<p>Trevor Paglen, <em>Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m</em>, 2007, from <em>Limit Telephotography</em>. Courtesy of the artist.</p>
<p>Trevor Paglen, <em>Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m</em>, 2007, from <em>Limit Telephotography</em>. Courtesy of the artist.</p>

No. 8: The Return of Landscape

Managing editor: Łukasz Zaremba

Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m, 2007, from Limit Telephotography. Courtesy of the artist.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. The Return of Landscape

    ”The Return of Landscape”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1417

    The introduction to the issue.

  2. A Farewell to Piotr Piotrowski

    , ”A Farewell to Piotr Piotrowski”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1057

    Our farewell to Piotr Piotrowski, a renown art historian and member of the Editorial Board of "View", who died in May 2015.

Viewpoint

  1. Feedlots / Pumped

    Mishka Henner
    Mishka Henner, ”Feedlots / Pumped”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1058

    Presentation of Feedlots (2013) and Pumped (2012), two projects by Mishka Henner.

  2. Degrees of Visibility: Mishka Henner's Views From Above

    Alicia Inez Guzmán
    Alicia Inez Guzmán, ”Degrees of Visibility: Mishka Henner's Views From Above”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1418

    Making use of satellite images from surveillance and government sources, Belgian artist Mishka Henner exposes two of America's most lucrative economies, oil and meat. His series "Pumped" and "Feedlots" give view to landscapes marked by the largescale production of the nation's most sought after commodities.

  3. Teresa Murak. Selected Earth Works

    Teresa Murak, Sebastian Cichocki
    Teresa Murak, Sebastian Cichocki, ”Teresa Murak. Selected Earth Works”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.2005

    Presentation of Teresa Murak's Earth Works with a commentary by Sebastian Cichocki.

Close-up

  1. Earth, World, and Globe: Phenomenological Considerations of the Contemporary Planetary Landscape

    Max Symuleski
    Max Symuleski, ”Earth, World, and Globe: Phenomenological Considerations of the...”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1420

    This essay discusses several post-Earthrise images of the Earth from space and considers how these profoundly dislocating views might be reconciled with a phenomenological account of embodied earthly perception.  I discuss Heidegger's anxieties about technology and leaving the Earth as the scene of the human, and consider what insights Edmund Husserl, Renaud Barbaras, and Jan Patocka may provide in anchoring the perceiver in/on the Earth. Throughout, technological apparatuses act as a foil to easily reconciling these images with a phenomenological understanding embodiment, and I assert that our contemporary images of the Earth (Google Earth, GPS) might not really function as images at all, but rather as more complex media objects, whose technological affordances interpenetrate our sense of earthly perception.

  2. An Attempt at a Deconstruction of Landscape

    Piotr Schollenberger
    Piotr Schollenberger, ”An Attempt at a Deconstruction of Landscape”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1064

    The goal of the article is to point at various theoretical tropes, which have rarely been theorized in works dealing with landscape. Following the lead of W.J.T. Mitchell, who suggests that we should see landscape more as a verb than a noun, I contemplate several ways of experiencing landscapes, in which it gains a specific agency. Through emphasizing the passive character of such experiences, I distinguish two possible ways of understanding the landscape: "agorascopic" and "agorapathic". I try to show how the experience of "being touched" by the landscape functions dialectically: as something close and far, something from which I am distanced and something I am in touch with. My main points of reference are essays by Erwin Straus, Georges Didi-Huberman, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and Michael Snow's film La région centrale. I show that the theoretical concept of the landscape allows for the description of a moment of simultaneous familiarity and radical strangeness, their existence in a single experience.

  3. Can the Sun Lie?

    Susan Schuppli
    Susan Schuppli, ”Can the Sun Lie?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1066

    Polish translation of the article published in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014). The article discusses controversial issues surrounding the objectivity of photography, the testimony of nonhuman agents, and the opposition between lay and scientific knowledge which have not disappeared with the introduction of the digital and the development of an ever-increasing range of technologies for measuring and recording the natural world. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the context of climate change debates.

  4. A Model Desert.The Gulf War, Landscape and the Pensive Image

    Krzysztof Pijarski
    Krzysztof Pijarski, ”A Model Desert.The Gulf War, Landscape and the Pensive Image”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1421

    The essay takes as its subject Sophie Ristelhueber’s Fait and Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (both 1992) to interpret them as instances of ‘pensive’ images. As such – negating the transparency of the photographic image – they are able to internalize the logic of what Judith Butler called their “visual frame, coercive and consensually established,” allowing it to transpire from the picture itself, as well as to confront or to sidetrack the issues of rhetoric and address. The essay tries to see what the two works, in spite of their abstract and decontextualized character, can tell about war in general, and the Gulf War in particular, claiming that pensive images reflect the world in a more obtuse, but at the same time more thoughtful way.

