Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Designed by Peter Zumthor, Photograph © 2011 Walter Herfst.

‘Landscaping’ with Visual Cultures: Paradise Lost

This session explores art historical determinations of Paradise, its loss, and genealogies of geopower. Historical ideas of biology, creativity, and environmental psychology are compared to more recent critical engagements. With the concepts of “natural beauty” and “pathetic fallacy” of Emerson and Ruskin, we ask whether there is a place for Romanticist views today and, if so, what form they might take and to what end. Accordingly, the order and complexity of Rudolf Arnheim’s garden aesthetics of East and West are considered alongside artworks that extend from the bucolic to the sublime, from Impressionism to Fauvism, as well as from Carolyn Merchant’s eco-feminist critique and Kathryn Yusoff’s decolonial critique of the wilderness/civilisation dichotomy in our new epoch, the Anthropocene.

This is a hybrid event:

Zoom link for meeting

In-person location: RHB Cinema at Goldsmiths, 8 Lewisham Way, London