The term landscape as we understand it is in constant flux: landscape as Real Estate, landscape as war-torn topographies, landscapes of extraction, landscapes as data centers and so on. A while back I read Etel Adnan speaking about the vagueness of this term, as opposed to, say, the concreteness of a word like terrain. It got me thinking, that the term landscape is one of those words that is both omnipresent and yet rarely understood. Like nature and culture, it is a grand abstraction of the human vocabulary. And yet, landscape is easily imagined as a subset of both nature and culture, in isolation and in unison.
 

The only thing that can be said with certainty about landscape as a noun is that it involves a land mass. John R. Stilgoe in his excellent book ‘What is landscape?’ (which inspires the title of this program) noted that Landscape comes from the old Frisian language, lânskip, that once meant ‘shoveled land’. Stilgoe’s etymological scavenging underscores the importance of human agency in shaping the earth’s surface, qualities that distinguish it from its other, namely, wilderness. The split between landscape and wilderness lodges with a slight shift when one takes up landscape as an adjective, which qualifies it within the realm of culture, as in landscape painting, which as John Berger once astutely quipped, has to do primarily with land ownership and settlement (there is also the minor matter of landscape as a verb, “landscaping”). The delimitation of landscape in landscape painting—where landscape ends and wilderness begins—is arbitrary, just as are notions of shorelines and horizons where landscape meets the other scapes: sea and sky. Landscape as an autonomous subject in art via painting emerged only in 18th Century CE, while human art history extends thousands of years. However through this development, landscape as an adjective in landscape painting is able to claim a kind of concreteness that landscape as a noun lacks. Oil paintings of landscapes certainly weren’t limited to their realistic physical appearances, but became a conveyor of moods and feelings, thus morphing into an object of attraction, of looking. Later, Modernist painting and the natural sublime of the traditional oil painting entered into an ambiguous relationship, Color Field painters for example flattened out the suggestions of deep space, and although non-objective in nature, their relationship to landscapes and expression of the sublime was altered and not entirely severed.
 

Within the camera arts, landscape became an enduring subject of American photography in the 1970s, its counterpoint, industrialism, appended it for the New Topographics generation. Barbara Rose observed that in the sphere of American culture lacking in the mythologies of the classical world—an established church that guided religious art, or a monarchy defining the pinnacles of a social order American art found its most elevated subject matter in the natural landscape. In film history, the prominence of landscape had sustained from the early amateur films through to the Westerns, that finally came to a head in Experimental landscape films in the postwar era; Larry Gottheim, Peter Hutton, and James Benning being its most notable exponents. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, experimental landscape films began to assimilate into an attitude beyond the confines of America as exemplified by David Rimmer and Michael Snow in Canada, Rose Lowder in France, Chris Welsby in the UK, Dore O. and Werner Nekes in Germany, Tsuneo Nakai and Hiroshi Yamazaki in Japan, Corinne and Arthur Cantrill in Australia, to name but the genre’s most towering protagonists. Broadly understood, these filmmakers, in different registers, cultivated a tension between pictoriality of the landscape and its visual representation, aiming to constantly re-configure our perception of it. This program traces the legacy of this history, in the works of their contemporaries and newer filmmakers.