that connected the presence in the country with an obvious ecological message (D. Tóth: The Journey to the Compassionate Ties,  1984), or highlighted the vulnerability of the ecosystem (D. Tóth: 14 Stops, 1982), and made an ephemeral track in the country using the artist’s own body (M. Kern: I Drew a Line By Myself, with My Own Body..., 1982). The most important motif of the pilgrimage is the distribution of a symbolic environmental message. (A. Mlynárčik: Alouette´80, 1980 – 1981).

"The Unfixed Landscape" pairs the landscape photography of Meghann Riepenhoff and Matthew Brandt. While the physical practices of these artists vary—one develops cyanotypes while the other works with chromogenic prints—both are intent on engaging with the landscape in unconventional ways. Riepenhoff and Brandt challenge the standard expectations and understanding of what photography is. When the medium gained rapid popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, it was largely due to its reproducibility and accuracy in capturing the subject. These two artists push against these staples of the craft by instead making prints that are wholly unique and partially or completely abstracted. Their embrace of the genre of landscape photography is simultaneously a denial of these expectations. Nevertheless both practices cannot be extricated from the history of art, and photography specifically, that grapple with portrayals of nature. Indeed, it is fruitful to plumb Riepenhoff and Brandt’s work in order to place them within an art historical framework, something that has been not been done in depth until now.

There are two key ideas that will be highlighted through a historical framework that provide the foundation necessary for understanding the work within our present day study of the photographs. The motivations for creating the discussed noteworthy artworks from the past carry forward and are the same impetuses that Riepenhoff and Brandt are tapping into today, but with new approaches: they empower organic matter to take a role in depicting itself, thus placing themselves as collaborators with nature, and they introduce a terrain to an audience for whom it is foreign or distant through innovative techniques. Their continuation of this exploration in today’s contemporary digital landscape make their works relevant and worth our consideration.

In this essay, their artwork will be considered in the context of four historical periods and specific artists active during those periods that directly correlate with the conceptual intentions or physical practice of Riepenhoff and Brandt. The discourse focuses on the rise of cyanotypes during the mid-nineteenth century, nineteenth century Westward expansion landscape photography, the Land Art movement of the late 1960s, and the return to outdated alternative photographic processes and concern for materialism during the late 1960s.

This piece was a long review/crit/assessment of Richard Long's seminal work as an artist working in and with the landscape, published at http://londongrip.co.uk/2009/06/art-the-work-of-richard-long/ in 2009. I was reminded of this piece when I recently attended the launch of Long's fabulous new exhibition in the house and gardens of Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

By analyzing excerpts and cinematic structures from the films From the cloud to the resistance (1979), Too early / too late (1981) and Cézanne (1990), this article will demonstrate that Huillet-Straub’s depiction of landscapes is a critical approach to the alienating relation between environment, society and labor within capitalism, but it concurrently evokes other forms of life that could blossom upon this system’s suppression and whose paradigm is the sensible or the real as the medium of a free and sensuous activity.

As concern for ecological sustainability has become a global issue, its visual representation has become prominent in the art museum. Through the study of the current exhibition, Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate, I analyse the role of exhibition design, curatorial practise and photographic meaning, to understand how environmentalism is communicated through the values of documentary truth. By simplifying the meaning of the photographs to their subject matter, and ignoring the important ideological function of aesthetics, authorship and photographic history, I demonstrate how, through the curatorial framework, the photographs in Imaging a Shattering Earth become isolated from their greater rhetorical meanings. Critically situating my paper within the discourse of photographic history, I maintain that landscape photography presents an ideological way of seeing, based on cultural and social values, and that its location in the museum directly impacts the interpretation of the work.

Despite the dramatic effect of the railway age on the natural surroundings, it was not seen necessarily as destructive to nature. Railways were both the epitome of progress as well as integral features in pastoral landscapes. This seemingly paradoxical perception of railways is partially explained by historicising the "naturalisation" of the German train system. This article describes the rapid transformation of the German train from a symbol of dynamic industrialisation to an integral part of the landscape. Visual images, such as lithographs and postcards, were the catalysts in this process. Railway companies, local elites and travel guide publishers promoted the process of "naturalisation" for economic reasons, but the iconography was a result of visual discourse in nineteenth-century German culture. This paper shows that unlike American, British and French depictions of railways, German artists portrayed a railway system, which rather than conquering nature, was blending peacefully into an existing natural landscape.

