L’art du paysage et l’expérience du temps : trois moments

Abstract

Landscape Art and the Experience of Time: Three Moments

The aim of this paper is to highlight three specific moments in the history of landscape art in order to demonstrate that the entry of art in the realm of nature shapes a certain experience of time in connection to a social and political ethos. Therefore, addressing the relation between aesthetics and politics put forward by Jacques Rancière, we move from the landscape of the classical gardens à la française in which the rigorous and unchanged appearance of the nature reflected the political status quo of the Ancien Régime, to the reinvention of landscape during the late eighteenth century in the Kantian philosophy of art as well as in the history of painting which followed. In addition to the modern episode wherein Rancière situates the “aesthetic revolution”, we will emphasize the revival of the artistic interest in nature in postmodernity through art movements such as land art. The way in which some land art works of Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim, as well as Giuseppe Penone’s and Joseph Beuys’ preoccupation with trees generate the impression of a fleeting existence through time leads to the question of a new regime of art and of a new possible interrelation with politics.

Keywords: art, modernity, land art, Rancière, aesthetics, Heidegger