  5. Polo-Images, Landscape and the Common

    Łukasz Zaremba
    Łukasz Zaremba, ”Polo-Images, Landscape and the Common”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1067

    The article examines the dicussion about the so-called "visual chaos" in Polish public space. The author argues that the radical commercialisation of such immaterial values as landscape in post-1989 Poland can be interpreted as a visual indicator of the ongoing processes of severe privatisation and commodification of that, which should remain common property. Furthermore, recent tendencies to "clean" Polish landscapes and establish a certain visual order doesn't challenge the processes of privatization itself, but only introduces a slightly "aesthticized" version of the private.

Panorama

  1. "The Face of the Earth." Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski's Philosophy of Landscape

    Mateusz Salwa
    Mateusz Salwa, ”"The Face of the Earth." Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski's Philosophy of”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1068

    The article is devoted to the work and thought of Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski (1860-1939), one of the first Polish thinkers, who wrote about the need to protect landscape. Through analyzing a number of Pawlikowski's texts and manifestos (including the essay Culture and nature from 1913), the author is able to examine Pawlikowski's "philosophy of landscape," which constituted an important part of this thinking about nature protection. Pawlikowski's theory is also compared to contemporary philosophical texts about landscape aesthetics (a.o. A. Berque, A. Carlson, P. d’Angelo, A. Roger).

  2. Time Saturation: The Photography of Awoiska van der Molen

    Ernst van Alphen
    Ernst van Alphen, ”Time Saturation: The Photography of Awoiska van der Molen”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1422

    The essay is dedicated to Awoiska van der Molen’s landscape work seen as
 a critical reflection on the medium of photography, a reflection that is necessary today because the taking and distribution of photographs has become an obsessive and compulsive, hence unreflected, ritual. Against this, Van der Molen works with the temporality of duration “drawing the spectator into the thick braids of paradoxical times.” In the terms of Brazilian theoretician Vilém Flusser, one could say that Van der Molen makes visible “the program of the medium photography.” She achieves this aim through understanding photography as a series of translations; of color, time, and space.

Perspectives

  1. Games We Play. Francis Alÿs in Conversation with Magda Szcześniak

    Magda Szcześniak, Francis Alÿs
    Magda Szcześniak, Francis Alÿs, ”Games We Play. Francis Alÿs in Conversation with Magda Szcześniak”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1424

    A conversation revolving around Francis Alÿs's exhibition Reel-Unreel, presented at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, from October 11, 2014 to January 11, 2015, curated by Ewa Gorządek.

Snapshots

  1. The Irony of Entropy

    Sidsel Nelund
    Sidsel Nelund, ”The Irony of Entropy”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1425

    The Anthropocene Project hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin is a two-year project considering from the vantage point of art and science the hypothesis that humankind is a geological force. The last exhibition of the project, The Anthropocene Project. A Report, is the focus of attention here and it can be seen as part of a broader tendency to create exhibitions that are platforms for discussing and sharing urgent concerns through a series of research and artistic events. But a challenge that such research exhibitions meet, is to balance information and aesthetics, science and art.

  2. Landscape after the Battle

    Justyna Chmielewska
    Justyna Chmielewska, ”Landscape after the Battle”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1069

    A review of Wojciech Wilczyk's photographic project Holy War (2009-2014) (Kraków 2014).

  3. Escaping Modernity

    Michał Pospiszyl
    Michał Pospiszyl, ”Escaping Modernity”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1070

    A review of Migracje modernizmu. Nowoczesność i uchodźcy [Modernist Migrations. Modernity and Exile], ed. Tomasz Majewski, Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska, Wiktor Marzec (Warszawa–Łódź: Narodowe Centrum Kultury–Stowarzyszenie Tomografie, 2014).

  4. Andrzej Wróblewski: Clearing the Field and Searching for New Perspectives

    Piotr Słodkowski
    Piotr Słodkowski, ”Andrzej Wróblewski: Clearing the Field and Searching for New”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1071

    Review of Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957), ed. Wojciech Grzybała, Magdalena Ziółkowska, Fundacja Andrzeja Wróblewskiego / Instytut Adama Mickiewicza / Hatje Cantz Verlag, Warszawa 2014.

  5. Rescue History of Photography

    Iwona Kurz
    Iwona Kurz, ”Rescue History of Photography”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1073

    Review of Magdalena Wróblewska's Ruins in Photographs. Photographs in Ruins. 1944–2014 (Warszawa: Muzeum Warszawy, 2014). 

  6. "Never Trust Photography"?

    Tomasz Plata
    Tomasz Plata, ”"Never Trust Photography"?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2014.8.1074

    Review of the Photomonth in Cracow, May 2015.