The Poetics of Landscape, The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), Houston, TX, October 22-25, 2025.

On its face, landscape is a simple depiction of a scene in nature. The suffix -scape entails notions of creation and condition (OED), so landscape provides a sense of the state of nature through this depiction. Yet landscapes have come under scrutiny, in particular in movements such as the Hudson River School of painting where the painters purported to glorify nature but have since been seen as complicit in rationalizing Manifest Destiny and westward expansion (Cushing). Others have argued that landscape is an appropriation of the land (Cosgrove 21), wresting it from access by others, and a genericization of it, removing its singularity and “irregularity” (Harley 246). At once, however, theorist discern landscapes as imbued with the tracework of human activity and memories of those behaviors (Morphy 196). Depicters of landscape can therefore extract from it or create through it, dislodge themselves from it or immerse themselves in it, dominate over it or collaborate with it.

In the spirit of ASAP’s 2025 theme, therefore, I invite abstracts for a round table that take up contemporary landscape in any medium or genre or to explore Worldmaking and Worldbreaking through, among others, extraction and/or replenishment, domination and/or collaboration, distance and/or immersion.

Artists might, but do not have to, include such figures as Vija Celmins, Raven Chacon, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Renee Gladman, Werner Herzog, Julie Mehretu, Etel Adnan, Sherwin Bitsui, Jos Charles, Craig Santos Perez, Ed Roberson, Juliana Spahr, Cole Swensen, Arthur Sze, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

Please submit abstracts (250 words) to Elisabeth Joyce (ejoyce@pennwest.edu) by the deadline of March 14, 2025.

Works Cited

Aikin, Roger Cushing. “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation.” American Art, vol. 14, no. 3, 2000, pp. 79–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109364. Accessed 7 Jan. 2025.

Cosgrove, Dennis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1985.

Harley, J. B. “Deconstructing the Map.” In Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of the Landscape, edited by Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, 231-247. London: Routledge, 1992.

Morphy, Howard. “Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past.” In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, 184-209. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.