Mateusz Salwa, “Landscape, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics”
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LANDSCAPE, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND AESTHETICS
Mateusz Salwa
Abstract
This paper presents the contemporary phenomenological intepretations of the concept of landscape. It confronts phenomenology of landscape as an example of non-representational theories of landscape developed in anthropology, archaeology and culture studies with approaches that are focused on landscape as a phenomenon. Furthermore, it is claimed that phenomenological approach to landscape may be applied to aesthetics and Arnold Berleant’s theories of aesthetics of engagement as well as of descriptive aesthetics are presented. The final conclusion is that conceiving of landscape as of an aesthetic phenomenon is fruitful since it better explains the relationships between people and the environment.
Keywords
Aesthetics, Landscape, Phenomenology.
The ubiquity of landscape
It will not be a gross exaggeration to say that we have witnessed not long ago the birth of what Michael Jakob termed ‛omnilandscape’ (omnipaysage).[i] In fact, one is tempted to claim that landscapes are everywhere these days: every area, site or territory may fall under this category either in everyday speech, legal documents, or in academic discourse. These circumstances may easily be seen as a proof of nothing more than a recent popularity of the concept, thanks to, among other things, the growing interest in landscape on behalf of the representatives of social sciences and humanities as well as to the recognition of landscapes as particular goods that should be protected legally. More importantly, however, it may be treated as a contemporary expression of an aesthetic revolution described by Jacques Rancière who discusses the 18th-century garden aesthetics as a symptom of a new manner of thinking about nature and art, one that can be compressed in one word: landscape.[ii] One could quarrel whether this aesthetic revolution took place during the Enlightement or it rather dates back to the beginning of the early modern era, or is medieval in origin[iii]. It can even be argued that such a revolution never took place, since in one way or another people have always experienced their surroundings as a landscape.
Yet, no matter what stance one opts for, it cannot be denied that never before the advent of the 21st century was the concept of landscape as important as an ubiquitous means of ‛distribution of the sensitive’ (to borrow Rancière’s term) as it is now. Undoubtedly, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when landscape turned into omnilandscape, yet a symbolic date may be suggested (at least in the European context): the year 2000 when the European Landscape Convention was ratified by the Council of Europe[iv]. On the one hand, the document, signed today by 40 countries is the first international treaty fully devoted to the issues of management, planning and protection of European landscapes and as such is a seminal step in recognizing that landscapes – natural, rural, ruban, peri-urban, of great value as well as common or even degraded – are of primary importance to all the people today and in the future. On the other hand, the significance of the Convention is recognized and debated on purely theoretical grounds, since it offers and in fact promotes a rather novel definition of landscape implying a particular understanding of the relationship between people and landscapes.[v] What is more, the Convention may be interpreted as a fruit of a long process driven by the rapid development of landscape studies and subsequent changes in perspectives assumed by landscape scholars.
The ground for the overall idea behind the Convention is expressed in the definition of landscape: “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. One of the recent documents on the implementation of the ELC is illustrated by a useful graph explaining its theoretical assumptions. The concept of landscape is presented as a circular scheme whereby ‛physical characteristics of the landscape’, when experienced, turn into ‛perceived landscape’ which becomes ‛interpreted landscape’ thanks to intepretation, and ‛interpreted landscape’ through actions turns into ‛used landscape’, which shapes the physical landscape.[vi] What is crucial in this approach is that objective side of the landscape, namely its material side (termed ‘space’ by the authors of the document) is indissolubly associated with its subjective or inter-subjective aspect (called ‛place’ in the text), namely – to put it broadly – people’s experiences. It is precisely this twofoldness that marks a break from a purely geographical understanding of landscape and an exclusively symbolic approach, the two perspectives that defined the spectrum of landscape thinking for a long time. As such it may be associated with various theories that in one way or another draw on post-phenomenology.
The definition may be accused of being generic and too broad – in fact it implies that landscapes are, or at least may be, everywhere – yet its open character may also be seen as its strength. It is comprehensive in the sense that it may cover different approaches and hence offer a common ground to them, while privileging none: it well accomodates representational theories as well as non-representational ones. As a result, it may be used as a promising starting point for landscape research, or a ‛landscape «metascience»’ embracing natural sciences, social sciences and humanities[vii]. It may also be seen as a ground for ‛philosophy of landscape’ understood as a reflection on a “specific modality of the experience of reality” that has “both a horizontal and vertical dimension”, a reflection that shall offer „a conciliation of distinct and disaggregated knowledge […] a heuristic thought that precedes interdisciplinary crossovers”.[viii]
At the heart of contemporary landscape theories lie different metaphors. Landscape is said to be, among other things, an image, noun, text or verb, that is concepts suggesting that landscape is an ‛object’ in front of a subject. The ELC definition may instead be taken to show, albeit implicitly, that landscape may also be conceived of as an ‛object’ that exists only insofar as it is experienced by a subject even if it cannot be reduced to his or her experience.
