Intuitively we may believe an objective image of a landscape could exist, but can it? Won't even a formalist's agenda highly mediate our viewing experience? Is the depiction of a landscape always an act of consumption?
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| Colorama #274, Surfers and surfboards, Peter Gales, 1966 |
The Colorama was a backlit 18x60 foot photographic display located inside New York City's Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990, a virtual window looking onto a fictionalized, idealized world where constant consumption and snapshot making abound, and the landscape is often prominent.
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| Grand Central Station, 1963 |
The colorama below, art directed by Norman Rockwell, has all the subtle satire of his magazine cover illustrations.
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| Colorama #126, Amdursky and Baker, Closing a Summer Cottage, 1957 |
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| Herb Archer. FAMILY CAMPING, LAKE PLACID NY, July/Aug 1959 |
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| Peter Gales, Colorama that appeared in Grand Central Station Aug. 26th, 1968 |
Rebecca Solnit, in her book, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art writes,
"The desert is famously a place of silence. A place without language, to some extent, unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar, corresponding to no familiar categories of experience, not truly outside representation but challenging to it. It was, for a long time, literally a territory without a map, the last part of the continent to be explored and mapped, and much of what is now the (Nevada) Test Site seems to be the last part of the contiguous forty-eight states to be mapped. Baudrillard would still be lost out here. Much of the difficulty the desert of the American West presented was linguistic and categorical: it did not correspond to what was known by easterners and Europeans. It is not only because the Spanish arrived earlier that many aspects of this place - arroyos, mesas, playas, bajadas - have Spanish names, but also because there are no English words for such landforms...
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| Richard Misrach, "Simulated Window" Wendover Airforce Base, Utah, 1986 |
The politics of the simulacra carry a different weight inside the Enola Gay bunker. Misrach's "Simulated Windows" shows a slab of drywall that closed off that bunker's view of the outside world on which military personnel drew and labeled "simulated scenery," "simulated bush,"...in a collection of images as clever and cold as anything by David Salle or Richard Prince, except that the detachment of these amateur artists is quite likely to be literally lethal, since it is not safely becalmed in the cultural driveway....Nuclear war and the U.S.military can be called, among other things, totalizing discourses, discourses that could be examined most clearly out here among some of the most crucial landscapes of the cold war....
Too, such a landscape at such a time makes demands that undermine the art histories we might call "landscape theory." Clouds here are not equivalents, the landscape is not a pathetic fallacy, because to hear it speak purely of self is to drown out urgent political histories, which affect that self profoundly. Both modernism and post-modernism are essentially urban, eastern practices. In both, landscape has been considered the most pedestrian, unintellectual of the themes of visual art, a kind of mental picnic. To find politics in its most virulent and secret form out in the desert upends those traditions. The landscape is no longer a given, but a threatened territory. The primary landscape tradition for Western civilization is that of the pastoral, in both literature and art: the pastoral as the antithesis of the city, a refuge from the politics and corruption of cities, a place of virtue, a place significantly outside history and ruled by cyclical rather than linear time. The pastoral at its most banal is the resort, vacationland, campsite. This tradition has made it hard to reinvision the landscape as instead the complex place in which futures are being prepared, secret wars carried out, poisons dispersed, histories inscribed." (Solnit p.75-78)
