Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia

‘Landscape Trauma’ is in many ways the most timely of exhibitions. Few of us will be unaware of the media’s insistence, over recent months, that Britain’s rural landscape is in some kind of perpetual crisis. The strongest signifier of this is of course the widespread presence of foot-and-mouth disease. Seen as a menacing and virulent cancer within the body politic of rural Britain. Other signifiers also proliferate: intensive farming, swine fever, the decline of the village, rural unemployment and homelessness, etc. Added to this, the rural environment has become contested territory: the right to roam challenges the rights of the private landowner, coupled with ever-present arguments about the merits or iniquities of fox-hunting, weekend homes in the country and so forth.

In seeking to use landscape as a starting point for artistic activity, the press release for this exhibition makes reference to ‘the macro and micro’. This is important because the signifiers of a countryside crisis mentioned above are what we see when we look, as the media tends to, at the smaller picture. But the bigger picture alluded to within ‘Landscape Trauma’ references much more profound implications. The soul, the heart of this nation is frequently perceived as residing within its wide open countryside spaces. According to this mindset, the modern city is an anomaly that does little or nothing to affirm a nation’s identity. The countryside, on the other hand, generates readings and meanings suggestive of a ‘green and pleasant land’ that is apparently the very essence of Englishness. So a countryside in crisis leads to the more unsettling crisis of English identity. The landscape trauma is the trauma of a nation uncertain of its own identity, and hopelessly unable to cope with the undermining of its mythological rural idyll by those forces signified by the alien, urban jungle…

…The non-conversation of our two protagonists confirms the sense of the human isolation of the city dweller – millions of people unable properly to engage with each other even on a one-to-one level. Talk to Me – even the piece’s title resonates with the despair and desperation of loneliness...

The above extracts are from an exhibition review by Eddie Chambers of Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia. The review appeared in  Art Monthly, London, Number 249, September 2001: 46-48