Landscape, Visual Culture and Ecology

Landscape, Visual Culture and Ecology
http://ecovisualculture.wordpress.com/

Earth, soil, dirt, property, view, landscape: our language belies the many associations we have with land. Rural land has been invested with mythic presence and has seemed to promise authentic, immediate experience to the viewer ever since the Renaissance. In our current moment of ecological crisis, studying the visual culture of landscape and ecology has become ever more pertinent. This course offers critical and historical background to our present ecological condition and offers models of hope and change. We will chart a trajectory of landscape and modern experience that will examine the place of landscape, nature and human subjectivity in Western art up to the present day. Traditional theories of the picturesque, sublime, pastoral, and beautiful as well as recent cultural studies of tourism, nostalgia, nationalism, gender and ecological awareness will inform a critical examination of landscape as a wide genre: from academic painting to performance and land-based contemporary environmental art.

Full syllabus: ASLE_Syllabi_LandscapeCoughlin