The Landscape Tale

Revisiting an old installation

(See previous post for details and directions to the exhibition: https://www.planetart.space/the-landscape-tale-update/ )

The Landscape Tale (original version 1993)

A statement

I believe that the European and European American landscape tradition effectively distances the viewer (who is characteristically middle and upper class) from the outdoors and other people. Virgil’s evocation of country life in The Georgics is the product of both rising imperialism and an urban society. The allure of “simple country life” and its cult of authenticity draws present-day middle class Americans to wilderness preservation as much as to suburbia. We can reclaim our cities and make them livable first by acknowledging our rage, our desire to escape the banality and oppression of our lives.
One way we can change our relationship to the land is to alter mediation forms and structures which separate us. In the US, especially on the west coast, our interest in suburban development has resulted in the destruction of many existing land uses, especially agricultural. We need to sustain and develop agricultural lands to make local sources the bulk of our food supply. While we work politically to create alternative development, we can sow visionary seeds for future harvests.
I hope that by using seemingly familiar images (the landscapes), I can attract the viewer’s eye and invite attention to our conflicts with land use. By providing resources for viewers, I want to support efforts at dynamic urban solutions to the perceived agricultural crisis.

Excerpts from the quotation essay, The Landscape Tale

...To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what Empire in the final analysis is all about. At the moment when a coincidence occurs between real control and Power, the idea of what a given place was (could be, might become), and an actual place--at that moment the struggle for Empire is launched.

–Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993 

“...[I]n walking up Milsom-street, she had the good fortune to meet with the Admiral. He was standing by himself, at a printshop window,....’Ha! is it you? Thank you, thank you.... Here I am, you see, staring at a Picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat. Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine Painters must be, to think that anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that. And yet, here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!’ (laughing heartily) ‘I would not venture over a horsepond in it.’

–Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818

Landscape photography is conventionally used to seduce and entertain....  Conventional landscape photography tends to overwhelm place with Image. It is usually presented in fragments rather than in grounded sequences. Once wrenched from its context, the Image, no matter how well intentioned or well researched, floats off into artland.... No matter how aesthetically pleasing the results may be, places are boiled down into commodities....

–Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local, 1998

The connection of religion to land, however, has been resisted by the dominant culture and the courts. This ancient aspect of religious worship remains virtually incomprehensible to Euro-Americans. Indeed it might: if even some small bits of  land are considered sacred, then they are forever not for sale and not for taxing. This is a deep threat to the assumptions of an endlessly expansive materialist economy.

–Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 1990

...If you work with Nature, you can’t claim property rights. If you take something away from Nature, you state property rights. The act of removal thus becomes the act of owning, and it is for the ability to remove, separate, and fragment that capital depends on science-based technologies. However, ownership through removal and mixing with labor denies that in situ existence there has been prior labor. There is no clear divide between nature and labor in the cultivated Seed. What the industrializing vision sees as Nature is other people’s social labor, and that it wants to denigrate. It defines that labor into non-labor, into biology, into nature. And defines both nature and women’s labor and Third World labor into passivity.

–Vandana Shiva, The Politics of Diversity, 1991

...He had been visiting a friend in a neighbouring county, and that friend having recently had his grounds laid out by an improver, Mr. Rushworth was returned with his head full of the subject, and very eager to be improving his own place in the same way;....

‘...Now at Sotherton, we have a good seven hundred [acres] without reconing the water meadows; so that I think, if so much could be done at Compton, we need not despair. There have been two or three fine old trees cut down that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or anybody of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down; the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill you know,....’

–Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814 

The clearing of Parks as ‘Arcadian’ prospects depended on the completed system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park Boundaries. There, too, an order was being imposed: social and economic but also physical. . . . Indeed, it can be said of these eighteenth-century arranged landscapes not only, as is just, that this was the high point of agrarian bourgeois art, but that they succeeded in creating in the land below their windows and terraces: . . . a rural landscape emptied of rural Labour and of  Labourers; . . .the expression of control and of command. . . . But it is a commanding prospect that is at the same time a triumph of unspoiled Nature: this is the achievement: an effective and still imposing mystification.

–Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 1973

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.

Thomas Jefferson (in the midst of a yellow fever epidemic, 1787), cited in The Lure of the Local, Lucy R. Lippard, 1998

Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this Life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from Peril than the envious court?

Here feel we not the Penalty of Adam,

The season’s difference, as the icy Fang

And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

Which when it bites and blows upon my body

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say

‘This is no flattery. These are Counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.’...

And this our life, exempt from Public Haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

–William Shakespeare, speech of Duke Senior,  As You Like It,  II.i.1-17, 1600

There are Shinto shrines throughout the Japanese islands. Shinto is “the way of the spirits.” Kami are a formless “power” present in everything to some degree but intensified in strength and presence in certain outstanding objects such as large curiously twisted boulders, very old trees, or thundering misty waterfalls.... The greatest of kami centers is Mt. Fuji....  All of Mt. Fuji is a ... shrine, the largest in the nation, from well below timberline all the way to the summit.... 

