Framing Nature:
Artsits in Communication with the “Natural World”
“... we begin with a venture into the world of the “landscape piece", where the visual depiction of these ever-changing power dynamics is exhibited through these historical, theoretical frameworks. Art historian W. J. T Mitchell’s work on the subject aims to ‘change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb’ by deconstructing the vantage point of the artists and what influence their perspective has over a piece that may appear only to replicate nature through paint (1). He sees landscaping in art as a “tool” for framing viewers as spectators, rather than participants within an environment. Looking at a prominent painting in the Romantic movement of the 18th century, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by German artist Caspar David Friedrich (fig. 2), embodies this human contemplation of nature by instilling a vicarious sense of surveying a landscape. The subject of the painting stands out from the scene he is taking in, distinctly a representative of civilized, human society. Inherent in this dichotomy between the fogged mountainous backdrop and the “Wanderer” is a sense of separation, that of a viewer from a scene. In Friedrich’s piece, the power of artistic representation allows the landscape to be ‘both a frame and what a frame contains,’ and at the same time, nature and the social concept of nature simultaneously (5).”
pg. 3-4