Framed Landscapes - or - Without a Frame there is no Landscape - WWW-Docs for B-TU.De
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 29
Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no
Landscape
Astrid Schwarz
1. Introduction
In the following I will be discussing the thesis «Without a frame there
is no landscape». This may initially sound banal, perhaps a little over-
speculative, and at first perhaps utterly counterintuitive as well. After all,
surely most of us will seek out a spot we are used to calling «landscape»
when our own four walls, the town we live in, or the micro- and
macrosocial «frame» of our lives in general start feeling oppressive and
threaten to hem us in. In such situations landscape is a cypher for freedom
and expansiveness; it may be as much about a contemplative experience
of nature as about a hyperactive one. At any rate, landscape becomes a
space for recuperation and, as such, a resource: the expectation is that
nature/landscape will «speak to» different aspects of our attentiveness
than art and culture; it can appear to us as arcadian, heroic, romantic or
melancholic – in other words, as a beautiful landscape in which aesthetic
sensibilities are aroused.
The painter Gerhard Richter thinks that all of this is «phoney»,
something he repeatedly seeks to address in his painted landscapes: «My
landscapes do not just appear beautiful or nostalgic, romantic or classical
like lost paradises; they are above all “phoney” […], and by “phoney”
I mean the glorified view we have of nature, a nature whose every form
is constantly against us, because it knows no meaning, no mercy, no
compassion, because it knows nothing, it is absolutely mindless, the
complete opposite of us, absolutely inhuman»1. Richter’s nature is a raw
and immoral nature, and it thwarts the idea of freedom.
It is what Kant described as the nature about which, because we fear
it, we can make no judgment, but which rather puts us to flight or at least
fills us with dread. We encounter this nature, for example, in – as Kant
puts it – «(b)old, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds
piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals;
1
G. Richter, «Notizen 1986», in D. Elger and H. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter. Text
1961 bis 2007: Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, Cologne, Walther König, 2008, p. 159.
«Iride», a. XXXIV, n. 92, gennaio-aprile 2021 / «Iride», v. 34, issue 92, January-April 202130 Astrid Schwarz
[…] the boundless ocean in a state of tumult» and so forth. What all this
shows us as humans above all is how vulnerable and unimportant we are,
how «insignificantly small» in the face of the might of a nature which is
surely «only against us». The situation is quite different, of course, when
we are able to observe such fear-inducing scenes from a place of safety;
then – to quote Kant – «[…] the sight of them only becomes all the more
attractive the more fearful it is, as longs as we find ourselves in safety,
we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of
our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a
capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to
measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature»2. Our
judgement regarding the sublime is made in an environment that provides
distance and safety, yet at the same time it is more than simply cultural
convention3. If a person observing a passing storm or some other event we
judge to be sublime shows no response and remains unmoved, we say of
this person – according to Kant – that they have «no feeling»4. It is not the
natural objects themselves which are sublime but merely our imagination
of their overwhelming might that enables the subject for his or her part to
experience their own strength – provided culture and technology guarantee
physical safety and thus the opportunity to experience this state freely.
Another state of nature in relation to which Kant says we can
experience freedom is natural beauty. Natural beauty presupposes a
state of contemplation out of which it is possible to look at nature non-
intentionally, a non-purposive contemplation of a natural thing which
pleases «freely and in itself». Natural beauty is «a beautiful thing»
whereas artificial beauty offers «a beautiful representation of a thing»5.
Nonetheless, for Kant art is not mimesis, merely a beautiful semblance of
nature; on the contrary, nature is perceived in aesthetic and teleological
regard as a work of art – because the phenomena of nature are not to be
judged merely as «purposeless mechanisms but rather also to the analogy
with art»6.
2. Natural Beauty and Poetic Imagination
It is important, then, to establish why natural beauty should be superior to
artificial beauty – a hierarchy, incidentally, which was critiqued and indeed
2
I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2000, pp. 144 f.
3
«[I]t is not therefore first generated by culture and so to speak introduced into
society merely as a matter of convention», ibidem, p. 149.
4
Ibidem.
5
Ibidem, p. 189.
6
Ibidem, p. 130.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 31
rejected as early as the 19th century. This creation of a hierarchy relates
to aesthetic judgment. Kant believes that it is only natural beauty which
affords the experience of a freedom foiled neither by intentions (such
as those of an artist) nor by prior conceptions of beauty or of «what the
object ought to be»7. As long as natural beauty is judged to be art, the
subject experiences a liberating sense of overcoming the distance between
him or herself and the world as it is. This kind of «tuning in» is not (made)
available to him/her in the case of artificial beauty, because here the subject
can only encounter him or herself. Natural beauty, then, is «a nudge» with
which nature invites us to reflect upon ourselves – without thinking that
the trace of the natural object has anything to do with us and without
becoming enmeshed in endless self-referential relations. This is the only
place where the subject encounters not just him or herself but also the
«technology of nature». It is only when aesthetic judgment turns into
teleological judgment that – according to Kant – «[n]ature is no longer
judged as it appears as art, but to the extent that it really is art (albeit
superhuman)»8 and thus as a purpose, just as the artist has a conception of
his sculpture when he begins to carve it out of a piece of wood9.
The particularity of the aesthetic as opposed to the teleological
contemplation of nature, then, is important because the useful and
the purposive are set aside in favour of freedom and beauty. «We may
consider it as a favor that nature has done for us», says Kant, that, in
«addition to the usefulness it has so richly distributed beauty and charms,
and we can» – he continues – «love it [this nature] on that account […]
and we can feel ourselves to be ennobled in this contemplation – just as
if nature had erected and decorated its magnificent stage precisely with
this intention»10.
Kant has rather random groups of natural objects appear as natural
beauties in this theatre, including «flowers» and «shell-fish»11, while a few
exotic birds are also mentioned by name: the parrot, the humming bird,
7
Ibidem, p. 114.
8
Ibidem, p. 190.
