AMANDA WATSON
"Sacred refers to that which helps take us out of our little selves into the larger self of the whole universe"
Taken from a book review in "Temenos" (6), of "Good Wild Sacred" Gary Snyder. 1984
"What is “landscape” and why has it been said that all landscape is man-made?
“…European landscape is the constant struggle with tradition, the competition with the centuries of its artistic visualization….Both the physical European landscape and European landscape art can be described as being structured by history over a period of centuries”.
The discovery of perspective during the Renaissance, the invention that enabled man to become the center of “his” world, (anthropocentric) meant that man could now stand and look at a view. Man was looking from a single viewpoint and therefore a limited one; a composed view determined by our peripheral vision, as if one was looking through a window. The seeds of “framing” a view had been sewn. I don’t believe that prior to this time it was natural for someone to look at the land before them as a series of “views through a window”, a series of “snapshots” each viewed separately. It is a way of seeing that had its roots in the Renaissance and has subsequently been reinforced by centuries of cultural and artistic tradition. We now search for a beautiful view and look at it, as if it was a painting before us; it is done naturally and without question.
We also seem to believe that everything that is green, containing shrubs, trees and a few wild flowers is “natural”; not that it is something created and designed by 18th and 19th century English landscape gardeners, on the assumption that they could improve on nature by designing the landscape to reproduce paintings brought back from “The Grand Tour”. We have this belief that what we see before us, in the majority of cases is “nature” and therefore untouched by human hands. Man and the culture prevalent at the time have manipulated both the land and the genre of landscape painting into something akin to a painting by Claude. The world therefore has not been represented truthfully; illusions were created referring to the Arcadian dream.
Is this practice of creating illusions, which allude to a rural, idyllic past still prevalent in today’s society? I believe so; the tourist industry for example is propagating the “wilderness”, “nature”, “natural”, “rural”, “peaceful” and “idyllic” landscape of the past few hundred years. It is a marketing tool, used to lure city-worn busy people to the calm and tranquility of the rural idyll. To gaze in awe at the landscape that inspired Wordsworth, Colderidge, Gilpin, Turner etc; that landscape being the Lake District. Or to be amazed at the towering mountains and sheer granite rock faces of Yosemite National Park, a region in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains made famous by Ansel Adams’s amazing photographs. Does a photograph, a painting or a poem of a place make us want to visit it, and when we get there do we search out a particular view or place, one that we have seen in a visual reproduction? Yes, I believe so; I have done it! Ansel Adams’s photographs inspired me to go to Yosemite and yes I did take photographs from the same spots, as he must have used. I took photographs of a beautiful and quite spectacular environment, composed with artistic rules of composition followed to the letter! If we really think about it however, the rules of composition date back to paintings by Claude Lorraine, surely we need to re-think the rules for a Post-Modern society. Is this all just successful marketing? Definitely, we are being sold an illusion based on art historical and cultural history. No one seems interested in the land surrounding these and other beautiful areas, does anyone actually look before they get out of the car at their destination, the “beauty spot”, the “photo opportunity”, the man-made end product of their efforts. Coaches drop tourists off in Yosemite Valley for 1 hour, before boarding and driving to San Francisco. We have seen Yosemite they say, what they have in fact seen is the part deemed suitably grand enough for tourists to view; the part containing the most spectacular of the mountains, the ones made famous by Ansel Adams’s photographs. We are being sold a pre-packaged “Nature”, that which our culture is still marketing as the “”other”, that to be looked at, that which is separate from us. Socially and culturally we have over the years designated areas of “outstanding natural beauty”, areas of land deemed worthy of protection. Who decided which land was up to standard, and what was it to be protected from?
“The wilderness is not the external “other” with which the sentimental urban dweller engages in moments of existential despair, but is part of the intrinsic internal “self” of each person”
Amanda Watson 2004.
Home |paintings |drawings |constructions |photography |digital |biography |musings |links
Images © Amanda Watson 2007 website designed by Springer Designs