Tracing the Midcoast

Uncategorized

Land and Landscape

by

Mitchell’s views in “Imperial Landscape” reminded me of the different landscapes that were discussed in Meinig’s “Beholding the Eye,” specifically landscape as wealth and landscape as aesthetic. I found these crossovers to be the strongest and most interesting in the last section of the paper “The Sacred Silent Language,” which begins with an excerpt from Emerson’s Nature. The excerpt simply says that the best part of a farmer’s land is the landscape that it is a part of, yet the farmer does not own the landscape. The landscape is owned by the poet, who is able to put all the parts in front of him together without physically altering it. It is his poetic property.

Mitchell looks deeper into the distinction between land and landscape with the comparison of a mountain filled with gold and the Grand Canyon. The mountain filled with gold is valuable only while gold still exists; once it ha been all mined and dug out, the mountain is worthless. Yet the value of the Grand Canyon as a landscape is invaluable. The amount of postcards, paintings, and artistic work that the Grand Canyon has been the subject for or has inspired in countless. In this sense, landscape as aesthetic and landscape as wealth are one in the same. The wealth is a product of the aesthetic landscape and the feelings that come from it. These feelings can be the simple awe from appreciating the natural beauty, but as Mitchell would argue, these feelings are typically wrapped up in the cultural forces that shape our perception. The Grand Canyon is a geological wonder, but also symbol of the American Frontier ands its sense of adventure and opportunity.

Landscape as a commodity

by

I found the section “The Sacred Silent Language” within Mitchell’s essay, Imperial Landscape, to be the most interesting and thought provoking part of the essay. I didn’t really understand his point that landscape is used as a “medium of exchange” until his example using the value of real estate. Placing a monetary value on every desirable piece of land perverts the “ideal landscape” when considering how people consume landscape. This emphasis of valuing landscape in monetary terms brings up the idea that our current societal structure has more or less made landscape its most valuable commodity. Mitchell points out that we can exhaust every natural resource within a given landscape, but still place a numerical value on it. In this sense, it seems logical that empires past and present have used the acquisition of land as a means of expressing power. The quote, “Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time,” is relevant to our class and our discussions on how space and time are linked together (Mitchell, 170). People use the concept of inhabiting a space to enhance one’s sense of self, but Mitchell goes a step further and says that people also use space and landscape to gather wealth and express it to others. It is this that affirms the idea that, as Emerson says, viewing landscape is never really free, and is inextricably linked to “economic considerations” (Mitchell, 169).

Betsy’s Landscape

by

The perception of landscape as a medium for culture connects well to the creation and interpretation of maps. While maps often depict more explicitly scientifically driven motives, the influence of cultural and political powers is evident. Landscape is framed by the perception of place within a cultural context, and a map tells of a certain cultural phenomenon in time.

Similarly, maps tell the story of what the cartographer wants you to see, and landscapes tell the story of what the artist wants you to see. “Landscape is ideal, not real estate” (Mitchell 6). Even Betsy Wyeth’s creation of Allen is an idealist landscape. She recreated an island and its cultural definition based upon what landscape she had envisioned–clearings, ponds, building the blockhouse, recreating the sail loft. All of this allowed her to transform landscape in terms of her perception of the place, of what she thought Allen once was, and what she wanted it to represent–forming landscape. Betsy is an artist in this regard, she uses Allen as an artist would a painting, or a cartographer would a map. It is still recognizable, but the physical form of place is always changing. Clearly landscape for her is not stagnant, but instead is malleable to her own desires–putting ponds in because it seemed like the island needed them. In this sense, her imperialism on Allen is a tremendous example of Mitchell’s historical proposition. Culture and landscape is defined by the interpretation of those who have influence, and Betsy has been the sole influence of Allen, interpreting previous cultures in ways that make the island her own.

Landscape Carries More Value Than Money

by

Landscape carries more value than money. Being an Economics major, W.J.T. Mitchell’s second “Thesis of Landscape” (Thesis #2) caught my eye: Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural…As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value. I have never thought of a landscape beyond its physical structure. I always thought it was aesthetically appealing, but never thought to ask, “what is this landscape telling us?” In contrast, I never thought of money as “good for nothing in itself”. I always thought of its value, but never the reality of its physical structure: a piece of paper.

Now, those with a lot of money carry a lot of value and therefore a lot of power. But the reality about money is that not everyone can have limitless dollars and limitless power. There is an uncontrollable restriction on the power of money. On the other hand, a landscape carries a “potentially limitless reserve of value” and power. The power that a landscape carries is uncontrollable and endless. It has the ability to reveal human relations while being concealed, or protected, behind the “beautiful” natural environment depicted within a typical landscape. There is this sense of secrecy behind a landscape and its meaning, which only few can reveal and truly understand. While W.J.T. Mitchell used money as a metaphor to help us better understand a landscape, it appears he failed to discuss a landscape’s dominance over money in regards to the value it carries.

 

 

by

I found this reading to be quite difficult to grasp, but overall I came to the conclusion that WJT Mitchell’s piece “Imperial Landscape” is attempting to redefine and decontextualize different meanings of landscape. Specifically, Mitchell is concerned with a more realistic, almost pessimistic (he refers to it as the “darkside of landscape”) of landscape. Mitchell says: “this dark side is not merely mythic, not merely a feature of the regressive, instinctual drives associated with nonhuman ‘nature’ but a moral, ideological, and political darkness that covers itself with innocent idealism” (166). I find this quote the most intriguing and I believe it summarizes many of the main ideas covered in this piece very well. The reading continues later on to reference that a problematic notion exists that landscape painting is uniquely Western and modern, and contradicts this notion by alluding to the antiquity of Chinese landscape painting. Not only has Chinese landscape painting existed before modern western thought, but it has played a crucial role in the formation and development of English landscape aesthetics. This subversion is pertinent because it speaks to the immorality that exists within the modern discourse of landscape. The burial of this deep history of landscape representation is indicative of the power structures at work and not only the literal imperialism (land) of the English/European/Western world, but the imperialism of knowledge as well. Imperialism has manifested itself into discourse of imperialism, and this cycle has reinforced an uneven structure of power within the global systems of both land and knowledge.

https://web.colby.edu/allen-island/2016/10/25/987/

The Timeless Imagination of place

by

The central idea in Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove’s piece is that what matters most about landscapes, is the mental schemas and the social or emotional associations we have with them. The meanings of landscapes are embedded within our own perception of  the social flows around us. The most important aspect of the essay is that landscape’s meaning is based on our own perception: “The post-modern apprehension of the world emphasizes the inherent instability of meaning, our ability to invert signs and symbols, to recycle them in a different context and thus transform their reference” (p. 7). Apprehension of place is terribly unstable. As postmodernity would have us believe, there is no single or simple classification of a place. In his piece on cartography, Harley would have us believe that consumption of place becomes universal through a hegemonic control of its representation. This piece leads me to challenge that thought with the notion that it is our own imagination that allows us to deconstruct landscape. My own physical experience of the Allen Island sail loft has interacted with my knowledge about the island to create an entirely knew perception of the sail loft, that exists outside of space and time. From being a store in 1822, to a sail loft later on in the century where rugged Mainers would hang out and smoke cigarettes, to now being a museum, the building is a timeless mental image for me, where I try and retrace its meaning as place to others throughout history. Nevertheless, this imagination is fully my own, and is filtered through my own experience of the buildings history and its current existence.