While landscape art has been considered as an approved vehicle of the articulation of class and racial relations, as well as imperialism, colonialism and nationalism, gender has, as a rule, been absent from artistic analysis of landscape. Still, “gender has imprinted and continues to imprint itself on the landscape in a myriad of forms”. The cultural construction of land itself is traditionally sexed: Nature is female, as is the Earth; the land can be “Virgin”, conquered via the odyssey of a customarily male explorer; sites can be spoiled, ideal, forbidden or untouched. The language of geography can be remarkably similar to the sexual one, a dichotomy defined by activity and passivity.

The natural world, therefore, is gendered in ways; and furthermore, for a long time so was the artist: pre contemporary culture -art history, even- speaks of creativity being male, unmatched by female’s procreativity. The male landscape artist can therefore -willingly or accidentally- identify and be identified with the combined gendered roles of male artist and explorer. Considering in addition that women’s access to travel, the land and the outdoors in general, has been historically restricted,  with male and female (artists or not) enjoying very different admittance onto the “imaginary and real space that makes up landscape art”, and the argument naturally forms - ought landscape art be reconsidered in light of gender?

The melancholic landscape is important to how we view landscape art and the following long research paper will look at how other artists and I express the emotion of melancholy through landscape. The artworks of nineteenth century romantic landscape artists – like Friedrich and Turner – have inspired contemporary dystopian landscape artworks by artists like: Anselm Kiefer, Emma Stibbon and Jason Hicklin. The emotional expression of alchemy and melancholy in landscape artworks will be unpacked in this paper.

