I wanted to put up a photo of Tim Ingold and something to do with lines and his writing but couldn't find anything, but i did find this, its a photo i took on my phone when the last snow fell and we were lambing - its the week that Wales and the Isle of Mann got snowed in and their sheep got buried. Anyway it seemed relevant in terms of the - Are we Landscape artists and what David Walker Barker has written and what i am going to go on and say. The photo shows my sister, one morning just after feeding sheep in a water logged, snow covered grass field after a long wet winter, there is walking track lines, power lines, an invisible meshwork of interconnections and becomings and the snow is falling.
Anyway there were several response i wanted to make
1. The adopting of the name Landscapist...it made me think of the name me dad calls me Fartist - farmer-artist! it links back to the name of farmer parsons of yesteryear Farsons - i cant find anything to back this up be he swears it was a description - perhaps a fens/Lincolnshire thing, need i say more.... It strikes me we need not name it, as by naming it we are bounded, instead we just need to ask the question so a discussion occurs and we consider the points it raises.
2. Ingold writes eloquently in his Being Alive book about Production, History, Dwelling and Lines in the Prologue. From it i wanted to draw out some points to add to the discussion. What follows seems relevant to the question of are we landscapers - where we ingest and become land as a way to create. Or the point Steve made about everything outside and also my question of are we creating representations or something else:
a. Producers both human and non human do not so much transform the world, impressing their pre-concieved designs upon the material substrate of nature , as play their part from within in the worlds transformation of itself. Growing into the world, the world grows in them.
b. There are human becomings, animal becomings, plant becomings and so on. As they move together through time and encounter one another, these paths interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry. Anthropology then is the study of human becomings as they unfold within the weave of the world.
c. The perceiver producer is thus a wayfarer and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown... To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being or rather becoming.
d. Recall.... that everything there is, launched in the current of time, has a trajectory of becoming. The entwining of these ever extending trajectories comprises the texture of the world. Whether our concern is to inhabit this world or to study it - and at root these are the same, since all inhabitants are students and all students inhabitants - our task is not to take stock of its contents but to follow what is going on, tracing the multiple trails of becoming, wherever they lead.
I was keen, i suppose, to argue that we are all living beings caught up in the current of life and as such, in this context, we are landscape artists because we cant be anything else.
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I am going to post about my two walks for the birdland project but reading this and also been in the middle of reading Being alive I keep thinking about life art and ethnography. It feels a bit circular like I not we are going around in circles with this but both my walks with Both Davids and others had to be about life - about trying to be there without anything else- a camera brain or pen or sound recorder without a means of interpretation and playing back other than memory. I think we can maybe be of the landscape - you are a fartist and I perhaps am a Farter a father artist but is this enough. In conversation with David Walker Barker I felt envious of his clarity on this issue - he knows where he stands so to speak
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm simply an historian who seeks to understand how we inhabit landscapes, and how we feel about them in relation to our identity. Landscapes are places outside of ourselves - urban or rural, with some overlaps. In this respect, I'm a simple soul - I like clarity, structure, and goals; I'm not so keen on post-modern/post-structural open-endedness.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was reading an essay by Virginia Woolf the other day, called Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a motor-car, and was struck by this thought about how we relate to landscapes:
'one looks up, one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could expect — there are now pink clouds over Battle; the fields are mottled, marbled ... and then ... with beauty and beauty and beauty, a pin pricks ... But what is the pin? So far as I could tell, the pin had something to do with one’s own impotency. I cannot hold this — I cannot express this — I am overcome by it — I am mastered. Somewhere in that region one’s discontent lay; and it was allied with the idea that one’s nature demands mastery over all that it receives; and mastery here meant the power to convey what one saw now over Sussex so that another person could share it.'
i empathise with this beautiful piece of writing /vision/emotion and understand the inability, the frustration to describe an aesthetic sublime moment, a moment of feeling overcome.
ReplyDeletei suppose we are interested in peoples ability to seperate the bits that make up their life and to have clarity and not be as V.W. described here,,,to be overcome.. Its perhaps a question of where does the historian stop - you must consider ideas notions when walking with the family for example,,,but are you then just in life, a dad???? I am interested in Ingold and his ideas of growing together in fact not of growing together but becoming together...we are one
oh and nice to hear from ya.