Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030436094
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Course Redesign: Landscape to Land Art Becomes Art and the Environment

Branding it with a new name, I restructured the course content to include a brief overview of the history of landscape painting with a focus on how images of landscape are sites for our projections—what we value, what we fear, what we desire—and how such images reflect the concerns and issues of the times in which they are made. Malcolm Andrews’ Landscape in Western Art provided a useful text for this portion of the class for grounding lectures and discussion (Andrews 2000).

We watched a documentary film, Dutch Light, by Pieter-Rim de Kroon. The filmmaker stated that he was inspired by Joseph Beuys’ assertion that “Dutch Light,” the light seen in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings, ended in the 1950s when the Netherlands completed the creation of an enormous 2000 km2 polder by reclaiming land from the Zuider Zee. Described as a mirror and the “Eye of Holland,” Beuys referred to the Dutch as having blinded themselves when they transformed sea into land. In addition to interviewing art historians, a curator, three artists, a meteorologist, and an astrophysicist, de Kroon also filmed every day for a year on the edge of the Ijsselmeer. In these segments, placed periodically in the film, the camera moves slowly, taking up to two minutes to complete a 360° pan. The filmmaker’s explanation for the slow pans was based on his belief that “we’ve lost our feeling for subtlety and rarely have an opportunity to discover things for ourselves” (de Kroon 2020). By giving time for engagement and response he hopes to assist the viewer in observing as a method of understanding.

After the students watched the film, I gave each a Blue Book to use as a journal and directions to spend ten minutes a day, quietly and without distraction, outside for five days observing light and writing descriptions of the light, including its effects on the forms and objects around them. My reason for the assignment was multifold: to get them outside, to provide them with an opportunity to slow down their looking and become better observers; to allow them to see what happens when they are removed from social and digital distractions; and, to encourage them to apply what they were learning from the film. Their responses were interesting—many of them said that they did not initially understand what they were supposed to be doing but that it began to make sense over the course of the week; several said that they enjoyed having to take ten minutes to be outside or just to be in the moment because they did not do that for themselves otherwise; and, several students commented that they felt that need for more words to describe all the things that they saw. One common pattern I saw in their observations was that they shifted from noting things, such as the sky was blue with a few clouds, to more nuanced descriptions, like seeing reflected color on leaves or unusual light effects such as a halo of light on the edge of tree line.

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