Landscape is a Renaissance phenomenon that has continued to contemporary art, although between 1907 and 1915 the artistic community shifted the formal visual gestalt into a completely new conception of art, consubstantial with the landscape, even though it remained relatively esoteric in its visual enquiries. To understand them, we study art history, particularly landscape art, and its avant-garde conception, analysing Land, Earth, Environmental. However, we restructured this theoretical and visual conception by assimilating the structuralism of scientific revolutions, according to Thomas Kuhn, who, by contrast, perceives revolutionary – non-cumulative – change, which ceases to add knowledge of the known, like art in this case, and distinguishes it from the normal – accumulative – change, which adds knowledge to the new conception. Evidently ready-mades, such as Duchamp’s Air de Paris, 1919, and abstract painting, such as Mondrian’s Composition 10 in Black and White, 1915, appear as landscapes that no longer represent the real, since they are the real. In Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb, 1432, Kenneth Clark sees the constituent elements of the landscape that remain relevant today: “there is a remarkable sense of our being in the landscape – of our being able to proceed smoothly from foreground to distance.” Such is Dan Graham’s March 31, 1966, 1966, mathematically exploring a line of sight from the retinal wall to the edge of the known universe. Five centuries apart, the landscape component of both works is still observable even though they stem from conceptually and visually incompatible.

Authors:
María Eugenia Rabadán Villalpando, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. María Eugenia Rabadán Villalpando is Full Profesor of History of Art at the Cultural Studies Department, Universidad de Guanajuato, México. Member of the National System of Researchers, Secretariat of Science, Humanities Technology and Innovation

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