1. Place: Land and Nature A Sense of Place Lecture 2 Andrea Peach
Last week we looked broadly at the theme of ‘place’ - seminars indicated that we all have very different, and quite personal definitions of what ‘place’ means to us. Some strongly linked to land and geography, others to people.
This week will look at theme of LAND and NATURE as enduring influences on artists, designers, craftspeople, photographers, and question how these concepts give us a ‘sense of place’.
Boyle Family image - not what it seems!

2. Wittgenstein’s Cottage, Lake Eidsvatnet, Norway
Nature - has always been a strong influence and source of creative inspiration to people.
Our idea of ‘sacred space’ often involves somewhere in nature - forests, by the sea etc.
The words of Henry David Thoreau are as relevant to us today as they were over a hundred years ago. Thoreau rejected life in the city to live in a small cabin on Walden Pond for 2 years, striving to be completely self-sufficient and to try and seek harmony with nature and the land.
Walden has now become an iconic ‘place’ in the American psyche - school children learn about it and are taken there on field trips. It is now part of a suburb of Boston.
Image - John Moran - Geddes Brook 1855
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

3. So - our relationship with nature is strong but also fragile
So - our relationship with nature is strong but also fragile. It used to be the fruitful provider, source of strength and fertility upon which community depended, is now fragile and dependent - needs to be managed and protected.
Lucy Lippard writes that today we are heirs to a collective sense of loss - land rapidly disappearing, resources being exhausted,decimation of wildlife
Late twentieth century - strong sense of human alienation from the natural world, breeding a desire to refamiliarise oneself with it. Stronger awareness of environmental concerns and fragility of the ecosystem. This creates a conflict and greater sense of responsibility with the artist/designer and the progress of technology.
Bantar Gebang, Bekasi, West Java, 2000

4. The spirit of place lies in its landscape
E Relph = the spirit of a place lies in its landscape (Relph is one of the first academics to write about ‘place’ - his book ‘place and placelessness’ written in the 1970s serving as a foundation for this field of study)
Many places are built on ‘myths’ of land.
Wilderness myth that underlies America’s image of itself ‘ as a pristine land divinely favoured’
Certainly irony when thinking about destruction of the indigenous population that once occupied these places, and the loss of natural habitats.
National Parks in the US - Recreation is RE- CREATION - a way of transforming ourselves, a way of being reborn

5. Land is a natural phenomenon ‘Landscape’ is a cultural construct
Assumes that ‘landscape’ means everything we see ‘out of doors’ - but there is more to it than that.
The word landscape originated in the German 15th century term ‘landschaft’ - meaning a shaped land, in other words, the antithesis of the wilderness surrounding it.
Today the word is often conflated with place, nature, view, scenery - and can include pretty rural places and socially constructed space
Looking at land within theme of place, many contemporary artists and designers have created works that embody the physical and emotional characteristics of specific locations. In these works both the tactile and psychological qualities are at play.
The treatment of the setting depends on the viewer’s mental outlook (artist and observer), as much as the place itself

6. Casper David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818
Historically, artists dealing with place would look at landscape. Can be traced back to over 2 thousand years ago to wall paintings in Roman villas that included natural scenery.
Landscape in art, conventionally speaking, is a framed representation of a piece of the natural world - a cropped view, selected and reduced as a portable memento of a pleasing visual experience of rural scenery.
But landscape doesn’t happen in nature; landscape is an abstraction, or an appropriation - an artist’s representation of nature. Bestows a mystique on the ‘original’ makes the artist and spectator detached observers of nature.
A landscape, cultivated or wild, is already ‘artificial’ before it has become the subject of a work of art.
Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich demonstrates strong conviction as to the enduring identity of place - a source of awe and inspiration
Casper David Friedrich
Wanderer above
the Sea of Fog
1818

7. Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews 1818
A landscape is what the viewer has selected from the land, edited and modified in accordance with conventional ideas about what constitutes a good view. Land organised an reduced to the point where the human eye can comprehend its breadth and depth in one frame or short scan
We are not passive consumers of landscape images - Our sense of our own identity and relationship to our environment is implicated in our response to such pictures (Mr and Mrs Andrews painting).
Paintings of place in Old Master paintings belonged to the rich and powerful - commissioned by the artistocracy, of their homes and possessions. The real message in this painting is not a couple in harmony with their place, but ‘trespassers keep out’.
Landscape tells us or asks us to think about where we belong. Important issues of identity and orientation are inseparable from the reading of meanings and eliciting of pleasure from landscape.
Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews
1818

8. Little Sparta, Stoneypath (Ian Hamilton Finlay)
18th century ‘landscape’ gardens tried to ‘re-create nature - striving for a more ‘nature look’ which was completely artificial.
Stourhead Henry Hoare created this artificial lake of eighteen acres in a valley by damming up head waters of the Stour river
Photograph taken in the 1930s
Landscape garden of artist Ian Hamilton Finlay in Stoneypath near Edinburgh - combines sculpture, text, garden structures, making references to original landscape gardens of 18th century
Stourhead Wiltshire (Henry Hoare 1720)

9. Pleasures of the Imagination: Connoisseurs 1986
Land is a natural phenomenon - landscape is a cultural construct.
By simply looking, we are shaping and interpreting. By creating a painting or a photograph, or even a garden, we are making a mental conversion.
Landscape pictures breed landscape pictures and visual prejudices - shape the way that we respond to our natural environment.
A landscape is what the viewer has selected from the land, edited and modified in accordance with conventional ideas about what constitutes a good view. Land organised and reduced to the point where the human eye can comprehend its breadth and depth in one frame or short scan
Karen Knorr’s Pleasures of the Imagination: Connoisseurs. The title is ironic.
Shows how we have become detached consumers of landscape and place. The classical décor of the room, highly civilised and refined, has little to do with the natural world. The gilt frame and gold rope cordoning off the picture add to the idea that this is more than a depiction of nature, but instead an object of value.
Knorr - ‘viewers tend to devour images without digesting them’
Karen Knorr
Pleasures of the Imagination: Connoisseurs
1986

10. Timothy O’Sullivan Witches Rocks, Utah 1869 Rick Dingus
1978
So a landscape, cultivated or wild, is already ‘artificial’ before it has become the subject of a work of art.
By simply looking, we are shaping and interpreting. By creating a painting or a photograph, we are making a mental conversion.
From the 1960s photographers were called upon to survey in detail the features of a place or region as a photographic record. O’Sullivan’s brief was to travel throughout Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho to record geographical features. Timothy O’Sullivan - appeared to be literal renderings of the earths surface, but also have powerful aesthetic.
Dingus was part of the RePhotographic project, whose goal was to find exact location where photographers like O’Sullivan stood and retake the shot at the exact time and season. In this case the photograph reveals that O’Sullivan cropped his image and titled the horizon to create amore dramatic effect of eruption. This kind of manipulation was not uncommon, although the public would have been largely unaware.

11. Ansel Adams Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, California, 1927
We know that as with landscape paintings, photographs are also an artificial construct of place.
Ansel Adams - photographs of Yosemite National Park in early 20th century. An example of converting land into landscape. Described his response to place as ‘emotional aesthetic’
Adams known for his great technical skills as a photographer - very popular in the mid-20th century, bring photography to a wider audience. Inspired by nature and a growing national sentiment for the environment. Tapping into a feeling for nature in a century that would be dominated by the machine.
Adams chooses to come up close to Half Dome; the geography is sublimated into an abstract composition of grey tonality. Adams camera creates a scene we would not see with the naked eye - details become sharper than they would normally be (this is PRE-digital photography!)
John Muir (Scot). Founder of National Park system in US, wilderness advocate, still influencing generations of conservationists

12. Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture
Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified. WJT Mitchell

13. Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street, New York, 1976
The new wilderness?
In contemporary art representations of built places are more prevalent than representations of natural places - does this mirror shift in living patterns as we become more urban and detached from nature?
Joel Meyerowitz - Broadway image - described by Graham Clark as an image of the Postmodern city in which ‘the eye is overwhelmed by signs and the colour adds to the effect of chaos … it is difficult to find a solid building at all.
This is the new wilderness - but the opposite to those of the natural wilderness - instead of a place being empty of humans and devoid of artefacts, the city is overused by humans and consists wholly of arefacts.
Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street, New York, 1976