Batı resim sanatının temel konularından biri olan peyzaj, Türk resim sanatının da ana dinamiklerinden birini oluşturmaktadır. Toplumsal ve dinsel nedenlerden dolayı insan bedenine mesafeli yaklaşan sanatçılar, duygularını ifade etme aracı olarak manzara veya belirli doğa imgelerini seçmişlerdir. 19. yüzyıla kadar doğaya olan hayranlığın bir ifadesi olarak estetik kaygıyla ön plana çıkan peyzaj resimleri çağdaş sanatta; sosyal, kültürel, psikolojik ve teknolojik araştırmaların bir metaforu haline gelmiştir. Çağdaş sanatta resim sanatının dışına çıkan sanatçıların; fotoğraf, video-enstalasyon, performans sanatı gibi yeni anlatım olanakları kullanarak oluşturduğu peyzaj imgeleri fiziksel bir sunumun yanında bedenin ve psikolojik durumların bir uzantısıdır. Doğayı kavrama ve sanatla yaşam arasındaki bağıntıların anlaşılması sezgisel bir kavrayış gerektirmektedir. Sanatta peyzaj imgesinin çağdaş sanatçıların eserlerindeki değişen anlamsal çağrışımları, karşılaştırılarak incelenecektir. Landscape which is one of the main subjects of Western pictorial art, also constitutes Turkish pictorial art's basic dynamics. The artists who approach to the human body distantly because of the social and regional reasons, have chosen landscape or certain nature images as an expression tool. Landscape paintings in modern art, which took over as an expression of admiration to the nature until 19th century with aesthetics worry, has become an metaphor of the social, cultural, psychological and technological researches. The artists, who digress painting art in contemporary art, landscape images that are formed by using new narration opportunities as photography, video-installation and performance art are the extension of a physical presentation as well as the psychological situations. Comprehending nature and understanding the relation between art and life require an intuitive insight. The changing semantic connotations in contemporary artists' works in landscape image in art is examined. Giriş Peyzaj ir r ş çerçevesinde yer alan t n doğal ve k lt rel çevrenin meydana etirdiği ir kompozisyon yahut ir ta lodur, aşka ir tanımla ulunduğumuz herhan i ir yerde izi çevreleyen şeylerin t m d r Dağlar, ovalar, çeşitli itki rt s ile arazi, yağmur, ulut i i zellikler peyzajın fiziki elemanlarını oluşturmaktadır Aynı zamanda peyzaj doğa ile insan ve onun k lt r n n değişen oranlarda ir araya elmiş halini yansıtır D nya zerinde doğa ve insanın var olduğu sonsuz varyasyonlarda s rekli değişen ir peyzajlar serisini rmemiz m mk nd r Doğa r n mleri ve onu kullanan insan topluluklarının r n ş ve yaşayış ilkeleri mekan ve zaman oyutuna ağlı olarak değişiklik stermiştir u nedenledir ki peyzaj doğal sosyal ekonomik ve k lt rel etkilerle değişime uğrayan dinamik ir yapıya sahiptir G l, ,s Sanat tarihi s recinde resim sanatına konu olan çevresel elemanlar ve doğa, Orta Çağda insanı Tanrı dan ve te d nyadan uzaklaştıran ir nah i i tanımlamasına ağlı olarak, soyut ve izemli ir nitelik kazanmış, doğa st ir erçeğin sim esi olmuştur atı sanatında doğanın manzara resmi ağlamında fon revi olarak kullanılmasından yola çıkılarak resmin elli aşlı konusu haline elmesi, 1 y zyıl kuzey Avrupa resminde ortaya çıkmıştır ununla irlikte, Almanya da ortaya çıkarak yay ınlaşan Romantizmin, kuzeyde peyzaj resmi ile ne çıkmasını da, manzara eleneğine ve Protestanlığın etirdiği kurallar t n ne ağlamak m mk nd r Octavio Paz Roma nın t renciliğine karşıt olarak, Protestanlığın vur uladığı dinsel deneyimin içe d n k doğası, romantik aşkaldırının ruhsal ve ahlaki nkoşullarını sağladığını elirtmiştir as ler, 1 , s Sanatta peyzaj, irçok akımın şekillenmesini sağlayan temel konulardan iri olmuştur Sanayi devrimi sonrası kentler, makineler, metropoller, insanlığa daha rahat ir yaşam etireceği fikriyle y kselirken Romantiklerin yarattığı kırılma ve oluşturdukları doğa duyarlılığı, modernizme eçiş periyodunda nemli ir d n m noktası olmuştur Romantizm ile irlikte nat ralizm ve Antik Çağ filozofu Lon inus tarafından kullanılan y celik kavramı, 1 Y zyılın nemli kavramlardan olmuştur Carlson, ,s u kavramsal yaklaşımın da desteklemesiyle, romantizmle irlikte peyzajın farklı varyasyonları ve insansız doğa manzaraları, resmin temalarını oluşturmuştur Romantik Dönem: Yüceltilen Doğa

Emma Gashinsky ed., Israel: Land and Identity- Artworks from the Levin Collection, Jerusalem, exh. cat. (Beachwood OH: Roe Green Gallery, Jewish Federation of Cleveland, 2015).

"Israel: Land and Identity," held at the Roe Green Gallery (November 2015 - July 2016), was the first opportunity to view selections from the Ofer Levin Collection outside Israel. This Exhibition and Catalogue was the outcome of a fruitful collaboration between the Cleveland Israel Arts Connection of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and the Levin Collection of Israeli Art in Jerusalem.

Partiendo del paisaje como temática utilizada en las obras de arte a lo largo de toda la historia, hacemos una revisión del Land Art como una actividad artística que explotó el paisaje como medio y escenario expositivo de las obras de arte. Los artistas utilizaron los materiales y los fenómenos naturales para explotar este medio inusual hasta la década de los años 60 y 70 del siglo pasado. Revisamos de una forma general los distintos aspectos que caracterizaron al Land Art y los diferentes niveles de intervención que se dieron en base a las ideas que quisieron materializar.

