Landscape between Representation and Performativity

Abstract

This article explores the concept of landscape through the lens of performativity, challenging the traditional visual-centric understanding rooted in Western art and culture but without denying the visual and representational character of landscape. It examines the evolution of landscape representation, from its origins in linear perspective and Cartesian dualism to contemporary approaches that integrate performative practices. The analysis highlights the dialectical tension between visual representation and immersive, multisensory experiences, arguing for a more integrated view that acknowledges the performative aspects of the visual. By re-evaluating the role of distance, vision, and representation, the article advocates for a nuanced understanding of landscape that balances the visual with embodied practices, ultimately proposing that landscape should be seen as a dynamic interplay between seeing and performing.

1. Landscape and Landscape Art between the Visual and the Performative

The concept of landscape is often considered to be consistent with an object-oriented approach in art, which in turn is based on the primacy of vision in Western modern culture and the associated undervaluation of the other senses in the appreciation of the environment. The primacy of the visual in landscape theory is today questioned by a wide range of approaches: environmental aesthetics ([1,2]), landscape phenomenology ([3,4]), non-representational geography ([5,6]) and pragmatist approaches to landscape ([7,8]). In some of these accounts, the visual dimension is placed in opposition to a more performative consideration of landscape.

In the last thirty years, we have witnessed a “performative turn” in aesthetics and art theory ([9,10]) as well as in the social sciences ([11,12]). The idea of the turn alludes to the ambition to recast the entire field of art and aesthetic experience in performative terms: The word “performativity” is not only limited to designating performing art (theatre, dance, drama, etc.) as opposed to the figurative and visual arts, but identifies a common characteristic of all the arts: “There is no performative artwork because there is no nonperformative artwork” [13]. In this framework, the concept of performativity is interpreted to include the visual in its scope. Dave Davies begins his work Art as Performance [9] by commenting on a painting1. Every work of art is performative as it is the result of a series of actions that are carried out according to a dynamic set of social norms and codes, and it is valued for its effects on the recipients and the contexts of reception themselves. Performativity is characterized by the fact that the actions performed to realize the artwork and the effects that the artwork produces are not deterministic, despite their inevitable connection to the prevailing social codes in a given cultural context: on the contrary, the performative can be captured as “the gap, the rupture, the spacing that unfolds the next moment allowing change” ([11], p. 475). Thus, performativity is connected to proximity, actual presence, multisensory experience, environmental affordances and haptic contact. Its geographical interest lies in the fact that it rethinks the constitutive and yet nondeterministic bindings between people, practices and lived environments, understood as, at the same time, the circumstances that give shape and meaning to actions and the ongoing outcomes of those actions.

Since its elaboration in Austin’s theory of language (1955), performativity has broken down disciplinary barriers and offered itself as a general paradigm for understanding the whole lifeworld in terms of practices in which people’s affects and habits, intentions and experiences are inextricably interwoven with social norms and codes, material objects and contexts, actions and processes. Part of the available literature on performative landscape, especially in contemporary cultural geography, subscribes to a kind of inquiry that neglects the visual character of landscape and rather focuses on embodied spatial practices that different actors (both human and nonhuman) perform thereby producing, maintaining and transforming landscapes: farming, gardening, planning, but also walking and driving [5]. Some versions of nonrepresentational theory speak of “more-than-representational geography” or “more-than-representational landscape” [14,15] in an effort to avoid a too sharp contraposition between the visual and the performative. They consider representation to be essential to the notion of landscape, yet they interpret representations as social practices, or performances, endowed with specific materiality, mediality and nondeterministic normativity2. In this sense, more-than-representational geography parallels the performative turn in the arts and contribute to the formulation of a performative understanding of representation in general.