Long before the rise of any state, the islands of Japan were studded with little shrines–jinja and omiya–that were part of neolithic village culture. Even in the midst of the onrushing industrial energy of the current system, shrine lands still remain untouchable.... In industrial Japan, it’s not that “nothing is sacred,” it’s that the sacred is sacred and that’s all that’s sacred.

...[T]he rule in shrines is that (away from the buildings and paths) you never cut anything, never maintain anything, never clear or thin anything... leaving us a very few stands of ancient forest right inside the cities....

...In the Western Hemisphere we have only the tiniest number of buildings that can be called temples or shrines. The temples of our hemisphere will be some of the planet’s remaining wilderness areas. When we enter them on foot we can sense that the kami or (Maidu) kukini are still in force here.... The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban as part of the same territory--never totally ruined, never completely unnatural.

–Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 1990 

Fanny had the pleasure of seeing him continue at the window with her, ...; and of having his eyes soon turned like hers toward the scene without, where all that was solemn and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclowded Night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. ‘Here’s harmony!’ said she, ‘Here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe. Here’s what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a Night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the World; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of  Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.’”

–Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814

Sociologically, too, there is a broad avenue that runs from Versailles to Le Corbusier and on to American Redevelopment. Bousset, the greatest of the chaplains at Versailles, once attached its reason for being by thundering in the presence of the king, “The city of the rich cannot long endure!” Le Corbusier, en revanche, tells us that his Ideal City will be a city of managers, a Cité d’Affaires, and that only those who can speak the language of the city will be allowed to live in it. All others will be banished to the farms or the industrial linear cities of the “Four Routes.” American Redevelopment [Scully’s term for so-called urban renewal programs in US cities during the 1950’s and 1960’s, programs which destroyed cities that existed already] worked out in much the same way. In its attempt to build up the city’s tax base and to induce suburbanites to shop in it, it gave everything over to superhighways and luxury housing, while low-income neighborhoods were destroyed. Their inhabitants were pushed out of the center of the city, usually with nowhere to go, and empty space, punctuated by skyscraper images of corporate order, of business at large scale, came to dominate the whole. It may therefore be said, I think, that Louis XIV also presides over American Redevelopment no less than over Washington and Paris.

–Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, 1991

The heavenly gift of honey from the air/ Is next my theme. Look kindly on this, too,/ Maecenas. I will show you a spectacle / To marvel at, a world in miniature,/ Gallant commanders and the institutions/ Of a whole nation, its character, pursuits,/ Communities and warfare....

–Virgil, Book Four, the Georgics

...The foundation of Empire is Art & Science. Remove them or Degrade them, and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa, as Englishmen suppose.

–William Blake, (1798)

cited in Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said, 1993

The idea that the Arts of Fortification and Landscape Architecture were almost the same was quite a logical one in the seventeenth century. Together, they shaped a New architecture, an earth-moving art in which, at the scale of the Landscape itself, the human will reached out to control the environment farther than human beings had ever been able to reach before.

–Vincent Scully,  Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, 1991

I think one of the main flaws in the enormous literature in economics and political science and history about imperialism is that very little attention has been paid to the role of culture in keeping an empire maintained. . . .

–Edward W. Said, “interview with David Barsamian,” Z Magazine, July/August 1993.

...If you work with nature, you can’t claim property rights. If you take something away from nature, you state property rights. The act of removal thus becomes the act of owning, and it is for the ability to remove, separate, and fragment that capital depends on science-based technologies. However, ownership through removal and mixing with labor denies that in situ existence there has been prior labor. There is no clear divide between nature and labor in the cultivated seed. What the industrializing vision sees as nature is other people’s social labor, and that it wants to denigrate. It defines that labor into non-labor, into biology, into nature. And defines both nature and women’s labor and Third World labor into passivity.
Vandana Shiva, The Politics of Diversity, 1991

it can be said of these eighteenth-century arranged landscapes not only, as is just, that this was the high point of agrarian bourgeois art, but that they succeeded in creating in the land below their windows and terraces: . . . a rural landscape emptied of rural labour and of labourers; . . .the expression of control and of command. . . . But it is a commanding prospect that is at the same time a triumph of unspoiled nature: this is the achievement: an effective and still imposing mystification.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 1973

framed commercial reproductions

Frederic Church (1826-1900), United States
A Country Home
oil on canvas
32 x 50 inches
collection: Seattle Art Museum

John Constable (1776-1837), Great Britain
The Hay Wain
oil on canvas
51 x 73 inches
collection: The National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), France
Site D’Italie (Italian Landscape)
oil on canvas
21 x 32 inches
collection: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

Jacob Isaacsz van Ruisdael (1628/9-1682), Netherlands
The Mill at Wijk
oil on canvas
33 x 40 inches
collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam