INDOC. Documentation centre about Art and Nature

The exhibition The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape at the CDAN

The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape – an exhibition curated by Javier Maderuelo and María Luisa Martín de Argila – will open at the CDAN on May 23. The show will take a look at the different ways landscape is currently interpreted and how landscape has been recovered in the arts over the postmodern period. The show, which will run until September 27, will be accompanied by an exceptional exhibition catalogue and a course entitled Landscape and Territory.

The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape will be held in parallel with the third Thinking Landscape course, which the CDAN will run in June.

The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape will take a look at the different ways landscape is now interpreted, and how landscape has been recovered in the arts over the postmodern period. Curator Javier Maderuelo sheds light on two basic ideas: the concept of landscape and the way that this concept is ‘constructed’.

First, in the words of Javier Maderuelo, it must be made clear that the concept of landscape is a construct, an abstract idea we create based on ‘what we see’ when we look at a territory – a land. Landscape is not an object or a set of objects configured by nature or transformed by human action; neither is it nature or even the physical environment that surrounds us or on which we are situated. As a concept, landscape is the link that enables us to interpret the qualities of a territory or place in cultural and aesthetic terms. We are able to make judgments of taste about a territory because artists, through their works, have taught us to look at the territory with ‘aesthetic disinterest’ and find in it qualities not recognised by the pragmatic gaze of a farmer who works the land or a property owner who derives pleasure only from his ownership of it.

The second key point is that landscape – given that it is a cultural and therefore human creation – is something that is constructed. In every historical period and society images of the world and the environment have been created according to people’s beliefs, knowledge and wishes at the time. European Romanticism, for example, gave landscape a privileged cultural status. Landscape took on a psychic and emotional dimension, and landscape painting was viewed as having an epic significance, and regarded as completely independent of any other subject matter.

The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape seeks to show how some ‘lands’ have been turned into landscapes by art. The exhibition also looks at the two ways in which artists have participated in this aesthetic operation: on the one hand by tattooing, carving, occupying and working on the territory, and on the other by generating, through their works, new ways of looking at territories, and therefore new ways of judging and valuing them.

Artists in the exhibition

Isamu Noguchi, Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Jan Dibbets, Alberto Carneiro, David Nash, Ulrich Rückriem, Isidro Blasco, Axel Hütte, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bleda y Rosa, Gerard Richter, Jesús Mari Lazcano, Paolo Bürgi and Catherine Mosbach are the artists selected to analyse this working thesis. Within the context of modernity, The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape looks at pioneers in the recovery of landscape, the role of the artwork in the place, and the gaze that constructs the space. The exhibition covers photography, painting and landscape architecture.

More information

• Website for The Construction of the Contemporary Landscape (CDAN website, available in English too)

Source: texts – CDAN. The photo at the top of the page is a still shot from the video on Wooden Boulder (2005), a work by David Nash.

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