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The Landscape/The Scene and the Web

I. When I saw a room full of Pratt students open their browsers wide, I understood the typical computer-window would not be default Macintosh. No, the screen format would be rectangular -- wider than long. This struck me as psychologically cogent. The "page" would be scenic. From a visual arts standpoint, less akin to the still life or portrait and more akin to the landscape.

II. At Lascaux, visitors gain perspective as they are surrounded by a "hunt" scene. In virtual reality, the computer circles an object or environment to provide a panoply. Horizontal scrolling causes nausea, yet enhances scope. Scrolling downward allows a world to unfold with less peripheral vision involved. Quite different experiences - the scenic versus the unfolding -- and both have charms. One revealed, one hidden. Scrolling of any kind is part of the discovery process. The size of the part scrolled is also relevant. Scrolling a long narrow strip to the right can be like pulling a message from a bottle -- an intimate experience.

III. Gertrude Stein in Lectures in America discusses the problem of plays and emotion. Audience member's emotions are always asynchroneous with the play's action. When one sees a landscape one takes it in all at once. Stein: "I felt if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance." The landscape features things in relation: the trees to the hills, hills to fields, trees to each other. Her opera Four Saints in Three Acts was written as a landscape.

IV. Henri Rousseau wanted to join the genres of the landscape and the portrait. One result was "The Dream," a painting of a nude woman reclining on a couch with the jungle encroaching and a man in the backgorund playing flute. After determining salient characteristics of a genre, it is often easy and exciting to work with those reductions -- to fuse various genres. I'm a non-purist, but I admire purists who identify the essence of mediums or genres.

V. Rose Lowder, experimental French filmmaker, captures moving landscapes/scenes. Her "Quiproquo" documents the intersection of nature and social-industrial techniology. Often she films with a stationary camera, and the landscape's action is due to the wind, changes in light, and frame by frame editing. In a similar vein, Suzanne Giroux, Canadian videographer set up her camera in Monet's gardens and taped "video-paintings"--a retake of scenes Monet had painted.

VII. My father painted landscapes of the Georgia sea coast and the north Georgia mountains while my mother painted still lifes. Audrey Flack in Art and Soul reviews various artists' preferred focus and scale. Choosing the landscape genre could indicate an inclusive/concerned view or an interest in advancing into the world -- which itself could have many definitions.

VIII. In recent years, the term "landscape" has been appropriated by physicists and mathematicians -- sometimes in a traditional sense as when applied to fractal-generated computer landscape, for example, Pi-landscapes, other times to reference grandeur, scope, magnitude. Mapping the Next Millenium, for example, has sections labelled, "Planetary Landscapes," The Animate Landscape," etc. Gluck in Chaos," speaks of how physics' achievements -- from atom bomb to transistor -- have "changed the twentieth century landscape."

IX. In my first book Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape the landscape of the title piece refers to the rather war-torn area of Daytona Beach where religious and "sin-city" interests wage ad campaigns to save or debauch souls. As a result the landscape has suffered degradation. The insertion of nude figures was my counter for an area increasingly the pawn of those with no respect for the natural environment.

X. If people are dressed and the land is natural is that an imbalance, similar to the oft-noted male dressed, female undressed phenomenon? What is the relationship of humans to the land and what is the relative importance of each in the vision of the artist or observer. The cover of Leslie Scalapino's book, The Return of Painting features an ocean-side landscape with tiny figures. This is provocative not due to its dramatic compositon but to the assigned weight in the figure-ground relationship.