On landscape / perception / space / histories of the natural / ways of seeingA collation of the texts i have read these past 12 months that have been particularly helpful, and things i am yet to read but am looking forward to. Any further suggestions that seem relevant would be very welcome....
Andrews, Malcolm - Landscape and Western Art - good stuff on the early side of things - a good overview, i thought.
Baudrillard, Jean - Simulacra and Simulation - the map is the territory.
Berger, John - Ways of Seeing - pretty important text, i think, despite the passing of years... he has such a sweet way of writing.
De Vries, Herman - Chance and Change - a very individual approach to landscape.
Goldsworthy, Andy - Hand to Earth - his best text in my opinion - less big colour plates, more process - an overview of his concerns 1976-1990.
Jenks, Charles - The Garden of Cosmic Specultation - trippy as this sounds, I found the text quite good, even if it is a bit of an ode to Jenks' departed wife.
Kastner, Jeffery and Wallis, Brian - Land and Environmental Art - a pretty good overview of the usual suspects - i drooled over this when i first found it - it still holds up tho, I feel.
R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, N. Bourquin ed. - Into the Nature… Of Creatures And Wilderness - published in 2006, i found this interesting in terms of what art within this realm was being hearalded as interesting... some lovely bits, some yawns
Solnit, Rebecca - A field guide to getting lost - essays on solitude and different versions of lost.
Solnit, Rebecca - Wanderlust - a history of walking - walking within western culture, and how it has related to, and sometimes governed, our perception of the natural world.
Solnit, Rebecca - River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West - contains some great stuff on the sociological history of American landscape in its depiction.
Solnit, Rebecca - As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art - some very good essays in here on different perceptions of landscape.
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden - Ye Olde but still very much referenced so a bit of a goer. Describes in plain language an experience of attempting to live within the cycles of nature with minimal enhancement.
On the waiting list:
Berger, John - Selected Essays of John Berger
Berger, John - About looking
Tuan, Yi-Fu - Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
Casey, Edward - Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape
Barringer, Tim and Wilton, Andrew - American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880
Dreikausen, Margret - Aerial Perception: The Earth As Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art
Schama, Simon - Landscape And Memory
Harrison, Robert Pogue - Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
Bachelard, Gaston - The Poetics of Space
Fisher, Phillip - Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences
1 comment:
I definitely think you can't go past Deleuze & Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' What sparked this thought was your response to Baudrillard's Simulation and Silmulacra '...the map is the territory.' Indeed it is, but you aren't simply given a map (ok, you are, but it's someone else's journey...it's a rigid and hard thing), rather, you map the territory (and therefore are flowing in and around your landscape until you have a rigid map again). It's a little bit off the chart in relation to the rest of your list and I'd recommend one of those cartoon drawn "Introducing Deleuze" books first, lots of tea and discussion. For me (and I don't care what any academic tells me) this stuff is easy so long as you don't think about it too much! Um...yeah...check it out.
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