Exploring the dialectic relationship between environments –both built and natural—and the figures that occupy those spaces, “Vernacular Environments, Part 1” brings to light the complexities and temporality of the vernacular. Ranging in works from the 1960s through present day, a 32-minute film of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) serves as the show’s departure point, illustrating the construction of Smithson’s earthwork as a conditional art relying on time and space for its existence, continually vanishing and resurfacing as the Utah lake’s tide rises and falls.
In the main gallery, the visitor is received by a series of photographs by Stephen Berens, that upon first glance, seem to be nothing more than hazy snapshots of the same place.
For my museum selection I decided to attend Texas State University’s Wittliff Collection. When I arrived, there was no one else there besides me and the librarian. To be honest, I probably would have never gone to an art museum if my teacher didn’t require me to. This was my first time attending the Wittliff Collection, thus I asked the librarian, “Is there any other artwork besides Southwestern and Mexican photography?” She answered, “No, the Wittliff is known only for Southwestern and Mexican photography.” I smiled with a sense of embarrassment and continued to view the different photos. As I walked through Wittliff, I became overwhelmed with all of the different types of photography. There were so many amazing pieces that it became difficult to select which one to write about. However, I finally managed to choose three unique photography pieces by Alinka Echeverria, Geoff Winningham, and Keith Carter.
This tendency is certainly comparable, if not a direct outgrowth of the idea of site-specificity by 20th century movements such as Conceptualism, Minimalism, and Land Art. The idea behind site-specificity is both crafting a piece and selecting a set place where the piece will be displayed (either permanently or temporarily), in such a way that the piece either cannot be displayed elsewhere or that the piece will have its meaning significantly altered if moved. Perhaps the most famous version of this is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a fifteen hundred foot long and fifteen foot wide spiraling pathway constructed over a period of months that juts into the Great Salt Lake. To even reach Spiral Jetty, one must travel a long way along the shore of Lake, as it is far away from any main road or town. Furthermore, Smithson did not just choose a random, remote location along the shore, but painstakingly chose the best spot for the longevity of the piece, avoiding soft muds while allowing for an easy approach from the beach. Finally, Smithson holds that the piece echoes the chemistry and geology of its location. In his written accompaniment to the piece also titled
Imagination can take you anywhere, and see beauty in unlikely places. Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” takes the reader on a short, but poignant journey through the poem, and leaves the reader, somewhat expectedly, at the end of the sidewalk. Though it sounds like a very boring location, Silverstein unexpectedly transforms the end of the sidewalk into a rift in reality that contains compelling impossibilities, and he encourages everyone to see it for themselves.
Gregory Crewdson once said “I love the experience of cinema- being enveloped in a complete world of another’s imagination. I love the quality of film- how it can capture so richly the color and light of a scene. And I love photography - for what it leaves unsaid for it is from this that we can start to spin our own imagination.” Crewdson accomplishes the both the most intriguing and frustrating aspect of art; he poses a question yet refuses to reveal the answer. It is the unanswerable question that leads the viewer to study the work and spend hours contemplating its meaning.
“The Boat”, narrated by a Mid-western university professor, Alistar MacLeod, is a short story concerning a family and their different perspectives on freedom vs. tradition. The mother pushes the son to embrace more of a traditional lifestyle by taking over the fathers fishing business, while on the other hand the father pushes the son to live more autonomously in an unconstrained manner. “The Boat” focuses on the father and how his personality influences the son’s choice on how to live and how to make decisions that will ultimately affect his life. In Alistair MacLeod’s, “The Boat”, MacLeod suggest that although dreams and desires give people purpose, the nobility of accepting a life of discontentment out weighs the selfishness of following ones own true desires. In the story, the father is obligated to provide for his family as well as to continue the fishing tradition that was inherited from his own father. The mother emphasizes the boat and it’s significance when she consistently asked the father “ How did things go in the boat today” since tradition was paramount to the mother. H...
Carol Franc Buck’s showcasing’s feature modern-day landscape photographs. Since his work began in the early 1990s, the collection has intended to tackle and secure subjects related to land-dwellings and the altering landscapes. His collection is equipped with a variety of skills, pictorial styles and conceptual positions. He has a concern for the impact of human activity being inflicted on natural backgrounds as well as flawless philosophies of scenic beauty and wilderness.
