Recovering landscape: an art between seeing and hearing

Keywords:

identity, landscape, memory, music, Puritanism, politics

Available in:

JVAP 5.1 - about JVAP

Funded by:

NAFAE - about NAFAE

Pulished:

July 2006

Article abstract

Cultural geographers have recently argued that landscape is experienced in an embodied way through a complex weave of senses: including sight, sound, smell, touch and social organization and experience. This has led to calls for a reassessment of hearing as a 'way of dwelling'. The article focuses on music to question Lucy Lippard's 1997 book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society - seen by many as a key text in relation to the interaction between visual art, social activism and cultural geography - asking why, in its 292 pages, there are no more than half a dozen references to music. Lippard's claim that place is for her 'the locus of desire' is rendered problematic because, as Janet Wolff demonstrates, the music that we listen to, particularly in our teens, plays a key part in locating us in the life world. Given Lippard's deliberate weaving of her own experience into the text, what might the absence of music suggest? Using the work of Rebecca Solnit, the article offers a hypothesis about the underlying orientation of Lippard's text with regard to a 'politics of listening'. It then takes up points raised in relation to Lippard and Solnit in the more specific context of a recent AHRB-funded project. The aim here is to suggest ways in which our understanding of landscape might be extended by working between a sense of sight and sound as a means to deploy what Richard Kearney refers to as the 'testimonial imagination'.

Written by: Iain Biggs

Other articles in: JVAP Volume 5 Issue 1