The visual character of landscape is enshrined in the Western history of the concept and still pervades many of the practices we usually perform on and with landscapes. Despite the theoretical efforts to reframe representation in performative terms, the visual character of landscape continues to hamper the maturation of a unitary landscape theory grounded on performativity. In my view, this depends on the fact that, despite there being good theoretic reasons to see representation as a practice among others, there may be conflict between practices of representation and practices of inhabitation and immersion that have been placed at the core of the attention of environmental aesthetics and nonrepresentational geography. The English geographer John Wylie [4] assumes such a conflict as constitutive of the landscape concept in the Western tradition. He contends that landscape arises from the dialectical tension between proximity and distance, land and eye, inhabitation and observation and finally nature and culture. It is easy to realize that any effort to solve the tension with a dualistic choice (either landscape is land or landscape is eye) would inevitably reduce the complex nature of landscape to something simpler, but semantically poorer. Now, these different tensions are in fact different sides of a single fundamental dialectical tension between belonging and distance. The pole of distance is linked by Wylie to the eye, observation and even culture (the profoundly visual character of modern culture is undeniable). These are certainly as performative as the terms Wylie associates with the pole of belonging (proximity, land, dwelling and nature), but the specific performativity of visual logic can practically conflict with practices of immersion, multisensory appreciation and dwelling. The visual is associated with practices of distance, such as the appreciation of a remote landscape through an image on screen, while the performative is more often associated with practices of belonging and immersion, like, say, driving towards our workplaces on daily basis. Such a conflict between practices of distance and practices of belonging can therefore be interpreted to some extent as a conflict between visual practices of observation and communication of landscapes and immersive practices of inhabitation performed in proximity. The very fact that, in everyday conversation, we refer to landscape in both respects (the visual landscape of paintings, postcards, movies; the lived landscape of dwelling, everydayness and familiarity) is quite revealing of the tensive and ambiguous nature of the landscape concept.

One possible answer to the theoretical paralysis that may originate from such a state of the art is to look into the specific performative character of landscape considered in its visual aspects. Landscape should not be considered as a construct in which its performative aspects coexist but are separated by its visual aspects. The visual and the performative, just like belonging and distance, must be thought of together in order to address the landscape concept’s real scope. But thinking about the visual and the performative together does not mean to equalize them or to reduce one to the other. Instead, the visual side of landscape must be thought of in its specific performativity, just as distance must be acknowledged for the specific manner in which it renews our being in the world—our belonging. The condemnation of vision, contemplation and distance coming from many phenomenological, post-phenomenological, nonrepresentational and performance-based studies is not even coherent with the universalist claim of performativity itself. Indeed, performativity remains true to itself if it avoids being welded too strongly to pure immersion and belonging.

In this article, I will set out a positive meaning of distance, vision and representation, while remaining faithful to a phenomenological approach that values embodied experience and belonging. To this end, I will retrace some steps in the history of cultural geography, visual studies and landscape theory (some of which are not new, but represent significant and sometimes overlooked steps in the evolution of the debate between representationalism and the performative turn) in order to synthesise the different theoretical approaches into a common history of the concept of landscape. I identify three layers of performativity, each operating at the different levels at which the visual domain engages with the landscape concept: First, the performativity that landscape as a visual construct shares with other media of the so-called “scopic regime of modernity”3. This is a kind of pre-art performativity that concerns the images and the media we use to communicate in everyday practices and conversation. The landscape, as a representation of an environment, is also, if not primarily, an instrument of communication, a message that is passed on to social actors, a sign or a collector of signs and traces of multiple presences, both human and nonhuman, alive and displaced in time. Second, the performativity of artistic landscape representations. This is an emergent dimension of the landscape performativity that presupposes the first, but should not be reduced to it. I will specifically focus on the case of landscape painting, which has been considered as a fully-fledged manifestation of the scopic regime of modernity laden with ideological meaning [17], at odds with an appropriately engaged attitude towards environment [1]. I will show that such an ideological dimension of landscape painting, which cannot be denied, is indeed not sufficient to grasp landscape painting as an artistic phenomenon. There is a third layer of the visual performativity of landscape, namely the expressivity of shaped space, or, in Humboldt’s sense, the “views” of nature (1808), whereby the view does not depend in the first place on the visual culture of the observer, or on the artistic style of the artist, but on the power of spatial morphologies to communicate themselves to the perceiver and thus trigger the process of representation. In this article, despite its paramount importance, I will leave this last topic in the background; in the discussion about the performativity of landscape painting, however, it will become clear that the quality of landscape art also presupposes something like a substantive aesthetic character of the landscape itself. I will therefore deal here specifically with the second layer of performativity, after having set out the main tenets of the first, by discussing landscape representationalism.

