Kendra Wallace: The Field of Appearances

There’s something about the genre of “landscape” in the history of Western art that makes it continue to operate as if it were neutral — or, worse, pastoral or picturesque — even though we know better. That something, it seems to me, is the way in which the eyes of the West continue to consume and appropriate nature for sentimental — and let’s face it, profitable — ends. If we think back to the hierarchy of genres in the European academies during the Enlightenment, landscape conveyed ownership, a timeless Classical past, or, later, a Romantic yearning to experience the forces of nature that engulf us, without ever actually being engulfed. No one feared, for example, that Caspar David Friedrich’s lone wanderer might actually fall off of that precipice and disappear into the murk, just as no one feared (back then) that the Tahitian women bathing in brilliant fields of fuchsia in Paul Gauguin’s primitivist reveries might one day jump out of the canvas and say, “Hey, ça suffit !” But with a little push from feminist and postcolonial theory, they did, and in their defiance they revealed the conceptual framework for what it is: the power of the West to cloak its biases in the prettiest of languages in order to facilitate the acceptance of the conventions (and political policies) operating under their cover.