Landscape Theory

by Rachael Ziady DeLue (Editor), James Elkins (Editor)

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about landscape in art.

Genres: Philosophy, Art

380 pages, Paperback

First published December 17, 2007

Reviews

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mostly frustrating book full of nonsense and critical theory BS. Reminded me of everything I hate most about MFA programs. Rebecca Solnit was probably the least annoying of the all the seminar's participants. She actually talked about concrete things, marginalized and indigenous people, and contemporary artists engaging landscape in non-traditional ways. It's probably why everyone else seemed to mostly ignore what she had to say.

There's some really tiring sections in which the dusty lens of a Marxist theory is used to critique landscape as ideology and there's some long sections on phenomenology and landscape for good measure.

But, the most egregious failing of this book is its almost complete lack of ecological awareness. The participants and later responders develop no line of thinking that concerns climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification, plastics, etc. and how these things effect our relationship with landscapes and the environment. For these reasons, the book feels awfully dated. Almost irrelevant given the state of the planet today. One of the participants even characterizes ecology as (paraphrasing) a kind of burden that gets in the way of really thinking about landscape.