“picturesque” 2020

By Julie Boldt

In times of turmoil, humans seek nature. Amidst the dawn of industrialization, western artists in Europe and America “returned to the soil” as a means to cope with the new geography of modernization – its urban density, structural proliferation of capitalism’s all-encompassing exploitation, and the physical toll of all that noise, motion, and content. Nature stands as a logical foil to industrialization but its translation has been focused from varying positions.

Modernist ideologies sought to discover, collect, and then classify the world, both physical and conceptual. The “rational” lens required everything to have its designated place and definition based upon difference. The surge of landscape paintings was no different, and from this time, intellectuals divided the works into three terms: the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. According to the Tate Museum’s glossary, “at one extreme was the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other [termed the pastoral] the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity.” In the space of social media, we can witness that, although terminology such as the picturesque is still in use, the strict modernist definitions (distinction between pastoral vs. picturesque vs. sublime) are constantly blurred and combined. In this sense, the vertically-ascribed definitional power has been lost and the word assumes new forms via connotation.

 Although its semantics are diluted, the picturesque nevertheless maintains a conceptual dialectic based upon two seemingly contradictory ideas. In Rosalind Krauss’ 1986 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde she identifies “the formulaic condition” as one element of the picturesque; a “series of recipes…that natural array is simply felt to be repeating another work – a ‘landscape’ that already exists elsewhere” (13). Yet this is coupled by singularity or subjectivity inherent in the “function of the beholder and the array of singular moments of his perception…the landscape is not static but constantly recomposing itself into different, separate, or singular pictures” (ibid).

This “beautifully circular” dialectic surrounding the “picturesque reveals to us is that although the singular and the formulaic or repetitive may be semantically opposed, they are nonetheless conditions of each other: the two logical halves of the concept landscape” (14). There are two tensions at hand: the first, between semantics and logic, the second between the individual and the collective. Although the antiquated Romanticist term of the picturesque is the point of entry into these dialectics, they increasingly define the contemporary condition as we drift further away from its origins and from the landscape itself.  

Julie Boldt is a Chicago-based artist whose practice operates between text and image. Her work plays with communication’s inherent gaps, exploring the potential of confusion and nuance of its origins.

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