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.
So what was the solution? Was what you said as an animator or was that from an earlier time. Was it what William Fox said or Stephen Pyne or was it derived from Laban. I can’t seem to find your gem of insight stated simply as that,
That’s a really fair comment John, specially coming from a ‘landscape animator’.
I woke up realising that I had been feeling stuck on thinking that I needed to be an authority on traditional landscape art to discuss it in my thesis. But I am not that person, and do not have a strong interest in that genre. Traditional landscape art sets up a distance between land and the observer.
I am of course briefly discussing this, but am also writing about other ideas about what a landscape can be.
I am interested in different ways people connect with the natural world through movement – through gesture, and animation. And that’s what you do, which is what interests me so much.
I am avoiding using the word landscape to refer to that kind of work, which will be discussed more in “Beyond Landscape”….towards the end of the Literature Review.
I also remembered something Simon suggested I consider when approaching thesis writing, which was to write “as an animator”, and to write about things that are of interest to the research from that perspective. This is about finding my voice as an artist-researcher, which seems to be a continuing process.
Maybe this is not the “nutshell” answer you were after, but I hope this makes sense.
Reading landscape is a key skill architects use. Also landscape architects and urban planners. This has a lot to do with developing sensitivity, or reading landscape Through our Senses:
In the article I have been writing about drawing (hopefully) about to be published by the Architectural Theory Review I wrote a section on Drawing and listening and quoted extensively from Glen Murcut:
” Why architects draw: Drawing as listening and paying attention
Australian most prominent architect and recipient of 2006 Pritzker Prize in Architecture Glen Murcutt claims that sensitivity is the crucial quality of the architectural design skills. The International Masterclass which he has been running every year since the year 2000 with a group of other prominent Australian Architects Richard Le Plastrier, Peter Stuchbury and Lindsay Johnston in Riversdale focuses on teaching sensitivity to the site and to the environment.
Every year the international group of selected lucky students go to the site and spend a week looking, sketching, and listening to the landscape before they are allowed to design a building there. When Glen describes the Master class site analysis he asks students first of all to spend time in the landscape, then to look for, sketch and record their experiences trying to understand it. The instructions sound like typical exercises in a drawing class. …
“…look into strength and delicacy of this landscape…look into finesse of the flora…look into transparency of the flora…look into translucency of the light and shade patterns…look at the way wind acts on this landscape…see how nature is working…respond to these factors in the selection of the site”
Once the students come back with drawings, sketches, and notes and share their experiences and discoveries this is when they start to understand the land and the site. Murcut points out that architectural design is not just about designing a building and simply placing it on site without any understanding or regard for its context. ‘If we don’t understand (the site) then we just put a building there that has no relationship. This is not a project about building a complex that is just simply placed here. This is a program about sensitivity to the site.” In the process students learn how to design low energy and environmentally sustainable buildings keeping in mind how to adapt the concepts to any topography and climate, how to capitalize practically on natural light, how to safeguard the surrounding landscape and why.
Glen Murcutt explains that the key to this process is not complicated. It is simply about paying attention, being aware of what is all around us. “I’ve been working for 35 years on harnessing the planet’s gifts for Homo sapiens – the wind, sun, shade, perfumes of plants, water, prospect, geology, flora, fauna, water table, drainage patterns, topography/contour, oh! It goes on …. (Glenn Murcutt, unpublished note on ‘Green Architecture’)
Yes, I can understand how connectivity is so vital to architecture, as it is with animation, when it is a DANCE: an organic response, in every dimension, to the environment.
Thanks Rena, for your remarkable insights.