New Terrain - historical overview of landscape painting - Illustration

Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Jack Thorndike

The title of Richard Baron's 1997 landscape 100 Years reflects the timeless, ethereal quality of the image. The rising full moon and twilight atmosphere speak of the tranquility of a natural world far away from the machinery and complication of modern life. But it's not.

100 Years is a computer-generated image constructed from mathematical models and vast amounts of satellite and aerial data. Baron wanted to show the effect large timber cuts would have on a forested mountainside after one century, so he chose a fictional date and determined the time of day, season, state of vegetation and the weather conditions to help him construct the image. Terrain images look like objective landscape photographs, but they actually represent processed data manipulated to depict a time and a condition of the land that never was.

In The Imperial Landscape W.J.T. Mitchell describes a number of social functions that landscape art serves, noting that "landscape is a medium not only for expressing value but also for expressing meaning, for communication between persons." [1] The present article examines how two genres of landscape depiction at either end of the twentieth century construct the relationship between viewers and the land within the ruling ideology of the dominance of nature, while at the same time eliding that inherent hegemony. Both fin de siecle pictorialist photography and contemporary computer-generated terrain images construct their audience to some degree--that is, the images posit a viewing subject that represents a constellation of opinions, beliefs and ideologies. The viewing subjects constructed by pictorialism and by terrain imaging express a specific stance toward technological power and operate within a regime of truth that supports the hegemonic aims of those who produce--or pay for the production of--the image s.

For both pictorialism and terrain imaging the viewing subject's attitude toward technology is paradoxical. The subject is aware that technology produced the photographs and computer images, while at the same time remains naive of the maneuvering of power and wealth needed to make technology possible. Moreover, the domination of nature makes such technology possible and the viewing subject remains naive of that relationship too. Such an implication in technology, plus a negation of relevant power relations, are found in the naive technological subject--the viewer of landscape images.

Michel Foucault describes a regime of truth as "the types of discourse which [society] accepts and makes function as true. " [2] Dominant political entities ordain what counts as truth in order to support ideologies that give them power. Foucault describes knowledge in similar terms, as chosen types of information that justify the hegemony of the ruling powers. The naive technological subject for both pictorialism and for terrain images is implicated in regimes of truth that determine which discourse is legitimate and which is not. These regimes of truth inform contemporary western culture's approach to nature and to environmental issues: Victorian beliefs about how nature should be best understood and contemporary beliefs about the proper relationship between technology and nature.

Precedents

European landscape paintings established hegemony over nature in the cause of royal, national or commercial power while American landscape painting traditions such as those of the Hudson River School appropriated nature as a path to transcendence. However, after the Civil War, the United States government and the national railroad companies used landscape photography's imperialist function to affirm their possession of land in the western territories. Here, the gaze was deployed with machinery--the camera--and it implicated the viewer in technological culture. Mid-nineteenth-century citizens generally engaged in politics without irony, and the territorial photographs served as documents that institutionalized hegemony over the landscape by the democratically elected government. This hegemony was sanctioned by an ascendant authority, namely science. The precision, clarity and supposed objectivity of the images established photography as a standard for validity in a regime of truth that valorized scientific pre cision.

By late in the nineteenth century, pictorialist photographers were in pitched battle with the "purists" who complained that "there is getting to be too much 'Bunthorne and the Lily'. . . too many 'twenty lovesick maidens' hanging on the accents of a few photographic Oscar Wildes."[3] Pictorialists' romantic images eventually triumphed and, though their otherworldly themes would dominate art photography for four decades, they would never be free of the tension inherent in the project of expressing spiritual values in a regime of truth where science is considered the only valid source of knowledge.

More recently, terrain imagery has allowed timber companies and forest management agencies to render the forests under their purview into large-scale images. World War II era aerial photos allowed forest managers to survey forests from the air, and 1970s resource maps allowed dozens of land features--natural and artificial--to be processed in mainframe computers and then manifested as maps expressing values that would allow for more profitable timber cutting. By the 1990s forestry technicians had developed terrain images in response to increased public participation in decisions concerning logging public forests. According to Hans Zuuring of the University of Montana School of Forestry, "All planners need is the numbers, but the public needs the maps."[4] And since the images were made for an audience, a viewing subject was constructed, somewhat aware of the technology needed to produce the images, yet mainly naive of the power relations necessary for the production of those images. By the early 1990s, terra in images would elide that power dynamic even more by obscuring the images' numeric origins and the power relationships that make their production possible.