Abstract
The emphasis in landscape studies on human agency and needs can obscure the complex relationships between non-human living things and their animate and inanimate contexts. Diverse authors have pointed out that this anthropocentric outlook is problematic, destructive, and neo-colonial. How might it be possible to approach a landscape, i.e., land itself, and all that lives on it, in a way that foregrounds the realities and risks of that site, without falling back on familiar humanistic and anthropocentric tropes? In this essay, I explore three recent artworks that each engage with a different landscape: Requiem for a Glacier by artist and composer Paul Walde (2013); the Urban Prairie designed by landscape architects Claude Cormier + Associés (2012); and The Boreal Poetry Garden by visual artist Marlene Creates (born 2005-). By analyzing these artists’ and designers’ creative strategies in relation to these landscapes, I delve into the question of ecological collaboration in each project, and explore the ways in which the non-human aspects of the landscape do, or do not, take centre stage. In so doing, this essay has a second aim: to explore the extent to which, in performing a didactic relationship with their sites, these three projects contribute to an activist and pedagogical ethos around climate change, habitat, and ecology.
Highlights
The ambiguity of the term stems, landscape historian Marina Moskowitz explains, from the very derivation of the word . . . an amalgam of the Dutch landshcap, the German landschaft and the Old English landskipe: the first connoted a scene, often in a painting or other framed image; the second referred to a bounded area and the visible physical elements of which it was composed; and the third had a more social meaning, encompassing the community associated with a given place [1]
Associated with an annoying, moralizing, and finger-wagging self-righteousness, didacticism has been all but banned from the realm of art, both on the grounds of epistemic vice and on the grounds that art that engages with the material realities and injustices of the world is intrinsically lacking
The number of species plummets, and calls for action increase, is it still—was it ever?—valuable to insist that art, in order to be “true”
Summary
“Landscape” is a broad and slippery term, with strong connections to the history of art, the history of territorial possession, and the cultural artifacts of human occupation in specific places. Ignoring Picasso’s most didactic work, his anti-war mural, Guernica (1937), they assert, “Picasso only becomes a truly twentieth-century artist with his development of Cubism, an art lacking clear social consciousness. On one hand, the will to instruct, the possession of a motive in such instruction, and the moral imperative behind such motive and, on the other hand, the distaste for didacticism in art should be weighed carefully against the towering twentieth-century legacy of rejecting art with a political purpose. As Chantal Mouffe has noted, “every form of art has a political dimension” [20]
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