Fleurieuscapes

The Fleurieuscapes project is  the photography of place.  It explores the regional land/urbanscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula in the contemporary world of a borderless, global capitalism with its society of the spectacle in which  the commodity structure of a capitalism  transforms things into ghostlike appearances of themselves.

The Fleurieuscapes project is a representation of the sensuous particulars of the Fleurieu Peninsula as a place to be in, rather than as a tourist destination or a wilderness. It is a landscape that has been largely shaped by human beings who cleared the land for sheep and dairy farming. The aboriginal presence prior to the white settlement has been more or less obliterated. Their history is marked by an absence  or memories.

The sensuousness and material particularity of art strives to assert what the rationalized concepts of instrumental reason have let slip away from the world. Thus, while the process of rationalization may well be pervasive in Western modernity, and increasingly so globally, it remains nonetheless plausible that artworks can demonstrate its limitations within a particular historical framework. Herein lies the critical force that artworks carry in the context of their historical existence. While art makes claims as a form of knowing, it presents us with insights that are not reducible to their conceptual equivalents.

What is at issue is art’s desire to serve as a form of sensuous cognition that has its own way of knowing the world and also a way of valuing it; albeit one that has, in turn,  become constrained in its ability to reveal things that a concept-bound theory seems to lack. Art as an intelligent sensing of the world, offers an engagement with the world sensuous particulars  that gives evidence of the kind of knowledge that has been occluded by the dominance of “abstract concepts” in the rationalized cultures of modernity.

Art photography, as an alternative  mode of rationality, has historically helped to  return us to those very things that have been alienated from the abstract concept: body, gesture, style, manner, tone, mood, and the other unsystematic, inarticulate, embodied, subjective experiences.  It has offered a way of knowing that does not subsume the object of knowledge (the sensuous particular) under the abstract concept. It is cognition that involves feeling,  not just raw feeling  in itself but as  an aesthetic comportment  based on the knowing body.

 

11 Comments

  • Reply Fleurieuscapes: Outtake 2 - Thought FactoryThought Factory January 4, 2016 at 1:40 pm

    […] image is an outtake from the 15 images that have been selected for my  forthcoming Fleurieuscapes exhibition  at  the Magpie Springs Gallery in 2016.  A previous outtake can be seen on this […]

  • Reply amongst the coastal rocks | poodlewalks January 9, 2016 at 11:12 am

    […] A photoshoot was a break from being more or less sitting in a front of a computer working on the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs. The opening is on Sunday January […]

  • Reply Fleurieuscapes: Out take 3 - Thought FactoryThought Factory January 12, 2016 at 8:45 am

    […] is another out take from the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs. It is part of the emerging trend in contemporary art photography […]

  • Reply early summer morning walks | poodlewalks January 19, 2016 at 9:17 am

    […] Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs opened on Sunday 17th January.We had a picnic lunch in the grounds of […]

  • Reply beyond the pastoral mode - Thought FactoryThought Factory January 20, 2016 at 9:51 am

    […] the opening of the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs done and dusted  I have had bit of  time to set up the various […]

  • Reply Fleurieuscapes Outtake: Petrel Cove - Thought FactoryThought Factory March 2, 2016 at 3:56 pm

    […] beach  dimension of the Fleurieuscapes was excluded from the exhibition at Magpie Springs. Images, such as the one of Petrel Cove below, […]

  • Reply field, sea, sky | poodlewalks April 10, 2017 at 12:12 pm

    […] these poodle walks. I am starting to find this somewhat frustrating since it means that the local Fleurieuscape project has come to a […]

  • Reply towards a photobook - Thought FactoryThought Factory September 4, 2017 at 2:19 pm

    […] one off hand made book doesn’t appeal since as I am thinking in terms of a series from the Fleurieuscapes […]

  • Reply homecoming - Thought FactoryThought Factory November 11, 2017 at 5:07 pm

    […]  starting to  work on the Fleuriescapes project once again  I can now see that it is more about  place and  homecoming,  with the […]

  • Reply Spring time: explorations | poodlewalks November 17, 2017 at 12:03 pm

    […] a return to exploring around the mouth of the Inmam River near Kent Reserve to re-connect with the Fleurieuscapes project that I am working […]

  • Reply upgrading poodlewalks | poodlewalks November 19, 2017 at 1:09 pm

    […] the walks are 1.5-2 hours in duration. Often I go back and reshoot for the Fleurieuscape book and portfolio. The new format will bring all the work around poodlewalks […]

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