2. Landscape as a Way of Seeing

Landscape painting as an autonomous art genre “starts late in the history of Western art, later than portraiture or still life and much later than allegorical or dramatic painting” ([18], p. 5). In the history of the West, landscapes were not accepted as autonomous and fully fledged artistic subjects until the 17th century; before then, they appeared, if at all, as the background to an (epic, religious or historical) plot. The English historian of art Kenneth Clark argues that: “only in the nineteenth century does it become the dominant art, and create a new aesthetic of its own” ([19], p. 229). The first major theoretical writings dealing with landscape painting and the kind of aesthetic appreciation with which it is associated appeared at this time: these include at least Alexander Cozens with his New Method ([20] 1785), William Gilpin with his Three Essays ([21] 1792) and Carl Gustav Carus’ Nine Letters ([22] 1831). Without considering the differences existing between different ways of theorizing and practicing landscape painting, it suffices here to note that the rapid spread of interest in landscape painting during the nineteenth century reflected a progressive transformation not only of art, but of the entire culture toward the restructuration and intensification of visuality.

Some art historians and cultural geographers, however, identify the conditions for the spread of landscape in the preceding centuries, with the invention of linear perspective. The cultural geography of 1980s and 1990s has been deeply influenced by Denis Cosgrove’s “exploration of the landscape idea as a way of seeing in the European tradition” ([23], p. 47). The author, drawing on Panofsky’s iconology and thus establishing a virtuous dialogue between art history and cultural geography, in his books and essays defends the thesis that the modern sensibility for landscape has its roots in the “realist illusion of space which was revolutionized more by perspective than any other technique” ([23], p. 55). Such a realist illusion of space is strictly tied with the hypostatisation of a viewer, who addresses the allegedly objective reality from a point of view that claims to be external to spatial reality itself. The beholder produces landscape out of the real environment by imposing visual frames onto it. They have the power to fragment the continuity of nature into different scenes “composed of regulated space and illusory settings” ([17], p. 20). Landscape painting, by means of the invention of linear perspective, is the first act of such a framing of nature into scenes, which reflects more the way of seeing of the artist (and her customers) than the reality of the represented environment. The solidarity between the development of linear perspective in the arts and Cartesian dualism in epistemology and philosophy is evident. They both are linked by Cosgrove to the exploitation of space that is typical of modernity, from enclosures to industrialization. Just as landscape painting results from the application of linear perspective to the way in which space is represented; the “physical appropriation of space as property or territory” ([23], p. 55) also results from this realistic illusion of space, which is nourished by linear perspective. If landscape, as a way of seeing, is understood in accordance with Cosgrove’s genealogy, is not but the ideological take of an extrinsic subject on an objectified nature, it is easy to understand why a certain mistrust of the idea of landscape itself, as expressed in Carlson’s environmental aesthetics, for example, persists to this day4.

What is special about Cosgrove’s position, however, is that his extensive deconstruction of the hidden ideological meanings of landscapes (painted and photographed, but also real and planned landscapes) is not directed against the visual, but takes place within the framework of a general justification of the visual character of the landscape itself. His investigation into the origins and meanings of landscape as a way of seeing takes its cue from his discontent with how the humanistic geography of 1970s has recuperated the notion of landscape after the positivistic rejection of it [24]. By considering how humanistic geographers like Eric Dardel [25], Yi-Fu Tuan [26] and Edward Relph [27] have approached landscape, we observe a certain loss of importance of the visual dimension in favour of a more holistic experience in which the human being is herself part of the scene. According to Cosgrove, those authors “adopted landscape for the very reason that their predecessors rejected it. It appears to point towards the experiential, creative and human aspects of our environmental relations, rather than to the objectified, manipulated and mechanical aspects of those relations” ([17], p. 45). The emphasis on embodiment against detachment, engagement against contemplation and immersion against vision is characteristic of phenomenological approaches to landscape still today, as shown by key authors like the archaeologist Christopher Tilley [28], the anthropologist Tim Ingold [3], the geographer John Wylie [29] and the philosopher Adriana Verissimo Serrão [30]. Now, differently from the latter, Cosgrove’s representationalist approach claims the visual character of landscape: “it was, and it remains, a visual term” ([23], p. 46). The geographer considers the “lack of interest in the graphic image” of perceived landscapes as “surprising” ([23], p. 46), especially in view of the interest of the authors of humanistic geography in the mental images of places, laden with affective and existential meanings.

