How do you define place? Is it connected to experience in the past or a vision of the future? Is it rated on usefulness at the time? Is it geological, historical or emotionally tied to stories of personal mythology? What is the charge of the place you are living in now? How does it reflect your inner life? Is this place a stop-over or is it the container for a life? Does it challenge your daily values?
Traditional Japanese wisdom says that you don’t choose place, it chooses you. Many people that I have talked to in Taos, New Mexico would agree, as they each have a story of how they were chosen. What does it mean to be chosen by place? Is there something specific that you need to do in that place? When place is done with d you do you have to move on? Can one be between places or in no place? What is the difference between place, land and landscape for you?
Lucy Lippard, art critic, curator and author, distinguishes between the intimacy of a lived-in landscape, which becomes place, and landscape seen from a single static point of view. She calls the latter a set of surfaces, a backdrop in the viewing. This is interesting in that the genre of landscape painting fits this definition quite literally. So often landscape paintings feels like a scene devoid of content, intimacy, without a component of heart or time. Although landscape, still life and nude models are used as an exercise in learning about space, color and technique of the materials, it has often served underlying themes of ownership and/or objectification.
Not only does this view of place call into question our fundamental relationship to nature, but also our relationship to our selves and each other. Art history demonstrates social trends of attitudes toward women through representation of the female figure, as it at the same time depicts the desire to conquer or romanticize the earth. Indigenous cultures, traditionally integrated with nature, create their mythology from the land. Group cohesion, coherence and sustainability are directly connected to their relationship to the land. Our depiction of the land often demonstrates alienation, expressing materialistic and sentimental values.
Karl Marx in Kapital, talks about labor being the mediator between nature and culture, “countryside” forms a barrier between “civilization” and “wilderness.” Mircea Eliade maintains that the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness.” The archetypal forms and patterns of the human psyche then are mirrored in the world of nature and how we perceive it. For me that resonance is the sacred organizing principle of life.
The idea of that where humans meet nature is a buffer zone, suggests that landscape is where what we control meets what we want to control, which underscores the ‘not belongingness’ that we have created. The liminal is that space in-between, a place of transition and transformation. It can be confused with the marginal, which is the projections and shadows that we don’t own, but see in others. Examples of the marginalized are criminals, homeless, insane, handicapped, aged or anyone viewed as not-me. The liminal is the edge that is evolving, sometimes over laps with the marginal.
How does this relate to your relationship to place? Most of the places we interact with daily have been designed for the expediency and profit of business. Perhaps that is why the current interest in feng shui,the Chinese brand of geomancy. We are desperate to be actively involved with where we live, if not in the design of place, then the energetics. This may also explain widespread interest to indigenous ritual, healing and world view's which find personal meaning in nature.
Visual artist, musicians and performers are exploring relationship to nature, place, and each other in more innovative and creative ways with interdisciplinary and multimedia which invite participation. Those in the arts have been interested for a long time in the question of relationship to place? People in general are looking for new perspectives on daily life which includes a healthy function of the cultural arts. Touring Europe as an extension of Disneyland is no longer satisfying. People want a different relationship to things and places which demands new ways of perceiving the world.
How we perceive ourselves in our place of being has tremendous room for creativity. Just as each of us is being called to become aware of the myths that sponsor our lives, we are also being called to create, as artist, our relationship to the world we live in. Begin with your awareness as to what place means to you and how it expresses your values.
Suzie Gablik writes, “a central aspect of new paradigm thinking involves a significant shift from objects to relationships… the emerging new paradigm reflects a will to participate socially… There is the aesthetic perspective orienting us to the making of objects, the ecological perspective connects art to its integrative role in the larger whole and the web of relationships in which art exists. A new emphasis falls on community and the environment rather than on individual achievement and accomplishment…”
