Art Works: Place

Tacita Dean is a Berlin-based artist whose work in various media often explores the nature of place. Jeremy Millar is an artist, writer, and curator based in Whitstable, Kent. (Amazon website)

p. 12
"Sometimes it is assumed that we all know what 'place' means..."

p.12
"It is interesting that landscape is not only the most popular of the major genres within the visual arts, but also the most recent, at least within Western tradition. In much Renaissance painting, for example, the landscape is most often glimpsed through the arches or windows of a securely interior world..."

p.13
Dark and Middle Ages - Landschaft, the first form of the word.
End of Middle Ages, adopted by Dutch - landschap
17c - referred to a land that could be represented by surveyor/artist, as map/painting.
17c - England - landskip - broad views of rural scenes containing villages, fields, woods, roads.
Something man-made, its organisation.

p.13
"A landscape is the land transformed, whether through the physical act of inhabitation or enclosure, clearance or cultivation, or rather the more conceptual transfiguration of human perception..."

p. 14
...place is something more often sensed than understood...

"Place is something known to us, somewhere that belongs to us in a spiritual, if not possessive, sense and to which we too belong."

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, CHAPTER XVII
"He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind."

"Place is thus space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past..."

"In a preparatory note to Ulysses, James Joyce wrote 'places remember events'..."

"In 4C BC, Archytas of Tarentum wrote a treatise on place..
'Perhaps that is the first of all things, since existing things are all in place or not without place.' "

p.15
".. the Hebrew name for God, Makom, means place..."

p.16
"We retain a strong sense of place, even if we find it hard to define with any satisfaction..."

p.20
"There are many people who value, and fight to protect, the particularities of a place, however, although within a society which often operates on a principle of economic utility, the calculable 'benefits' presented by developers, investors or corporations are often more easily grasped than the more tangible 'sense of place'. with its related notions of authenticity, character and identity."

.. the early Taoist philosopher Chuang-Tse remarked, 'Everybody knows that the useful is useful, but nobody knows that the useless is useful too."

p.25
..a more profound engagement must depend upon more than the visual, upon those things that remain invisible. How would one make visible the extraordinary history and mythic status of the Bialowieza Forest in eastern Europe? ... they look just like many other places if we cannot see 'the invisible ones of the days gone by', in Hardy's phrase."

p. 43
"Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything." - Bruno Latour

p.47
To wander across cultivated fields is to encounter the earliest forms of activity.

p. 58
..Horn recognizes that one of the most important relationships in an understanding of place within contemporary art: a desire to re-enchant the land with meaning or to examine that area of overlap and coincidence between inner and outer spaces.

p.90
.. we are reminded, in the words of Robert Smithson (an important artist for Koester) that each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substratum of disaster.

p.92
"Topical History: Places remember events." - James Joyce

p. 102
About Luc Tuymans: These paintings refuse to make explicit any reading of the tragic events that make up the late colonial history of his native country, but rather turn their attention towards incidental details or events that suggest violence and corruption of power that clearly took place.

p.118
Making numerous journeys, Hiller filmed and took photographs of these evocative places, whether inner-city shopping streets, anonymous suburbs or secluded country roads, in an attempt to trace the absence that is explicitly named on maps and street signs. (German roads and streets that bear the name Juden in them)

p. 126
Any place is in fact a layering of other places - that is, the place at different points in its history.

p. 166
Artist: Yvan Salomone "It is impossible to make an image of a grain silo if I haven't been there."

p.178
Place .. it will always connect to somewhere in our autobiographies - future and past. Tacita Dean