For the past while I have been stuck on the question of how to write about landscape art of Antarctica. A solution came to me on waking this morning. Now that I have it, it seems so obvious.
As an animator I write:
What is a landscape? What does it mean to represent a place as a landscape? Is there more than one way to compose a landscape from observing the natural world? I will approach these questions through visual-kinesthetic readings of some examples.
William Fox (2007, 2000) offers insights into ways artists have made space into place, in the Nevada desert and Antarctica, that involve understanding ways we physically move through them.
Stephen Pyne’s book The Ice has just arrived (from an oder put in a local book shop weeks ago). I look forward to re-reading his chapter on Antarctic literature and art, which I remember only vaguely but with interest from about 5 years ago. Re-reading now, I see why. Pyne’s language has a strong kinesthetic quality. He seems to take you physically into the spaces and processes he is discussing. His writing is poetic. For anyone interested in ice this is an extraordinary book, with insights into scientific/objective and subjective/artistic perspectives on this most important element.
Articles written by movement analysts working in the fields of dance and animation, whose use of various languages, derived from Laban, suggest ways of empathically reading and interpreting Antarctic landscape art.
American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defines landscape as ‘a depiction of natural and man-made features arranged in some kind of perspective order’ (Fox, 2007, p. 93). Writer Mel Gooding explains the traditional ‘framed’ view as Cartesian, where ‘the eye is conceived as a window between the primary reality of the mind and the secondary reality of the external world’ (Gooding, 2007, p. 3). This explains, he argues, the importance of optics to physicists of the Renaissance, and of perspective and the camera obscura to artists. Such traditional ‘abstracting and framing’, he argues, is based on the idea of ‘observing’ of a world which is essentially separate from the observer.
In Antarctic Animation, the observer is not presented as separate, but as intrinsic to the environment observed. Gestures and lines are animated to present relationships between humans and the environment. Antarctica is presented in terms of relationships between its physical and biological entities, including us.