Thanks, chris, for prodding. If it's an axiom that anything that
looks at nature is looking over its shoulder and so must be an effect
of nostalgia and elegy, then my point collapses - if the shoulder is
the urban margin, ie everywhere - but one could simply look at one's
feet. Elegy can be there but not by right, though it is a really
important sub-strain, and nostalgia has its uses too. Nostalgia is to
the numinous as the erotic is to the sexual - part of the fund of
desire, each a sort of leading or lead-in particle.
But it's not necessarily there, and for me the achievement of Brit
Land Art is to have removed the pastness of nature and taken our
present into it. Also the latching on of the postmod to the premod.
I was thinking of people like David Nash and Peter Randall-Page (the
latter has a show at Warwick at the moment). I agree about Richard
Long (Hamish Fulton may be of more interest now). Interesting you
couple RL with Andy Goldsworthy - who for some are at opposite poles.
AG brings wit into the whole process - and makes natural materials
seem artificially brilliant at times but with nothing but
juxtaposition superimposed. He is a sort of "rococo" strain in BLA.
In all these there is a strenuous sense that nature can't be left
behind, and that it doesn't cease to overtake us, least of all
when reduced to that cosy hybrid "humanature".
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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