CONRAD ATKINSON LANDESCAPES (sic)

2007

I'm going to discuss three or four different projects which look at the issue of globalisation, politics and art in relation to ecology. Obviously with the difficulty of the time limit to actually get into the work in a deeper way, I've tried to think of projects where specific political questions have come up-sometimes during the making of the work, or sometimes from the outset of a project. In fact, just to come back to Oliver's talk this morning, I particularly enjoyed his comment about having to sell a concept to people in order to get their cooperation. I think that's often the process of negotiation that I find myself in as an artist-to try and get something to happen, you have to negotiate with different people in different ways, and I guess make decisions along the way.

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 1984

How then, asked the stone, can the hammerwielder who seeks to penetrate the heart of the universe be sure that there exist any interiors? Are they not perhaps fictions, these lures of interiors for rape which the universe uses to draw out its explorers? John Coetzee, Dusklands Over the years, a number of heroic efforts have been made to restore Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to its historical moment.1 A meticulous unearthing of sources has occupied a good deal of the energy of Conrad scholarship. Much has been made, for example, of Conrad's claim that "Heart of Darkness is. .. experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."2 Yet, there is equally a highly important sense in which the Congo of Heart of Darkness is not the Congo of any history book. That is to say, the apparently innocent activity of source-hunting masks a number of serious methodological problems. Perhaps the most important of these can be broached by invoking Conrad's contemporary, Nietzsche, for whom "there is no set of maxims more important for the historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origins and its eventual uses are worlds apart."3 Put in another way, between the text and its historical origins, between Heart of Darkness and the events in the Congo, there lies an area of ideological shadow. So as to confront this shadow, I will explore Conrad's troubled representation of landscape as one aspect of the ideological terrain of Heart of Darkness. If, as Octavio Paz would have it, "a landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see. .. [but] always points to something else, to something beyond itself ... [as]. .. a metaphysic, a religion, an idea of man and the cosmos," then, at the simplest level, I will be exploring what idea of the cosmos Conrad's landscape secretly figures.4 More specifically, I will argue that Conrad draws on a number of different representations to image the Congo and that these appear, on scrutiny, to be curiously contradictory. They alternately figure the universe as penetrable, as impenetrable, as absurd, as anthropomorphic, as malign, and as primitive. A historical account of the ideological contradictions that these representations betray may restore the book more productively to its historical moment. Near the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe voices his uneasy suspicion that he is about to set off for "the centre of the earth," he is invoking

2017

The students in my class on 'Romantic Landscape Painting in Britain: Nature-Capitalism-Modernity' at the City University of New York Graduate Center in winter 2013 helped me to new perspectives on the theme through their curiosity and intelligent questionings. My special thanks to Dr Chin-tao Wu for inviting me to speak in Taipei and to Dan Sherman and his colleagues for the invitation to give the Bettie Alison Rand lectures at Chapel Hill. Rosanna Woensdregt at Brill answered my many queries patiently and efficiently, and Danny Hayward's careful readings of the text saved me from numerous errors and inconsistencies. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Steve Edwards for suggesting this collection and for his contributions to its realisation. Without the love and support of my wife, Carol Duncan, and my daughter, Mary Hemingway, the book would not have been possible. Sources and Occasions The following essays have been published previously and are reprinted here with only cosmetic alterations and some updating of the bibliography: 'Meaning in Cotman's Norfolk Subjects' ,

In its ironic narrative and distinctive geography, Joseph Conrad’s 1897 short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ is well suited for geocritical analysis, insofar as Conrad demonstrates the degree to which space and place affect both the characters in the story and style of the text. Focusing on the unique setting – the ‘outpost’ – in which the events take place, we argue that Conrad’s tale employs an ironic narrator in order to highlight the tale’s distinctive spatiality, particularly with respect to a geopolitical system that too neatly divides the spaces of the globe into civilised and barbaric regions. The spatiality of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ can be seen in the geographical aspects of the narrative, with the specific site or heterotopia of the ‘outpost’ situated at the edge of a territory coded as ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilised,’ thus connecting the colonised domain in central Africa to the metropolitan society of northwestern Europe, largely unseen, but implicitly present throughout the story. But this spatiality may also be observed in its formal or stylistic elements, especially in the point of view and voice of the narrator, as the perspective shifts from omniscient overseer to ironic commentator and then to a free indirect style in which the distance between narrator and subject is dramatically reduced. In this way, Conrad produces an ironic, spatial narrative that highlights, in both content and form, the absurdity of the imperialist ‘civilising mission’ in Africa.

2019

A groundswell of art since the turn of the millennium has engaged the politics of land use, addressing topics from the widespread privatization of public spaces and resources to anthropogenic climate change, borderland conflicts, the Occupy movement, and the rhetoric of “sustainable development.” Some of the most compelling artists today are forging new representational and performative practices to reveal the social significance of hidden, or normalized, features inscribed in the land. Their work pivots around a set of evolving questions: In what ways is land, formed over the course of geological time, also contemporary, or formed by the conditions of the present? How do environmental and economic structures correlate? Can art spur more nuanced ways of thinking about and interacting with the land? How might art contribute to the expansion of spatial and environmental justice? Certain artists negotiate the legacy of 1960s and 1970s Land art or the conditions of the global art world,...

for the seminar

1995

Landscape and Land Art focuses on so-called ‘Land Art' in Britain in the period from the mid-1960s to the present day. The dissertation concentrates particularly on Richard Long who, it is argued, functions as the definitive index of British Land Art. Land Art Beginning investigates how Land Art's earliest instances have shaped its subsequent discourse and introduces the methodological approaches employed in the dissertation. Land Art is then studied through a series of frames or milieus in the following chapters. Land Art Sculpture defends the necessity of viewing Land Art in the context of the practice and theory of sculpture. Land Art Repetition examines repetition as one of the most prevalent and informing strategies of Land Art practice and theory. Land Art Body focuses on one of the most overlooked and yet crucial components of Land Art, the body. Through identifying and delineating the different kinds of bodies and representations of bodies included in (and excluded f...

o la aceptación como tal y c) En un plano más simbólico, el proceso y el avance de mi propio ser.

Copyright Doosan 2007 K1030026ES Manual de instrucciones y de mantenimiento DOOSAN se reserva el derecho de mejorar continuamente sus artículos para abastecer el mercado con productos de primera calidad. Estas mejoras pueden ser implementadas en cualquier momento y no obligan a cambiar los materiales de los productos ya introducidos en el mercado. Se recomienda que los usuarios contacten periódicamente con su distribuidor para obtener documentación reciente sobre el equipamiento adquirido. Esta documentación debe contener accesorios y equipación opcional que no está disponible en su paquete de la máquina. No dude en contactar con su distribuidor oficial para conseguir cualquier artículo que pueda necesitar. Dado que las ilustraciones que aparecen en este manual se emplean únicamente para representar las piezas del equipamiento, pueden no coincidir por completo con los componentes reales. Manual de instrucciones y de mantenimiento K1030026ES Número de serie 5001 y superiores Marzo 2007