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Our fascination for the landscape is dependent on both
constancy and change. With each passing moment of seasonal light and weather,
we desperately hang onto our sense of what is familiar about a place. We all
think we understand what links us to a particular landscape - the terrain we
inhabit and travel from, each place we move through and arrive in - and yet,
what is it that is informing such an illusive and one-sided relationship?
Many of the contributors to Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision believe they can answer this question. As academics
in the field of landscape history, they find rather elaborate ways of
explaining how these connections are formed through our sensory, conceptual
and emotional experience of landscape. Despite the aspirations of the editors
Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles who are responsible for three of the
eleven essays, this idea of the landscape as a spatial, psychological and
sensory encounter seems to have been with us for decades, mainly through the
voice of the Land Art Movement. The sheer scale and monumental quality of
works by artists such as Robert Smithson and Christo have given rise to new
theoretical ways of thinking about how both we see and negotiate the
landscape. Likewise both Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have re-emphasised
the implication of movement, making work simply about the significance of the
walk in constructing our 'sense of place'.
In an attempt to get beyond this expansive approach, most of the authors of Sites
Unseen have chosen to focus on particular
elements. They interpret the everyday features of landscape such as gates,
walls, windows, doorways, paths and corners as not only human attempts to
shape out experience but as both metaphorical and literal instruments of
ideological power. Their arguments are concerned with how our environment is
'framed', so that our movement into the landscape can be restricted to 'a
staged experience that may carry an aesthetic experience or a socio-political
agenda'.
Each writer takes a different perspective to demonstrate how human activity
provides the landscape with meaning and definition: Diane Favro concentrates
on an Ancient Roman vision of landscape; D. Fairchild Ruggles describes the
framing devices adopted in the construction of an Islamic palace; David L.
Hays offers aspects from late eighteenth century France. In a more contemporary
context, W. J. T. Mitchell contrasts the Gilo Wall in Jerusalem with
Christo's Gates in Central
Park, New York, while Dianne Harris addresses the domestic situation of
post-war America. However there is a consensus that we should see through
these historical surfaces, to discover the existential truth of a place
through our senses - touching, seeing, smelling and hearing - to evoke an
overall 'vision' of landscape.
The cumulative effect of these cross-disciplinary essays is to constantly
remind the reader that everywhere in the landscape we are faced with some
form of human presence that colours, if not interferes with 'direct'
experience. Throughout this worthy exploration of how this experience is
mediated through gardens, parks, buildings, villages, towns and cities, I was
reminded of the justification Christo gave to an interviewer (in 1993) for
his enigmatic interventions into landscape: 'When we feel the real wind, the
real sun, the real river, the real mountain, the roads - this is reality, and
we use it in our work.' Landscape is subtly formed by human process and Landscape
and Vision shows how this constant
reinvention informs all our actual connections to a place: ingredients that
are essential to orientating any kind of reality for ourselves within the
flux of a twenty-first century environment.
© Peter Gillies
2007
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