The Politics of Landscape Art

Land. Outside of our bodies and the oxygen that we breath, land, earth, is the most fundamental of human phenomenon. It defines our lives in every moment.

Whether it’s through the way we are standing, walking, or sitting on it, or by the way we’ve manipulated and shaped it into objects to use.

In short, land is universal to us, it is a fundamental part of our psychology and so a should be a foundational consideration of any phenomenology

But as well as being universal, land is able to be shaped and so is particular, contextual, cultural, has a history.

All landscape art, whether political or not, has political subtleties underpinning it.

But furthermore, many political pieces have landscapes in the background. What does a careful reading of landscape say about Hobbes’ Leviathan, or Rousseau’s Social Contract? How did Locke imagine the American landscape in Two Treatises of Government?

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Sources:

Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, London, Reaktion, 2001.

W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, Chicago, UCP, 1994.
Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature, London, Reaktion, 1994.

Bryson, Norman, Holly, Michael Ann, Moxley, Keith P.F., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover, WUP, 1994.

Frank M. Coleman (2006) The Origins of Advertising Discourse: Locke, Landscape, and America, Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography, 9:1,101-12

Justin Champion, ‘Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images, 1651-1714’ in Michael Hunter eds. Printed Images in Early Modern Britain , pp. 256-275