Such an approach has several advantages that may be added to the ones mentioned above. It may be used in defense of the concept of landscape against criticisms stemming from, for example, the belief that it is overused (or, to put it differently: ubiquitous) and hence meaningless.[ix] It may explain the fact that the concept of landscape links “approaches that pretend to be «objective» and appreciations that inevitably imply «subjectivity»”.[x] Finally, it may also justify the need to use the concept of landscape which – as the authors of the graphic illustration of the ELC definition state – may be associated or even replaced by such concepts as space or place. Landscape ‛as perceived by people’ is – as Arnold Berleant convincingly shows – inherently aesthetic, which means that it has an aspect that place or space do not necessarily possess.
One of the most important changes in the understanding of landscape consists in departing from the tradition that identified it with an image (a landscape picture) or a ‛way of seeing’, which implied a particular approach to aesthetic values of landscape and aesthetic appreciation, one that Allen Carlson called the ‛landscape model’.[xi] However, one of the consequences of this move was divorcing the idea of landscape from the aesthetic or reducing the latter to research on human aesthetic preferences. The phenomenological approach seems to offer a possibility to reconsider the aesthetic and to show why it should be reintroduced to landscape debates. In what follows I shall briefly sketch what it means to conceive of landscape in a phenomenological vein and how it translates to aesthetics.
The phenomenology of Landscape
„Phenomenology of landscape” is an ambigous expression. It may denote en bloc various contemporary approaches to landscapes focusing on human practices taking place in various environments and hence treating landscapes as “more-than-visual and more-than-symbolic”. [xii] It may also refer to the perspectives, including the abovementioned ones, which are explicitely based on post-phenomenology. In such a case “phenomenology […] shapes both what is studied under the heading of «landscape», and how it is studied”.[xiii] What is more, in both cases, the approaches at stake are underpinned by the belief that they are able to clarify the phenomenon of landscape. No matter, however, to what extent and how directly these theoretical perspectives are inspired by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the two pillars of phenomenology of landscape, they recognize in one way or another the fact that humans cannot be conceived of as beings detached from the world around them, that their existence may be best described as dwelling in an environment or landscape, and that inhabiting it involves not only interpreting it but also and above all experiencing it through the senses.
These general assumptions are grounds for a vast range of studies that have been recently conducted in different fields and focused on innumerable instances and facets of the existential intertwinning of human beings and landscapes.[xiv] These studies aim to analyze ‛acts of landscaping’[xv] and approach landscapes through various individual or social practices taking place in them and conceive of these practices as factors that in fact co-create landscapes. In other words, landscapes are interpreted in a performative key – they are not scenographies for human performances but they exist insofar as they may be said to be performed by humans as well as other-than-human beings. Such a view goes counter to the representational theories that interpret landscapes in terms of cultural representations defining the way people relate to their environments.[xvi] Reducing in one way or another the landscape to a ‛way of seeing’ have been accused of overlooking a number of crucial aspects of human-landscape relationships, mainly the fact that people are always in a landscape, and not in front of it as it is implied by thinking of landscape as of a mental or visual image. Being-in-a-landscape, in turn, is said to amount to a constant engagement and interaction with landscape. This means that people shape their landscapes and at the same time are shaped by them. Another way of putting it is to state that people inevitably live in what may be called a ‛phenomenological landscape’.[xvii]
In order to come to terms with these circumstances one has to recognize and acknowledge several things. Tim Ingold and Christopher Tilley, two major exponents of the approach hereby discussed, underline that we should think of landscape as perceptual, material, and spatio-temporal and we should never abstract from the fact that humans are always bodily immersed in landscapes, and that – contrary to the traditional view – landscapes are not only visual, but also auditory, olfactory and tactile. In fact, the word ‛landscape’ denotes “the mutual embeddedness and interconnectivity of self, body, knowledge and land”.[xviii] This means that it is impossible to understand people without considering their locale, just as it is not thinkable to interpret landscapes without taking into account who dwells in them. As Ingold puts it “[the landscape] is with us, not against us, but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscapes becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it”[xix]. A similar position is offered by Tilley who claims that “we have an environment and we are part of it and it is part of us” or that “we enter into them [landscapes], they in turn enter into us; we form them, they form us”.[xx] In that matter phenomenology of landscape remains faithful to Jose Ortega y Gasset’s famous statement: “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are”.[xxi] Seen in this way, landscape is an existential or ontological ground for humans since it defines their daily lifes: “it is lived in and through, mediated, worked on and altered, replete with cultural meaning and symbolism”.[xxii] Hence, landscape is also experiential in the sense that living in a landscape implies experiencing it in various ways and it is through an experience involving not only the body and the senses, but also memory, emotions and thoughts, that people become aware of the environment they inhabit it. As Ingold claims that “the world of [our] being-in presents itself in the form of the landscape”.[xxiii]
