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November 12, 2006
This image by Josef Sudek makes a change--it takes us back to the poetic sensibility of the European romantic past:
Josef Sudek
This is the world of 5 x 7 contact prints and European romanticism.
Josef Sudek
The landscape tradition, as we understand it today, has its roots in British and European Romanticism, with its underlying Kantian notions of the beautiful and the sublime and, ultimately, of an imprint of divinity, which would serve to underwrite human beings aesthetic adventure in the great wilderness of creation. The European romantic landscape harked back to the Biblical Eden.
European romanticism is different from Australian romanticism. Australia inhabited the European Romantic imagination as the dystopia (penal colony) to North America's utopia (Jerusalem). This dystopian geographical unconscious, which is arises from the Western encounters with the Australian landscape, consistently found it to be aberrant, repellent, dystopic; the underside of the world, the Antipodes--- it was a traumatic encounter.
This trauma was contained through the aberrant earth and its species being normalized through utility in the service of advancing civilisation and sustaining economic progress.The connection between this utilitarianism and the dominant aesthetic is mediated by the pastoral tradition that translates and the land as earth into land-scape. Yet there is a resistance to this translation in terms of an element of the unassimilable, which is signifiin the romantic tradition as 'wilderness.'
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