burghart schmidt
The discovery of landscape
Landscape is not simply handed to us like an image captured at a particular instant in a mirror. That only occurs in landscape painting, in other words, as the outcome of a human act of production. In our imagination and in memories in our mind's eye, landscape is composed from many, many gazes. That is one of the fundamental teachings of Lucius Burckhardt, from which he began to develop his promenadology, his science of strolling. The comments I wish to make are therefore dedicated to him. He takes as his starting point the experience we all share, namely that when we imagine a landscape, we are always right in the midst of it, as if we had eyes set all around our head. When we imagine landscapes we do not stand in front of the landscape, for our conceptions stem from many, many glances as we turn our head to look in all directions. That is where the correlation between imagining landscape and film comes into play. Both are on a journey from the very outset and each is related to the fleetingness this entails, in conjunction with freeze frames.
Heidi Dumreicher l Sergio Fant l Marcy Goldberg l Bodo Hell l Christoph Huber l Lilli Lička l Johannes Moser l Michael O'Pray l Hans Schifferle l Christian Stadelmann l Mika Taanila l Jean-Philippe Tessé l Barbara Wurm