Representing Place: Landscape Painting And Maps by Edward S. Casey

by Edward S. Casey

You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space—as well as our place in it—is the subject of Edward S. Casey’s ambitious study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey’s discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language—a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject. Representing Place is the third volume in Casey’s influential epic project of reinterpreting evolving conceptions of space in world thought. He combines history with philosophy, and cartography with art, to create a new understanding of how representation requires and thrives on space, ultimately renewing our appreciation of the power of place as it is set forth in paintings and maps.

Genres: Philosophy, Cartography, Art, Academic

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Professor Edward Casey was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009-10, and he was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

His recent research includes investigations into place and space; landscape painting and maps as modes of representation; ethics and the other; feeling and emotion; philosophy of perception (with special attention to the role of the glance); the nature of edges.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim, having seen it while browsing amazon. I'm always on the lookout for writing that might relate to my art - in particularly, the relationship between art, memory, and space, my recent obsession. Casey's book tries to put forth a comprehensive view of the way in which landscape painting and maps deal with issues of space, but fails to develop it into any kind of full-fledged theory. Ultimately, the main benefit of the book was introducing me to a number of landscape artists that I wasn't familiar with, and reminding that I need to spend a lot more time looking at the Hudson River School painters (particularly, my old favorite Church).

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't know self-identifying phenomenologists still existed. Casey presents some interesting concepts in the first few chapters involving the sublime, but the further I got through this book, the more out of touch and irrelevant his ideas became and the more tedious and downright boring this book became.

Trying to look past what a slog it was to finish, a few more specific things stick out. Casey's ideas around landscape are extremely anthropocentric, ecologically unaware, and normative in regards to European colonialization. Throughout the book Casey associates non-colonialized lands as "desolate" and characterizes them as "dangerous" and "unsettled." Never mind Native American peoples or non-human lifeforms that called these places home. He spends some time writing about Thomas Cole's The Oxbow and, in my opinion, totally misreads the painting by describing the European farms depicted in the right portion of the painting as examples of "tranquility" and, quoting Cole in different context, some kind of an "Eden"! Casey writes: "The vision of a future beauty brought about by the realization of an archetypal American dream of peace and prosperity: a realization that combines the resources of natural place with the fruits of human labor." Peace? Who's peace, exactly? Who's prosperity? What's most egregious is that Edan is precisely pre-agrarian! It was because of the "fall of man" that humans were condemned to a life of toil of the land, i.e. farming! It's uncultivated, unsettled wilderness, inhabited by pre-agrarian hunter gatherer Native American populations, that should properly represent Edan in this scenario.