When put to practice, phenomenology of landscape may consist in analyzing what various ‛phenomenological landscapes’ are like and what sorts of entanglements, relations, tensions define them– in fact this is what is done in the abovementioned studies of ‛landscaping’. It may also result in a ‛thick description’ which is an attempt at translating an in situ landscape experience into a more or less academic discourse or – one may venture – into a sort of phenomenological description aimed at grasping the essence of that particular landscape, that is of the landscape that existed insofar as it became a part of the subject who was becoming its part, too.[xxiv] It is thanks to such descriptions that one may become aware that, as Barbara Bender writes:
‛landscape’ is therefore, ‛the world out there’ as understood, experienced, and engaged with through human consciousness and active involvement. […] The same place at the same moment will be experienced differently by different people; the same place, at different moments, will be experienced differently by the same person; the same person may even, at a given moment, hold on conflicting feelings about a place.[xxv]
In other words, one may realize that landscape is not only objective, but also subjective, i.e. it exists in an individual’s experience. This does not mean, however, that conceived of in this manner landscape turns out to be free from cultural, historical or ideological aspects.[xxvi] Quite the contrary, an individual’s landscape experience is per force shaped by cultural, social and other factors, which makes landscapes highly contested.
The landscape as a phenomenon
Even if rooted in phenomenology, the approach discussed above does not really touch upon the phenomenological status of landscape. On the one hand it is quite understandable: despite its denomination phenomenology of landscape is a theory invented in order to offer new insights useful to anthropologists, archaeologists and other cultural studies scholars who are more interested in analyzing cultural performances. On the other hand, however, reflecting on landscape as a phenomenon tout court allows to focus „on more abstract and first-order questions regarding the nature of subjectivity, and human relationships with the world”[xxvii] and hence to approach the idea that landscapes are performed from a different angle, one that allows to come to terms with the major issue inherent to landscape. A good account of it is given by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception:
Suppose that my friend Paul and I are looking at a landscape. What precisely happens? Must it be said that we have both private sensations, that we know things but cannot communicate them to each other—that, as far as pure, lived-through experience goes, we are each incarcerated in our separate perspectives—that the landscape is not numerically the same for both of us and that it is a question only of a specific identity? […] When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history. Are we to say, then, that what we are concerned with is an ideal unity, that my world is the same as Paul’s […]. But ideal unity is not satisfactory either, for it exists no less between Mount Hymettus seen by the ancient Greeks and the same mountain seen by me. Now it is no use my telling myself, as I contemplate those russet mountain sides, that the Greeks saw them too, for I cannot convince myself that they are the same ones. On the other hand, Paul and I ‘together’ see this landscape, we are jointly present in it, it is the same for both of us, not only as an intelligible significance, but as a certain accent of the world’s style, down to its very thisness. The unity of the world crumbles and falls asunder under the influence of that temporal and spatial distance which the ideal unity traverses while remaining (in theory) unimpaired. It is precisely because the landscape makes its impact upon me and produces feelings in me, because it reaches me in my uniquely individual being, because it is my own view of the landscape, that I enjoy possession of the landscape itself, and the landscape for Paul as well as for me.[xxviii]
When someone inspired by non-representational theories of landscape tries to define what landscape is, the main difficulty he or she has to overcome lies precisely in accounting for what Merleau-Ponty notices, that is for the fact that landscape is my experience and at the same time a stretch of the world independent from me and my experience and hence accessible to others, too. In fact, I can look at or enage in the same landscape as other people do and that at the same time what I experience is perforce different from what other people experience. It is precisely this twofold character of landscape that makes it not only analyzable in terms of an object independent from the subject, but also indissolubly associated with the subject to whom it belongs as a phenomenon.
This boils down to the fact that, according to Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, landscape should be understood as an ‛invention of the land’ on behalf of the subject, yet an invention that is not altogether arbitrary since determined by the outer world.[xxix] To put it in a different way, landscape is ‛something’ given to people in and through their experiences and hence depends on how it is experienced, but at the same it has its own truth (essence) that can be experienced. A landscape exists, then, only insofar as it is experienced, which means that: without someone’s experience – it may be strictly individual, but it may also be shared with others – landscape cannot exists and it exists in the ‛form’ determined by the experience; furthermore, landscape trascends every experience in the sense that it can always be experienced in some other way. As Le Dantec underlines, the same land may carry different landscapes. This characteristic is crucial since it is responsable for the fact that landscapes are so contested: what people experience as their landscape is not only their own invention, but also a reality inhabited and shared by others who experience it differently and hence live in a different landscape. Following Le Dantec’s hermeneutical inspiration it may be said that experiencing a landscapes amounts to experiencing the world as meaningful. The source of the meanings is the experiencing subject, but they are not arbitrarily created. In other words, landscape is not a „pure representation, or pure presence, but a creation resulting from the encounter of the world with a certain point of view”.[xxx]
A similar position is offered by Augustin Berque who suggests the following formula to describe the relationship between people and their milieux: r = S/P (‛r’ stands for human’s reality; ‛S’ denotes Subject meaning Earth conceived of as ‛ground or substance’ to which predicates are added according to one’s experiences, thought and actions; ‛P’ – denotes the predicate, that is the World (‘totality of predicates’). The formula is supposed to show that human’s reality is in fact the Earth (independent reality) experienced as the World.[xxxi] A similar approach is offered also by Michael Jakob who proposes the following equation instead: L = S + N (‛L’ – landscape; ‛S’ – subject; ‛N’ – nature).[xxxii] These formulae are supposed to render the fact that - as Eugenio Turri writes – „[…] the man discovers the world through landscape, which, grossly speaking, means that „the world is what we experience”. […] It is through landscape that an exchange between the man and the enviroment takes place”.[xxxiii]
Accordingly, thinking of landscape as of a ‛phenomenon’ (Le Dantec) or ‛middle term’ (Collot) allows one to approach it in a way that does not reduce it either to human experience that would not be determined by what is experienced, or to the object that would determine the experience. Such understanding of landscape makes it possible to analyze objective aspects of landscapes while recognizing the fact that their objective character is a manner of experiencing them. At the same time it allows one to treat their subjective traits as real as their nonsubjective qualities. What is more, such an approach opens a path to interpreting various ways of experiencing environments, that is various landscapes, as alternatives, such that none of them is privileged more than others as corresponding to objective reality.
Treating landscape as a phenomenon that is as a way in which people experience their surroundigs or – to express it in a phenomenological parlance – a way in which the surroundings appear to them as lanscapes, seems to grasp the birth of landscape in the most fundamental or existential dimension, a birth that accompanies both looking at ones surroundings from a distance or engaging bodily in it through some sort of practice, e.g. working the land or walking.