Progress is in the eye of the beholder. Throughout the years society has forced nature out of its life and has instead adopted a new mechanical and industrialized lifestyle. Technology may be deemed as progress by some, where it is thought of as a positive advancement for mankind. Yet technology can also be a hindrance for society, by imposing itself on society and emptying the meaning out of life. In “Autobiography at an Air-Station,” Philip Larkin conveys his distaste of how society has denounced nature. By employing an ironic tone in the sonnet, Larkin comments on the significance of the sonnet in relation to industrial life. Life has become ironic because it is no longer a natural life that society leads, but a fabricated life. Through his use of rhyme and meter, the extended metaphor comparing the air-station to life, imagery, and diction, Larkin reflects on what life has come to be: a deviation from the intrinsic.
The Town of Seahaven Island is spiritually uplifting, quaint, and completely artificial. Everything and everyone, including the main character, Truman, are predictable in habit and pattern. Nothing happens spontaneously or out of synch. When Truman steps out of his usual routine, the entire town must leap into choreography of damage control. Carefully anticipated, controlled perfection must be restored, but this portrayal of contemporary urban life, however exaggerated, may be inappropriate (Rees; 2003; 104). New Urbanists believe physical design can influence behaviours and attitudes and cause organic evolution of ideal communities. In fact, romanticizing the village model through architectural codification and rules of development may be less engaging than vague and bland. Several criticisms of the New Urbanism style of community, versions of which are becoming extremely privatized, have been discussed. The New Urbanism regime of community is utopian and unnatural—a contradiction of the very ideals purported.
In the essay, “A Literature of Place” by Barry Lopez, he explores the topic of forming a bond with nature. He claims that the human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at a young age. When Lopez was growing up in the California Valley, he claimed that his imagination was shaped by the beauty of the “exotic waters” to the “eucalyptus trees”. As Lopez wrote this essay, he described how nature gives humans lively stories which help keep each other's imagination alive, not only does Lopez believe nature is important to the imagination but also to the brain's intelligence and our health, which is why western people have become so anxious about the lands fate in hopes that it stays urban so that
Wrede, Stuart and William Howard Adams, eds. Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
Stories are the basic tool to convey information among people, and people use stories to shape the worlds that they lived in. The term “narratives” refer to both the story, the aspect of it being told and the means of telling. The very beginning systematic analysis of concepts in relation to narratives was initiated in the 1960s. Coming from Latin and Indo-European words with the meaning of “to know”, narrative “implies a knowledge acquired through action and the contingencies of lived experience”. Since the early 1980s, narratives have become the focus for many design filed including landscape architecture as people started to realise the importance of meaning which may perhaps make design similar to a piece of litera...
- first landscape architecture's legacy of the picturesque which foregrounds formal and pictorial representations and
Stewart, Jack. “A ‘Need of Distance and Blue’: Space, Color and Creativity in To the
Hirsch, E. 1995. “Introduction, Landscape: between place and space” in Hirsch, E. (ed.) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press.
Tennessee, lying midway between the fruitful Southern climes of Florida and the wintery North, represents a perfect location for Wallace Stevens to explore his attitudes toward the sort of creative identity he makes for himself in either location. The South, characterized by its warmth and wildness clashes with the “gray and bare” (10) industrial North on that hill in Tennessee in “Anecdote of the Jar”. Though the jar takes dominion, the poet does not necessarily place favor on either side of the conflict since Stevens was “of two minds… about this midway South” (Stevens, 208). Here we see that Stevens is in a place both geographically and poetically between the two extremes. He has not yet reached his destination on his poetic journey, but seems closer to the beginning of his trip than the end. Old images of nature and Keats’ Urn crop up here in Tennessee and though he has not yet finished “taking the leaves off the tree”, Stevens he has more than begun to strip it bare. “Anecdote of the Jar” reflects Stevens’ ambivalence about man’s ability to create order in a chaotic world and the role of the artist or poet in using old forms to create a new order.