Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Post-Landscape:
Between Nature and Culture

…We forget that battlefields are one kind of landscape and that most landscapes are also territories…on the small scale they involve real estate and sense of place, on the large scale they involve nationalisms, war, and the grounds for ethnic identity…(the landscape is) not just where we picnic but also where we live and die. It is where our food, water, fuel, and minerals come from, where our nuclear waste and s--- and garbage go to, it is the territory of dreams, somebody’s homeland and somebody’s gold mine.

Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, 2001

“Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture” brought together artists whose work employs landscape to explore the relationships between nature and culture. Through installation, painting, photography, and video, these artists examine such major issues as land use, urbanization, technology, and globalization, as well as their own relationships with nature. Most focus on the Southern California region—including the urban, exurban, desert, and mountain geographies—as the basis for their investigations.

This exhibition looked at the meanings of landscape, nature, and culture, and their interrelationships. Landscape aesthetics generally are considered in terms of genres (beautiful, heroic, pastoral, picturesque, sublime), media (painting, photography), as actual physical places for visual contemplation, or, more recently, as representations of cultural and economic practices. Throughout the history of art, landscape has evoked experiences ranging from the overwhelming and awe-inspiring to the still and contemplative. The origins of landscape genres can be traced to the 18th century and the Enlightenment notion that nature is controllable, and to the 19th-century Romantics’ belief in its transcendental power.

In this exhibition, landscape was used as a framework to investigate further the relationships between nature and culture. The “post” in “Post-Landscape” referred to more than the dualistic relationship between previous landscape art and the current work in this exhibition; “Post-Landscape” also suggested work that rethinks traditional landscape conventions and posits a new kind of relationship with the land. The artists in this exhibition use the landscape to examine critically a range of ideas, including the social and political implications of land use and the control and commodification of nature.

The artists selected offer a wide range of approaches to the issues at hand by exploring either personal or more conceptual responses to the local environment. They provide a framework within which to revisit, reexamine, and reconstruct traditional understandings of nature and landscape and our relationships to them.

Colette Dartnall
Rebecca McGrew
Co-curators