Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: In recent years, artists, art historians, critics and curators have revised the epistemologies of elements that rely on perspectives taken from the environmental humanities, stimulated by the debates surrounding the Anthropocene.We have known for decades, but are now increasingly experiencing, that the climate is changing.This also concerns the metaphorology of the elements, and in particular their underlying metaphysical foundations (equilibrium, harmonia, eucrasia).To structurally understand this change of paradigm, it would be helpful to focus on one particular trope: seasons.For centuries, "our" seasons were taken as a given, dividing the year in characteristic phases mostly based on the weather and daylight.As such, the seasons provided, or so it seemed, an eternal inspiration for the arts.The definition Hans Blumenberg gave of the moon, the "last placeholder of anthropocentrism" 1 , could in this sense be transposed to Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter as well.In poetizing the seasons, we still desire to confirm our subsumed centrality within the eternal return of being and meaning. 2And while there are surely others models with two or three seasons, in tropical regions for example, the main hegemonical model (since capitalism, e.g. in fashion culture) has been the mid-European, "Western" reckoning of the four seasons.This model of seasons, it is well-known, has been a classical subject in the history of painting.Consider Nicolas Poussin's famous Les Quatre Saisons (1660-1664) which associated Spring to "The Earthly Paradise", Summer to "Ruth and Boaz", Autumn to "The Spies with the Grapes of the Promised Land" and Winter to "The Flood".Poussin's landscape allegories conceal biblical references, which are readable for the scholarly eye, but its figural language arises, from a painterly perspective, "according to the local climate" 2 .A contemporary reading of this cycle is thus confronted with a double aporia: one the one hand, "the auto-deconstruction of Christianity" 3 or the "auto-deconstructive image" 4 as a processual self-oblivion of Western thought (e.g. the teleological nature of the cycle from Paradise to Apocalypse), and on the other as a change in the transcendental structure of this iconographical conjunction of cultural (biblical) and environmental (seasonal) representation.The Seasons of History Critique d'art, 57 | Automne/hiver 2021 1
Source: Critique d’art
Author: Toni Hildebrandt
Language: French
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4200467701