9
In the case of an artificial thing, by contrast, we know that the artist has a conception
of his sculpture when he begins to carve it out of a piece of wood – in the end, however,
the artist genius also adheres to the rules of nature which it prescribes for art. Here, too,
it becomes clear that Kant places natural beauty above art.
10
Ibidem, p. 252.
11
M. Schaub, Das Singuläre und das Exemplarische: zu Logik und Praxis der Beispiele
in Philosophie und Ästhetik, Zürich, Diaphanes, 2010, pp. 193 f. Kant’s examples of
natural beauty are more of a random collection – «as depressing as they are remarkable»
remarks Schaub (ibidem), referring – half humorously, half in disappointment to the «sheer
statistics», which alone show «that exorbitance and everyday ordinariness constituted
the unbearable lightness of Kant’s examples: natural beauty: flowers, gardens, crystals,
Myron’s cow, furniture, music, horses, women».32 Astrid Schwarz
and the bird of paradise12. Any hope of finding landscapes mentioned here,
though, is disappointed; indeed, Kant does not use the word «landscape»
at all when talking about aesthetic judgment in his Critique of the Power of
Judgment. What does play an interesting role here, however, is landscape
gardening, or today’s landscape architecture, mediating as it does between
natural beauty and art, between theory and praxis. We will return to this
issue in detail later.
At this point the important thing is, once again, first to notice that when
contemplating, for example, a bird of paradise as a natural beauty, no
conception of, say, a zoological or systematic kind should be introduced,
as this would in itself restrict «the imagination, which is as it were at play
in the observation of the shape» (Freiheit der Einbildungskraft)13. Instead,
when contemplating a form, the imagination should be completely free
and without a thought of any purpose. So one should not think: the more
colourful and the longer the tail of the bird of paradise, the greater is
its reproductive success; rather, the poetic imagination should hold sway.
Poet Peter Rühmkorf, using the free play of imagination, has a different
name for the kiss of the muse: «Bird shit from paradise – feel free to enjoy
the gift given»14.
Recognizing natural beauty may not, then, broaden our knowledge
about natural objects, but it certainly does broaden our perception of
nature: natural objects are not to be found and described only in the
realm of necessity, as mere natural mechanisms, but also in art, that is,
in the realm of freedom. We have seen, however, that for such a choice
to be possible it is necessary, first, for the subject to be at a safe distance
to the objects or events – looking out of the window at the spectacle
of lightning, say – and, second, for him or her to be prepared for an
aesthetic experience, in other words, to let go of any motivation based on
purposiveness – to not want to shoot the lion but to have an encounter
with it15. Gerhard Richter’s comment about a beautiful landscape being
«phoney»16 may also be meant in the sense of this twofold distance to the
natural object. It is distancing itself that gives us the frame, that enables
beautiful or sublime nature to mean something to us and to reinforce
our idea that in this respect the landscape has almost been created for
us. What this frame does, we might say, is highlight the distance and thus
12
I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 114.
13
Ibidem, p. 114.
14
P. Rühmkorf, Paradiesvogelschiß, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 2008, pp. 7 f.
15
This refers to Blumenberg’s lion in the book Blumenberg written by Sibylle
Lewitscharoff (2011). Inside cover text: «large, yellow, relaxed: with enchanting
unselfconsciousness, a lion lies one night in the study of the renowned philosopher
Blumenberg».
16
G. Richter, «Notizen 1986», p. 159.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 33
enable nature to be an image of landscape17. And the more we find out
about what the non-conceptual frame enables, achieves or indeed holds
at bay, the less trivial and – perhaps also – the less surprising the thesis
appears that landscape always comes in a frame. The landscape in the
frame likewise organizes our perception of nature, as it does relations to
this nature, as «the imagined Other» outside ourselves.
«Without a frame there is no landscape», then, initially means nothing
more (but also nothing less) than acknowledging that the framing of nature
as art, or as landscape, produces a parallel set of opposing conceptions: in
addition to natural beauty and artificial beauty, there are other fascinating
pairs of concepts, including the useful and the sensual, the idea of a
technology of nature and a technology of art and thus, also, of the naturally
given and the product of artifice. Ever present in contemplations of
landscape is also the relation of the part to the whole, of the particular
detail to the full totality and, ultimately, the question of what we merely
see or have already always known in relation to a landscape, whether it is
an actual fact or an invention.
3. Forms of Framed Landscape
To put this in more specific terms, we must first ask what the difference
is between the various visible kinds of landscape and whether or not it is
an essential difference. After all, the framed landscape appears to us in
not just one but several different forms, namely, in landscape as image,
landscape as garden and, finally, landscape as an ensemble of natural
objects.
1 – The landscape image has existed as a genre since around the 16th
century, its media being painting, drawing, print and photography. Here,
the frame is given quite literally by material and form, by the sizing and
also by the exhibition situation.
2 – Landscape gardening, or today’s landscape architecture, as it has
been and continues to be practised in gardens and parks, in recreational
landscapes in the 20th century and – in scientized form – in the «built
natures» of restoration ecology. Here, the frame is formed by relations of
ownership, by political or topographical boundaries.
17
This argument is prevalent in philosophy and history of geography or cultural
history literature on landscape e.g. G. Hard, Die Diffusion der «Idee der Landschaft»,
in «Erdkunde», 23 (1969), no. 4, pp. 249-264; R. Piepmeier, Das Ende der ästhetischen
Kategorie «Landschaft». Zu einem Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse, in «Westfälische
Forschungen, Mitteilungen des Provinzialinstituts für Westfälische Landes- und
Volksforschung», 30 (1980), pp. 8-46; D.E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape, London, Croom Helm, 1984; I.H. Thompson (ed.), Rethinking Landscape. A
Critical Reader, London, Routledge, 2008.34 Astrid Schwarz
3 – The rural landscape beyond towns, parts of nature that may be
more or less cultivated, sublime or beautiful. One has to know what a
landscape is, otherwise it cannot be seen but is just a collection of trees and
roaring stags or a hill with this or that many potential hectoliters of wine.