Cosgrove questions too sharp a distinction between the landscape image that is offered to all the senses in an immersive experience and landscape representations that somehow force this experience into the two-dimensionality of pictures or photos. Is it really possible to approach landscape experience (and experience in general) independently from the sociocultural conditions that give shape to it? Is it possible to address the mental images of landscape that we develop in everyday place-based practices and performances without taking into due account the multitude of landscape pictures (paintings, photos, social media pics and selfies, but also movies, postcards, maps, planning sketches, painted walls, stamps and advertising posters) that crowd our lifeworld? Actually, those material pictures are strictu sensu performative [31,32], meaning they actively shape our aesthetic preferences about landscapes, our sociospatial practices and our building and planning choices and styles. In this sense, a too straightforward distinction between visual art as contemplative and detached and performance as multisensory and panperceptual must be rejected. In this respect, however, Cosgrove’s reduction of the visual character of landscape to an ideology of exploitation based on Cartesian dualism is also probably ungenerous.

Behind much scepticism about the scopic regime of modernity there is a perduring influence of Heidegger, as can be noticed in the work of authors like Dardel in the 1950s and Ingold in 2000s. Heidegger’s reservation against the reduction of the lifeworld to a “world picture” ([33], p. 57) harbours the danger of hypostasizing a non-existent world that is naturally located in an idealized rural past, untouched by the enormous changes that visual culture has undergone in modernity [34]. Heidegger and his epigones have given great philosophical importance to space and place, but not to landscape, because of its relationship with the scopic regime of modernity. But the scopic regime of modernity is the context in which we have been living during the last few centuries: from the Claude Class, used to enhance the landscape views of the beholders in the picturesque travels [21], to the chromatic filters that we all use in social media today to enhance the picture of a scenic landscape. We can respectfully play with the famous Latourian claim that we have never been modern, by suggesting that we have never really stopped of being modern, at least as long as our technological developments have continued to enhance visuality more and more, in spite of all rhetoric on the immersivity of digital images and media. As noted by the geographer Aharon Kellerman: “Virtual co-presences with places may need the use of vision only, but physical visits to places may be fully experienced only if the four senses of vision, hearing, touching and smelling are used. Co-presence with people, probably being the most basic kind of co-presence, requires in its ultimate and mostly intimate occasions, the use of all five senses, including also speech. However, contemporarily available technologies for virtual co-presence with people exclude the ability to use smelling and touching. Finally, the upcoming introduction of co-presence with things, will require the use of vision and probably also of hearing for the reception of alerts” ([35], p. 82). These claims are not at all meant to downsize the extraordinary impact of digital technology and imagery on the evolution of the scopic regime of modernity. The point is that such an impact can be appreciated from within a scopic regime that can be remediated [36] either in the direction of more interaction between visuality and other senses or towards an overemphasis on the visual. Such an overemphasis, which by the way is among the most interesting processes of contemporary life that are in full continuity with the scopic regime of modernity, triggers new forms of exoticism and aestheticization of landscapes in our customary patterns of behaviour that are often unperceived5. The general performativity of the visual, the first layer of the visual performativity of the landscape that we elaborated in the introduction, lies precisely in its ability to operate unseen, in its power to shape and change both reality and experience unnoticed. Even if we cannot really eliminate visuality from the framework of our spatial experience, we must engage with it critically and avoid taking its meaning for granted: “more engagement means more aggressively confronting the ethics of looking and of seeing, while at the same time remaining open to visual diversity, discomfort, and surprising delight; to feel all the pleasure, sadness, and grace the visual can offer” ([39], p. xxi).

3. The Performativity of Landscape Painting: Between Construction and Description

Representationalism, of which Cosgrove has been one of the outmost representatives, claims the visual character of landscape even when criticizing it, in line with postmodern visual studies. In Cosgrove’s representationalism, landscape is a matter of vision, and vision is a social construction, bounded up with ideological interests: “landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world” ([17], p. 13). Here, the choice of the terms is quite telling: The conflation between composition and construction hints at a reduction of the artistic sphere to the processes that determine the formation of social meanings in general. As visual products, landscape images cannot escape the overall semiotic and semantic conditions of construction, circulation and consumption of images. As a consequence, with representationalism, the materiality of landscape evaporates into a dynamic set of cultural symbols, icons and imageries, among which there is figurative or photographic art.

