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' ,

Architectural Heritage, 2012

Of course, the distinction between 'productive' and 'designed' is a false one -almost every estate would be characterised by both approaches. While the gridded, productive landscape of the Netherlands undoubtedly influenced Scotland, so too did the grander, baroque landscapes of France and, as the example of Alloa shows (discussed elsewhere in this volume), the ideas of productivity and profitability could equally be present in such an elaborate landscape design. This paper is concerned with some of these grander landscapes and with the designed rather than the productive landscape. In considering this, it will also seek to characterise some of the key elements of a Bruce formal landscape and how that was responded to, modified and developed by his sometime amanuensis, Alexander Edward. This discussion will touch upon some aspects of the 'historical landscape', partly because Sir William Bruce has been credited with its early development 3 and partly because it is an idea that Alexander Edward seems to have taken forward in his own work. In considering this, this paper will first characterise the Bruce approach to landscape and then will focus on two case studies in which Bruce and Edward worked together: Kinnaird Castle, near Montrose, and Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh. The first of these, dating from the 1690s, predates Edward's 'Grand Tour' (to England, France and the Low Countries) of 1701-2; the second postdates that visit and an argument will be advanced that links the Hopetoun landscape very firmly to the experience of that tour and, in particular, the experience of French gardens. But these two case studies also perform another function in that they also allow us to engage with the idea of the Scottish Historical Landscape in two very different contexts in landscapes with quite contrasting or even opposing ideas of history and civilisation. At Kinnaird the landscape is an ancient, Pictish one that Edward relates to his very formal landscape design, while at Hopetoun we have a landscape on the edge of Roman civilisation, looking towards the untamed and uncivilised (Pictish) north. Alexander Edward was the Episcopalian minister of Kemback, near St Andrews, who lost his living after the Revolution in 1689 and developed an existing skill and interest in architecture and garden design into an alternative career. His relationship with Bruce was an important part of this and was mutually beneficial. However, that was only part of the picture and his family's roots in Angus and the web of patronage that went with that, particularly with the Earls of Panmure, was also key to his success. After his removal from his parish, Edward seems to have returned to Angus, where he carried out many of the improvements to the Panmure estates on behalf of James, 4 th Earl of Panmure. Edward had acquired considerable skills as a surveyor and draughtsman and was also an acknowledged expert in antiquarian studies and natural history, bringing all of these skills together in aiding his father to produce a new map and description of the County of Angus in 1678. It was a feature of Edward's later career that he was acknowledged as an expert in these fields, most notably by Sir Robert Sibbald, the great Scottish polymath and intellectual leader in Scotland at that time. 7

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...