Transcript Witches Rocks, Utah

Place: Land and Nature
A Sense of Place
Lecture 2
Andrea Peach
Wittgenstein’s Cottage,
Lake Eidsvatnet,
Norway
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
Our life is frittered away by detail …
simplify, simplify
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
The spirit of place lies in its
landscape
Land is a natural phenomenon
‘Landscape’ is a cultural
construct
Casper David Friedrich
Wanderer above
the Sea of Fog
1818
Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews
1818
Little Sparta, Stoneypath
(Ian Hamilton Finlay)
Stourhead Wiltshire (Henry Hoare 1720)
Karen Knorr
Pleasures of the Imagination: Connoisseurs
1986
Timothy O’Sullivan
Witches Rocks, Utah
1869
Rick Dingus
Witches Rocks, Utah
1978
Ansel Adams
Monolith, the Face of Half
Dome, Yosemite Valley,
California, 1927
Landscape is a natural
scene mediated by culture.
It is both a represented
and presented space, both
a signifier and a signified.
WJT Mitchell
Joel Meyerowitz
Broadway and West 46th
Street, New York, 1976
Guiseppe Penone
The Tree will Continue to
Grow except at this Point,
1968-78
Andy Goldsworthy
Things are continuously in a state of
change or flow and everything, even
stone, has a sense of movement about it.
Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty,
Great Salt Lake, Utah
1969-70
One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state
of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract
banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought,
ideas decompose into stones of unknowing
Robert Smithson
Christo and Jean Claude
Surrounded Islands
Biscayne Bay, Miami
1980-1983
Richard Long
I like the idea of
using the land
without possessing it
A Circle in Alaska
1977
Jim Partridge
Gray’s Seat
Lancaster
2000
The processes I use are often
metaphors for nature’s
processes, one which
naturally weather and create
a surface. This object is not
specifically about the
landscape ... But is was
stimulated by the experience
of being in a particular
place at a particular time. It is
about an almost indescribable
feeling of fragility and ever
vulnerability
Elsje van Keppel
Animal Vegetable
1996
Simon Starling
Island for Weeds (Prototype)
2003
Simon Starling
Tabernas Desert Run
Biscayne Bay, Miami
1980-1983
Dalziel and Scullion
Modern Nature
Tyrebagger Hill, Aberdeenshire
2000
Iceland taught me
that each place is
a unique location
of change.
No place is a fixed
or concluded
thing.
Roni Horn
Becoming a Landscape, Iceland, 1999-2001
The view is not
separate from
the viewer
Olafur Eliasson
The Weather Project
Tate Modern, London
2003
The real voyage of discovery
consists in not seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes
Marcel Proust
For the Seminar:
Bring an object, text or image, which you feel is
either directly or indirectly influenced by either
‘land’ or ‘nature’.
Come prepared to discuss how this contributes
to our programme theme of ‘a sense of place’.