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  • Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s ‘Salons’ to the Postmodern Museum by Gillian B. Pierce
  • Van Kelly
Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s ‘Salons’ to the Postmodern Museum. By Gillian B. Pierce. (Faux titre, 383). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 240 pp., ill.

Gillian B. Pierce explores the space that Diderot and successors Baudelaire, Breton, and Lyotard construct at the intersection of landscape painting and writing about landscape. These last three figures identify with Diderot’s dialogic writings in his Salons, especially the ‘Promenade Vernet’ (Salon de 1767), where he effects an imaginary entry into, and walk through, the artist’s landscapes in order to appropriate them and test their coherence. Pierce argues that Baudelaire and Breton amplify this move away from the canvas’s surface, indeed away from external reality, towards imagination and the spectator’s subjective reactions. Lyotard, to whose idea of ‘scapeland’ the book’s title pays homage, and whose conception of Diderot’s aesthetics inspires Pierce’s arguments, breaks with mimesis and ekphrasis: scapeland is an ‘immaterial’ [End Page 142] network (p. 194) where spectators construct ‘parcours’ among electronic traces (p. 197), illustrated by Lyotard’s 1985 museum exhibit Les Immatériaux. The promeneur or flâneur is ‘a governing trope’ (p. 10) for Diderot and cohort. In Chapter 1, the sublime — absent from volume title but crucial for Pierce’s analysis — is defined, with special reference to Edmund Burke, as the spectator’s reaction to the clash of ‘incommensurable’ systems or elements within landscape, art writing, or museum space. The second chapter analyses how Diderot deploys the sublime to emphasize the inadequacy of verbal descriptions of landscape. Pierce also associates the sublime with theatricality and connects Diderot’s interactive approach in the Salons to his remarks in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien about the conflicting demands of emotivity and objectivity. Chapter 3 evaluates Baudelaire’s sceptical reception of contemporary realistic landscapes — Courbet being the primary example — and his admiration, in the Salon de 1859, for Méryon’s more imaginative depictions of Paris. While explaining Baudelaire’s shift to cityscape in his prose poems, Pierce offers convincing readings of subverted landscape in ‘Le Gâteau’ and of ‘theatrical doubleness’ in ‘Une mort héroïque’ (pp. 139–40). In Chapter 4, Pierce discusses the Surrealist city as psychic milieu or ‘dreamscape’ (p. 149) governed by hasard objectif. This turn inwards towards ‘immateriality’ (p. 177) is mirrored in Le Surréalisme et la peinture, where Breton eschews description of paintings in favour of discourses elaborating Surrealist tenets. Likewise, Breton’s vistas of Tenerife in L’Amour fou celebrate the point sublime of the Second Manifeste, where consciousness and the unconscious fuse. The fifth chapter turns to Lyotard’s assertion that Diderot’s Salons anticipate postmodern rejection of master narratives. The sublime resurfaces in Lyotard’s différend, art objects becoming ‘artefacts’ that ‘bear witness to an unpresentable content’ (p. 196). This inverted landscape that makes ‘no truth claim’ (p. 199) experiments with exhibition spaces constructed as fields of depersonalized acoustic and visual ‘signals’ (p. 197). The resulting ‘ontological dislocation’ (p. 210), or sublime incommensurability, ‘threatens to subsume the human spectator’ (p. 203). Pierce’s argument is occasionally unwieldy, especially in Chapter 1, which manoeuvres from Burke to Kant, Derrida, Michael Fried, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, and others. Overall, though, multidirectional plotting of landscape, the sublime, the promenade, theatricality, and immateriality reveals the similar aesthetic procedures or signatures underpinning the landscapes of Diderot and his intellectual progeny.

Van Kelly
University of Kansas
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