Event overview
This event is part of Art History Festival 2025 organised by the Association for Art History.
This session considers landscape as a representational mode locked in tension with its own subject: the order of nature out of which it is composed. This tension appears in the aesthetics of Georg Simmel as a paradoxical encounter between part and whole. Landscape on the other hand, tied to a specific locality and a circumscribed perspective, always entails a break with this continuum. It detaches itself from the whole by tracing a line of demarcation where there would otherwise be none. “To conceive of a piece of ground and what is on it as a landscape, this means that one now conceives of a segment of nature itself as a separate unity […].” This dynamic is repeatedly discernible in contemporary aesthetic engagements with landscape, and we will unfold its implications among artworks.
Dr Sam McAuliffe’s (Senior Lecturer, Visual Cultures) research is based in modern European philosophy and critical theory, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary art and aesthetics, addressing questions such as the politics of the image, the experiments in language and form characteristic of twentieth-century literature, the theory and practice of utopia, and the fate of nature in the post-Enlightenment period. He also has a particular interest in the models of experience produced as a function of administered society.
Image credit: Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Ruins, 2010.
Online attendance option via Zoom Webinar:
Meeting ID 990 8148 8954
Passcode 580600
Invite Link https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99081488954?pwd=SUCD5icK8LaRMlhsbbIL361YKNl8RE.1.
Association for Art History Festival 2025
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Sep 2025 | 2:00pm - 3:00pm |
Accessibility
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