The landscape outdoors is an «invented landscape»: whether and how we
see a landscape is initially down to the poetic-inventive imagination18. Yet
it is by no means arbitrary which signs fit together to make a landscape
and what this landscape then represents; rather, this is steered by a
certain attitude of expectation that is embedded in cultural and cognitive
patterns. Ernst Cassirer describes this constitutive context as follows: «All
genuine representation [of aesthetic space – i.e. of landscape] is by no
means a mere passive imitation of the world; rather, it is a new relationship
that humans adopt to the world»19.
What all three forms of landscape have in common is that they are
framed in one way or another: the traditional landscape image is framed
quite literally by a picture frame, the landscaped garden by a more or less
explicit garden border, the imagined landscape by the distancing strategy,
by definitional attempts to demarcate it as well as by well-known artistic
depictions.
The landscaped garden functions as a hinge between images of
landscape and the outdoor landscape. As in the supposedly untouched
landscape, many of its elements (shrubs and perennials, for example)
exist thanks to «the technology of nature». At the same time, though,
the landscaped garden is quite obviously a readable product of art to
the extent that its components have symbolic meaning. The baroque
garden is designed using specific plants and trees arranged according to
an abstract idea, namely, that of nature ordered according to the laws of
geometry, mirroring the ordering of Renaissance society. Paradigmatic
here are the gardens of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte20, which offer
axial views and hierarchical terracing and present a theatre of absolutist
domination.
18
«Der Künstler will zur Welt durch ein Ganzes sprechen, dieses Ganze aber findet er
nicht in der Natur, sondern ist es Frucht seines eigenen Geistes oder, wenn Sie wollen, des
Anwehens eines befruchtenden göttlichen Odems», J.W. v. Goethe, in J.P. Eckermann,
Gespräche mit Goethe. In den letzten Jahren seines Lebens 1823-1832, «18.04.1827», Berlin,
Aufbau-Verlag, 1956, p. 313. On «category landscape», see G. Simmel, The Philosophy of
Landscape (1913), in «Theory, Culture & Society», 24 (2007), no. 7-8, p. 22.
19
E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Teil 3. Phänomenologie der Er-
kenntnis (1929), Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975, pp. 27-29 [trans-
lated by Catherine Cross].
20
Both designed by French landscape architect André le Nôtre. D. Hanser, Architec-
ture of France. Reference guides to national architecture, Westport, Connecticut, London,
Greenwood Press, 2006, pp. 271 ff. and pp. 291 ff.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 35
The landscaped garden – more so than images of nature perceived
as art – is thus the pictorial expression of a certain relationship to
nature, historically contextualized and shaped by philosophical and
social theories. According to Kant, the art of landscape gardening – or
Lustgärtnerei – is «a beautiful arrangement of its products […] the art
of pleasure gardens […]. The beautiful arrangement of corporeal things
[…] is also given only for the eye»21. The landscaped garden is at once
something that has become and something that is made (Gewordenes und
Gemachtes): geometric planting, tree pruning and plant breeding. Here is
where the technology of nature and the technology of art encounter one
another: society’s relationships to and perceptions of nature are realized
directly in the practice of gardening22.
Like the landscape image, the landscaped garden also has a frame
– a hedge, a path – which limit and frame this constructed landscape.
The landscape image in its frame, though, can only give us «a semblance
of corporeal extension». This illusion is due above all to the ever more
complexly developed central perspective23 but also to other techniques
involving illusion and to pictorial conventions, such as lowering the
horizon24 and increasingly representing nature using references to natural
history finds25.
The pivot of landscaped garden/ landscape of natural beauty suggests
the idea that we can see the technology of nature in analogy to art: nature
shows itself to us in the form of landscape, and by imagining this we
are living out a certain relationship to nature. The frame here adopts
the function of a distancing perspective – it provides for a distanced
relationship to the object depicted within it.
All these three forms of landscape, then, should not be thought of as
something given, as a thing that simply needs to be seen or discovered – not
the landscaped garden either, with its «corporeal things» which, after all,
in themselves do not make a garden but are merely a collection of things.
It should also be noted that each of these three forms – the landscape
image, the landscaped garden and the landscape of natural beauty – is
connected to other conceptualizations of framing. These differ but are in
each case framings that have a tangible impact, enabling «landscape» to
21
I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, pp. 200 f.
22
Another practical aspect is that the landscaped garden demands a certain way
of seeing from the observer; as with a picture, the gaze is directed and, by means of
perspective, adjusted.
23
E. Panofsky, «Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”», in F. Saxl (ed.), Vorträge
der Bibliothek Warburg. Vorträge 1924-1925, Leipzig, Teubner, 1927.
24
A. Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in
literarischen Landschaftsbildern, Frankfurt on the Main, Suhrkamp, 1990.
25
Ibidem; E. Panofsky, «Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”».36 Astrid Schwarz
emerge as such in the first place, as something that has at once been made
and has become.
What does this interim conclusion mean, then, for the thesis «Without
a frame there is no landscape»?
3.1. Enabling «Landscape»
Ways of conceiving landscape and its framing are the subject of diverse
disciplinary discourses: is landscape a projection of landscape paintings
onto the perceived world or is landscape a physical unit that can be
empirically accessed and explored? That the landscape «outside» is a
purely conceptual one is an assertion found principally in the discourses
of philosophy and art history. What we describe as landscape, so these
discourses go, is oriented toward landscape painting as a prototype and so
is only seen when landscape exists inside a picture frame. There is certainly
historical evidence for this thesis, both practically and conceptually.
Regardless of the disciplinary context, it is the term «landscape» itself
here which serves as a frame and allows landscape to emerge – which
ultimately makes the «framed landscape» a tautology, as the frame and the
term are interchangeable: «framed landscape» and «the term “landscape”
refers to a part of nature» then mean one and the same thing.
