«Objects are closer than they appear in mirror»: Glasses and the midwifery of landscape experience

The 2006 SHIFTS Conference in Jyväskylä1 gave me the opportunity for reflecting once more about the becoming of the occidental appreciation of «landscape». A vague idea that was the result of teaching and research in the present and historical shape of acoustic and visual environment condensed into the more outspoken conviction: our «landscape» is, despite the overall evolution of sight in the history of art and of aesthetics, still an idea of environment that is heavily founded on the picturesque. However, I am not going to judge the appropriateness of the presence of an 18th century perceptual and representational heritage in the 21st century. I thank the organisers and the public for having given me the opportunity to discuss issues I could not as easily have tested in my home discipline, human geography, and to make discoveries about the relationship between perception, representation and the technologies linked to these processes. Many paths have been shown to me that call for further walking. I do actually recur to paintings, witnesses of historical stages of representation. I am centring on images, not objects that are «real» in some way or other: even composed objects like the geographers' landscapes. I also prefer concrete cases to universal principles, following a conventionalist theory of pictorial representation.2 This means I contend that when understanding and appreciating a picture, be it pictorial or photographical, we use a set of conventions that orders our sight into a view. I contend that this convention is contained in a heritage that evolves constantly under the effect of everyday perceptions, but nevertheless is rooted two hundred years back in the fruits of pictorial and academic aesthetics. To grasp the contemporary everyday experience we have to develop phenomenological awareness, and to understand its historical precursors we have to apply hermeneutic techniques.