ALL OVER THE PLACE! Introduction Lure of...Local

PLACE: WHERE DESIRE IS FOUND...

-How we are transported by walking, driving, swimming, flying, etc. somewhere-Use of imagination to envision what may or may not be there in one’s mind eye-Author’s love of a place, even above the love of people; a sort of transcendence-Spiritual home vs. actual home; nomadic (later RV’s/trailers) vs. permanent one

ROMANTICISM THOUGH POLITICAL -Dream a little (dream of me), Dream, I dreamed a Dream -Dream of First Female President? Wake-up call; it’s time! -Author’s personal experiences important to use of place -Intersection of land, history & culture in N. American art Native/White contact (1492/1992) History of her family since death of parents Local histories of places-Grassroots movement-Art that is part lived-Feminist fascination w/the processes of daily life

DEFINE IRONY OF LATE 20TH-C. LIFE-“Multicenteredness” vs. multiculturalism; the former an extension of:

“…when we move we often come into contact with those who haven’t moved aroundor have come from different places” hence trying to understand differences

-Hybridity and different roles to be played and the impact of money (poor vs. more affluent)-Sometimes the term ‘place’ can be exchangeable with “nature” pending the social impact-Lucy is 100% WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) “nomad with…serially monogamous passion”-Geographer Pierce Lewis wrote to use “literal primitive drawings…to force one to notice details”-So she with her family would paint watercolors on Sundays and regard the landscape so much-Lure of the Local is her inspiration from this -Mine is Sunday in the Park with George

HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, DEFINED

“As written in the landscape or place by the people who live or lived there” Coming together of natural climate, cultural surroundings, historical background and ideologies

Also exposure of our own political and spiritual thoughts

Psychological need to belong somewhere

-Concept of place, whether it be land/town/city and may be correlated with a memory/historyhas ups & downs, whether geographically, time wise, personal, how deep/widedeals with connections (missed?), formations, past, present and future (beginning/mid/end)

-Def. of landscape “the external world mediated through human subjective experience” (Cosgrove,D.)

LANDSCAPE (FOR DAYS)-If lived in becomes an intimate place-If only observed or explored remains landscape (my term escape from one’s personal land?)-Etymology is Germany 15th c. from landschaft “a shaped land, a cluster of temporary dwellings…”

Dutch 17th c. word landschap is a painting of such a place; antithesis of wildernessEasiest definition is “everything you see when you go outdoors”Can also be a sort of activity; imagining our relationship to nature (scoping out the land?)-American definition, but in the image of old world European, “essentially rural, the product of trad-

itional agriculture interrupted here and there by traditional artifice”-Pierce Lewis adds on to Mae Thielgaard Watts’s thought that landscape gives clues to culture: “Our

human landscape is our unwitting autobiography…reflected in its ordinary vernacular…”“Space defines landscape, where space combined with memory defines place”

SPACE (MAKE IT FIT, PLEASE!) Dated definition “distance extending without limit in all directions” or “distance, interval or area between or within things”

-Postmodern version of place -More neutrally used and similar to the word “nature” of ecology -Deep space is more social “If space is where culture is lived, then place is the result of their union”

A “sense of place” with cross-cultural communications “Between restlessness and continuity lie a lot of contradictions.”

HISTORICAL COLONY COMPARISON Columbus’ Invasion (Encount

-er) Columbus’ Discovery

CULTURE AND CULTURE SHOCK“Place and its meaning to people” but “place [also] defines culture”When moving across country, people will likely face culture shockCultural geographer Don Mitchell says that we fall back on the term culture when unsure of which definition to use “because any consensus on social relations is always contested and…changing”Since the 80s there’s been the excuse of using “it’s just our/their culture” with the mix up of terminology from others like race/ethnicityBut on the other hand we don’t want “scientific racism”Do climate differences make an impact on culture? Answers lies some-where in between

NATURE & RELIGION/SPIRITUALITY “No matter how far culture will go to destroy its connections to nature, humankind and all of our technology, good and bad, are inextricable parts of Nature”

When Christianity combated “heathens”, wilderness came to mean anything uncontrollable in nature

The writer Wendell Berry has accused Americans of being accomplices to the ecological crisis and that it is culturally driven: “Our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable”

“…The Big Guy directs while M/Other Nature does the work…” Term ‘environment’ has come to replace “Mother Nature” quite a bit

NATURE IN HISTORY/CAPITAL H -Oft times the winner takes all and the losers are left small, “sometimes literally buried”

“History is the essence of the idea of place” (Glassie, Henry) but it also passes us by

Bioregionalism is based in local autonomy, which threatens “locals” History of most places are related to cultural concepts of time; what we choose to remember, or may be forced to

We here us easily disregard our pasts to push on to the future (Good?)

