The Time of the Landscape: On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution

by Jacques Rancière, Emiliano Battista (Translator)

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience. This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published January 4, 2023

About the author

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.

Reviews

[Rafael Borrego · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uno de los momentos más interesantes para la historia del arte se produce al mismo tiempo que el nacimiento de la estética. Será en el siglo XVIII cuando se fijan algunos conceptos ligados a estas cuestiones. El primero de ellos la distinción entre lo que entendemos como Bellas Artes y lo que pasará considerarse como artesanía o bien, como indica el autor, artes mecánicas.
La representación del paisaje se abre en ese momento a calificaciones en las que algunos autores han fijado la manera de percepción, lo que conocemos como la experiencia estética. Hablamos de conceptos como lo bello o la introducción de lo sublime, que sin duda está más unido a la representación del paisaje, ya que el componente natural juega un papel importante en este tipo de obras. Autores como Burke, Kant, Baillie o Hegel tratan aspectos relacionados con estos conceptos.
También nos habla el autor sobre lo pintoresco, aquello que proporciona un buen tema para el cuadro. Desarrolla la idea y la explica aplicada a la representación del paisaje. Otros autores también tratan este tema como Victor del Río en su libro "Políticas del paisaje" o Jaime Vindel en "Cultura Fósil".
Este que nos ocupa es un muy buen libro sobre cuestiones estéticas y como el paisaje influye en los cambios que se llevan a cabo en las artes a partir del siglo XVIII.

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un essai très intéressant sur la place de l'art paysager dans la conception des arts et de la société au XVIIIe-XIXe. Très intéressant sur les parallèles explicites entre organisation de l'espace et de la société, sur les changements dans la manière de voir la beauté (ou l'absence de beauté) de la nature, et sur les conséquences politiques des changements d'organisation du paysage, comme le fait de chasser les paysans de la vue des nobles anglais pour faire de plus beaux parcs paysagers, malgré les conséquences désastreuses sur la vie de ces paysans.