My intention in introducing the thesis «Without a frame there is
no landscape» is, in contrast to this, to draw attention to the praxis of
a relationship to nature that comes into play when we look at a part
of nature as landscape. Even when we are sitting cosily at the coffee
table watching a storm outside our window, we have made sure that this
contemplative mood is possible and that we are not left at the mercy of
the raging forces of nature. We have established a distance that makes
an aesthetic attitude possible – and this distancing is already part of the
praxis of a «framed landscape». In other words, the «framed landscape»
should be ascribed neither completely to the realm of a concept which
alone constitutes landscape nor to a completely concept-free mode of
acting and seeing.
Rather, the «framed landscape» is intended to indicate a non-
conceptual framing with which relationships to nature are set in motion
and where concepts and actions are related to one another and are kept
on the move26.
One is inclined to concur with the conciliatory suggestion made by art historian Max
26
Friedländer when he notes: «It is not a question of that which is visible, but rather of that
which we have perceived; and surprisingly little of that which is visible gets perceived, that
is absorbed into our memory of forms», M.J. Friedländer, On Art and Connoisseurship,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1942, p. 21.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 37
If we assume, then, that the landscape is not just a form of looking,
only one that is framed conceptually, then the framing of landscape must
be linked to a quite particular praxis; boundaries must be drawn, details
defined, materials selected and formed – paper, wood, plants, paving.
Landscape in all three forms – as image, as garden and as part of nature
– thus acquires a certain «thingness» (etwas Dinghaftes), it is something
«really constructed». The landscape painter, for example, uses a set of
tools that organizes the part of nature she wishes to paint into the shape
of a landscape when «transferring» it onto paper. When this is completed,
this paper contains readable signs arranged in a certain way – in this sense,
landscape «exists» in a quite material way.
4. A Research into the Materiality of Landscapes
In the following I now want to spell out further the «framed landscape»
as understood in this material way. I do this first by looking more closely
at the materiality of the framings and thereby examining the aesthetic and
logical principles according to which it is constructed. The constellations
«experiencing wholeness in a landscape» and «gazing on the landscape»
round off the discussion about competing concepts of nature that are
kept in balance by the «landscape frame».
Let us begin with the gaze upon the landscape and thus with the issue of
how knowing and seeing are mutually related when looking at landscape, of
the reciprocal influencing of natural beauty and art, and thus the question
of the criteria for differentiating between what has been made and what
invented, between the technology of art and the technology of nature.
The discussion focuses on a filmic landscaped garden that serves to
illustrate the pivot function of the garden between image and part of nature.
Screenshot taken from Peter Greenaway, The Draughtsman’s Contract, 198238 Astrid Schwarz
What do we see through this frame?
Shrubs, trees and flowers, a few sculptures, a house in the
background, all connected by paths, not a soul in sight. We have before
us an English garden from the baroque period, not just any garden
but a quite specific one. It is the garden belonging to Mr. Herbert, the
generally absent and yet permanently present owner of the property.
It is this garden that plays the real lead role in Peter Greenaway’s film
«The Draughtsman’s Contract»27. The garden is at once a contested
object and theatre for disputes, an arena of desires and a coveted object.
The garden forms the frame in which events are played out; it is the
backdrop before which the conversations of petty rural society unfold
and simultaneously the site of contestation through which different
philosophical views are negotiated regarding the relationship between
world and reality. At the end, philosophical differences of opinion
regarding seeing and knowing give rise to an experience of existential
extremity for draughtsman Mr. Neville, who is as naive as he is vain:
during the final minutes of the film he is beaten to death by a gang of
the house’s male staff. Up until this brutal ending a highly pleasurable
time is had by all, including Mr. Neville, as his philosophical opponents
spare no effort of argument or stage management to demonstrate that
the mere landscape is most definitely not neutral or innocent but rather
contains readable traces.
4.1. Seeing and Knowing
Mr. Neville’s dictum «Draw what you see and not what you know»
is countered by the following considerations presented by one of the
ladies of the house: «Mr. Neville, I have grown to believe that a really
intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. A painting requires a
certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options. An
intelligent man will know more about what he is drawing than he will
see»28.
27
The film appeared in cinemas in 1982 and was Greenaway’s first major box office
success. Responding to standing ovations from 3000 spectators at the Venice Film Festival,
he quoted from the lines spoken by his main protagonist Mr. Neville: «I am surprised ...
delighted ...overwhelmed», J. Lüdeke, Die Schönheit des Schrecklichen. Peter Greenaway
und seine Filme, Bergisch Gladbach, Lubbe, 1998, p. 65.
28
And, he continues: «in the space between knowing and seeing, he will become
constrained – unable to pursue an idea strongly, fearing that the discerning, those who
he is eager to please, will find him wanting if he does not put in not only what he knows,
but what they know, as well. You, Mr. Neville, if you are an intelligent man – and thus an
indifferent painter – will perceive that a construction such as I have suggested could well
be placed on the evidence contained in your drawings. If you are – as I have heard – a
talented draughtsman, then I could imagine that you could suppose that the objects IFramed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 39
As a highly professional documentary artist, Mr. Neville must
abandon his own role as co-producer of events – he is merely a neutral
observer. As an intelligent man, Mr. Neville must deny his knowledge
and adopt the pose of an innocent viewer – promptly, in doing so,
becoming embroiled in events precisely because of his distanced and
unreflected approach. At the end, the draughtsman himself inductively
produces all the clues that ultimately turn into circumstantial evidence
that points directly at him. In order to simply see, Mr. Neville knowingly
sets aside his knowledge of the construction of what he has seen, relying
completely on the objectifying function of his construction frame, which
is directed at the landscape. Merely wishing to see is presented here as a
naive attitude and a wrong use of the frame: «Film is not a window onto
the world through which you can see reality» says Peter Greenaway;
«seeing and knowing are not the same thing»29.
Capturing a landscape through a frame obviously requires more than
just knowledge about the correct use of the frame as a technology; it
also requires knowledge about what this technology actually affords – it
requires an awareness of its constructedness.
