Contra la utopía temporal: la temporalidad del paisaje

Abstract

A historical overview of the awareness of landscape reveals that it has been a largely ambiguous field from the very beginning, when the sought-after ideal – embodied by literature, art (the Golden Age), and gardens (with their timeless Neoplatonist-influenced agenda) – was already subject to a process of deconstruction. The period’s emphasis on ruins and the ephemeral can be read as a sign of what was to come – landscape, with its eternal movement through the seasons and its insistence on processes, has never settled on a single, all-encompassing utopia. It is not surprising, therefore, that aside from embracing the aesthetics of the ugly and the fragmentary, contemporary landscape art has always centred on time and transience.