On Landscapes

by Susan Herrington
Thinking in Action series (editors Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney)
Routledge, Taylor & Francis, New York and London (2009)
150 pp., b/w illus. Trade, $90.00; paper, $20
ISBN: 0-415-99124-2; ISBN: 0-415-99125-0.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
legart@ozemail.com.au

The Thinking in Action series, some 30 titles so far, has commissioned contemporary philosophers to engage lucidly with ‘of the moment’ topics. Susan Norrington puts a frame around her philosophical viewpoint on the invented landscape and its regard, with an aphorism: “Landscape is the hidden art. It’s everywhere and it’s a part of everyone’s life.” Delving in to the back blocks of our regard for that stuff out there, she ranges widely: from a Bagel Garden in Boston (with real bagels), to Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, to the extraordinary Ecokathedraal in Holland, to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta in Scotland. But this is not a quaint Gardens book. The deliberate if not planned organization of space extends to the horizon of the human mind, as is evidenced with great clarity of prose in the genres of landscape discussed. In a final section the electronic horizon also receives attention.

References on the topic abound, writers mostly from the last two decades, centrally the landscape historian J.B.Jackson and the philosopher John Dewey, whose theories of aesthetic experience develop ideas increasingly prevalent today, intent on embedding art into everyday life. The author in describing visits to many of the sites brings valuable first hand experience into the picture. Like all responsible philosophers, she raises more questions than she has space to fully respond, making the text a valuable resource upon which to base further work.

Short histories (well covered in other sources) introduce in many of the chapters the central questions of why does landscape look as it does, what does it mean to us and who is the designer of landscapes, besides the natural world itself? Or is Nature just another figuration of our imaginations, just a part of Culture? Two Russian émigrés, Komar and Melamid, used questionnaires to determine the ideal image of landscape and the details people needed to see represented. Repeated in various countries around the world, the suite of paintings produced via this process consistently revealed blue lakes, mountains and blue skies. The reality of obsolete city sites and community consultation in their redevelopment, included ponies in south-east England and rubble from the demolitions in Glasgow – these were extravagantly planted to create flexible, marginal spaces, or what Michel Foucault has described as heterotopias, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?), not discussed in this volume.

Coming to grips with representation, the ‘landscape idea’, the other place removed from our urban settings, exists as a response to industrialisation, corporations, the ownership of bucolic acres. Bedford in New York state deploys the image of the traditional farming community employing Latino labourers to work the land “in a seemingly natural state of affairs”, but excludes them economically as neighbours. Industrial landscaping, of motorways and redundant docklands demonstrate robust realities, turning away from the idealised and heading towards the “…intricate network of human and biophysical processes.”

The gaze and its resolution within a vista or environment, here lies implicitly with the landscaping professionals, commissioned to engineer instruments such as mnemonic devices and narrative interpretation for the imagining of historical context. The extraordinary works of Robert Smithson, Frank Serra, James Turrell, Anthony Gormley and other contemporary visual artists receive scant attention. Concealment and revelation for heightening the experiential and to create challenging encounters within designed sites, like the Moerenuma Park in Japan, begin to lead for this reader to questions about the claimed art experience and the art of making landscapes. Are these places only possible following complex community consultations? At the end of the day do they provide an art experience, or just another shift of backdrop at worst, didactic contextualising at best?

The travelogue of sites presented here inevitably lead to a desire to visit, to experience, to test the implied notion of shared creative space(s). In a two-page endpiece, the vast digital landscape is mentioned. Accessible as an augmentation to (or replacement for) the physical and biological world in which we are embedded, GPS, Google Earth and iPhone attach us to the landscapes in ways with which the author’s imagination is yet to consider. Watch these spaces.