The Time of the View

Rancière focuses on the turning point in 18th-century Europe when landscape ceased to be merely an object of contemplation and became a specific object of experience and thought. During this period, new garden concepts, theoretical discussions on landscape arrangements, landscape depictions, and travels into the wilderness came to the fore. With this new form of experiencing sensible diversity, the arrangement of modes of perception and objects of thought changes, the criterion of beauty shifts, and the meaning of the concept of nature and the word art transforms.

During this period, landscape became a model demonstrating how natural elements coexist within a whole. This coexistence served as a model not only for art but also for political communities. The time of landscape is the time when a common horizon could be vaguely perceived in an era of aesthetic and political upheavals. It is contemporaneous with both the birth of aesthetics as a regime of perception and a thought of art, and with the French Revolution.

Rancière positions landscape at the beginning of what he calls the "aesthetic revolution," the transition from the representative regime to the aesthetic regime, and attributes a decisive role to it; for landscape is an early example of the identity between art and non-art, and an emblem of the change in the meaning of beauty.

Translated by: Aziz Ufuk Kılıç