Landscape and the Moving Image
Catherine Elwes
Landscape and the Moving Image
Catherine Elwes
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Description
New exploration of how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists’ film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. An informed, personal view from a high profile author considering if appreciation of nature’s aesthetics undermines commitment to ecology. 30b/w illus.
'This is a beautifully-written, well-researched, thoughtful, generous and passionate book. It is one that seeks to make a difference not only to our knowledge of representations of landscapes by moving image artists but also to inspire new generations of eco-critically-minded artists to discover fresh ways to communicate urgent messages about the ongoing breakdown of the natural world. The book offers innovative explorations of how the moving image continues to facilitate understandings of our relationships to ‘natural’ landscapes. [...] This is an original, often inspirational work which offers a comprehensive and up-to-date view of landscape and moving image from the perspective of a highly knowledgeable artist.'
'Complex, yet highly readable. [...] The strength of Elwes’s writing is that she is not simply a film scholar discussing landscape and the moving image, but she is also an artist underpinning it with her experience of making videos, hence her interest in embodied and emotional responses to landscape. [...] Elwes takes great care to include a wide range of artists (using moving image or otherwise), sometimes returning to specific individuals, which creates a sense of continuity. Her stated focus is how artists might sensitively and ethically engage with the moving image in the landscape in the context of the environmental crisis.'
'Drawing on her lifetime’s work as an artist, a scholar, and an arts administrator, Catherine Elwes’s new book is magnificent. The book’s global reach (from Uluru to the Arctic), the erosion of white male colonial and pectatorial privilege entailed in her expanded geographical perspectives, and her contextualization of all questions of landscape in political issues together mark a decisive and much-needed scholarly paradigm shift, one at last responsive to our present ecological disasters.'
'[Elwes’s] writing really brings the films to life in their absence. It made me intrigued about the films but the book also stands alone and apart from them, vividly offering images that the reader puts together from the text. It adds other dimensions to the films that are enough even if one were to never see the works themselves – as a piece of writing conjuring a rich critical dimension.'
'Moving images are now everywhere in galleries and art biennials, and ecology is no longer a niche theme. Drawing on decades of making and writing about film and video, Elwes offers more than a guided tour. She offers encounters with the art, ideas and artists of the Anthropocene, and invites readers into rich conversations about and between feminism, decolonial critique and environmentalism with eloquence, passion and wit. You will never see landscape art the same way again.'
Elwes as a practitioner was a key figure in the early phases of video art in the United Kingdom and, at the same time, worked as a curator and critic. Until her retirement, she was professor of moving image art at the University of the Arts London; she is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) and author of Video Art: A Guided Tour (2005) and Installation and the Moving Image (2015).