PLACE - THE FIRST OF ALL THINGS notions (Tacita Dean Jeremy Millar)

..... everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone. (Stalker, Tarkovsky 1979)

Saint Augistine's remark
"What, then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know" In considering place, one might respond similarly.

.....place is something more often sensed than understood.... (p. 14)

Place is thus space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which, to quote the philosopher Henri Bergson, is "lived and acted, rather than represented".

..... place remember events ......

.... important historical events are now known simply by the name of place: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Chernobyl ....

.... there is nothing outside of place ..... ?

Place is all that there is, the limit of all things and in this it might be considered as a divine being.

Descartes proclaimed: "When we say that a thing is in given place, all we mean is that it occupies such a position relative to other things."

We retain a strong sense of place, even if we find it hard to define with any satisfaction, and this in itself demonstrates a refusal to accept the mathematical model of place-as-location proposed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers.

Jacob van Ruisdael (first landscape paintings in oil in the West)



William Blake forcefully rejected the mechanistic universe of Newton, whom he portrayed as a cold monster measuring out the world, and vilified in verse: "May God us keep / From single vision and Newton's sleep.

Caspar David Friedrich
.... horseless French cavalry officer....., find themselves clearly out of place.


John Constable "Why, then, may not landscape painting he considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?"


"The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" , Proust wrote, and perhaps these are what are required if we are to see the complexities of the places that surround us.

Artist are not bound in the same way that property developers are, and so have no need to build upon what is already in place.

Huebler has created a rich and delicate work that asks us to consider the difference between what we believe to be our relationship to a landscape, and what we would like to believe that relationship to be.

Robert Smithson
A tour of the Monuments of Passaic

Marine Hugonnier Ariana - Profound limitation of the visual


How would one make visible the extraordinary history and mythic status of the Bialowieza Forest?  ..... they look just like many others places if we can not see "the invisible ones of the days gone by" in Hardy's phrase.

Joachim Koester Bialowieza forest


Guy Moreton Ludwig Wittgenstein's house
http://www.guymoreton.org/works/2005/Ludwig+Wittgenstein/67/

"Everything is somewhere and in place." Aristotle said.