Towards a Polytheistic Relationship to Landscape: Issues for Contemporary Art

Abstract

ASTRACT The paper examines the concerns of the art critic and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit with the myth of Eden in the book of Genesis, the assumptions of a Judaeo-Christian monotheism and its secular inheritance, as a means to introduce the need for a 'polytheistic' psychology to advance a genuinely radical understanding of the relationship between issues of place, identity and contemporary landscape art. Drawing on the work of Peter Bishop and Edward S. Casey to identify a body of thinking related, via issues of metamorphosis and ambiguity, to both art historical and geographical contexts relating to a 'conversational' aesthetic are identified. This is seen as making possible a polytheistic conception of art based on imaginal space as an alternative to the dominant traditions of conceptual and Minimal art since the 1960s. Finally, the approaches of specific artists, and in particular the world of Sian Bonnell, are examined in relation to garden traditions in the UK.

Song and the Presence of Absent Communities

“…Consequently, I understand these artists as deliberately refusing to make categorical 'either/or' choices between the very different, often apparently contradictory values, memories, goals and understandings that underpin the different types of community and location to which they relate. For reasons that I have set out elsewhere (Biggs 2005(Biggs , 2001 and will return to here in a somewhat different context, I understand them as adopting a position of psychological (as distinct from theological) 'polytheism'. It is this that links our mutual concerns to the old quasi-pagan Borders ballads.…”

The geographies of cultural geography II

“…This review attends to the entanglements and collaborations that are trans-, inter- and intradisciplinary. Just outside its core focus is the geographical research on individual artists (Bauman, 2007; Fiona et al, 2006; Housefield, 2007; Matless and Cameron, 2007; Peters, 2006; Rycroft, 2005; Vasudevan, 2007; Yusoff and Gabrys, 2006), their identity-practices (Bain, 2004a, 2004b; Macpherson, 2008), and the work on relationships between the body, landscape and art practice (Abrahamsson and Abrahamsson, 2007; Bartram, 2005; Biggs, 2005; Butler, 2006; Cant and Morris, 2006; Parr, 2006).…”