Landscape aesthetics
The hitherto discussed phenomenological approaches to landscape have one particular trait that may be considered a weakness, namely the way they cope with the aesthetic dimension of landscapes. On the one hand, it is either ignored or conceived of as the issue of aesthetic preferences accompanying, influencing, or resulting from people’s ‛acts of landscaping’ or – on the other – it is associated with art since having a landscape experience is thought of in terms of ‛artification’.[xxxiv] It is, however, possible to offer an alternative to these perspectives and show that landscape as a phenomenon is inherently aesthetic. A good way to do it is to follow Arnold Berleant’s ‛phenomenological aesthetics of environment’.[xxxv]
The point of departure for his analyses is painting, which is not surprising given the history of the concept of landscape. He famously distinguishes two sorts of landscapes. The observational or panoramic corresponds to the Newtonian concept of space and implies that one views the world from a standpoint of a detached observer („such a viewer is totally disengaged, gazing contemplatively upon a landscape from which he or she is utterly removed”[xxxvi]). The participatory or engaged landscape, corresponds to a phenomenological view of the world and implies one’s immersion in the environment („the participatory landscapes requires that we look into the space, that we enter it […] and become a part of it”[xxxvii]). According to Berleant, these two sorts of lanscapes may be found in paintings, but more importantly they are expressions of two different manners in which people may experience the world around them. Western culture predominantly identified the concept of landscape with panoramic landscape and so did aesthetics. Berleant opts, instead, for thinking of landscape mainly in participatory terms and claims a necessity to develop ‛aesthetics of engagement’ that „fuses partipicant and environment”.[xxxviii] Such a perspective, he believes, grasps more adequately not only the relationships between humans and their environments but also the way they experience it: „in such a phenomenological field the environment cannot be objectified; it is rather a totality continous with the participant”[xxxix]. In other words, all the experiences are determined by the environment and take place in the environment, but at the same time the environment exists for people as something experienced by them. Environment then is a „field of forces that engage both perceiver and perceived in a unity of experience, turnig the world we inhabit into a truly human habitation”[xl]. Or, as Berleant also puts it: „we can say […], not that I live in my environment, but that I am my environment”.[xli]
It is noteworthy that he repeatedly underlines the fact that these experiences are not only bodily and hence sensorily, but also imbued with emotions and beliefs and determined by various cultural contexts. Thus, landcape aesthetics aimed at studying how people engage in their landscapes requires taking into account all these factors. It may be practiced in various manners but there is one which Berleant underlines: descriptive aesthetics. It is supposed to offer accounts of aesthetic experiences, descriptions that „may be partly narrative, partly phenomenological, partly evocative, and sometimes even revelatory”.[xlii] What is more, such attempts are also normative in character, since they are supposed to focus their recipient’s attention to the aesthetic experience involved in being engaged in a landscape. Descriptive aesthetics, then, is „not the critical appraisal of […] buildings, cities, and scenes but a detailed exposure of their conditions, their qualities […] together with the penumbra of meanings that are the rich product of human association”.[xliii] In other words, it offers an account of the way one aesthetically experiences the landscape in which he or she actually is in. Descriptive aesthetics brings, then, to the foreground what lies at the core of aesthetic experience, that is awareness of aesthetic qualities of landscape. Or to put it differently: it helps one realize that landscape is a phenomenon, which means that it exists only insofar as it is experienced and the way it is experienced. Consequently, another aspect of ‛phenomenological landscape’ is revealed.
No matter whether panoramic or participatory landscape is always experienced as material. If it is experienced as meaningful it is so because it is also experienced as sensory and in this sense is inherently aesthetic. When we focus on how we experience it, we become aware of this fact in the first place: landscape is always physical surroundings. Descriptive aesthetics, as postulated by Berleant, is supposed to give an account of this. However, noticing that landscape is inherently aesthetic in the above sense involves not only becoming aware of the fact that it is experienced through the senses and that its sensory qualities are, so to say, vehicles of the meanings it is experienced as having, but also realizing how we experience it as sensory and meaningful. To put it differently, thanks to an aesthetic experience of landscape we become aware of the landscape that appears to us and of the way it appears.[xliv] Thus, we may grasp its appearing or its ‛phenomenological’ birth.[xlv] This is what, according to Merleau-Ponty, Paul Cézanne managed to show in his Mount Victoire landscapes.
One remark may be added, here. In light of what has just been said, every landscape turns out to be aesthetic, even if more often than not we do not notice it, since we do not focus on its aesthetic qualities as we usually experience it as, for example, an area where we have to act in a particular way or do certain things. It is possible, though, to point out a landscape in which its aesthetic aspects come to the foreground. This would be aesthetic landscape, that is landscape whose aesthetic features are experienced as more important than others. This is what descriptive aesthetics is about and what is shown in paintings or described in poems, but also this is what appears to all of us, whenever we aesthetically appreciate landscapes.
