Aesthetics and the processual nature of landscape

Abstract

The main subject addressed in this essay is the idea of landscape approached from a new perspective, namely the aesthetic category of the sublime, as opposed to the historical category of the picturesque. I argue that landscape is something more than an image and a phenomenon, and we should consider it and define anew, since its meaning is both aesthetic and cultural. The re-reading of the sublime as a kind of common sensory experience free of metaphysical connotation offers an insight into the kind of experience accompanying the relationship with the landscape and redefines its essence. In the optics of the sublime, the landscape assumes the nature of a process in which one sees the overlapping of certain socio-cultural relationships and the natural world, as well as the meaning of the surrounding reality, the living, current environment and its sensual perception. We may assume that the significant difference emerging when we try to approach landscape, appears between the landscape as an idea (aesthetic landscape) and the landscape as a process (cultural landscape). Thus landscape is seen as a cultural space of human activity, not a pictorial part of the reality. As such, landscape is related to surroundings. Surroundings are a space of life and activity, while landscape is the space experienced, but both are two aspects of our living-in-the-landscape. Dwelling as the creation of the surroundings is nothing but practice to make landscape present.

The article was first published in Aesthetics of Human Environment.VIIIOvsiannikov International Aesthetic Confe-rence, ed. by. S. Dzikevich, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 2017, p. 7-19.