Towards a Polytheistic Relationship to Landscape: Issues for Contemporary Art

Abstract

The paper examines the concerns of the art critic and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit with the myth of Eden in the book of Genesis, the assumptions of a Judaeo-Christian monotheism and its secular inheritance, as a means to introduce the need for a ‘polytheistic’ psychology to advance a genuinely radical understanding of the relationship between issues of place, identity and contemporary landscape art. Drawing on the work of Peter Bishop and Edward S. Casey to identify a body of thinking related, via issues of metamorphosis and ambiguity, to both art historical and geographical contexts relating to a ‘conversational’ aesthetic are identified. This is seen as making possible a polytheistic conception of art based on imaginal space as an alternative to the dominant traditions of conceptual and Minimal art since the 1960s. Finally, the approaches of specific artists, and in particular the world of Sian Bonnell, are examined in relation to garden traditions in the UK.

Keywords:

• Landscape
• identity
• art
• polytheism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Judith Tucker and Sian Bonnell for permission to reproduce their work, Dr. Paul Gough for encouragement to write this paper, and the two anonymous referees who provided valuable and insightful criticism of a previous draft.

Notes

The terminology used here is taken from Richard Kearney's interview with Paul Ricoeur, ‘Myth as the bearer of possible worlds’ (Valdés, 1991). The ‘mythic nucleus’ of a society is, for Ricoeur, a hidden and pre-reflexive orientation which determines and rules the distribution of that society's more explicit functions—the political, economic, legal, educational and so on. The effects of this ‘mythic nucleus’ appear in a ‘monotheistic’ society as embodied in the hundreds of apparently inevitable psychological presuppositions about how things are and how they should be (Hillman, 1981b, p. 127).

Two points of clarification may be useful here. The first is that this polytheistic position includes forms of monotheism because, unlike both monotheistic psychology and theology, it is committed to the view that the multiplicities of existence are not mutually exclusive. The second is that this position is best understood as ‘a style of consciousness’ and so should not even be called ‘polytheistic’ since, historically speaking, the term is a symptom of monotheism (see Hillman, 1981b, p. 133).

Solnit notes that each of these terms has a particular temporal locus and value, a fact that, for brevity's sake, I have had to ignore here. However, a more detailed exposition of the argument presented here would need to engage with these differences and their social and political implications.

Organized by the National Gallery and toured to Bristol and Newcastle in 2003.

Writing of the categorization of animals in Leviticus, Alan Bleakley notes that: “What is unholy, unclean and to be tabooed (which also means to be feared and avoided) is what crosses borders, is a hybrid or does not easily fit a category system … The classification reveals a hidden principle: intolerance of ambiguity” (Bleakley, 2000, p. 28, emphasis added).

In art-historical terms, the polytheism advocated here would need to develop Perry Anderson's argument that the plurality of antipathetic art movements in the early decades of the 20th century precludes the reduction of 20th-century art to any one monolithic explanatory theory of modernism, including Anderson's own Marxist reading (Anderson, 1984).

Solnit refers to artists who “interact with their subjects and sites with a conversational give-and-take, assuming that meaning is to be found, rather than imposed”. “Conversation is, among other things, a more democratic model, as well as one closer to the systemic interdependence of ecosystems, than is the monologue of mastery …’ (Solnit, 2001, pp. 5 – 6). A conversational aesthetic, in its ongoing give-and-take, thus makes possible the re-presentation of polymorphic meaning and being.

The use of parentheses here acknowledges a necessary generalization, where ‘American’ is understood here in the context of discussions of fantasies of a monotheistic planetary holism, and of the United State's official self-image in relation to that holism (Bishop, 1986; Samuels, 1993, pp. 103 – 121). The term ‘American’ refers more to a mentality than to a geographical location, while recognizing the importance of the latter to the former.

This identification might be taken as mirroring, at the level of individual identity, the ‘deep pathologies’ that drive the recurrent desire for ‘global solutions’ that, in Bishop's view, animates ‘American’ politics (Bishop, 1986, p. 68). A recent manifestation of the underlying mentality Kuspit identifies can be found in the statement by the right-wing American columnist and talk-show guest Ann Coulter regarding the 9/11 terrorists: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” (quoted in Meek, 2004).

It must be said, however, that Hillman's generalization regarding “the twentieth century's contempt for representational painting” is, itself, to some degree a particularly ‘American’ projection of Modernist readings onto far more complex art histories (Hillman, 1977, p. 11).

This position relates closely to Kearney's understanding of the importance of both ‘testimonial’ and ‘utopian’ elements in the imagination (Kearney, 1991, p. 218).

The British artists referred to below, Judith Tucker, Sian Bonnell and Andrea Thoma, are, like the author, members of the landscape research group LAN2D and their work can be viewed electronically on the LAN2D web site at www.cusp.org.uk