A shortcoming of Cosgrove’s constructivist view appears at this point: the artistic gesture of representing a landscape is reduced to a mere instantiation of a general, non-artistic process of symbolisation, which is indeed inherent to the shift of emphasis from artistic images to non-artistic, everyday images that occurred in visual studies. Landscape painting or photography may be of some semiotic interest, insofar as they serve as texts to be read and interpreted [40] in order to better grasp the sociospatial processes from which it originates, but quintessentially remains an expression of that search of “control and order” ([17], p. 21) that is typical of other visual tools, such as modern cartography [41]. Now, there is no doubt that landscape is a social product and that the artistic gesture cannot be fully understood without reference to its extra-artistic conditions. We can readily subscribe to the view that landscape painting is a part of the scopic regime of modernity, in the general sense that every development in the field of arts can be explained in the light of the evolution of sociospatial relations, available media and prevailing cultural tastes and aesthetic habits [42]. But if the consideration of the semantic and semiotic conditions of art goes so far as to blur the distinction between artistic representations and other visual representations of space, there is a danger that the specific nature of artistic representations will be overlooked, especially with regard to their contribution to shaping the modern sense of landscape. Is there a specificity of artistic landscape images with respect to other visual renderings? It is sufficient to closer inspect the diversified history of landscape painting to realize how often artistic representations of landscape have emerged in opposition to the implicit imperatives of the predominant canons of representation. In this sense, landscape painting exhibits a specific kind of performativity: it takes a methodical distance from the way we usually experience the landscape (i.e., the pre-categorial dimension in which we usually look for performativity), not to freeze its unconscious vitality in an image, but to reshape the way we look at it (and thus live in it).

A contribution in this direction is provided by the work of the art historian Svetlana Alpers [43], who challenges the hypothesis that landscape as a way of seeing derives directly from linear perspective and its geometric (and philosophical) implication, namely the Cartesian grid. According to Alpers, the prevailing part played by Italian Renaissance in a traditional history of art has obscured the autonomous contribution that Northern art (and especially XVI-century Dutch painting) has given to the development of the modern sense of landscape. In this latter tradition, narrative, that Alpers regards as the core of epic and historical painting (which remained the predominant artistic genre in French and Italian art until late 19th century), cedes the stage to description. While the epic and historical narrative requires the construction of an idealized space by means of linear perspective and geometry, description binds the viewer’s point of view to a world of objects and spaces that surround and encompass it. Martin Jay, in his effort to provide a nondeterministic and pluralistic view of the scopic regime of modernity, adds that: “The nonmathematical impulse of this tradition accords well with the indifference to hierarchy, proportion, and analogical resemblances characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism. Instead, it casts its attentive eye on the fragmentary, detailed, and richly articulated surface of a world it is content to describe rather than explain” ([44], p. 13). In other words, the emphasis on description brings the act of painting closer to expressive perception than to imitation of rational nature: “If there is a philosophical correlate to Northern art, it is not Cartesianism with its faith in a geometricalized, rationalized, essentially intellectual concept of space but rather the more empirical visual experience of observationally oriented Baconian empiricism” ([44], p. 13).

Description is also fundamental in the ambit of phenomenology: The “phenomenological description of things just as they are” must be understood primarily as the sign that phenomenologists felt “free to engage with all areas of experience” ([45], p. XIII). When we describe, meaning try to communicate what we perceive, in an effort to remain faithful to the noematic constraints, we remain bound to our intentions. And we really go back to the things themselves only when we acknowledge such an intentional frame precisely as intentional; that is, neither absolute nor natural. Of course, a constructivist may reply that the position of a world of objects and spaces suitable to nonnarrative description in XVII century Dutch landscape painting is in itself suspicious, for the descriptive intention in which that objective world is given is indeed determined by multiple sociocultural conditions that need to be decoded and deconstructed6. This objection is based on the assumption that intentions are sociocultural constructions of which we remain largely unaware. When we describe something, however, we remain aware of our intentionality and positionality as describers, and, at the same time, we let the perceptual content shape and govern our intentionality, without giving up the idea that what we describe exists beyond our specific intentions and their sociocultural conditions and frames7. In the act of describing, our intentionality has the opportunity to escape or at least suspend the automatisms of the socially constructed gaze by virtue of a renewed relationship with the reality that we want to describe. But this also means that our intentions cannot be fully explained in terms of sociocultural frameworks and automatisms. Describing landscapes means exposing ourselves to the skin of formed space and letting it challenge and eventually transform our social and normative preunderstandings of the world.