Let us take a closer look, first, at the technology of the frame which,
in the film, marks the constant distancing of the draughtsman from the
landscape30. The instrument through which Mr. Neville sets his sights on
garden and landscape is a so-called diopter sight31, a piece of apparatus
that frames what is to be pictured and sets it in a technical and material
relation to the detail to be captured on paper – just, indeed, as the
camera technique defines the detail which the cinemagoer gets to see.
have drawn your attention to form no plan, stratagem, or indictment». And Mr. Neville
replies: «Indictment, madam? You are ingenious. I’m allowed to be neither of the two
things (intelligent, indifferent) that I wish to be at the same time», A.R. Werner, System
und Mythos. Peter Greenaways Filme und die Selbstbeobachtung der Medienkultur, Berlin,
De Gruyter, 2010, p. 198. Unlike a photographic snapshot, Neville’s drawings emerge
over a period of 12 days in which, unsurprisingly, the scenery changes – both the scenery
outdoors and the scenery of the social edifice – even and in spite of his considerable efforts
to control it.
29
K. Frommer, Inszenierte Anthropologie. Ästhetische Wirkungsstrukturen im
Filmwerk Peter Greenaways, Cologne, University of Cologne, dissertation, p. 72 [translated
by Catherine Cross].
30
And because in a film by Peter Greenaway, of course, it cannot simply be a matter
of straightforward filmic reality, these technical and narrative strategies lead to a deliberate
distancing of the person watching the film.
31
E.S. Sturm, Weiße Tücher, Weiße Tasche, Weiße Karte. Absicht und Arbeitslosigkeit
bei Peter Greenaway, Andreas Karner und Lewis Carroll, in «Kunstforum», 12 (2000), no.
152, «Kunst ohne Werk. Ästhetik ohne Absicht», pp. 152 f.40 Astrid Schwarz
Screenshot taken from Peter Greenaway, The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982
The draughtsman’s wooden frame consists of two rectangular frames
placed one in front of the other whose position in relation to the other
can be adjusted by sliding them along a rail. Wires strung horizontally and
vertically inside the frame subdivide the field of view and simultaneously
assist in capturing the motifs in an exact centralized perspective; in fact,
it almost seems as if we were watching Mr. Neville taking a photograph
or filming a scene32.
With the help of the optical apparatus the view of the garden is dissolved
into quadrants: trees, sculptures and the house are transformed into isolated,
disparate signs by the constant shift between the view through the frame and
the drawing hand. This procedure for creating a «de-piction» (Ab-Sicht)
was already widely practised in the Renaissance and took many and varied
forms: Leonardo da Vinci’s «grids» and Albrecht Dürer’s «lattice frame»
are forerunners of Mr. Neville’s technical apparatus. Common to both is
that they offer a rule-turned-apparatus that enables something found in
three-dimensional space to be represented in two dimensions. Likewise,
they both ensure that the equipment generates not just a geometric lineal
pattern during the process of drawing but also a distance to the everyday
meaning of the motif. This occurs via the introduction of a formal principle
that facilitates and indeed demands a different context of meaning between
the imagination of the draughtsman, the eyes and hand focused on the
canvas, and the object being drawn or painted33.
32
This impression is further reinforced by the fact that the strategy behind the camera
settings is simultaneously presented to the cinemagoer by the frames distributed through-
out the landscape. These are unusually static; they show many vista views and, by means
of the double framing – that is, of the visible draughtsman’s frame and the invisible camera
frame – invite the viewer to explore the view of the draughtsman and the cameraman, dis-
tanced and observing: landscape and garden are offered up for contemplation as tableaus.
33
See also Sturm, who refers here to Lacan: «in our relationship to things, which isFramed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 41
Screenshot taken from Peter Greenaway, The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982
The workable scale of the grid enables the painter to not engage in
processes of interpretation or questioning: what he sees is not a house or
a tree but quadrants to be filled with various brushstrokes and shadings.
Ernst Gombrich described this technique of transmission as mosaic
theory, a method of comparing disaggregated parts, of subdividing and,
finally, of taking in the whole disinterestedly, as it were34.
But even in such a pinpoint-precise de-piction of a landscape, it may
be that the painting or even a photograph does not work «properly». Paul
Cézanne believed that the individual elements of an image could never be
fitted together to make a convincing whole in the process of depiction.
The mosaic theory seems to have limited scope, at least with regard to the
landscape image. Other techniques need to be utilized, then, to «produce
the illusion» such as partial enlargement, the placing of natural objects in
relation to one another – the space between a mountain and the edge of
the picture, or the passepartout and the frame35.
constituted by the line of sight and arranged according to the figures of our imagination,
something slides, runs and transmits itself from stage to stage which to a certain extent
is always circumvented – it is that something called the gaze (Lacan)» [translated by
Catherine Cross], E.S. Sturm, Weiße Tücher, Weiße Tasche, Weiße Karte. Absicht und
Arbeitslosigkeit bei Peter Greenaway, Andreas Karner und Lewis Carroll, pp. 152-161. Mr.
Neville’s blind spot corresponds to Lacan’s gaze: it shapes and misshapes at the same
time – although Mr. Neville lacks the distance to his procedures/model; he can only see
the depiction.
34
«There is no essential difference […] between the artist who paints a landscape
and another who copies a picture. Both are concerned with piecemeal matching, much
as a mosaicist would be who works from a cartoon and selects one stone after another
that comes as close as possible to the corresponding hue of his prototype, arranging them
in the shapes he sees in front of him», E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 6 vols., Berlin, Phaidon, 2002, pp. 256 and 259.
35
Ibidem, p. 263.42 Astrid Schwarz
At this point, the effect produced by the frame acquires a kind of
significance that has not yet been acknowledged, namely, as a mode of
assembling disaggregated elements. It is only when the originals – the
natural objects being looked at (or referred to as such) – are viewed at a
distance, from within the very composition of the image, as it were, and
always in relation to the frame that landscape can emerge. The rules of
perspective alone are not enough. Instead, the landscape space is organized
and arranged – as occurs on the stage of a theatre – by placing objects at
different depths and by having individual parts of the scene positioned,
like props, to left and right and facing toward the front, parallel to the
imaginary stage curtain36. Art historian Max Friedländer points out that
this practice was invented in Dutch landscape painting of the 16th century
(Jan van Eyck) and that it contrasted dramatically with the technique that
had been used up to that time, namely, simply spreading out the figures
and whatever else was to be depicted across the surface37.
In his aesthetic study Georg Simmel illustrates once again the
distancing mechanism of the frame and the impact it has on that which is
framed: «What the frame achieves for the work of art is to symbolize and
strengthen this double function of its boundary»38. This double function
consists, he maintains, in the fact that the frame marks a boundary to the
space outside while simultaneously creating a unity on the inside: it places
the work of art «at that distance […] from which alone it is aesthetically
enjoyable»39. In his Philosophy of Landscape Simmel considers the
techniques of demarcating, cutting out and reconnecting in order to
describe the condition of possibility for bringing forth landscape.
It is, says Simmel, a quasi-artistic act to delineate
one part within the chaotic stream and infiniteness of the immediately given
world, and conceives of and forms it as a unitary phenomenon. This now derives
its meaning from within itself, having severed all threads connecting it to the
36
M.J. Friedländer, On Art and Connoisseurship, pp. 69 f.
37
Ibidem, pp. 114 f. and pp. 117-119.
38
G. Simmel, Der Bildrahmen – Ein ästhetischer Versuch ex: Der Tag. Nr. 541, 18.
November 1902 (Berlin), in
(accessed 1-25-2021). Art historian Max Friedländer expresses this in a similar way when
he stresses that image and frame form a whole: «It is not without a sense of shame that
we look upon the wavering between anarchy and uniformity and turn admiringly to the
past, in which picture and frame formed a whole, an organic unity, and the moulded
fillet was subtly adapted to the picture space, heightening or supplementing the effect
– differently in each case; now treating the frame simply, now with great complexity;
making it a continuation and a barrier at the same time», M.J. Friedländer, On Art and
Connoisseurship, p. 96.
39
G. Simmel, Der Bildrahmen – Ein ästhetischer Versuch ex: Der Tag. Nr. 541, 18. No-
vember 1902 (Berlin).Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 43
world around it and having retied them into its own centre. We follow the same
procedure […] as soon as we perceive a “landscape” instead of a meadow, a
house, a brook and passing clouds40.
Simmel explicitly emphasizes the fact that the norms by which landscape
comes into being must be conceived of from the vantage point of the work
of art. «Landscape» arises out of a process of enhancement and purification
that disregards the random factors of everyday life or the mere impression
of natural objects. This is also what is behind a common opinion that farm
workers do not see any landscape – formulated pointedly by Cézanne, for
example: «Sometimes I tool walks and accompanied a farmer behind his
cart who was going to the market to sell his potatoes. He had never seen
Sainte-Victoire»41. Only at the moment when we no longer see a sum of
individual, possibly useful natural objects but rather really see «landscape»
do we have a kind of preliminary form of artwork before us «a work of art in
statu nascendi», as Simmel writes42. When contemplating a landscape, then,
any one of us can become an artist – albeit a lowly one, as Simmel opines.
This is especially so because the experience of looking at a landscape is an
act of synthesis that demands the whole person: it is as «whole men that we
stand before a landscape», before the landscape-turned-image as before the
landscape «outside». In other words, seeing a landscape also means placing
one’s own competence in a frame – by choosing the right distance, the right
detail, the right synthesis. And «right» means that which is subsumed in
disinterested appreciation from the perspective of aesthetic judgment43.
This notion of the individualization of form-giving by means of a frame
seems to be what Greenaway44 is also pursuing when he expresses criticism
of the standardizing function of «frames» in painting, opera, photography,
theatre, television and, of course, cinema – even if it is obvious, he says,
that the old formats are breaking apart all over the world. If Greenaway
had his way, we should not all have to sit in a dark cinema looking in the
same direction at a flat space; instead, we ought to develop an «idea of a
multiplicity of simultaneous picture formats». He certainly seems to have
made a start on this in the Draughtsman’s Contract45.
40
G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Landscape, p. 23.
41
P. Cézanne, Conversations with Cézanne, Berkeley, University of California Press,
2001, p. 120.
42
G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Landscape, p. 25.
43
Ibidem, pp. 25-26.
44
M. Luksch, Das Medium ist die Botschaft (the medium is the message), interview with
Peter Greenaway, Telepolis, 2-13-1997, in (accessed 1-25-2021).
45
«[O]ne should not underestimate knowledge. Those who know the most see the
most. But one should not overestimate knowledge either. To those who do not see, it is of
no use», M.J. Friedländer, On Art and Connoisseurship, p. 184.44 Astrid Schwarz
The aim of Simmel’s ideas and Greenaway’s experiment, then, is partly
to assert that there can be no landscape without knowledge of formation,
of the framing of landscape. Above all, however, their argument is also
one about the praxis of framing and thus about its constructive character
for the reality of landscape. We behave differently and move differently in
relation to that which we take to be landscape in a given area.
