Det kännbara landskapet : Om marken som gemenskap

The overall aim with this article is to historicize the view from above, which is a recurrent view when the ecological crisis is being addressed within contemporary art and visual culture today. The view from above may be considered a reasonable way to picture environmentally harmful land use and its consequences. However, the view from above also contain a few, but essential, problematic traits. It correlates with an ideal viewing position established around the mid-19th century and responded, according to art historian Jonathan Crary, to a need for an objective perception. A starting point in the article is that this viewing position cannot be decoupled from an anthropocentric take on the world, through which man has been assigned hegemony over other beings and has become the measure of all things. But this ideal viewing position was not the only one developed during the 19th century. In both art and literature, a multi-sensory experience of nature and its landscape was articulated, one which anchored people to – rather than separated them from – their surroundings. Thus, a non-anthropocentric, holistic worldview was fashioned, one which we have reason to reactualize today