14. The Tree will Continue to Grow except at this Point, 1968-78
Guiseppe Penone
The Tree will Continue to Grow except at this Point,
So returning to nature and place:
In the 20th century the distinction between art and nature has become increasingly problematized. Shifting border between the two has produced very interesting work.
In 1960s, the gallery seemed a less desirable place to show work - too many connections with status and capitalism
Let to Earth Art and Land Art - a reversing of the detached way that landscape had been traditionally presented.
Guiseppe Penone - the tree will continue to grow except at this point
Engagement with natural materials, more or less at the source from which they originate, led to experiments involving the assimilation of the artist’s self with the natural world.
Penone grasped a sapling with his hand, and at point of contact fastened a cast-iron model of his hand to the tree. Over the next ten years the hand maintained its grip and the tree grew around it.

15. Andy Goldsworthy Things are continuously in a state of change or flow and everything, even stone, has a sense of movement about it.
Desire to depict change in place (discussed in the seminars - ‘change’ being a major theme within the subject of place)
Goldsworthy stress on change reminds us that landscape in art has so often functioned to transmit an apparently timeless world - a direct contrast to disturbing discontinuities of urban living.
The concept of change has parallels with Eastern philosophy - Buddhism and the belief in non-permanence of things

16. Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty,
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Robert Smithson, one of the best known practioners of Earth art in 1960s and 70s - Spiral Jetty at Salt Lake (at one stage was going to construct a cinema underneath so he could how film of the making of this earth work. 1,500 foot counter-clockwise coil into Great Salt Lake of Utah - composed of earth, black rock, salt crystals and red algae. Had to buy a lease of the lake. (the shape apparently came to him almost as a hallucination).
Relationship between the object and the site is key - landscape art IS that relationship. If the object is constructed of natural materials, then where does one end and the other begin?
Involves getting one’s hand’s dirty - an act of intervention, kinship with nature - very visceral. Exchange between artist’s mind and the material of the natural world.
Very different to traditional landscape art which is about selecting and framing off a view of landscape and taking back into a studio and then a gallery.
One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing Robert Smithson

17. Christo and Jean Claude Surrounded Islands Biscayne Bay, Miami
Bulgarian born artist - Christo and his French wife Jean Claude.
Surrounded Islands - Biscayne Bay, Florida. Eleven man-made islands lie in the Bay surrounding Miami - sheets of pink polypropylene extend 200 feet from each island. Remained for 2 weeks. Cost (huge) of the work paid for by the artists. Transformed the cityscape - pink petalled islands trying to reclaim some of the beauty from the urbanized smoggy environment.
Christo and Jean Claude
Surrounded Islands
Biscayne Bay, Miami

18. Richard Long I like the idea of using the land without possessing it
Not all Land Art was so large and ambitious
English artist (b1945) - wants to distance himself from the American land artists.
Walking (my art is the act of walking itself)
Said his interest was more thoughtful - wanting to make relationship between art and nature visible and invisible, using ideas, walking, sticks, stones, tracks, water, time in a way that was flexible. Felt it was the antithesis to Land Art because it didn’t really need money, or to buy land, or to wield machinery. (this he felt was truly capitalist art)
Long had a revulsion for Capitalist art that appropriates and transforms tracts of land (was part of leftist 60s anti colonialist green thinking)
Long described his experience of land as a way of simplifying life - similar theme to Henry Thoreau
A Circle in Alaska
1977

19. Jim Partridge Gray’s Seat Lancaster 2000
This genter approach can be seen in the work of Jim Partridge’s bridges. A significant proportion of Partridge’s works have been made in forests and national parks
Engagement with natural materials, more or less at the source from which they originate.
The work is rough, direct, imprecise - mostly uses materials he has found

20. The processes I use are often metaphors for nature’s processes, one which naturally weather and create a surface. This object is not specifically about the landscape ... But is was stimulated by the experience of being in a particular
place at a particular time. It is about an almost indescribable feeling of fragility and ever vulnerability
Hand-spun and woven silk, resist dyed, vegetable dyed.
Dutch Australian - many senses of place
This metaphoric use of land, nature, place is very prevalent in the work of textile designers, and craftspeople generally.
Elsje van Keppel
Animal Vegetable
1996