In the period between Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish landscape painting underwent decisive changes. World landscape or overview landscape as a type lost its importance, while at the same time new landscape types emerged, which focused on singular aspects of reality in landscape. This era marks a turning point, at which the aesthetic concept of landscape changed fundamentally. The representation of mountain and forest landscapes, in which wilderness was regarded for first time as worthy of depicting as an independent topic of landscape painting, signifies a key in this process and forms the subject of this study. These new landscape types are interpreted as a coherent phenomenon set against the backdrop of contemporary ideas of nature and art and placed under the new term „visual curiosity“ – derived from Hans Blumenberg’s concept of the „process of theoretical curiosity“. Concurrently and often in close connection with scientific exploration of the world, the process of visual curiosity in art exploited the appearance of reality, environment and visible nature.

In a short introduction the most distinctive features in the development of Netherlandish mountain and forest landscape painting from 1550 until 1620 are presented. This forms the basis for the ensuing study, which is divided into three methodological aspects.

The first part deals with this phenomenon in the context of the history of concepts and ideas and art theory. The emergence of the aesthetic concept of landscape, the contemporary concept of nature and the changing relationship between both of these ideas within the process of visual curiosity are discussed. Then the idea of praise of creation as a catalyst and justification for visual curiosity with regard to landscape painting is treated. The next chapter discusses the theory of imitation and the idea of emulation of nature by artists and their relationship to landscape painting. Finally, the emergence and development of the notion of the „picturesque“ („schilderachtig“) is interpreted as a characteristic feature of visual curiosity.

The second part is devoted to the image of wilderness with respect to the cultural horizon at that time, which is determined by the interaction of cultural traditions and contemporary experiences. First, the ambivalent and varying attitudes toward „the forest“ are examined. The next chapter explores the implication of the new culture of travelling for understanding of landscape painting, which appears as mediator of foreign landscapes and scene of imaginary travels. The last chapter deals with different aspects of the fascination with the Alps as a new phenomenon in contemporary literature and Netherlandish painting.

In the last and most detailed part the question of the image of wilderness is elucidated and specified with the help of the most common subjects of staffage that appear in mountain and forest landscapes. The manner in which the staffage subjects bearing iconographic traditions were treated as interacting with specific landscapes types offers the opportunity to interpret the image of wilderness in these pictures. The following subjects are examined: the Biblical desert, the poetic wilderness of antiquity, farmers and forest workers, the hunt in the forest, woods of pleasure, travellers in the landscape, robbers, the draughtsman in the landscape, landscapes without human staffage.

Il arrive que le cinéma de fiction représente les espaces naturels autrement que comme un décor ou un « fond » pour l’action, qu’il les amène temporairement à l’avant-plan de l’attention spectatorielle. Ce faisant, il dialogue de façon insistante avec l’héritage des autres arts, au premier rang desquels la peinture et la littérature. Mais il peut aussi proposer des mises en relation avec la nature qui lui sont propres. C’est le cas, notamment, dans un certain nombre de films des trente dernières années, formant un courant non officiel que nous proposons d’appeler « cinéma géopoétique  », auquel participent des œuvres de cinéastes venus du monde entier (Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bruno Dumont, Lisandro Alonso, etc.). Quelles sont les caractéristiques des films géopoétiques qui permettent de les identifier en un corpus cohérent – distinct (tout en lui étant parent par certains aspects) de ce que l’on a pu, ailleurs, appeler « contemporary contemplative cinema » (Harry Turtle) ? Comment ces films mobilisent-ils les moyens expressifs du cinéma afin de tenter de renouveler la compréhension sensible de notre relation à la nature ?

This thesis assesses the impact and legacy of the medieval monastery on the historic landscape up to the present day, examining both physical topography and how landscapes have been perceived and experienced; exploring not only what mark has been left, but also what embedded memory, recognising that the stories about landscape are as important as material evidence. A hypothesis that the topographical legacy of monasticism has remained a central element (though often hidden or unseen) underscoring the genius loci of the places looked at is explored, examining how this has influenced landscape evolution, experience and remembrance.

