WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC
DAVID MUTCH with JOHN CLARKE
Psychogeography of
craters and lakes
Talk and
walk - 2 pm on Sat 9 May 2015 - Starts 79 Main St BEEAC
(Note: this event has been rescheduled from 3 May 2015)
The spirit of place becomes increasingly elusive
in an increasingly frantic world. This talk and walk offers an opportunity to
hear the response of an artist, Mutch and the insights of local man, Clarke, as
they ponder the extraordinary grey salt lakes around BEEAC, an
important part of the Lakes and Craters Precinct of the Kanawinka Global
Geopark of SW Victoria, an extensive volcanic lake network recognized under the
Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, Iran, 1971).
Mutch’s work, and the lakes, share some
reflection on the issue of climate, and by implication on the state of the
contemporary world. Clarke’s indigenous heritage connects to many thousands of
years of local culture.
Enquiries: Anna acsande@gmail.com
Below is a tangent readers might like to explore:
Below is a tangent readers might like to explore:
REGARDING THE EARTH -
Ecological vision in word and image
Ecological vision in word and image
A conference 2012
ECOPOETICS Abstract:
Picturesque
The word itself announces the basic political and ecological fallacy of the Romantic category of the ‘picturesque’: it frames the world as a picture. What gets left out of the frame is ‘unscenic nature’ and ‘the dark side of the landscape.’ The picturesque naturalises social exploitation and domesticates the alien otherness of the natural world, securing the satisfactions of the bourgeois self twice over. More decorative than the sublime but more fungible than beauty, the picturesque is the aesthetic at its most ideological. It presents a fantasy of unmediated vision over a world that is unthreatening not least because it is entirely owned.
I want to propose an alternative reading of the picturesque, one that takes its orientation from Steve McCaffery’s reworking in Dark Ladies of William Gilpin’s description of the picturesque as ‘the scenery of vapour’: ‘Imagine a text as a scenery of vapour then say “loss” is one less word between you and your grave.’ There’s something uncanny in the vision of the picturesque, I want to suggest, something clouded, something textual and fragmented, involving a paradoxical loss of loss—that is, something potentially more radically ecopolitical than standard critiques have yet been able to acknowledge.
Tom Ford – ‘The Scenery of Vapour’: The Ecopolitics of the PicturesqueFor other abstracts:
