Abstract

Western Landscape is more than a description of Nature, it is a field on which discourses of perspective, aesthetics, and political philosophy intersect to describe the subject's relationship to Nature and civil society. Defined as such by the homogenous space of linear perspective, Landscape is not a 'real', but a virtual space, which functions hegemonically to conceal the material body and to legislate subjective agency. Classical representational space imposes limits upon visible, material Nature by confining the spectator to a unique viewing position; the park or garden delimits an ideal subject of government by presenting a politically expedient vision of Nature. Landscape--both the image, and the real spaces which pattern themselves after it--demands to be read as a text, locating the subject as/at a 'point of view' which is removed from real space and time. Perpetuated by historical and present-day discourses of landscape representation and alteration, as well as the discourse of art history, Classical or perspectival vision characterizes not only the subject's relationship to real Nature, but to knowledge and history as well. Positing subjective agency in/as corporeal choice is a possible means of critiquing perspectival vision and its role in traditional art historical practice. Deconstructing the 'point of view' implies a different way of situating oneself as a subject; as well, it suggests the collapse of the narrative history of Landscape. Finally, it raises the question that the real itself is produced out of a desire for the other.