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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Landscape & Nature

  
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:37 / 05.08.03
This is probably a bit of a half-warmed fish as far as threads go, but I thought I'd whack it up anyway. It was prompted by this George Monbiot piece in today's Guardian, which is a basic account of how western and colonial powers have appropriated the environments of other people in order to create visions of nature and of its paradisal state:

The Yosemite valley in California was set aside by Abraham Lincoln as the world's first public wilderness. As the historian Simon Schama records: "The brilliant meadow floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants." The first whites to enter the valley were the soldiers sent to kill them. Eden, in an inversion of the biblical story, was thus created by man's expulsion. The colonists redefined the Ahwahneechee's managed habitat as wilderness in order to assert both a temporal and spiritual dominion over it.

(Schama reference is probably from Landscape and Memory, which is a bit of a behemoth and full of purple prose but is still worth reading)

This is not only the case with native peoples in conquered countries, but with the populations of the powers themselves - Monbiot cites the difference between Constable's idyllic country scenes and the realities of the enclosures of the Agricultural Revolution, a topic which is also well covered in a book called The Dark Side of the Landscape by... I forget, but will look it up when I get home.

I think the tendency to see new landscapes as 'empty' is primarily connected with the colonialist worldview - I remember reading an article about a play set in the East Indies islands which saw the 'natural' landscape (inhabited by native islanders, of course) as a wilderness which could be beautified by agricultural improvements and cultivation; obviously later that changed so that 'wildernesses' were seen as places to be preserved free of human habitation (i.e. free of natives but free to the gaze of the colonialists and preserved for them...). So the appreciation of suh landscapes can be as deleterious as the exploitation of them (and indeed the two are often the same thing).

Monbiot's article highlights one of the many ways in which the landscape can be pictured by artists in a politicised fashion, but I'm sure there are others. After all, can there ever be such a thing as an unmediated prepresentation of the natural world? No... there was a thread or a post or I was talking to someone on Barbelith once about how David Attenborough's nature programmes misrepresent 'Nature' to us and impose narratives on it (and I'm sure there was more). And an artist like Andy Goldsworthy is as guilty of manipulating the environment as any other - imposing ideas of what is natural for materials. Then there are more abstract representations of landscape (I'm thinking of colour field painters like Clifford Still here in particular)... and so it goes on.

I will post some more when I get home and have time to get some decent examples together, but does anyone have any thoughts/examples to contribute? As wishy-washy as you like (much like this post...)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:29 / 05.08.03
To go back, back, back, I assume some of you don't know lansdscape history so-- quick 'A' level course for you...

Landscape art has a long history. In its current form it really begins in the 18th century with artists like JMW Turner. It is probably important to note that Turner was a terribly controversial artist while he was painting. These were after all some of the first paintings created purely to reflect the landscape and not to represent, for instance, land ownership. Gainsborough's work is a perfect example of landscape art created to make a point about people's lives and not to simply show the natural world. Yet there is a great expanse of land shown in his pictures.

Landscape art falls under a number of sub-categories, most I don't remember but there's the Romantic, the Sublime, Roccoco... blah blah. I'll add some links in later.
 
 
Linus Dunce
14:39 / 05.08.03
The concept of the wilderness predates the colonisation of America by a long way and probably painting itself. Also, despite the culpability of painters that is implied by Monbiot, it's a bit of an anachronism -- this is the way people saw the world back then. They were certainly wrong but that doesn't make them liars.

More established arguments hold that landscapes were not so much propagandist paint jobs, rather, expressions of the desire to objectify the scary wilderness/rural type into something more benign or to retain some continuity in the face of rapid, fundamental societal change. In short, the artist was just as blind as their audience.

Whatever, spin isn't peculiar to the brush-suckers --

The first whites to enter the valley were the soldiers sent to kill them.

I'm not denying there were soldiers sent, probably in effect to kill the Native Americans, but shouldn't that be the first recorded whites at the very least? Doesn't sound so snappy though, does it?

... our fathomless collective guilt. Whatever George. I think we are guilty, but I really don't feel responsible for the actions of the government of Botswana. Maybe if there were fewer people recasting the myth of the Noble Savage as the Helpless Victim of Capitalism there'd have been a longer dialogue before the indigenous people were kicked out. And I don't think blithely arguing a causal relationship between Capability Brown's gardening and genocide really helps anyone, does it?

Sorry, can't stand Monbiot.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
15:06 / 05.08.03
oOOH, I sniff an argument... Rather like Monbiot myself, and I think it's a bit unfair to castigate him for not quite covering his arse in one statement. Also, he's not suggesting a causal link between Capability Brown and genocide so much as highlighting the apparent tendency for people to avoid looking at unpleasantness - 'Confronted by atrocities, we invoke a prelapsarian wonder', as he puts it. That's coming it a bit strong, really, but there is a valid point there.

I think we are guilty, but I really don't feel responsible for the actions of the government of Botswana.

I think that western society can be seen as collectively responsible for some of it if, as Monbiot suggests, the reasons behind it were less to do with preserving wildlife habitat than tourism and the diamond mines. Cui bono?

The concept of the wilderness predates the colonisation of America by a long way and probably painting itself. Also, despite the culpability of painters that is implied by Monbiot, it's a bit of an anachronism -- this is the way people saw the world back then. They were certainly wrong but that doesn't make them liars.

True enough, but I think the point isn't so much the concept of the wilderness per se as the conceptualisation of the wilderness as being virgin territory, ready to be shaped by its discoverers, when in fact it was already the environment of indigenous peoples. So it is, as you say, a question of a different perspective, but I don't think it's one that can be dismissed as 'just the way they saw things then' and more than we could say that the idea a woman was the property of her husband was 'just the way they saw things then' - ideologies do affect events, even if that effect is not always direct.

More established arguments hold that landscapes were not so much propagandist paint jobs, rather, expressions of the desire to objectify the scary wilderness/rural type into something more benign or to retain some continuity in the face of rapid, fundamental societal change. In short, the artist was just as blind as their audience.

Yeah, certainly it looks as though that's what Constable does, but of course not all landscape painters did Constable-ish bucolic idylls (I want to address some of Anna's points later re: different forms of landscape paintings but I need me books to do that, I think). What about someone like Caspar Friedrich? Or there's a thread somewhere on here on the American Sublime which might be relevant - will go and haul it out...

It is probably important to note that Turner was a terribly controversial artist while he was painting. These were after all some of the first paintings created purely to reflect the landscape and not to represent, for instance, land ownership

Yeah, he was controversial all right, but wasn't this because of his technique rather than his subject matter per se? Can't quite remember the details of the controversy, though I know Ruskin stuck up for him against the stuck-in-the-muds (Academicians=C19 Stuckists?). Also probably worth noting that he spent a lot of time doing his marvellous studies of light etc. in the landscape at Petworth, under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland (I think at any rate - know it was one of the Percys who built it). So it's not as obvious as it is in Gainsborough, but it's still there in the background...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
17:32 / 05.08.03
he was controversial all right, but wasn't this because of his technique rather than his subject matter per se?

Both actually! Turner managed to break ground that Gainsborough didn't because he never had a human or object as the focal point of his paintings. The change in subject matter and the technique were both progressive.
 
 
Linus Dunce
17:36 / 05.08.03
ideologies do affect events, even if that effect is not always direct

That true of course, but what Monbiot seems to be saying is that it was a knowing ideology, when in fact it was likely something closer to dumb consensus. A man who believes that his wife's property is morally his own is not a liar, just very wrong -- not the same thing at all.

Let's not argue, but talk more of landscapes :-) I only really replied to this thread the way I did because, to me, Monbiot is a general who hands out ill-made weapons to his troops then accuses the enemy of mendacity.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
20:16 / 05.08.03
I think he's a lot better than that, but as you say, let us agree to differ and talk of landscapes... I think that, where people in the past thought differently to the way we do now, it's dangerous to assume that it was a 'dumb consensus' (and I'm guessing that you didn't actually mean that they were all stupid, but...). Different, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was thoughtless. I still haven't worked out how people in the past thought of other people - it's one of those things you could study for a lifetime and still change your mind every three minutes.

Here's the thread on the American Sublime - mostly pictures, but some jolly nice ones. I never did manage to go and see it.

Here's one of the Joseph Wright of Derby ones I was talking about:



A Constable study (I much prefer his studies actually to his finished paintings:



I think especially in his cloud studies, Constable does foreshadow Turner... the most important thing about Turner for me is his light, which is astonishing, and his attempt to capture weather conditions. The Tate's Turner collection is the best place to look online (duh, but still, you know...). My personal favourites aren't the landscpaes but the sea pictures (am an absolute sucker for a sea picture):



Bloody brilliant!

And of course it was Ruskin and his enthusiasm for Turner who inspired the hyper-realism of some of the Pre-Raphaelites, such as Holman Hunt:



I don't think Turner's work was totally without precedent, but I certainly agree that he was a revolutionary... More thoughts to follow...
 
 
Linus Dunce
21:53 / 05.08.03
Oh yes, they are marvellous, and there was a kind of luminism thing going on, wasn't there? Though that Holman Hunt is a bit too fiddly for me.

To resize, just add width="300" (or however many pixels you want) in the tag. Though I don't mind if you don't -- resized images take just as long to download, and look crap in my browser.
 
  
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