Another way of recognizing the artistic performativity of landscape art is to revisit the issue of aesthetic disinterestedness within the framework of a general theory of art as human practice. Georg Bertram [53] argues that disinterestedness can somehow constitute the specific mark of the aesthetic intention. This idea seems in contrast with the emphasis on engagement and embodiment that has become commonplace from Berleant [54] onwards. However, Bertram promotes the inclusion of the disinterested attitude towards nature of artworks that has been key to the emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline into the broader category of human praxis. Art is a human practice of a reflexive kind, in which disinterestedness emerges historically as an expression of freedom from other kind of engagements with objects and spaces, such as the economic and the religious; freedom to engage perceptually with objects and spaces for the sake of perception itself, drawing from them the matter of our own creation. This model holds also in the case of landscape art: it shares a social normativity and it lends itself to ideological uses just as other visual human practices, for instance those which use visual tools to enhance vision, such as surveying a field with a drone, sending selfies from an exotic vacation destination or watching the road in the rear-view mirror of our cars. But, at the same time, landscape art enacts a disinterested attitude of a reflexive kind towards the environment, in the effort of coping with its actual presence for how it announces itself to the sight, in cooperation with other senses. The practical interpretation of disinterestedness offered by Bertram resonates with the engaged account of description we have drawn on Alpers’ interpretation of landscape painting. Going further, it is possible to argue for the overcoming of the dualism between contemplation and engagement, embraced by Arnold Berleant by noting that aesthetic contemplation is indeed a kind of engagement. A possible contribution of visual landscape art to our active engagement with environment lies in the temporary, occasional, sometimes methodical and sometimes sudden, even ecstatic suspension of habitual utilitarian values that we take for granted in our everyday interactions with the environments we inhabit or experience.

4. The Reflexive Performativity of Landscape Art: An Alternative View of the Picturesque

One can encounter such a performative and at the same time reflexive meaning for visual landscape art in the most intense steps of the history of landscape painting. It is all too easy at this point to evoke Cezanne’s series of watercolours of the Montagne Saint Victoire, which so inspired Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological proposal. But many other examples of extraordinary importance for the development of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline can be cited. The picturesque is perhaps one of the most overlooked and controversial examples. According to the prevailing literature in both art history and environmental aesthetics, partially facilitated by the writings of the first theorists of the picturesque (Gilpin)8, the picturesque is nothing but a second step in the maturation of the scopic regime of modernity after the linear perspective and in full continuity with it. There are two features that would allow linear perspective and the picturesque to be treated as manifestations of a unique visual phenomenon. The first is that both constitute a fundamental moment in the process of progressive artificialization of real space and its rendering in the pictorial dimension. The attention of Italian Renaissance artists on architectonic space and of English picturesque painters and planners on gardens shows that landscape painting has been part of a more comprehensive effort of domestication of untamed nature with a view to turn the earth into a home for humanity. The second is that both are linked to ideology, control and power. If, as we have seen, linear perspective has been related to processes of rational exploitation of nature, the picturesque has been connected to the interests of the landed gentry [57], imperialism and colonialism [58] and aesthetic capitalism [59]. The picturesque, with its overemphasis on the visual side of aesthetic appreciation, has contributed in decisive way to the detachment and disengagement of the viewer’s position from the environment: “The picturesque requires a dissociation from the actual consequences and realities of what appears. Literally, the picturesque depends on providing views and scenes to a spectator from some privileged vantage point” ([60], p. 370). Townsend describes the aesthetic detachment of the viewer from the depicted environment as a dissociation from the actual reality of the scenery. Here too, the inherent logic of the picturesque reflects the philosophical discourse of modernity, which is based on dichotomous opposites such as nature vs. art, subject vs. object, the contemplative vs. the engaged and the visual vs. the performative.

But if all this is true, how can we consider the picturesque landscapes of Salvator Rosa or Gaspar Dughet (and those inspired by them, such as the paintings of the Hudson River School in 19th century North America)9, as genuine expressions of art, which can only partly be reduced to the ideological dynamics of the scopic regime that cultural geography has denounced since Cosgrove? The picturesque is undeniably entangled with ideological motifs that characterize every human practice, art included; the picturesque, however, was born exactly in opposition to the canons of classical mimetic representation and the technique of linear perspective. At stake is the possibility of bringing to depiction a more realistic image of the landscape, whereby realistic is to be understood precisely as being close as possible to the environmental experience, direct or mediated (for instance by the Claude Glass, as mentioned above), but, in any case, not conditioned by the impositions of the canon. In other words, the picturesque has the merit of bringing representation closer to perception and description. Its emphasis on the sensual effects of a particular landscape on the viewer highlights the receptive dimension of the subject and promotes the ideal of a strong aesthetic engagement with one’s surroundings. Vision and contemplation may be less distant from engagement and performance in the picturesque than one might think at first glance.

