Issue No. 5 (December 2002) — Regional Landscapes
abstracts
Selling the Suburbs: Nature, Landscape, Adverts, Community
By Dennis Wood
This essay discusses how the real-and-imagined spaces of ‘nature’ are used to promote the burgeoning master planned communities or enclave estates. On one hand it focuses on the actual sites of the estates and discusses how nature, as a construct, plays a prominent role in presenting the estate as a place of ‘wholesome community values’. It then goes on to discuss how ‘nature’ as a concept is used in various advertisements to promote these community values as a sales tool.
Key terms: Community, enclave estates, firstspace and secondspace, imagineering, nature.
Wildflowers and Other Landscapes
By Stephanie Green
“Wildflowers and Other Landscapes” explores, issues of difference, gender, the field of vision, the body, the landscape in Australia, and the way we write, mark and imagine the land. The piece begins from my own bodily experience of living in this country. Along with other non-Indigenous Australians I carry with me many questions about belonging: where do I belong?; where are my people?; what is my place? As a white woman where do I have the right to go? I am an urban dweller: what is my relationship with country? The paper is presented as a meditation on these questions, attempting to link and move between associated experiences and ideas. The challenging painting on found tarpaulin, entitled “Wildflower”, by Western Australian artist Jo Darbyshire, provides a touchstone for this discussion.
Key terms: gender, landscape, place, belonging.
Sublime Futures: eco-art and the return of the real in Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy
By Ian McLean
The paper examines the relationship between earlier nineteenth century aesthetic representations of nature through a romantic subjectivity and its tropes of the sublime and freedom, and contemporary ecological values. The focus of the discussion is the work of three very different artists: Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy. While each emerged in the 1970s in three very different places with three very different aesthetic agendas, they shared two deeply held convictions: a highly developed ecological consciousness that sought to aesthetically subvert the anthropocentric values of Western civilisation, and a commitment to working far from metropolitan centres. The paper diagnoses in their work a desire for renewal and redemption on the edges of civilisation that has preoccupied modern art since the late eighteenth century. It argues that a wild nature was the locus for thinking about the great themes of Enlightenment: domination, freedom and subjectivity. The ecological turn might seem to turn against the anthropocentric conventions of Enlightenment&Mac226;s progeny, capitalism and modernity, but in fact it reinforces (through a repetition) the overall project. Wilderness always was and still is a site from which modernity imagines the origins of its discourses of freedom and redemption.
Key terms: redemption, Goldsworthy, Wolsley, Dombrovskis, sublime, subjectivity, nature.
Urban Exposures
By Panizza Allmark
Unlike the traditional notion of the sublime, which is a masculine aesthetic, my photographic work explores the uncanny, a feminist counter aesthetic, and the urban environment. I describe my work as a photographie feminine, writing the traces of the feminine body. Importantly I address the contradictions and dichotomies of the feminine that exist within the periphery of the city.
Key terms: uncanny, photography, sexuality, feminine, night.
Rocks in Their Heads: The “Landscape and You” Experience
By George Karpathakis
Humanity has had a long relationship with rocks including collecting them. This article argues that humans collect and use rocks for many for many purposes: utilitarian, economic, scientific, sacred, decorative and mnemonic. The collected rock acquires meaning different from the rock in situ. This meaning can be communal or personal, connected to events, real or mythic, or to place. The rock can act as a sign or tell a story. It can be seen as a metonym of the landscape. Or it can be viewed as a synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole, for a landscape or an experience. The meaning of the collected rock or the rock collection varies from person to person and can change over time.
Key terms: rocks, collections, stories, histories, landscapes, Australian culture, iconography, fossickers, souvenirs, clubs, pastimes.
China’s Mother River Scolds Her Young: Modernization and the National Landscape
By Jane Sayers
The search for modernity has been central to Chinese cultural debates in the twentieth century. One argument that has commonly been expressed is the fear that the price of modernity will be traditional values. Tradition is strongly linked to the countryside, and as a way of clearing a space for the modern in urban centres, this link has led to the rejection of the countryside has that which is holding the nation back in its quest. But recently nature has been breaking out of these representations and bringing the consequences of the degradation it has suffered back into the arena of urban attention. This is discussed through an examination of the countryside in two cultural texts, and then in light of the case of the deforestation along the Yellow River, which has contributed to erosion, desertification and other consequences that enter the urban centres.
Key terms: China, national identity, cultural politics, environmental protection, modernization, Yellow River.