Cultural Heritage and Creativity for tourism and territorial development

AESTHETICS AND ART IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

AESTHETICS AND ART IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

Academic year 2023/2024

Sommario del corso

• Course objectives
• Results of learning outcomes
• Program
• Course delivery
• Learning assessment methods
• Suggested readings and bibliography
• Teaching tools
• Course card

Course objectives

The course explores the concept of landscape by fostering a novel dialogue between disciplines that rarely cross their paths in academic debates, such as human geography and philosophical aesthetics. Landscape is a notion essential for understanding modernity; however, it is a multilayered and somehow contradictory idea, referring at the same time to the actual shape of the land and to its representation. In the course we will reconstruct the origins of the idea of landscape in history of Western art, history of aesthetics, and history of spatial practices. Among the considered spatial practices, tourism plays a major role in conditioning both landscape representations and planning. We will discuss the issue of how to balance ecological equilibrium, social needs, aesthetic value, and tourism practices. We will also deal with the role of arts and artistic practices in planning, protection, and transformation of both natural and urban landscapes, by focusing on examples that will in part be given by students.

Results of learning outcomes

Students will familiarize with the main questions implicit in the very idea of landscape and will learn the most important positions elaborated in both philosophy and human geography about it. During the course, students will gain deeper awareness of the complexity of the idea of landscape in general and concrete landscapes in particular. They will be led to reflect on the both visible and invisible factors giving shape to landscapes and will learn to see both tourism and artistic practices as practices of “landscaping”, having an impact on places at both material and symbolic levels.   

Program

The course will be divided in three parts (16 hours each):

1) Landscape: between aesthetics and geography. From institutional sources to philosophical investigation. Space, place, territory, environment, landscape: conceptual elucidation. Aesthetics: the origins. Aesthetic judgements – the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime. Simmel – philosophy of landscape and the ruins / ruin porn – beyond beauty. Croce – the first Italian law devoted to landscape and the idea of heritage.

2) Landscape and representation. Landscape painting – a historical and conceptual overview. Landscape as representational fiction: Ritter, Carlson and Environmental Aesthetic. The geographical concept of landscape: from von Humboldt to Sauer; from the Marxist critique to the discovery of vernacular landscapes. Contemporary landscapes – multisensory landscape and non-representational landscapes. Landscape and digital representation: from institutional frames to DIY guides, instagram and the "instagrammable".

3) Landscape and tourism. Landscape between dwelling and building: phenomenology and ontology / Heidegger, Ricoeur, Ingold. An overview on the history of tourism and its connection to the idea of landscape. Introduction to a philosophical approach to tourism: tourism between theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics.

Course delivery

Frontal lessons with the support of slides and images and, in the final part of the course, seminars held by students. Lessons include in-class reading of texts shared to the mailing lists of the students a few days before the lesson and examples of “landscape readings”. A substantial part of the lessons will be devoted to dialogue and examples from history but also from current cases. In the course interventions from other relators might be foreseen. In the end of the course, students will be asked to present their own research on a landscape of their choice.

Learning assessment methods

Oral exam on the contents of the course. The oral examination will deal on what will be explained in the course and on the text that will be actually addressed during the course. The presentation of a landscape case study in the last part of the course will be subject to evaluation and for those students who will present their case studies the third part of the program will not make the object of specific exam.

• Agnew, J., Space and Place, in Agnew, J. e Livingstone, D. (eds.), Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, London: Sage 2011. Chapter available at the link https://www.geog.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/users/jagnew/416.pdf.
• Burke, E., A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757; online edition available at the link: https://www.bartleby.com/24/2/.
• Casey, E., Representing Place. Landscape Painting & Maps, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2002.
• Ingold, T., “The Temporality of the landscape”, in World Archaeology 25 (2), 1993, pp. 152-171.
• Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven 1984.
• Lorimer, H., “Cultural geography: the busyness of being “more-than-representational”, in Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 29 (1), 2005, pp. 83-94.
• Paden, R., “A Defense of the Picturesque”, in Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 10 (2), 2013, pp. 1-22.
• Penny, D., “The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie”, in Boston Review, Nov. 17, 2017: essay available at the link https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/daniel-penny-insta/.
• Price, U., Essay on the Picturesque, 1794; excerpts available at the link https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/picindex.htm.
• Ricœur, P., Architecture and Narrativity, 2016 (ed.), in Études Ricœuriennes / Ricœur Studies, Vol 7, No 2 (2016), pp. 31-42, available on the website of the journal.
• Ritter, J., Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft, 1963;
• Sauer, C., The morphology of landscape, University of California, Berkley 1925, in Agnew, J., Livingstone, D. N., Rogers, A., (eds.), Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, Blackwell, Oxford 1996, pp. 296-315.
• Simmel, “Philosophie der Landschaft”, 1913; English transl. “Philosophy of Landscape”, in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 24 (7-8), pp. 20-29.

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