Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum by Gillian B. Pierce (review)

Jean-François Lyotard conceived his 1985 Pompidou Center exhibition Les Immatériaux as a postmodern interrogation of aesthetic phenomena. Viewers entered through a long dark tunnel wearing headphones playing dramatic fragments from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, looked at diorama spaces empty except for shifting lights and elsewhere projections of sculpture, and eventually arrived at the main exhibition distributed in a maze of sixty-one sites. The experience was about dislocation, the effacement of the boundaries of materiality, the self, the transformation of the human into a machine, and the nature of the city as ontological habitat. The work of art resides neither in an autonomous object nor the subject, but in the moment of interaction between the work and the viewer, a process that decenters both.

In his essay “Scapeland,” deliberately inverting “Landscape” to underline the theme of displacement, Lyotard sees in the genre of the landscape painting a mode of aesthetic expression that moves away from the boundaries of narrative, part of his overarching “incredulity to metanarrative.” Paysage (landscape) anticipates dépaysement (dislocation). By displacing narrative, the landscape painting invites the viewer to supply his or her own, in turn opening the work to the aesthetics of the Burkean sublime, the problem of experiencing and writing about what transcends language. In his postmodernist project, Lyotard cites the inspiration of the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot. With Lyotard mapping the itinerary, Gillian B. Pierce, an assistant professor of rhetoric at Boston University, marks the trajectory of writing about landscape painting from Diderot, to Baudelaire, André Breton, an aside to André Malraux’s musée imaginaire, and back to Lyotard. Pierce examines how their art criticism plays on the aesthetics of the sublime, transforming it into works of art, nurturing commentary and appropriation by subsequent art critics.

Diderot found his reviews of the Paris art exhibitions a stimulating opportunity for literary expression and experimentation. The Salons de 1767 evoked Edmund Burke’s theories of the sublime in order to address issues of representing the visual in language and the limits of the rational faculties, inviting a literary response. The inexpressible is expressed by means of a discourse in which the observer meditates on himself in the act of observing, thereby expressing the inexpressible by contemplating its limits. For Diderot the literary imagination of the poet-viewer allows the painting to “unfold on the canvas” (83), elaborating a narrative to explain and evoke the painting. Pierce draws on Michael Fried’s concepts of absorption and theatricality to consider how Diderot narratively dissolves the boundaries of the frame, allowing the observer to “participate in the tableau” (73), moving as it were through the painting. Diderot found the landscapes of Vernet and Bernard especially rich in their narrative potential. He staged his account of the exhibit as his promenade Vernet, opening in Pierce’s judgment a split in the beholder between two selves, one who experiences the pleasure of beauty and one who experiences the terror of the sublime, a view that she finds echoed in Diderot’s theatrical writings, particularly the Paradoxe sur le comédien.

It was only the nineteenth century that began to appreciate the achievement of Diderot’s Salons as it sought to create its critical idiom. Developing Diderot, Charles Baudelaire conceives of the art critic as an imaginative voice in his own Salons of 1845, 1846, and 1859. Rather than a technical assessment of the work, Baudelaire offers a subjective response to evoke what cannot be put into words. Diderot’s promenade becomes the inspiration for Baudelaire’s critic as flâneur. Baudelaire was also inspired by the potential of the landscape, but translated it to the cityscape, the “paysage parisien” (131). Pierce is especially interested in his treatment of Charles Meryon’s engravings, which appeal to elements of the sublime in their representation of ruins and slums. Although Baudelaire does not explicitly mention the work, Pierce suggests that Meryon...