Monastic estates have traditionally rarely received comprehensive attention from landscape archaeologists and historians, and few studies have attempted to track the subsequent evolution of these estates beyond the Dissolution within the context of their monastic antecedents. The research questions of this project are addressed through the detailed examination of landscapes associated with several monastic houses in the southern Welsh Marches and the tracing of their later progression. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multi-layered approach, a core emphasis on topographical change and continuity is supported by an examination of shifting conceptions of cultural value. Consequently, the study interweaves themes which have long dominated historical and archaeological discourse around landscape with a more recent interest in how places and landscapes are perceived, appreciated and codified in both the past and present. The tools of conventional landscape history and archaeology are deployed, combined with approaches more commonly associated with cultural geography to provide a comprehensive analysis – a deep topography - of the perceptions and realities of these complex landscapes.

Presented here is a research project which can ultimately contribute to informing decisions on how such landscapes with complex pasts and presents are managed, utilised and presented to the wider public; an urgent need, now more than ever, as competing land-use pressures play out across rural and urban Britain, and the cultural and economic value of ‘heritage assets’ is increasingly seen to be realised on a landscape rather than a fragmented site-based level.

The landscape as an artistic topic is not constituted as such until the 19th century, when it sets itself up as the genre par excellence of the epoch. Albeit nature is already present in paintings of previous centuries-from Giotto to Poussin to El Greco-, its role within representation is of secondary importance; its presence is significant just as a contextual element of a scene or main theme. But as an established genre, the landscape refers to a certain extension, in its origins, of nature, that is contemplated and admired by an individual that produces and limits frameworks and references of perception and observation under which such stamp is appreciated. In light of such a contemplative conception of the landscape, as an object seen by a subject who finds delight and aesthetic pleasure, nature acquires an aesthetic character in contrast with previous times in which it was regarded on the basis of subsistence and raw natural resources's exploitation. The landscape, thus, inaugurates a different appreciation of the environment, highly aesthetic, but it also opens up the door to a consciousness of the place. It is in this sense that Smithson's 'abstract geology' is a way to understand the landscape as a cultural construction, a way of looking at and seeing the environment, that transforms and constitutes it into an object of contemplation and representation culturally apprehended. It is a dialectical process combining the earth's surface and thought in a reciprocal mediation, where geological processes and thinking discuss and displace each other.

Associate Professor Alexandra Stratou initiates a dialogue on the notion of Solastalgia with:

Architect Andreas Angelidakis,
Architect Thomas Doxiadis
Architect, Prof. Panos Dragonas
Visual Artist Maria Papadimitriou
Sozita Goudouna (respondent)

Landscape—as a genre, medium, or form of representation, as uncultivated or cultivated, formed or farmed, or seen or shaped land—is the product of many contradictions. In politico-economic terms, landscape has to do with the necessity of preserving humankind's relation to its environment (and the semi-fantastic origin of what today we call “nature”) and with an urge (or ploy) to conceal certain injustices, such as the appropriation of land and of agricultural rural labor. In terms of power, governance, and governmentality, landscape has served many masters with seemingly opposite ideological agendas, including both colonialism (the expansion and control of land beyond historical borders) and nationalism (a contraction or consolidation around a core identity, territorial sovereignty, or flag). Some of these oppositions can be translated into formal principles, by invoking the disparity between horizontality—which art history has often linked to landscape, connoting not only spatial expansion or sequential narration, but also traditional inertia or the maintenance of the status quo—and verticality, which in art has been associated with the figure (as in portraiture) or, in broader anthropological terms, with the triumph of the Spirit and the rise of Homo erectus above animal horizontality and the state of nature.

This thesis looks at the video works of Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, regarding them as starting points for an investigation into affect in relation to place. It wishes to consider the body in space - the body as a mean to think geographically - and space in the body - as spaces are made places through our bond with them. The text looks at Film sets as evidence of the landscape as lexicon; Moffatt’s often surreal, expressionist sets function at the intersection between internal and external landscape, unveiling the land as bearer.
In the postcolonial context of contemporary Australian society, I consider how the land may assume the quality of traumatic contact zone, a site susceptible to ‘hauntings’. The intent, here, is one that considers Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading practices; that is, one that proposes imaginative solutions to oppression. In the case of this text, such proposed solution lay in an affective turn within the Humanities, one that widens the borders of what experiences and styles of articulation can be recorded into history.

