Meaning, mapping and making of landscape

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Jeremy Melvin

Landscape has long been a source of inspiration. RA Forum invited art historian Malcolm Andrews, author of Measuring America Andro Linklater, artists Simon Callery and Hamish Fulton, film-maker Patrick Keiller and architect Farshid Moussavi to discuss the Meaning, Mapping and Making of Landscape.

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MALCOLM ANDREWS

Origins of the term 'landscape' seem to lie in northern Europe: the Dutch, Belgian, Germao terms, Lantschap, Lantskip. Landschaft respectively. Sometimes it was used to designate land in the immediate environs of a town or city, not just natural scenery. When eventually used in terms of art, it designates the area of a religious painting that forms the setting for the central drama and its protagonists. Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1670) gives a definition that might have applied to the term through much of the early modern period:

'Landtskip (Belg) Parergon, Paisage, or By-work, which is an expressing the Land, by Hills, Woods, Castles, valleys, Rivers, Cities & c as far as may be shewed in our Horizon. All that which in a Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or by-work. As in the Table of our Saviors passion, the picture of Christ upon the Rood (which is the proper English word for Cross) the two theeves, the blessed Virgin Mary, and St John, are the argument: But the City, Jerusalem, the Country about, the clouds, and the like, are Landskip.' It is the outdoor setting for the principal dramatic action, and includes towns and settlements as well as countryside scenes. However, it was during the Enlightenment that Landscape became more emphatically associated with natural, non-urban scenery. Romanticism's worship of Nature and of the Sublime in Nature, and its recoil from early industrialization and rapid urbanization pushed Landscape into remoter retreat from signs of developed civilization. We have inherited the Romantic version of landscape. However, modern understanding of landscape often emphasizes its conceptual, cultural significance rather than the topographical or material meaning. Landscape is explored as a mental construct. 'Landscape is Nature mediated by Culture' is an attractively succinct definition, until one begins to ask what exactly is 'Nature'? and question the extent to which 'Nature' itself is a cultural construct? Can we oppose Nature and Culture so easily as this definition suggests? Where do we draw the line between Nature and Culture to preserve the integrity of 'Nature'? These questions suggest that 'tastes' in landscape act as a cultural barometer of civilization's sense of its relationship with Nature.

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Images of landscape often evoke sheer pleasure, a pleasure which arises from several possible sources. It might be associations, such as memories of holidays, pastoral idylls, the peacefulness, the slower pace, or a whole imagined way of life. Equally it could be from the space, light, freedom, colour found in landscape. It might also be seen as an antidote, either to an over-controlled domestic environment, or the complexity and pressure of city living. Contrasting Joel Meyerowitz's Broadway and West 46th Street with Claude Monet's Meadow with Haystacks shows the latter. Meyerowitz gives an archetypal view of the contemporary city. All is oppressive foreground with lots of people but no human interaction against a bewildering array of signs, where Monet offers depth, readability at a glance and softened forms, feathery texture and gentle gradation and soft colour against Meyerowitz's hard, sharp edges and austere geometry. The metropolis is the new wilderness, but constituted by almost the opposite components to those of the old natural wilderness: instead of a place almost wholly empty of humans and devoid of any artefacts, the city is a place overused by humans and consisting wholly of artefacts.

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As we become more urbanized and mechanized, the greater our appetite for landscapes without human presence, or signs of human presence--unless, that is, the human presence is organically sympathetic to landscape, such as shepherds, cottages, or cornfields. The relish for the Sublime--for mountain scenery, horror, mystery and the irrational--arose just at the time when the Enlightenment was celebrating triumphant discoveries of Nature's Laws. In Romanticism the perception of our fragile mutability heightened a sense of Nature's stable, unchanging constitution. That mindset is less and less sustainable now: Nature we know to be a dynamic, changing process, its renewability limited. So the experience of landscape is attuned to our desires and expectations, and to our cultural conditioning.

Since the early modern period, landscape has become an increasingly precious aesthetic amenity. We like to consume it. We put a value on it. On 4 October 1769, while at Keswick. Thomas Gray encapsulated this point, [I] saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmitt to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds'. Modern day tourists follow Gray's line of thought. They see a grand stretch of lakes and mountains, use the camera to frame a section of the spectacle, and take the picture, supposedly 'fixing it in all the softness of its living colours'. Then they get it developed and printed and offer it for sale, and these terms, 'take', 'capture' and 'fix' all belong to the language of appropriation. Landscape is a commodity. It is commodified as an aesthetic amenity as well as a piece of real estate. In View from Mount Holyoke, Thomas Cole schematically dramatizes landscape values in a diagonally divided composition. In the sunlit river valley the new farms, wrested from the wilderness, and the grid of their fields, flourish in a benign, fertile, mappable landscape. Old savage America survives in the unmappable high-country wilderness on the left, as a Romantically precious landscape of the Sublime.