Conclusions
As mentioned at the outset, an important step in the history of landscape theory was made when the European Landscape Convention was enacted. The significance of the ELC lies in the definition of landscape („an area, as perceived by people […]”) which, in light of what has been said above, appears to present landscape as an aesthetic phenomenon. It is noteworthy that this definition is centered on the fact that landscape is both subjective (or intersubjective) and objective. In a concise manner it gives an account of what Donald Meinig described as follows:
Take a small but varied company to any convenient viewing place overlooking some portion of city and countryside and have each, in turn, describe the ‛landscape’ […], to detail what it is composed of and say something about the ‛meaning’ of what can be seen. It will soon be apparent that even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not – we cannot – see the same landscape. We may certainly agree that we will see many of the same elements – houses, roads, trees, hills - in terms of such denotations as number, form, dimension, and color, but such facts take on meaning only through association; they must be fitted together according to some coherent body of ideas. Thus, we confront the central problem: any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.[xlvi]
Even if Meinig identifies landscape with a view, assuming a perspective opposed by phenomenological approaches, later on in his text he enumerates possible manners in which a landscape may be experienced not only visually: as nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, aeshetic. This view is shared by, among others, Yi-Fu Tuan who defines landscape as “an ordering of reality from different angles”.[xlvii] According to Tuan landscape may be seen from a ‛vertical view’ and a ‛side view’. The former, ‛objective and calculating’ presents landscape as an environment indispensable for human life, while the latter, ‛personal, moral, and aesthetic’ shows landscape as surroundings in which people live or – to say it a la Berleant – participate. The point is that “if the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can take place only in the mind’s eye”.[xlviii] Not only in the mind, but also in the senses, one could add, which would give Meinig’s and Tuan’s claims a truly phenomenological tune.
Summing up, approaching landscape in a phenomenological vein seems useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it links the concept of landscape with human experience by showing that landscape is in fact the objective world as experienced by people and that there is no other way for them to be aware of their world than by experiencing in one way or another. Secondly, it makes it possible to understand that the world in which people live is a world of their experiences, some of which are individual and some collective. In other words, thinking of landscape as a phenomenon allows one to take into account different ways in which people experience the world around them. As an aside, it may be said that it is equally possible to claim that this is the reason why landscapes are studied from different perspectives. The ambiguity or vagueness of the concept of landscape, deplored by some scholars, may be interpreted as a sign of the fact that various academic disciplines and approaches are rooted in different experiences. Thirdly, it shows that every landscape is aesthetic even if only sometimes do we notice it by focusing on how it appears to us and that its aesthetic aspect involves sensory qualities as well as meanings and values. Finally, all the approaches presented here under the heading of ‛landscape phenomenology’ support the belief that landscapes are ubiquitous and justify their omnipresence – landscapes are everywhere because people always and everywhere experience in one way or another the world around them. It is an existential truth, since human existence is after being-in-a-landscape. No other approach shows it better then phenomenology combined with aesthetics.
[i] Michael Jakob, Il paesaggio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 7 (original version: Le paysage, Infolio, Gollion 2008).
[ii] Jacques Rancière, Le temps du paysage. Aux origines de la révolution esthétique (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2020).
[iii] See e.g. Kenneth R. Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” in Kenneth R. Olwig, The Meanings of Landscapes. Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2019), 18–49; Michael Jakob, L’émergence du paysage (Gollion: Infolio Éditions, 2004); Hansjörg Küster, Piccola storia del paesaggio, trad. Carolina D’Alessandro (Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2010); Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Ernst H. Gombrich, Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 107–121; Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: 1952).
[iv] https://www.coe.int/en/web/landscape [accessed: 15/10/2021].
[v] See e.g. Mainstreaming landscape through the European landscape convention, ed. by Karsten Jørgensen, Morten Clemetsen, Kine Halvorsen Thorén, Tim Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2016); Angioletta Voghera, Dopo la Convenzione europea del paesaggio: Politiche, piani e valutazione = After the European landscape convention: policies, plans and evaluatio (Firenze: Alinea, 2011); K.R. Olwig, “The Practice of Landscape ‘Conventions’ and the Just Landscape: The Case of the European Landscape Convention, Landscape Research, vol. 32, 2007, no. 5, 579–594.
[vi] Felix Kienast, Flurina Wartmann, A. Zaugg Marcel Hunziker, A Review of Integrated Approaches for Landscape Monitoring. Report: CEP-CDCPP (2019) [https://rm.coe.int/council-of-europe-european-landscape-convention-10th-council-of-europe/1680968476].
[vii] Hervé Brunon, Catherine Chomarat-Ruiz, Pierre Donadieu, André Torre, “Pour une “métascience” du paysage,” Projets de paysage: revue scientifique sur la conception et l’aménagement de l’espace 2009 (hal-01198150; online).
