7 Gaze into the Landscape: Can Sensory Immersion, Landscape Reading and . . .
95
perception of the landscape. Indicators seldom mean only one thing. They create patterns and are repeated in the landscape
15 . Identity, characteristics and names depend
on them, based on the cultural background that local people share. For example, the
landscape of Fontainebleau forest lies in the bracken, the sand, the sandstone, etc.
Necessary, although not sufficient, these visually or physically interconnected landscape indicators had to be harnessed by an array of practices, views and illustrations
to achieve status as a picturesque “landscape”
16 . Sometimes, in culturally anonymous
landscapes, indicators are already at work but have not been named by inhabitants.
They must therefore be dug out, explained. For example, which landscape indicators
“portray” the landscape specific to Brest? The cranes? Or the piers?
7.2.6 Bringing the Landscape’s Features to Light:
The Vital Mediation of Drawing
The landscape is the fruit of individual perceptions, although built on a common,
shareable basis (the actual area), attaching to the here and now of a given place. It
must therefore be rendered singular, unique. With the appropriate indicator, it is thus
the distinctive “quality” of an area, the elements to which people can and do give
meaning, that a landscape designer will seek to capture. And he will do so both in the
literal (epistemological and semantic) and figurative sense: a landscape designer’s
drawing, his core practice, is the most appropriate “operational scheme”
17 not only
to detect but to bring out the subtle indicators of the landscape. The drawn line
does not have the deceptive objectivity of a dot or precisely plotted zones. Fleeting
singularities temporarily detached from the spatial, perceptive background, these
landscape units emerging through the pencil are not predefined: they are provisional
segments emerging from the continuity of space seen by the eye. Whichever cognitive
criteria (contrast, shape) may be responsible for their detection, it is important to
know what crosses the threshold of sensory detection beyond which “something”
appears in the world like a complete object, is noticed and is therefore noticeable.
Landscape features and the drawn line are open to the realms of possibility, to the
peripheral, to extending beyond the scope. Other indicators, and alternative meanings
and perceptions remain possible. In drawing, no truth is imposed, only a vision
proposed. This is made evident in the refusal to close the drawing, to finish the strokes,
to mark the limits specific to sketches. These lines are part of and greatly depend
on the attention given, the scale, the moment, and the spatial and psychological
15 Cf. infra note 10.
16 Historically through the role of the Barbizon school of painters in particular.
17 Or “schema of practice”: social anthropologist Philippe Descola demonstrated the relevance of
this concept to describe efficient cognitive operations using know-how acquired in non-scientific
cultures (crafts, hunting), without recourse to the traditional, European, modern-day concept of
“idea” preceding the action, and therefore outside the intellectual presupposition of the theorypractice model. Cf. Ph. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Beyond Nature and Culture), Gallimard,
Paris, 2005.
95
perception of the landscape. Indicators seldom mean only one thing. They create patterns and are repeated in the landscape
15 . Identity, characteristics and names depend
on them, based on the cultural background that local people share. For example, the
landscape of Fontainebleau forest lies in the bracken, the sand, the sandstone, etc.
Necessary, although not sufficient, these visually or physically interconnected landscape indicators had to be harnessed by an array of practices, views and illustrations
to achieve status as a picturesque “landscape”
16 . Sometimes, in culturally anonymous
landscapes, indicators are already at work but have not been named by inhabitants.
They must therefore be dug out, explained. For example, which landscape indicators
“portray” the landscape specific to Brest? The cranes? Or the piers?
7.2.6 Bringing the Landscape’s Features to Light:
The Vital Mediation of Drawing
The landscape is the fruit of individual perceptions, although built on a common,
shareable basis (the actual area), attaching to the here and now of a given place. It
must therefore be rendered singular, unique. With the appropriate indicator, it is thus
the distinctive “quality” of an area, the elements to which people can and do give
meaning, that a landscape designer will seek to capture. And he will do so both in the
literal (epistemological and semantic) and figurative sense: a landscape designer’s
drawing, his core practice, is the most appropriate “operational scheme”
17 not only
to detect but to bring out the subtle indicators of the landscape. The drawn line
does not have the deceptive objectivity of a dot or precisely plotted zones. Fleeting
singularities temporarily detached from the spatial, perceptive background, these
landscape units emerging through the pencil are not predefined: they are provisional
segments emerging from the continuity of space seen by the eye. Whichever cognitive
criteria (contrast, shape) may be responsible for their detection, it is important to
know what crosses the threshold of sensory detection beyond which “something”
appears in the world like a complete object, is noticed and is therefore noticeable.
Landscape features and the drawn line are open to the realms of possibility, to the
peripheral, to extending beyond the scope. Other indicators, and alternative meanings
and perceptions remain possible. In drawing, no truth is imposed, only a vision
proposed. This is made evident in the refusal to close the drawing, to finish the strokes,
to mark the limits specific to sketches. These lines are part of and greatly depend
on the attention given, the scale, the moment, and the spatial and psychological
15 Cf. infra note 10.
16 Historically through the role of the Barbizon school of painters in particular.
17 Or “schema of practice”: social anthropologist Philippe Descola demonstrated the relevance of
this concept to describe efficient cognitive operations using know-how acquired in non-scientific
cultures (crafts, hunting), without recourse to the traditional, European, modern-day concept of
“idea” preceding the action, and therefore outside the intellectual presupposition of the theorypractice model. Cf. Ph. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Beyond Nature and Culture), Gallimard,
Paris, 2005.