The environmental aesthetician Roger Paden proposes quite a different genealogy of landscape painting from the one proposed by Cosgrove. He highlights that the picturesque is a reaction against what Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz has named the “Great Theory of Beauty”, according to which beauty “consists in the proportions of the parts, more precisely in the proportions and arrangement of the parts, or, still more precisely, in the size, equality, and number of the parts and their interrelationships. This can be illustrated with reference to architecture” ([62], p. 167). The “Great Theory” is an ancient idea that was initially linked to the notion of a universal Logos, of which the phenomena perceptible to the senses are only a pale and imperfect manifestation, and then to the monotheistic notion of an intelligent design, which in turn remains inaccessible to our senses. Tatarkiewicz reference to the illustrative role of architecture is revealing: the Pythagorean and Euclidean features of the Great Theory do not fit the irregularities of natural objects and environments and require the rational intervention of humans, who can elicit from the given space those forms and patterns that meet the requirements of the human rational soul. Classical architecture results from this kind of rational intervention on space. This is why, Paden continues, the multi-millennial impact of the Great Theory “might be an independent source of Europeans’ unwillingness to consider landscapes as aesthetic objects” ([63], p. 52).

As a matter of fact, in landscapes we find objects, contexts, patterns and dispositions that are irregular and “nonrecurrent” ([64], p. 318). Different temporal orders are involved in the composition of landscapes [65]: The time of natural processes, the time of history, the multiple temporalities of individual existences. Every landscape gathers in its very material aspect the effects of the actions of these different temporalities on a portion space and displays them in a concrete totality that communicates itself altogether to the perceiver. The human framing that Cosgrove considers central to the understanding of landscape as a way of seeing does not invent the spatiotemporal matter from which landscapes emerge as cultural products. This is not just about the irregularity of natural objects and environments compared to the artificial regularity of architectural objects and environments—and this is a point that is often misunderstood, especially in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Rather, it is precisely about the irregularity of landscapes, which are understood as dynamic formations made up of elements of both anthropogenic and natural origin and their complex interactions, whose “character”10 can be fully communicated only in aesthetic experience. One can see how deeply landscape—and landscape painting in particular—is tied to the deepest roots of aesthetics: in fact, the emergence of the modern landscape concept fosters the autonomization of both taste judgements and artistic activity from other spheres of the lifeworld. Furthermore, landscapes are always singular, nonrecurrent formations: modern aesthetics emerges in the act of claiming cognitive consistency of what is phenomenally unique, particular, specific and singular, and, at the same time, using the powerful sentence of Luigi Russo, “retraining the noetic universe by shifting it to the level of history, so that it becomes capable of representing the magmatic process of formativity” ([66], p. 244)11.

As much as it may seem to lack depth, the picturesque passion for what is intricate and irregular, for ruins, for shadows and winding paths, for soft lights, imprecise shapes and biased vanishing points, already represents a way for landscape painting to actualize its own specific artistic performativity: that of rendering in a reflexive image a pre-existing spatiotemporal entity—the landscape—that the artist encounters with all the senses, perhaps through the aid of technical devices functional to a more vivid rendering of experience. Much of what the picturesque anticipates, and then soon betrays by developing a canon clearly linked to the ideological need to regulate experience and taste rather than liberate them12, is later realised by the decision of nineteenth-century artists to paint en plein air. One should not forget the great synergy of landscape painting and travel, which is employed precisely in the years of picturesque travel discussed by Gilpin for purposes of geographical, botanical, geological and, by extension, anthropological knowledge. Paden notes that: “given the care that a painter takes in observing nature, we might learn a great deal about nature by studying painting; but what is important is that, on Price’s view, it is nature that shapes painting through the painter’s special powers of observation, not the other way around” ([67], p. 10)13. This last consideration, which we will not examine here from a historical or textual perspective, suggests a final philosophical sense in which the performativity of the visual is to be understood in the context of landscape theory: The landscape as a real and nonrecurrent construct is expressive in itself, therefore it offers limitations and constraints to those who accept the challenge of representing it. In that resistance of landscape’s self-expressivity against representational reduction lies the third layer of landscape’s performativity announced in the introduction.

