Fresh air: Space–time and new models for landscape painting
Authors: Joy Clair 
Published: September 2017

What is the place of landscape painting today? What is landscape painting and what can it do? What questions does it allow us to ask? Landscape painting has historically been associated with space, but today we perceive space and time not as separate but interconnected and mutually defining. Furthermore, space and time are now considered to be unpredictable forces. This article looks at how contemporary landscape painting may be understood as an invocation of our new sense of what cultural geographer Mike Crang refers to as ‘dynamic space–time’. Seeking to broaden the discourse of contemporary landscape painting, I begin by tracing the evolution of this idea of space-time within various disciplines. The rapidly evolving sense of ‘place’ itself as a process, a practice is also described. Because of the associations between ideas of landscape and place, I propose that landscape painting must reflect, perform and enact this changed paradigm. I look at some of the possibilities of how landscape painting can be understood to invoke not only characteristics of space–time but also place as an inter-relatedness, a sense of activity and unpredictability.

My references here are largely from theoretical frameworks that have evolved from the consideration of cities, but once landscape painting can be understood as connected and performed as the enactment of the rapid simultaneities and shifts of urban life, the same lens of dynamic space-time can be used to view works that use or are situated within non-urban spaces. Even in the earthworks of Robert Smithson, the rapidity of urban space–time may be replaced by the ‘glacial’ pace of geological time, but the natural world is perceived with an increased sense of interrelatedness and multiple domains. I explore landscape painting in light of concepts generated outside of the ‘art world’: philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s vision of the city as composed of multiple temporalities, geographer Doreen Massey’s notion of the ‘practicing’ of place, and architectural historian Sanford Kwinter’s claim for time’s essential attribute as the capacity to make change possible. This survey also leads to looking at how mapping practices now used by urban planners and architects can invite new ways of thinking about landscape painting.

From the perspective of space–time, the precedents for contemporary landscape painting appear quite different, with Robert Smithson, Alighiero e Boetti, and Eugenio Dittborn, asserting themselves as relevant predecessors, new models. These considerations serve as a framework for observing the changing space–time in landscape with regard to how process can involve the engagement between ‘natural’ conditions and the social processes that interact with them (Smithson); people, parts of the world, and materials (Boetti); and how paintings can engage with actual and social spaces (Dittborn). ‘Fresh Air’ is intended as a kind of circuit-board or field connecting some of the points of artistic and critical practices generated by and around contemporary landscape painting vis-à-vis space–time. The last part of the essay suggests how more recent artworks may be connected to these concerns, in particular the work of Julie Mehretu, Sarah Morris and Angela de la Cruz.