A year ago, I accepted the invitation to work on an edited book Landscape, which is the first in the new series that offers a discursive contestation with the topic of artistic engagement with landscape. The book entails several contributions by established scholars of Land art and Environmental art, along with quotations of canonical writings on landscape and examples of artistic interventions. On the one hand, the project builds on a rich tradition of landscape writings, while, on the other, it simultaneously attempts at a reorientation of the category of Land art. Landscape accompanies the outdoor biennial Art Safiental and the international summer school Alps Art Academy in the Swiss Alps that explore art in the peripheral, rural and alpine regions. A detailed, visually compelling catalog of artistic projects conducted during the 2016 and 2018 biennials can be found in the final part of the book.
Next to the introduction co-authored with Johannes M. Hedinger, the book features my essay “The Lands of Art: On Land (Art) and its Shifting Grounds” that offers a historical overview of the origins of Land Art and a selection of canonized works and positions, as well as newer ways of using and interpreting the environment. Issues of temporal and spatial remoteness, decay, entropy, mediatization and documentation are analyzed against the backdrop of land interpretation.
Editors: Johannes M. Hedinger, Hanna B. Hölling
Series: Documents of Land and Environmental Art, volume 1
Essays by: Aufdi Aufdermauer, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, William L. Fox, Johannes M. Hedinger, Hanna B. Hölling, Mattli Hunger, Sibylle Omlin, Janis Osolin, Lukas Ott, Jano Felice Pajarola, Jolanda Rechsteiner, Emily Eliza Scott, Chris Taylor, Lucie Tuma.
English and German, 288 pages, 114 images
Publication date: 1 December 2019
ISBN: 978 3 909090 94 5
Order: Vexer Verlag St. Gallen/Berlin