5. Landscape Inside the Frame. The Total in a Long Shot
All of which leads us to the final constellation of conflicting concepts
of nature that are held in balance by the «landscape» frame. This is
the topos with which we are all familiar, that of the holistic or total
landscape, and this touches on the issue of how the relationship of the
part to the whole and – with regard to the 19th century – the relationship
of the bourgeois subject to «his» landscape is theorized. «We stand
before the landscape as a whole man» asserts Simmel, drawing thereby
on something of the pathos of that historical figure of thought which
almost always comes into play when there is talk of wholeness and,
especially, of loss of wholeness. In macrohistorical terms, the history of
this figure is identified (whether the focus be philosophical, historical
or sociological) with the rearrangement of relationships to nature
in modernity. The key issue at this point is something that has been
captured by the expression «the landscape eye opening»46: the reference
is to nature as a whole having fallen into the realm of aesthetics at the
precise moment when the modern sciences came into being and the
tradition of holistic contemplation of the cosmos broke apart. It is
only after the whole of nature is disaggregated into specific cause and
effect mechanisms, following the methods of modern natural science,
that nature emerges as art, as «landscape»47. It is in «landscape» that
a sense of disease regarding modernity crystallizes out. As aesthetic
nature, landscape becomes a counter model to the useful nature of the
urban-industrial world, even though the «landscape eye» is looking
out on the same natural spaces where the modern industrial world of
work is expanding its presence. Thus, landscape becomes a symbol of
untouched, cosmological and utopian nature – though as we shall see,
46
W.H. Riehl, Das landschaftliche Auge, in Id., Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten,
Stuttgart, Cotta, 1862, quoted in R. Piepmeier, Das Ende der ästhetischen Kategorie
«Landschaft». Zu einem Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse, p. 13.
47
See also Piepmeier’s reference to the associated decline of philosophy, which no
longer functions as «theoria» to contemplate the whole of nature but rather breaks off into
aesthetic and phenomenological perspectives – «free contemplation» – and into scientific
and conceptually oriented perspectives on nature. R. Piepmeier, Das Ende der ästhetischen
Kategorie «Landschaft». Zu einem Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse, p. 14.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 45
the aesthetic power of the framed landscape outlasts even the destruction
of all «untouched nature»48.
It is instructive here to consider the views of Alexander von Humboldt
who, as a proponent of a simultaneously scientific and aesthetic approach
to nature, acknowledges the constituting function of the frame. Humboldt
recognizes the potency of the frame to enable the observer to take in a
total impression of – or, to put it in terms of framing theory, to enframe
(einfassen)49 – an area and, in so doing, to bring together topographical,
physical and botanical data in a so-called plant formation (or plant
community, as biologists would say nowadays). The scientific term
Humboldt uses to express these ideas – alongside «plant formation» and
the «total impression of an area» – is still the «physiognomy of plants»,
but not landscape; this term he reserves for painting, bringing together
scientific and aesthetic representation as follows (to offer an example):
there [is also] a certain natural physiognomy belonging exclusively to each
region of the earth. The idea which the artist indicates by the expressions «Swiss
nature» or «Italian sky», rests on a partial perception of local character. The
azure of the sky, the form of the clouds, […], the succulency of the herbage,
48
[…] and can thus «be directed in the urban-industrial world a g a inst this same
urban-industrial world», G. Hard, Selbstmord und Wetter, Selbstmord und Gesellschaft:
Studien zur Problemwahrnehmung in der Wissenschaft und zur Geschichte der Geographie,
in «Erkundliches Wissen», no. 92 (1988), p. 263. Around the turn of the 19th century
the «landscape eye» frames a relationship to nature that cannot exist without a receiving
subject at the center of the perspectival construction. the bourgeois subject appropriates
nature through the landscape perspective as increasingly addressed in literature, art and
science: «the transformation of nature into an image [and thus into landscape] […] is
supposed to occur on the spot, as it were», (A. Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts:
Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern, p. 144), naming as
examples plein-air painting, literary travelogues and the records of natural history. The act
of sizing up the distance on the spot allows the attitude of a relationship to nature that is
felt to be right and causes the threads – to use Simmel’s terms – to be severed at a point
appropriate to the frame. In the process of reconnecting the threads, of organizing the
total image, the horizontal line proves to be the decisive boundary line in front of which,
in the perspectivally secured space, the new commandment over nature is presented in
the foreground of the picture. The capturing of natural objects in the landscape thus
increasingly becomes – also in art – a means of practicing casting a controlling gaze upon
nature. This gaze can also be found in literature, among others in Goethe, who on his
travels in Italy (1786-1788) presents his readers with a harmonious cultural landscape
and makes use of facts of natural history to inform them about animals, plants and the
morphological shape of a region, all of which, taken together, promise an increasingly
scientific penetration and transparency of things. The landscape thus understood comes
then into conflict with the genre of landscape pictures which in the 17th century generally
had its sights on the human-nature-relationship – and not on natural places that were wild
and were perceived as unsightly.
49
From impression to expression.46 Astrid Schwarz
the brightness of the foliage, the outline of the mountains, are elements which
determine the general impression [of an area]50.
Chunglin Kwa has pointed out that, in the course of such descriptions,
Humboldt constantly switches between painterly and scientific techniques:
how we are to look in detail at the characteristics of a plant formation
can be learned from painting – while conversely painters can learn from
detailed botanical descriptions51.
Debates around Humboldt’s holistic landscape remain lively in
Geography even today. Given that he is also a frame theorist, his aesthetic
approach can be rendered fruitful in a different way again52. Humboldt’s
framing suggests not only that the «local character» of nature can be
described using techniques of painting or of botany but that these two
are mutually referential. This means that the constitution of distinct
relationships to nature can be ascertained by means of the concrete practice
of description and drawing such as Swiss nature by way of the Matterhorn.
According to this view, art functions not merely as a preliminary stage
before science, as suggested by some theorists of geography who have
interpreted «total character» as a means of generating aesthetic ideas53.
Instead, artistic and scientific techniques of capturing nature come
together in Humboldt on an equal footing, as it were, and constitute an
object that is held in suspension between different perspectives.
And what does the landscape eye now see when the artistic gaze
(for which the beautiful landscape was always a constructed one) is
confronted with the scientific gaze (which searches the landscape
50
A. v. Humboldt, Cosmos. A Sketch of a physical description of the universe, London,
Bohn, vol. 2, 1849, pp. 89 f.
51
C. Kwa, Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention of the Natural Landscape, in «The
European Legacy», 10 (2005), no. 2, p. 153. It is this aesthetically motivated total
impression that becomes a plant form and vegetation zone in scientific vocabulary in order
to form a higher-order individual out of the collection of individual plants. For a critique
of this view, see L. Trepl, Geschichte der Ökologie. Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart,
Frankfurt on the Main, Athenäum-Verlag, 1987, «after Humboldt»; Id., «Research on
the Anthropogenic Migration of Plants and Naturalization: Its History and Current State
of Development», in H. Sukopp, S. Hejný and I. Kowarik (eds.), Urban Ecology. Plants
and Plant Communities in Urban Environments. Lectures and Posters, The Hague, SPB
Academic Publishing, 1990, pp. 75-97.
52
Wholeness is thereby transformed from an idea/concept in natural philosophy to a
veritably constructed reality. Written comment Alfred Nordmann, in B. Bensaude Vincent,
S. Loeve, A. Nordmann and A. Schwarz (eds.), Research Objects in their Technological
Setting, New York, Routledge, 2017, p. 126.
53
G. Hard, «Kosmos» und «Landschaft». Kosmologische und landschaftsphysiognomische
Denkmotive bei Alexander von Humboldt und in der geographischen Humboldt-Auslegung
des 20. Jahrhunderts, in H. Pfeiffer (ed.), Alexander von Humboldt. Werk und Weltgeltung,
Munich, Piper, 1969, p. 151.Framed Landscapes – or – Without a Frame there is no Landscape 47
for naturalness)? Perhaps we can say this: the paradox of the mutual
conditionality of socially reworked nature and of beautiful «open»
countryside54 can dissolve into appreciation at the very moment when the
landscape eye brings the difference between conceptual constitution and
real construction to the nature it finds before it55. The latter can then be
continued in the constructive creation of a landscape, even if there is no
longer any natural nature present. The gaze of the landscape eye can be
directed aesthetically at the socially reworked space – at the industrial
wastelands, the monocultures, the urban green spaces – and discuss it
(and them) as landscape(s).
All this now brings us to the final question: what purpose does the
framed landscape serve when untouched nature – the concept and the
reality – fades into non-existence?
What remains, first of all, are strategies for preserving a landscape
understood as «open countryside» (freie Natur): its «museumization» in
the form of nature reserves with their strict conditions of access and rules
of conduct – a rigorous regulation of the setting in which this «natural
landscape» is to be encountered56. The natural beauty of a beautiful
landscape cannot, however, be saved in this way. The aesthetic landscape,
one «untouched» by humans, is a thing of the past: acid rain, nuclear
fallout and climate change have catapulted us into the Anthropocene era.
According to some geologists, this era began as early as the 18th century
with the first stirrings of industrialization. If we take this to indeed be
the case, then the «magnificent stage» of nature evoked by Kant would,
even in his own day, merely have conjured ideal landscapes that were
either long gone or else in the process of disappearing – or, conversely,
everything that Kant presents to us on his magnificent stage would always
only ever have been nature appearing as art.
What also remains is the fact that the category of landscape is not left
behind as a shell that is empty of meaning when its object of reference is no
longer «untouched landscape». This applies in historical terms to the fine
arts, wherever since the 16th century the landscape showed above all an area
populated by people, including themes such as «peasant scenes» or the
54
The aesthetic function «of the rural scenery as well as of “open” nature is grounded
in its historical pastness, in its simultaneous non-simultaneity», R. Piepmeier, Das Ende
der ästhetischen Kategorie «Landschaft». Zu einem Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse,
pp. 24, 27, 34.
55
The landscape eye becomes stereoscopic.
56
Adorno: Aporie des Naturschönen (R. Piepmeier, Das Ende der ästhetischen Katego-
rie «Landschaft». Zu einem Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse, p. 32), an unreconciled
condition of society. An aporia which, in the strict sense, is to be understood as inescap-
ability.48 Astrid Schwarz
harmony of town, countryside and river – in short, cultural landscapes57.
With the motifs depicted within a constructed frame showing something
that has evolved (etwas Gewordenes), landscape cannot but appear to be
primordial; accordingly, pictures of landscapes can be produced that are
completely fictitious and random (examples include Alexander Cozens,
the blotting method – the blot as an alternative to a pattern book)58.
What remains above all, however, is our awareness of the garden
as a pivot between the three forms of landscape. It may be that, in
the landscaped garden, the landscape eye cannot contemplate ideal,
untouched nature; but it can nonetheless behold a kind of nature that,
like beautiful art, is not useful and yet whose forms have been created
solely for the purpose of opening up and occupying the imagination. If
we now allow the landscape eye to cast its gaze beyond the frame of the
garden and yet to retain its newly acquired way of seeing (namely, an
aesthetic perspective on nature shaped and formed), then even populated
and industrially reworked nature can become landscape.
In this way, the frame – without which there would be no landscape
– has practical significance. Even industrially shaped, social nature can
be a garden landscape that we can shape and form: from the central
reservation on a motorway or a green belt around a town or city to a
restored lake – a new kind of landscape gardening finds expression here59.
The fact that this programme has been driven largely by artists over the
last few decades shows that the landscaped garden is a genuine model
for success in its guise as nature made artificially beautiful (kunstschöne
Natur) – and as a pivot between image and part of nature. Additionally,
though, it shows that, for the time being at least, we will not be able to
escape the mode of framed landscape.
57
See A. Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts; M.J. Friedländer, On Art and Con-
noisseurship; R. Piepmeier, Das Ende der ästhetischen Kategorie «Landschaft». Zu einem
Aspekt neuzeitlicher Naturverhältnisse; E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psy-
chology of Pictorial Representation.
58
Experience/construction of landscape – the postcard view: we look for the ste-
reotypical part of the whole, and it is gratefully received as something that has grown to
be as it is, which is why the camera’s shutter release is confirms our view with the words
«landscape setting», so that we can receive nature as art.
59
The dangers of a totalizing mode of planning and shaping are rife here, of course,
even if such planning exists to take account of climate change and its predicted threats.
The vision of a totalitarian planetary environmental hygiene has already been articulated
– the imaginative excesses of environmental designers easily hold their own compared to
those of designers of new organisms.You can also read
