Images Re-Vues (Jan 2014)
Le dehors du paysage
Abstract
Robert Smithson is stated to be one of the artists who initiate Land Art. Also an amazing writer, his texts cast a singular light upon his visual work. If we can consider landscape as a medium for his earthworks, Smithson has also wrote about this genre/category that spread all across the modern era. As we're making for a definition of landscape through his writings — an obvious task at first sight, a difficult one when getting closer —, we chose two papers. One text follows a demonstration close to art history while studying the way Frederick Law Olmsted reads the picturesque theoretical work of Uvedale Price in order to build Central Park landscapes. The other, from the iconographical standpoint of painting some religious topic, describes with a more prophetical tone how sacred and secular matters are entangled together through the issue of producing modern art. A link between those two statements is to be found among the "background games" that characterize a picturesque which, according to Johanne Lamoureux, is coming back in the middle of the eighties, ten years after Smithson death. From a concept of accident and scar to a more subjective definition attached to the image, a picturesque quality can root itself into Giorgione Tempest, according to an epicurean reading of Nature traced back by Stephen Campbell. Some "natural order" of observation should teach us about the world and its strengths, a knowledge of the outside.