What about surviving and learning from that? (Native Americans)

HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY Use of public art and photography to become re-inspired to imagine possibilities

Land is to be used for space and spirituality beyond just life; 3 types:

1) physical land 2) metaphorical land 3) ideological land (“This Land is your Land this Land is my Land”) Some consider land worth dying for “Tierra o Muerte” Land is a coming together of “history, culture, agriculture, community, and religion, incorporating microcosm and macrocosm…”

STILL SPIRITUAL CONCERN Different people’s beliefs impact their use of the land and respect too The spiritual aspect here, if it comes into play, is located between nature and culture and is not often acknowledged by the learned and is especially hard to bring up in land debates

Even more difficult does it become to use the word “spiritual” as a coming together of different mixed religions on top of more “pagan” and alternative religions

However, some ancient alternative treatments of the land have bud-ded up into popularity including Feng Shui, yin/yang; Tai Chi, Yoga

Feng Shui is “environmental psychology”, a spiritual architectural way

CONTINUING NARRATIVE “There is no geography without history and meaning” and “the land is already a narrative—an artefact of intelligence…[without] wilderness”

Acoma poet Simon Ortiz disagrees with this; that modern cities are a “Most people today, at least those not attached to any religious institution, are hard put to explain what they believe in”

And have lost contact with nature and healing (missed connections) Some hope for a recall of Mother Earth, but the author challenges it; “Nature is capable of the sublime; humankind is capable of the ridiculous”

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE/THE COLORS OF THE WIND “The interconnectedness of all things” vs. “plastic shamans” “Natural history” as a national hobby, which is “caught between the nineteenth-century methodologies on which the popular museums are based and “Granola TV” (two bugs making love to Mozart)

“Despite the Endangered Species Act, Western thought still tends to perceive plants, animals and non-western civilizations as existing outside of time and outside of history”

OTHER SPIRITUAL FORMS TO TRY “Walking alone cross-country is a form of meditation” allowing one to open themselves up to the “spirit of place” and to its underlying history

Movement allows a special mental freedom that brings a person to a place by touching in and through their whole body

“Women, when alone with nature, are subject to a particularly contradictory experience, liberating on one hand, threatening on the other” (social freedom and yet oppression)

A “sacred place” or “place of power” has been transmitted to us from native cultures but that thought is a distant thought for us as opposed to something apparent and habitually close to indigenous

VISIONARY ARTISTS “Tribal Americans to Shakers to the avant garde, depend on some connection with the spiritual side of “nature,” but specific places play minor roles in vision quests, transcended by the experiences…[there]”

Terminology of spirit and spiritual are used nowadays, however their actual use in visual art is difficult to determine the use of successfully

Thought about tent crusades and visions; use of tongues, “seen light”

There is no way to compare the transcendent experience with the art

Similar to a nonreligious epiphany in the desert due to high heat, etc.

“Human creativity is an integral part of the web formed by land…”

ACTIVIST ART “The potential of an activist art practice that raises consciousness about land, history, culture, and place and is a catalyst for social change cannot be underestimated”

“Artists can make the connections visible” and be a great guide “They can expose the social agendas that have formed the land, bring out multiple readings of places that mean different things to different people at different times rather than merely reflecting some of their beauty back into the marketplace or the living room”

They may be able to make a way to fight in opposition to the commanding culture’s especially greedy view of nature and bring back the power of “public” experience

WAYS OF CAPTURING ART “A painting, no matter how wonderful, is an object in itself, separate from the place it depicts” and it comes from the artist’s perspective

“Like tourism, painting formalizes place into landscape” and photo-graphs can be considered the same way, as they “lie and expose lies”

“Photographs are about memory—or perhaps the absence of memory” and are a great way to bring haste to one or to help lessen worries

“Landscape photography could have it both ways—at once subject to personal vision and attributed the objectivity of scientific precision”

“Art that is in place…can create a different (not necessarily better) relationship between the viewer and the place” but is still in its youth

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