Space and Society

Faculty of Humanities and Arts - UNR

Landscape and Power1

Introduction

The aim of this book is to shift the notion of “landscape” from a noun to a verb. Such an
operation demands that we think of the landscape, not as an object to be seen or as a text to be
read, but as a process through which social and subjective identities are formed.

The study of landscape has undergone two major changes in this century: the first (associated
with modernism) attempted to read the history of landscape primarily on the basis of the
history of landscape painting, and to narrate that history as a progressive movement towards
the purification of the visual field2; the second (associated with postmodernism) tends to
decentralize the role of painting and the purity of the visual in favor of a semiotic and
hermeneutic approach that treats landscape as an allegory of the psychological and the
ideological3. I call the first approach “contemplative” because its aim is to evacuate the verbal,
narrative and historical elements and present an image designed for transcendental
consciousness – a “transparent eyeball”, a “presential” experience or an “innocent gaze”. The
second strategy is interpretive and is exemplified in attempts to decode the landscape as a body
of determining signs. It is clear that landscapes can be deciphered as textual systems.

Natural elements such as trees, stones, water, animals and houses can be read as symbols as
religious, psychological or political allegories; characteristic structures and forms (elevated or
closed perspectives, times of day, positions of a spectator, types of human figures) can be
linked to generic and narrative typologies such as the pastoral, the georgic, the exotic, the
sublime and the picturesque. Landscape and Power proposes to assimilate these approaches within
a more comprehensive model that can question not only what landscape is or what it means
but also what it does, how it functions in cultural practice. The landscape, we suggest, does not
mean or symbolize

1
”Landscape and Power”, The University of Chicago Press, 1994; 2002. Introduction (pp. 1 –
4). Translation by Marilina Lava for the Chair of Space & Society, FHyA, UNR. 2This
approach to landscape aesthetics is best developed in the influential work of Ernst Gombrich,
particularly in his essay “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape”, in Norm
and Form; studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Chicago, 1966). See also Kenneth Clark,
Landscape into Art (Boston. 1963) which popularizes and universalizes Gombrich's claims.
3
See, for example, Reading Landscape: Country—City—Capital, Ed. Simon Pugh
(Manchester, 1990): “This collection of essays proposes that landscape and its representations
are a “text” and that, as such, they are “legible” like any other cultural form” (2-3).

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Faculty of Humanities and Arts - UNR

merely to power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even (or often
presents itself as such) an agent of power that is independent of human intentions. The
landscape as a cultural medium therefore has a double function with respect to something like
ideology: it naturalizes a social and cultural construction by representing an artificial world as
if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes this representation operational by
interpellating its spectator in a relationship more or less determined by his vision and his site.

Consequently, the landscape (whether urban or rural, artificial or natural) always presents
itself to us as a space, as an environment, within which “we” (arranged as “the figures” in the
landscape) find – or lose – ourselves. A consideration of landscape in this way cannot,
therefore, be content simply to displace the illegible visual of the modernist paradigm in
favour of a legible allegory; it must trace the process by which landscape erases its own
legibility and naturalises itself, and it must understand that process in relation to what might be
called the “natural histories” of its own viewers. What we have done and are doing to our
environment, what the environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to others,
and how those “doings” that are promulgated in the medium of representation that we call
“landscape” are the real subjects of Landscape and Power.

Although this collection does not contain any essays on cinematic landscape, it should be
made clear why moving images, in a real sense, are the subtext of these revisionist
considerations of traditional, still images of landscape in photography, painting, and other
media. The basic argument of these essays is that landscape is a dynamic medium in which
“we live, move and have our being” but it is also a medium that is itself in motion from one
place or time to another. In contrast to the usual treatment of landscape aesthetics in terms of
fixed genres (sublime, beautiful, picturesque, pastoral), fixed media (literature, painting,
photography), or fixed places treated as objects for visual contemplation or interpretation, the
essays in this collection examine the ways in which landscape circulates as a medium of
exchange, as a site of visual appropriation, as a focus for the formation of identity. Thus, even
the most traditional subject of landscape aesthetics, 17th-century Dutch painting, is treated in
this collection by Ann Adams as a dynamic, transitional formation, participating in an
ecological revolution (the literal creation of the Netherlands from the sea) and the formation of
a complex network of political, social and cultural identities. In Adams's view, the Dutch
landscape is not merely a body of paintings to be interpreted "in their historical context" but is
a body of economic and cultural practices that make history in both the real and represented
environment, playing a central role in the formation of social subjects as illegible "private"
identities that are publicly determined by figured regional and national identities.

Similarly, Ann Bermingham in her work on the “politics of English landscape drawing” for the
1790s, treats the representation of landscape as a “discourse” within which different political
positions can be articulated, and in turn, as a cultural practice that silences discourse and
disarticulates the legibility of landscape in order to carry out a process of political and
institutional legitimation. Elizabeth Helsinger shows how, for Turner, landscape not only

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represents natural sites but generates a system of “circulating places” associated with the
dissonant class interests of flourishing tourism, nationalism and British imperialism, a system
that reflects, at the same time, the conditions of political representation in the public sphere.
Joel Snyder examines the process by which the American frontier is first appropriated and
domesticated by 19th-century landscape photography and then (in the work of Timothy
O'Sullivan) is, as it were, alienated from those modes of popular consumption to be
represented as an object of dangerous power that can only be interpreted by a professional
expert. David Bunn investigates the transfer of European (especially British) landscape
conventions from the metropolitan core to the imperial periphery, focusing on the ‘transitional’
forms and ‘prosthetic’ features in both verbal and visual representations of the South African
landscape as they work to naturalise its colonial position and manipulate the contradictory
experiences of exile and domestication, exoticism and familiarity.
This collection, from beginning to end, is delimited by a series of essays that propose
antithetical approaches to the question of landscape. My essay, “Imperial Landscape,” aims to
displace the genre of landscape painting from its central place in art historical accounts of
landscape, to offer a consideration of landscape as a medium of representation that is
embodied in a wide variety of other media, and to explore the adequacy between the concept
of landscape in modernist discourse and its use as a colonial technique of representation.
Charles Harrison’s final essay, “The Effects of Landscape,” reopens the question of landscape
as a pictorial genre, goes back to the pictorial practices of modernism, and analyzes its effects,
especially in its moments of resistance to the ideological constructions of the viewer. Harrison
keeps us aware of a point to which all the contributors to this volume subscribe. Taking into
account the “power” of the landscape or the environment in which it is represented does not
imply reading it simply as the representation of power relations or as the trace of the power
relations that influenced its production. Attention must be paid to the specificity of the effects
and to the types of work of the spectator required by the medium depending on the
particularity of the historical situation. Landscape, in the form of the European picturesque
tradition, may well prove to be an "exhausted" medium, at least for the purposes of serious art
or self-critical representation; such exhaustion, however, may signal greater power at other
levels (for example, in the art of mass culture) and a potential for renewal in other forms,
elsewhere.