[viii] Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, Morika Reker, “Introduction,” in Philosophy of Landscape. Think, Walk, Act, ed. by A. Veríssimo Serrão, M. Reker (Lisbon: Centre for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon, 2019), 13–14.
[ix] Florian Plit, Krajobrazy kulturowe w geografii polskiej. Szkice (Warszawa: Dialog, 2016), 78–83.
[x] Paolo D’Angelo, Filosofia del paesaggio (Roma: Quodlibet, 2010), 12–13.
[xi] Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment. The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2000); on the history of this tradition see e.g. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 1–38; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
[xii] John Wylie, “Landscape and phenomenology,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. by Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, Mick Atha (New York: Routledge, 2019), 132.
[xiii] Ibidem, 127.
[xiv] Brief general accounts may be found in e.g.: Barbara Bender, “Place and Landscape,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), 303–314; John Wylie, Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2007), 139-186; Emma Waterton, “More-Than-Representational Landscapes,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. by Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, Mick Atha (New York: Routledge, 2019), 91–101; Wylie, “Landscape and phenomenology”.
[xv] Hayden Lorrimer, “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being «More-Than-Representational»,” Progress in Human Geography 29(1) (2005): 85; see also Plit, Krajobrazy kulturowe w geografii polskiej, 13.
[xvi] David Crouch, “Landscape, Land and Identity. A Performative Consideration,” in Land and Identity. Theory, Memory, and Practice, ed. by Christine Berberich, Neill Campbell, Robert Hudson (Rodopi: Amsterdam 2012), 41-65; David Crouch, “Landscape, Performance and Performativity,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. by Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton (New York: Routledge, 2013), 119–127; Waterton, “More-Than-Representational Landscapes”; see also Kenneth R. Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape”.
[xvii] Bender, “Place and Landscape,” 305.
[xviii] Wylie, Landscape, 1.
[xix] Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” in Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 191.
[xx] Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 221.
[xxi] José Ortega y Gasset, “La pedagogia del paisaje,” in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. 1, Rivista de Occidente, Madrid (1966): 55.
[xxii] Tilley, The Materiality of Stone, 25.
[xxiii] Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” 193.
[xxiv] Tilley, The Materiality of Stone, 28.
[xxv] Bender, “Place and Landscape,” 303.
[xxvi] Ibidem.
[xxvii] Wylie, “Landscape and phenomenology,” 132.
[xxviii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, transl. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 472.
[xxix] Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, “Philosophie du paysage,” in Mouvance II. Du jardin au territoire. Soixante-dix mots pour le paysage, sous la direction de Augustine Berque (Paris: Villette, 2006), 80.
[xxx] Michel Collot, La pensée-paysage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011), 18.
[xxxi] Augustin Berque, “Déploiement écouménal,” in Mouvance II. Du jardin au territoire. Soixante-dix mots pour le paysage, sous la direction de A. Berque (Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2006), 40–41; see also Augustin Berque, Thinking through Landscape, trans. by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (lLondon: Routledge, 2008); Berque claims that peirceving the World as landscape is not universal since several cultural conditions have to be met.
[xxxii] Jakob, Il paesaggio, 30–31.
[xxxiii] E. Turri, Antropologia del paesaggio. (Venezia: Marsilio Editori 2008), 103.
[xxxiv] Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997).
[xxxv] Arnold Berleant, “A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment,” in Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment. Variations on a Theme (London: Routlegde, 2005), 3–6.
[xxxvi] Arnold Berleant, “The Viewer in the Landscape,” in Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 63.
[xxxvii] Ibidem, 69
[xxxviii] Ibidem, 73.
[xxxix] Berleant, “A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment,” 14.
[xl] Arnold Berleant, “Architecture as Environmental Design,” in Berleant, Art and Engagement, 104.
[xli] Ibidem, p. 103; Berleant defines landscape as a lived environment, claiming that ‛environment’ is a more general term (“Aesthetics and Environment,” in Living in the Landscape. Towards an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 12-13).
[xlii] Arnold Berleant, “Descriptive Aesthetics,” in Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Phildadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 26.
[xliii] Ibidem, 37.
[xliv] Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, transl. by John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
[xlv] Jakob, L’émergence du paysage, 32-35.
[xlvi] Donald W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes:
Geographical Essays, ed. by Donald W. Meinig, John B. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 33–34.
[xlvii] Yi-Fu Tuan, “Thought and Landscape,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. by Donald W. Meinig, John B. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 90.
[xlviii] Ibidem.
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