Are we Landscape artist?

When Kate first suggested this idea that perhaps we were landscape artists I was a bit in two minds about it.  I'd not really thought about it much but I suppose I saw a landscape artist as somebody who tried to represent landscape and I have mainly been thinking that we are trying to be artists who don't really try to make representations or things which "Stand in" for something else.  I then wondered if we were phenomenological artist which in a way is possibly a landscape artist but as a word it's pretty useless as every time I look it up and read what it means I forget the definition.  I do this with Oxymoron but can now remember it by thinking of an example - like the Buddist- Boxing at our local gym.  I can't really think of an example of phenomenology but perhaps us as landscape artists may be it.

The useful thing about the question and why I'm growing to like it more and more is it is forcing me to consider where we sit in the history of art - not of course as historical figures but as the small cogs in the machine of history- the cultural worker bees.  I suppose this is a good time as we have our press in "Force of Nature" which physically sits in the same room as this art history.

 I went to a talk by Chris Watson who is a sound artist developing a sound scape of Sheffield for a major show and I wondered what his ground was - his work seemed very painterly but I wasn't sure what he was painting on - the ground was something he seemed to have established through space, technology and listening.   It was a good realisation as the surface of the practise wasn't an issue it was more his relationship to his own sonic universe.  Perhaps he is also a phenomenological artist but he is also simply representing the experience back through recording.  I decided that his ground was certainly not silence and this is where I write it here if we are landscape artists paper or canvas are not our ground - niether is the social world of social interaction - perhaps we need to be more like chris and think of a different approach to our ground or as ethnographers would say 'The field" which to them is probably everthing which is outside their skin.


I liked Pauls comment on the last post that he hasn't really seen what work I do - at last somebody who thinks that art has de-materilised in 1968 or perhaps he just thinks I'm lazy.