The Relationship Between The Land Art Movement Of The 1960s And 70s

For many, Fresh Kills conjures up images of the “World’s Largest Landfill” - bulldozers pushing mountains of trash, flocks of seagulls fighting over table scraps, and plastic bags fluttering in the wind. After the closure of the landfill, many hope that this image will be replaced by Fresh Kills as a public park. The international design competition, Fresh Kills: Landfill to Landscape was the first step in transforming this image. Six finalists suggested six different visions of how Fresh Kills could be re-imagined. The winner of the competition, Lifescape by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, proposes a design that focuses on nature not only as the antithesis of landfill, but as an agent of cultural change. James Corner, founder and director of Field Operations, first asked how might landscape architecture be a force that enriches and informs people’s perception of nature in his 1997 essay Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity. Through Lifescape, Corner proposes an answer to his own question, and the resulting design responds to Fresh Kills landfill past, and it’s post-industrial future as a park.

“So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the planets, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. ‘A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view’ does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her

Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.

In the late 18th century when the Industrial Revolution started to spread from England to other countries such as France, Spain and Germany and even in the U.S, the changes that its dynamic brought to the society were drastic and radically different of what people were used to until then. The work hours become longer; young children and their parents were working most of the time; new factories opened up and old villages now were the main workforce source to keep the production level up to the demand and supply requests. Villages started turning into urban centers, crowded by large number of people; poor people that

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the industrial revolution was at its way, gaining many economic and technological advances but the price of hardship forced onto the workers and children during this time was paid. During this time period rural societies transformed into urban/industrial ones and a shift from working at home to factories and mass production with machinery. Many different advancements including the iron and textile industries, and also the invention of the steam engine helped pave the way of the revolution. Industrialization brought an increase of manufactured goods and also helped pave the way to our world as we know it today. As all these things were great, the industrialization significantly and truly lowered the living conditions

Throughout history the unique and changeable Australian landscape has inspired a diverse array of artistic responses. Impressios of its power and beauty, expressions of individuals' responses, symbolic religious orientation, the range of landscape art works extends onwards. A great example of the vast variations of styles can be seen in the artworks of Glover, Drysdale, Berkowitz and Reid.

In chapters two and three titled “Sites” and “Movements” respectively, Howard makes the case that there is a “dialectical” relationship between the subject and the landscape (both social and physical) and

“By the 1800s, people could earn higher wages in factories than on farms.” (Industrialization; Case study:Manchester, 723) Although these higher wages made in factories pushed the industrial revolution forward, by being able to afford resources such as coal, factory life damaged its workers and the community by created border between classes. For example, working conditions. Working conditions during this time were extremely poor, and on average, a worker would spend 14 hours a day in factories. Factories were unsanitary, unsafe and generally not enjoyable. “Factories were seldom well lit or clean. Machines injured workers. A boiler might explode or a drive belt might catch an arm. And there was no government program to provide aid in case of injury.” (Industrialization; Case

For almost as long as humans have been on Earth, we have changed landscapes drastically to suit our needs, historically often without regard to the damage caused in the process. This has changed over time, with the passing of legislation like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, the creation of national and state parks, and efforts being made to restore degraded ecosystems. While we may never see perfect natural systems again, especially in areas heavily populated by humans, reconciliation is possible. Reconciliation ecology takes the concepts of restoration ecology, in which managers seek to restore an ecosystem to how it used to be at a particular time, and combines them with inevitable human presence. It uses these factors

In more recent times, the interactions of people and the landscape have influenced the landscape and the life that depends on it. Swampland has been drained, cleared and cultivated, roads have been constructed, and homesteads established. Wildfires were stopped and non-native vegetation was introduced. Pollutants have also degraded water quality. Non-native

Australia has a prolonged tradition in portraying and illustrating the complex and breathtaking landscape which surrounds it. The landscape representation has been extrapolated along time in different backings as painting, literature or cinema and embodies the post-colonial performances. According to the Tweed River Art Gallery (2009), Macleod is influenced and astonished by the greatness and sharpness of the Australian landmass and this is what he intends to represent in his pieces. His sources of inspiration embrace such impressive dissimilar environments as New Zealand, the central Australian desert, and Antarctica. Euan Macleod’s work suggests an utopic world where the countryside is prosperous and wealthy and the human manifestation is

Urbanization in Great Britain was key to ushering in industrial capitalism to Great Britain, which brought an increased sum of money into the country. Urbanization was caused by the Enclosure movement and a decline of cottage industries. The Enclosure movement took away land from people that was once considered public land. Many people in rural areas needed land to make a living, and because they enclosed this land, many people had to move away from their cottage industries and move into urban areas to work at factories. Once there was an abundance of food and more population throughout Great Britain caused by the Agricultural Revolution, farmers began to move into cities to work in these factories. However, with more people working in

Munro grew up in town of Wingham in southern Ontario. She remembers the days when she was young and the town was full of nature and beautiful sites to view. When she went to British Colombia she longed for Ontario landscape. After fifteen years when she came back to Ontario the land had changed .she looked around to see any beautiful landscape and found none. Most land had been used to build schools and hospital. People had fenced their lands and trespassing was not allowed. She couldn’t cut through lands without owner’s permission as before. The river and streams that had clean water for animals to drink and humans to swim, had been choked with various kinds of algae and water plants over stimulated by fertilizers flowing from the fields.

The United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (UNESCO) (2012), define cultural landscape as “cultural properties that represent the combined works of nature and of man.” It is a broad concept that can be referred to as the appearance of the earth’s surface, and its depiction in arts, human cultures and general territories (Steve Hoelscher 2007, p. 76). There exist many cultural landscapes that represent different regions from around the world, and to date there are 88 cultural landscapes and 4 trans-boundary properties on the world heritage list (UNESCO) (n.d.).

In Nature & Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics, Allen Carlson proposes that scientific knowledge can enhance our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. He draws a connection between technical know-how used in the context of natural landscapes and art history or criticism in the context of conventional art forms. In either case, the viewer would find relatively more meaningful experiences of aesthetic appreciation than if one looked at a painting or landscape without any prior knowledge about it. Carlson endorses this point within his larger Natural Environmental Model, which asserts that though the environment is not entirely of our creation, it does not mean that we have to approach it without any prior understanding.