Discuss: The Limits of Landscape

I’m now reading Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and have read her “Wanderlust,” which I expect to read again. I almost always find her observations interesting; she is the only writer I’ve encountered in a long time who makes me want to take notes.

Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that the decision to paint something is also a decision not to paint something else. There are always elements one might have included but chose not to, for reasons the viewer may never know.
I go to a painting, and even to a photograph (though, admittedly, less often), for a representation I understand may be very much a composed or embellished one. I admit I’m more interested in impressions than facts.

As I write this, I’m looking over at the only landscape I own (though I’ve never thought of it as one). It’s a landscape-of-sorts in the form of a scroll by painter Joyce Malerba Goldstein.  The scroll depicts a meeting of earth and sky as seen from the perspective of someone looking down a canal or narrow river toward the horizon.

This Malerba-Goldstein scroll is in some ways a very conventional image. It is saved from being trite by suggesting the meeting of earth and sky, rather than stating it baldly, which to me at least would have made it almost reportage rather than art.

As someone who has begun taking (digital) photos only very recently in connection with my blog, Walking is Transportation.com, I’ve been amazed to discover how much a photo reveals that I, who took the picture, failed to see—as it reveals more fully whatever it was that caught my eye in the first place.

I enjoyed Solnit’s thoughts on landscape and nature.

I write about dreams and about the role of dream imagery in healing. I make the statement in my book that I am alive because of my dreams, a truth for me because my dreams diagnosed my breast cancer 18 years ago when doctors found nothing of interest on a mammogram. In the healing process I learned how to use dream imagery to my advantage - how to take the fixed image of the dream - the visual landscape of the dream - and turn it into a living fluid scene that - in waking - invoked the full scene unbounded by a frame. An important part of that process of turning landscape into “nature” was to connect to my symbols within the dream and allow them to guide me into the deeper meaning of the dream.

I found a personal comparison of working with a sleep dream in Solnit’s distinguishing between the painted landscape and the experience of that landscape when viewed in its full form as nature. Dreams are a place - a place you go to, a place you experience on many levels of consciousness - and when you return to waking from a dream, you have the ability to transfer that place to others in a visual painting of all that happened there. Sometimes your transfer can guide others in understanding the importance of their dreams through a guided tour of your dreamscape.

I’m learning to draw and I have found the most difficult thing to do in a drawing is to not just see an image and transfer it to paper but to really see what is inside the image, what it was before and what it is after its transfer to the paper. I understand now how easy it is to lose the deeper meaning when it becomes fixed on the paper but if I am describing my image to someone, if I am completely in touch with the image, I can take the viewer back to the place where I was and allow the lines on the paper to become fluid again and to capture again the scene I have drawn and perhaps guide the person viewing the image to capture something unique for themself. It might not be the same scene for me, and it might be an entirely different scene for the person looking at my drawing; but both are valid because I am seeing what I have drawn in a different way and the other person is seeing something from their personal experience in a new way.

I am new at drawing. My goal is to learn to “see” in the way Solnit describes and to transfer landscape to paper as nature. I strive - in imagination - to find a way to connect to that deeper sense of place in all the landscapes of my life. I strive to see them in their most fluid and ever-changing forms and to find ways to lead others to that same place - where landscape becomes nature.

Welcome home Rebbecca, You have more claim to the megaliths than most.As your “part” o a perilous European Enlightenment project. cam I reccomernd the current Unesco website bleak, and a bit like trying to stop the Carbon Cycle.Its easy to “see” why the current War on Terror is doomed to failure, it is just like any other colonial stuggle, bad land and overpopulation will out.My hunting dogs aghree lol Interesting l;y they also use photorgaphic representation.Hmmmm

corn,
mussel shells,
hair,
worn work shirts, a
and bread dough

oh humans labor
as animals do,
working with water,
with earth,
with blood,
bone,
honey,
with thanks
for poems
rising up out
of the ground
singing

The issue of landscape versus nature reflects a fundamental belief in Western culture of the sentient human as the subject and the rest of nature as the object. The human as subject has power over the object (nature) - the object is always the servant of the subject. To change this way of looking - to see all nature as subject in its own right - requires a fundamental change in beliefs. And a humility to accept that the needs of other creatures are as important as our own.

As I understand Ms. Solnit, she finds traditional landscape painting and photography lacking because it does not incorporate enough reality.  She also doesn’t like it because it portrays the earth as feminine and; therefore, passive.  Finally she doesn’t like the fact that it “de-emphasizes” the energies which pulse through the landscape and the universe. 

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Of course landscapes leave out stuff.  One of the first and most important compositional decisions an artist makes is what to leave out; what to ignore.  That is just like survival; to live we must decide what to ignore.  Even if it were possible to depict all of reality in a photograph or on a canvas, no artist would want to.  Art is about discrimination.  Whatever an artist’s vision is; to convey it to the rest of us compels omission. 

Moreover, even though she may like the requirement, “traditional” landscapes do reduce a multi-dimensional reality – probably many more than the three Ms. Solnit recognizes – into two.  Photographers must learn to see in at least three dimensions but reduce to two.  Another way of counting – and viewing landscapes – is that they reduce four dimensions to three: A good landscape includes time.  The eye is drawn into the photograph and then through it, thus incorporating at least one concept of time.  But the fundamental point is that the artwork requires imagination from both the artist and the viewer.  The limits Ms. Solnit finds in landscapes may well be the limits of her imagination, not the artistic imagination that created the work.

Next she faults landscapes for coming out of a tradition of seeing land, “. . . as feminine and the feminine as passive—as something you act upon rather than an actor.”  No doubt many artists may have thought that about land as feminine.  The earth is our mother in most traditions, after all.  But it is much less certain that landscapes all come from a tradition of viewing the feminine as passive.  Inanna, Lilith, Hera, Artemis, Durga and uncounted other women from mythology were anything but passive.  I doubt that Ms. Solnit herself is passive. 

Comparing landscapes to real estate, she says, “It is easier to dump nuclear waste, for example, into a place you imagine as inert than one you understand to be constantly moving, changing, and connecting to everywhere else.”  That too seems wrong.  If Ansel Adams had made a photograph of the moon rising over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, I doubt the nation would be contemplating storing our nuclear waste there.  No one is suggesting we should store it in Yosemite, thanks in part to Adam’s landscapes.

Finally, she decries landscape art’s inability to portray the energies pulsing through the place.  It is true that we humans have a very limited ability to detect energy.  We have only five senses which we tap into—most of the time.  And even those are limited.  Most of the reflected light illuminating those landscapes is invisible to our eyes; most of the sound, inaudible to our poor ears; unsmelled by pathetic noses; untasted and mostly untouched.  But does that mean I can’t feel the energy pulsing through a Turner landscape or a Picasso representation of a landscape?  I don’t think so. 

What Ms. Solnit worries about isn’t the art form, it is the viewers.

I’m wondering if anyone knows how to find a transcript or documentation of the debate between Andy Goldsworthy and Edgar Heap of Birds that is referenced at the end of this article.
Thanks!

Romanticism has indded formed much of our Landscape perception.Its vitalism, however is misplaced.Islamic culture for example has no Landscape, We as products of Enlightement thought have tended to “Mediterreanize” much repesentation in photography and painting.The urgency of addressing Global Warming make that proposition redundant,In addressing the very “Real” facts of human extinction(Unep)Solnits work faces that challenge.This in a “Nation of climate change denial”.In the “Anthropocene” errors in human thought have geopolitical implications,it time to reinvent America.