showing The landscape idea is a visual ideology; an ideology all too easily adopted unknowingly. — Denis Cosgrove
21 Put Things Out Of Perspective The history of landscape and the history of perspective are so entwined it is hard to imagine one without the other. The modern idea of landscape emerged as conventions of linear perspective were being established, and perspective remains a widely understood device for simulating depth, and control, on the flat surface of a drawing. But there is another, preperspective side to landscape. When the word landscape came into being, it had nothing to do with converging lines and vanishing points. Instead it described something close to what is now called ‘place’: an area associated with particular people, rituals, and institutions. In this original sense, landscape was not a composition of scenes, but a collection of practices. So: think how you would show landscape if perspective had never existed. Experiment, invent. Wonder, as you put converging guidelines to paper or screen, how much of the original meaning, and richness, of landscape is receding into blue? For further reading:
Cosgrove, Denis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Getch Clarke, Holly. ‘Land-scopic Regimes: Exploring Perspectival Representation beyond the “Pictorial” Project’. Landscape Journal 24, no.1 (2005): 50–68.
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