Content area
Full Text
Landscape has long been a source of inspiration. RA Forum invited art historian Malcolm Andrews, author of Measuring America Andro Linklater, artists Simon Caller/ and Hamish Fulton, film-maker Patrick Keiller and architect Farshid Moussavi to discuss the Meaning, Mapping and Making of Landscape. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.
MALCOLM ANDREWS
Origins of the term 'landscape' seem to lie in northern Europe: the Dutch, Belgian, German 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 lbrms 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 modem 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 Afary, and St John, are the argument: But the City, Jerusalem, the Country about, the clouds, and the like, arc 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...