An examination of how environments are represented across media forms and how they mediate cultural practices. Media forms include landscape painting, nature photography, art installations, music, video games, science fiction, comics, podcasts, and eco-cinema. Cultural practices include romantic, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions, engaging with indigeneities, nationalism, environmentalism, settler colonialism, and warfare. The following ideas are braided through the course: the Environment in Media (or aesthetic framing of "nature"), Media for the Environment (such as advocacy for preservation), Environment as Media (found forms as vessels of meaning), and Media as Environment (immersion, etc.).

During the late nineteenth century, the Mexican picturesque, through its seemingly innocent charm, veiled its political function and promoted sentiments of national pride. From its ideological foundation in colonial racial politics, this pictorial convention negotiated cultural identity in the newly independent republic by exalting the history of its Indigenous peoples while undermining their subjectivity. By understanding the picturesque as a by-product of the global literary style of sentimentality, we can recognize images of nation building that celebrate a sanitized history, appealing to human emotions in order to justify the supremacy of what was considered enlightened modern civilization.

A catalogue essay for the exhibition, Overburden, by artist Lily Mae Martin (b 1983, Australia) presented at Eureka Centre Ballarat from 3 February to 2 August 2020. The essay provides context for the exhibition which addresses the legacy of Gold Rush mining. Through close observation of the landscape around Ballarat - one of Victoria’s most alluring Gold Rush cities - Lily Mae Martin has uncovered evidence of past catastrophic environmental exploitation and destruction caused by mining during the Victorian Gold Rush. 

From initially viewing this wilderness as pure and unadulterated, the artist began to see it differently: as deeply impacted by the history of Gold Rush mining activity. Her new-found knowledge inspired a deeper investigation into the forgotten environmental mining disasters across the Victorian goldfields, culminating in the creation of the drawings features in the Overburden exhibition. These recent drawings are the result of a year of focussed research and site visits throughout the Ballarat region. Through walking and drawing, the artist began to understand how the landscape had become heavily impacted by mining and transformed by earthworks - abandoned mine shafts, mullock heaps, and the abundant evidence of sludge that once clogged water systems. She also discovered areas where mining had occurred that seemed almost entirely reclaimed by nature.

These drawings have their genesis in on-site sketches that were further developed in her studio resulting in exquisitely detailed pen and ink drawings. Her use of black and white brings to her drawing a strong metaphoric association with truth-telling.  Through her close observation of nature and her dedicated act of drawing the artist aims to strip away nature’s veneer of regeneration, bringing traces of environmental degradation to the fore and revealing the past trauma lurking under the surface of the land. The act of drawing stolen Indigenous land in black and white - a deeply associative Western idiom that is emblematic of the colonial project of claiming and classifying - highlights the act of dispossession embedded in the transfigured landscape and positions nineteenth century gold mining at the centre of the advancement of colonisation.

The number of cultural parks has been steadily increasing in recent years throughout the world. But what is a cultural park? This book provides a detailed answer to this question and sets out the basis for an academic debate that moves beyond the technical narratives that have prevailed to date. It is important to open up the topic to academic scrutiny given that cultural parks are becoming widespread devices being employed by different institutions and social groups to manage and enhance cultural and natural heritage assets and landscapes. The main problem in dealing with this topic is the predominant lack of theory-grounded, critical reflection in the literature about cultural parks. These remain largely conceived as technical instruments deployed by institutions in order to solve an array of problems they must deal with. As cultural parks are generally regarded as positive and constructive tools whose performance is associated with the preservation of heritage, the overcoming of the nature/culture divide, the reinforcing of identity and memory and the strengthening of social cohesion and economic development, this book critically explores these issues through the analysis of the literature on cultural parks. In addition, it provides a novel theoretical conceptualization of cultural parks that is connected with, and underpins, a tentative methodology developed for their empirical analysis.