21. Simon Starling Island for Weeds (Prototype) 2003
Starling’s work investigates how this plant (indigenous to the Caucasus and Southern mediterranean) which was introduced in the 18th century in British ornamental gardens, has escaped and now become established as a part of the indigenous flora. A major problem for landowners and conservationists alike.
Conceived to float on Loch Lomond, within Scottish National Park, Island for weeds is a structure designed to sustain and contain a small number of Rhodendron Ponticum plants.
Poses question about nature and the make-up of the country’s landscape.
Lill Nielson and the oil seed rape?
Starling’s work is practically conceived - made from plastic pipes used in marine engineering and fisheries - can regulate its own height in the water.
Simon Starling Island for Weeds (Prototype) 2003

22. Simon Starling Tabernas Desert Run Biscayne Bay, Miami 1980-1983
 Simon Starling is fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object or substance into another. He makes objects, installations, and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas  About nature, technology and economics. Starling describes his work as ‘˜the physical manifestation of a thought process’, revealing hidden histories and relationships.
For Tabernas Desert Run 2004, Starling crossed the Tabernas desert in Spain on an improvised electric bicycle. The only waste product the vehicle produced was water, which he used to paint an illustration of a cactus. The contrast between the supremely efficient cactus and the contrived efforts of man is both comic and insightful, highlighting the commercial exploitation of natural resources in the region.
Simon Starling
Tabernas Desert Run
Biscayne Bay, Miami

23. Dalziel and Scullion Modern Nature Tyrebagger Hill, Aberdeenshire 2000
We are at a critical juncture in the relationship between humanity and Nature. Intense economic competition, population growth - all put pressure on the natural environment.
In NE we have witnessed depletion of fish stocks in North Sea, demise of farming - cannot be optimistic about our ability to master nature.
Modern Nature - Tyrebagger Trust. Aluminium structures grouped like a glade of sliver birch, which house solar panels powering a sound system. The speakers buried underground in the surrounding landscape periodically broadcast the call of the Capercaillie
Dalziel and Scullion Modern Nature Tyrebagger Hill, Aberdeenshire 2000

24. Roni Horn Becoming a Landscape, Iceland, 1999-2001
Iceland taught me that each place is a unique location of change.
No place is a fixed or concluded thing.
Horn recognises that one of the most important relationships in an understanding of place within the visual arts: a desire to re-enchant the land with meaning or to examine that area of overlap between inner and outer spaces. (inner - body; outer - surroundings)
Horn’s work: Becoming a landscape. Paired photographs of thermal springs and a young person. Hard to read the person’s age or gender. The geysirs seem body-like
Roni Horn Becoming a Landscape, Iceland,

25. Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project Tate Modern, London 2003
The view is not
separate from
the viewer
Nature and identity are one for Eliasson - his native Iceland featuring strongly: fog, moss, steam and ice - a wilderness that is personal and exotic.
Like Goldsworthy, Eliasson’s work taps into the changing aspects of nature
Ability to see ourselves seeing, makes us conscious of the act of perception, being caught in the moment of awareness.
In order to fully understand the nature of perception, we must step back from it so that we no longer view objects in the world through the lens of perception but make perception itself the object of consciousness. (theories of philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty - phenomenology)
Experience as both physiological and psychological. His works challenge presuppositions of our surroundings by creating situations that require viewers to reorder their perception of the environment and their place within it.
Describes his works as ‘pheomena-producers’ - devices which generate replicas of nature.
Also looking at our connection with weather - preoccupation with weather but also general detachment from it.
Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project Tate Modern, London 2003

26. The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes Marcel Proust
‘Place’ is complex - different ‘senses of place’ are often in conflict with one another

27. For the Seminar: Bring an object, text or image, which you feel is either directly or indirectly influenced by either ‘land’ or ‘nature’. Come prepared to discuss how this contributes to our programme theme of ‘a sense of place’.