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September 04, 2006
I mentioned here that I often walk along the cliff tops with the dogs on the weekends when I'm down at Victor Harbor. This is a typical view that we see all the time. It is 'seen' as 'scenery appreciation' within an aesthetic appreciation of nature as beauty, sublime or the picturesque.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Looking to Kings Head, Victor Harbor, 2003
This is late afternoon in the winter sunshine. In the summer the green goes and the earth becomes the light brown of dried grass.
Our aesthetic experience of nature still has sits roots in eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics which concentrated primarily on sublime and picturesque scenery based on continental travel writing---the tradition of picturesque tours.
How long before this landscape is covered in houses through seachange is any body guess. That concern takes us to the edge of environmental aesthetics as an area that considers aesthetic appreciation of things other than works of art. How then do we to understand aesthetic appreciation of non-art?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari on clifftop walk, Victor Harbor, 2004
The concern for the state of the environment is not simply one of preserving natural scenery and returning to romantic naturalism, as we probably need to interrogate assumptions about the self and nature which Romantic writing helped to naturalize. These assumptions suggest that seeking an aesthetic appreciation of nature is a solitary pursuit constituted by a spectatorship, which begins and ends with the individual self, and signals a separation from the world.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Atget on clifftop walk near the Bluff, Victor Harbor, 2004
We need to move away from self-centered conceptions of Romantic aesthetics of nature and toward greater environmental aesthetic that assumes we are a part of, and within, nature.
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The thing I miss most about Australia is its coastline, and its coastline culture. The US doesn't have that, not on the east coast anyway.