Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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On landscape

“1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.

2. Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value.

3. Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature.

4. Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.

5. Landscape is a medium found in all cultures.

6. Landscape is a particular historical formation associated with European imperialism.

7. Theses 5 and 6 do not contradict one another.

8. Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of expression. Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so.

9. The landscape referred in Thesis 8 is the same as that of Thesis 6.”

– W. J. T. Mitchell, "Imperial Landscape" (1994)

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