5. Conclusions

In this article, I have attempted to restore philosophical dignity to the history of an artistic practise, landscape painting, which today is regarded by many as demode and lacking in theoretical depth. In doing so, I have drawn on authors, texts and debates that are not always up to date, and have only traced a few stages of a complex path at the level of the history of ideas. A path whose highly interdisciplinary nature presents some difficulties in translation. In this essay, I have tried to tackle two theoretical and methodological questions: First, when we speak of performativity in aesthetics, the arts and the social sciences, do we mean the same thing? And second, how do we deal with the ambiguity of the landscape, the ambit of which swings between poles that are so often seen as opposites in the philosophical discourse of modernity and even today? As a matter of fact, I have assumed the semantic ambiguity of landscape as a premise of the present investigation; an ambiguity that is worth preserving and setting in motion, rather than solving, making the semantic poles collapse one onto the other. In this last section, I will offer some conclusions by focusing on the first question concerning the nature of performativity.

As far as the first question is concerned, there is a danger in the fact that the performative can be treated as an “umbrella term” to explain too many different things. Therefore, following the logic of the matter, I have linked the discourse on the performativity of non-artistic practices (referring in particular to visual practices) with the discourse on artistic performativity by pointing out their mutual co-implications as well as their differences. The solution found consists of recognizing a specific performativity of a reflexive nature in artistic activity, which finds its material conditions in the performativity of practices in general, but critically reflects these through the artistic gesture. Of course, this emergence of artistic performativity from that of non-artistic practices can only take place to the extent that non-artistic practices are also conceived in nondeterministic terms. On this point, even the clearest exponent of nonrepresentational theory, Nigel Thrift, philosophically inspired by critical theory and affect theory, is nevertheless unambiguous about the nature of bodily affects and embodied practices and habits: “I do want to retain a certain minimal humanism. Whilst refusing to grant reflexive consciousness and its pretensions to invariance the privilege of occupying the centre of the stage, dropping the human subject entirely seems to me to be a step too far. I have done much to rid myself of an object that often seems to me to be a user-illusion (…) Still, I am uncomfortably aware that, taken to extremes, a resolutely anti-humanist position parodies the degenerative path taken in the nineteenth century (…) This degeneration can be seen equally as a movement from intention to automation as the industrial systems of that century took hold. Whatever the case, I want to keep hold of a humanist ledge on the machinic cliff face” ([5], p. 13).

Thrift argues for a performative interpretation of practices and habits: our body is entangled in formed space and interacts with it according to rules and codes, but it interprets them in multiple, geo-historically varying ways. The bodily interpretation of environmental stimuli, even if deeply conditioned by embodied cognitive and emotional schemas, retains a variable degree of unpredictability. It is the unpredictable nature of the relationship between us and our spatial lifeworld that makes such a relationship performative rather than mechanical and machinic. We can therefore also speak of a constitutively aesthetic character of the extra-artistic relationships between us and space, at least in the sense that the mediation of these relationships is always the experience that we with our senses, in direct or technologically mediated form. And it is at this point that the discourse on the visual branches off, at least in part, from the general discourse on the performativity of the subject–space relationship. The technological innovations that have revolutionised our viewing habits have gradually decoupled vision from embodied and immersive experience, presenting our sharpened gaze with a multitude of objects and icons of people and places from around the world. Landscape painting also played this historical role before the mass proliferation of photography and cinema. Nevertheless, such a distancing from the immediate conditions of experience brought about by the scopic regime of modernity is still a way of expanding the scope of our experience of the world. By means of landscape images, we anticipate, accompany and somehow “post-produce” our experiences of the elsewhere, not only in tourism, but also in migration, business emigration and asylum applications. Images are also performative insofar as they give shape to our desires and expectations, but also to our fears and anxieties. Above all, however, landscape images remain in a dialectical interplay with the instantiated landscapes, so that if we believe too much in images, we will be unsettled by the real encounter with and immersion in the landscape.

The gap between our geographical expectations fostered by the image and the geographical reality is simultaneously a form of entanglement: the immersive experience can be epiphanic and liberating as well as uncanny and disorienting, partly because of its capacity to disappoint our imagined expectations. Such productive disorientation, by the way, underlies artistic practises of landscape, understood as reflexive practises aimed at refreshing and rejuvenating our relationships to it. The assumption behind this assertion is that the experience of landscape is not an invention of consciousness, but a relationship in which the experiencing subject encounters an alterity that not only inspires but also resists our representational frameworks. This otherness communicates itself aesthetically: The landscape becomes a site of aesthetic encounter. And this could at least be a starting point from which to give a clearer answer to the second question posed at the beginning of this conclusion.