Arts

This article examines the role of visual and plastic art as a key instrument for constructing and interpreting cultural space. The study synthesizes a corpus of diverse theoretical works on the interaction between art and landscape, systematizes the principal issues within the field, and proposes avenues for further discussion. It investigates how art not only reflects but also physically, visually, and semantically transforms the landscape. Functioning as a mediator between spiritual, material, and symbolic realities, art creates distinctive forms of spatial experience. Through artistic practices, the aesthetics of a landscape are formed, along with visual and semantic codes, and new centers and loci that alter the perception of the environment. On a theoretical level, the research draws upon the semiotics of space, the philosophy of art, and the concept of landscape as text. The mechanisms through which landscape is endowed with meaning—via architecture, sculpture, painting, and literature—are examined, with a focus on narrative and symbolic modes of artistic interpretation. Particular attention is paid to art as a tool for shaping cultural memory, from memorial complexes to heritage museums, which become spaces of a different temporality and “reservations” of meaning. The cultural landscape is a site of interaction between the sacred and the profane, tradition and innovation, and elite and mass art. Art forms the codes for reading the landscape, translating visual characteristics—color, form, the vertical, the horizontal—into the realm of cultural significance. Thus, art is presented as a form of world reconstruction: an instrument for the spiritual and semantic appropriation of space, one that transforms the landscape into a text perpetually rewritten by culture.

This study deals with the painting Snowy Stream, which is often used to represent the style of the poet painter Wang Wei (699–761). This album leaf, with several colophons by Dong Qichang, was long believed to have been in his collection. It played a significant role in giving form to “painter Wang Wei” as the founding patriarch of the Southern School and thereby helped Dong shape his theoretical reorientation of Chinese landscape painting. First, the paper examines the social life of this painting during the time of Dong Qichang and argues that it underwent major remodeling and renovation that significantly changed its format and appearance before being acquired by Cheng Jibai. Dong’s unreserved approval of this painting was largely motivated by financial concerns for the benefit of Cheng. Second, the paper explores the rationale behind the warm reception of this image despite its dubious provenance and severe condition. The author argues that the remodeled image echoes the pastoral theme and level perspective that is a signature of Wang’s poetry, embodies the key doctrines and aesthetics of Chan Buddhism, and demonstrates the visual effect of using a pure ink wash to replace linear outlines and patternized texture strokes.

Reflecting on the digital unconscious may mean proposing a reflection on non-mastery in a field—digital creation of images and sounds, or the use of the digital in audiovisual creation—where resides the idea that digital machinery gives immense power to the artist who can now, thanks to calculation and data storage, surpass the usual limitations that human capacities have otherwise imposed on creation. On the contrary, we should take into account not only what digital machines reveal about us or from which unconscious patterns our work with them emerges, but how we deal with them as machines. Are we so aware of what we expect from technologies, or of what we project onto them? Pierre Schaeffer (the inventor of musique concrète but also a media theorist in his own right), who wrote on that topic 50 years ago can be of help here. This paper mainly relies on his text “Le machinisme artistique” (“Artistic Machinism”), published as a chapter at the beginning of Machines à communiquer in 1970 (his book on media theory and practice, not yet translated into English) and proposes, with this approach in mind, an examination of several uses and conceptions of the digital image today, with particular reference to the movie Oppenheimer.