Unframed Landscape

For the frame cuts and recuts; on its own it conquers the infinite of the natural world, takes away the too-full, the too-diverse. The limits that it sets out are indispensable to construction of landscape as such. Its law rules the relationship between our point of view (singular, infinitesimal) and the multiple, monstrous thing. And so not only do we interpose the frame of the viewfinder between the world and us, but we double and triple the veils, the screens.
— Anne Cauquelin 1 1  - Anne Cauquelin, L’invention du paysage, 3rd ed. (Paris: PUF (Quadrige), 2004 [1989]), 122 (our translation).

In the interview that opens the thematic section, philosopher Anne Cauquelin, author of the well-known book L’invention du paysage, reminds us that landscape is traditionally a product of pictorial and perspectival research and that the relationship between landscape and nature stirs up confusion, which might contribute to distancing us from nature. Cauquelin notes that the frame that cuts out the landscape transforms our vision of nature, somehow subduing the wild. Yet, considering an environment increasingly damaged by human interventions in this epoch that we are now calling the Anthropocene, can we still conceive of landscape as a distancing of the world? Can we ignore the state of nature, which has been circumscribed, cut out, or framed to become landscape? It must be admitted that the disinterested contemplation traditionally associated with pictorial landscape is now imbued with an ecological and socio-economic conscience, which acts as a powerful filter in the representation and perception of nature in contemporary art. Does this mean that today’s landscape is helping to amplify the dystopian imagination? Although a feeling of uneasiness sometimes surpasses the grandiose in our experience of the sublime, it may also be that the dark beauty of the artworks associated with the industrial sublime diverts us from the reality behind the image.

Without necessarily attributing an ecological scope to all art practices in which the notion of landscape is used, many of the works and essays published in this issue seem to challenge human hegemony over the environment and the dualist approach to nature that prevails in Western culture. Chloé Roubert and Gemma Savio, for example, writing about our responsibility in the ecological destruction of the planet, underline that humans are no more equal in this respect than they are in our capitalist system — a situation that they would label, justly, “Capitalocene.” Thus, the picturesque landscape’s powers to seduce, to convey stereotypes, and to encourage speculation and consumption are also propositions explored in these pages.

This section does not, however, paint a sombre portrait of landscape in art. In a particularly broad panorama, there are also gardens, encounters, voyages, wanderings, and, by extension, the multiple relationships that we have with nature. If we can observe that, as Cauquelin states, ambiguity persists between the notions of nature and landscape, it is perhaps due to an ultimate attempt to remove landscape from the frame to bring it back to experience. Alexis Pernet puts it in these terms: “The landscapes that are being created would thus embody the paradox of existing only in experience in order to evade the logics of depletion that have affected previous representations.”

Translated from the French by Käthe Roth