What Is Landscape?

Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl Aug 13, 2006

Last week,

I emphasized landscape as a dimension of our personal and collective history. To illustrate that point, I wrote a little about the landscapes that shaped my own existence: the landscapes and horizons of the area around the more than 2,000 year-old city of Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands.

Interestingly, the term landscape itself is rooted in a Dutch term that originally referred to the painting of natural scenery (Steven C. Bourassa, 1991). This term, landschap, was first used in English - landskip - in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Milton referred to landtskip as a view of the scenery itself rather than the painting of it (Bourassa, 1991).

Even though the way we commonly use the concept 'landscape' is clearly influenced by Milton's use of the term, landscape is an ambiguous and difficult concept, which involves nature as well as art and objects. Our common use of the term landscape presupposes that we withdraw from the practical use of or day-to-day immersion in this mix of nature, art and objects to look at it as if from a distance. In other words, the way we use the term 'landscape' presumes a detached viewer. But experiencing landscape involves more than seeing- it is an experience, which involves all of the senses. The way we tend to speak of landscape fails to deal with this all-encompassing sensuous experiential aspect of landscape.

So landscape involves not merely aesthetics but practical and sensuous engagement as well. As Bourassa argues, landscape requires an aesthetics of engagement rather than an aesthetic of detachment (Bourassa, 1991, p. 21). In the next few weeks, this is how I will employ the term landscape- as a practical, lived and aesthetic dimension of the ways in which we live our personal and collective history.