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2. Absence of Landscapes
HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.
CLOV: There’s no more nature.
Samuel Beckett – Endgame
2.1. Modern Nature
Now in the age of new media, we often experience nature indirectly
and mediated with man-made images and perspectives, but we still
constantly receive messages from the environment. Nature is a subject of
permanent interest and relevance as seen in landscape paintings, art and
photography everywhere. Nature might always be the most popular
subject of art; it is also arguably the most open-ended.
Figure 6. Ned Kahn.
Technorama Façade,The
Swiss Science Center,
Switzerland. 2002
The web survey project by Komar and Melamid in 1995 concerning
the ‘Most Wanted and Least Wanted Paintings’ 3 reflects “the artists'
interpretation of a professional market research survey about aesthetic
preferences and taste in painting.” 4 As the result of the survey, the most
popular pictures were landscape paintings for almost every country in the
world, and this says landscape be the most popular subject of everyday life.
However, at the same time, we can see how the representation and
imagination is limited. Such culturally defined distancing often privileges
the visual objectification of landscape while marginalizing all of the nonvisual
forces at work in nature.
3
form Golan Levin’s keynote presentation at Infovis07, ‘Visualization without computer’
4
http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.html(accessed May, 29,2008) In 1994, they began the
process which resulted in America's Most Wanted and America's Least Wanted paintings,
which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title "People's
Choice."
J.KIM_A LANDSCAPE OF EVENTS 16