Place in art

I read over ‘Place – The First of All Things’, an essay by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar in full and then went a read back certain bits that stuck out to me in more detail. Here are some notes I made on the piece:

• Place is difficult to locate or define and has been throughout time
• It’s not just simply geographical
• Importance recognised in anthropology, architecture, ecology, feminism, globalism, literature, mathematics, music, psychology, urbanism and art
• We would be lost without it
• Often used as a synonym for ‘space’, ‘location’, ‘site’ or ‘territory’
• ‘Place is to landscape as identity is to portraiture
• Term landscape didn’t exist in Dark and Middle Ages, typical features of landscape were but weren’t looked at collectively
• Landschaft – Landschap – Landskip (cultivated land surrounded by unknown wilderness, eventually recognised as views of rural scenery)
• Does landscape exist if there is no one to look at it?
• Like time, we are familiar with place and engage with it every day but don’t understand it properly
• ‘A place for everything and everything in it’s place’ – Samuel Smiles and ‘a sense of place’
• ‘When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place’ – Yi-Fu Tuan
• Place can be personal and interpreted differently to each person (like art)
• ‘places remember events’ – James Joyce
• Historical events often known by place they occurred (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Auschwitz)
• Many places within a place, many regions – each with own identities
• If something is in a certain place it ‘occupies such a position relative to other things’ – Descartes
• Reduced to position/site or simple location
• We have a strong sense of place and a strong sense of belonging (place as a concept)
• Common to fight to protect places of importance (subjective)
• Art and place hold similarities – both down to interpretation, much more to it than what we first see, many types of art and place
• both need ‘a little time, a little patience, and no little sensitivity’ to be aware and open to what else it is

This was a complex essay that covers various aspects of the concept of place but I definitely think it’s a useful piece of text as an introductory to the subject. There are certainly aspects that I agree with – for instance I do think it’s true that when somewhere becomes familiar to us and hold memories we regard it as place. Also, I think it definitely links to both time and art, just with our struggle to define them as concepts alone. I’ll most likely come back to this essay throughout this section as I’m sure it will prove useful to the exploration into place and with academic texts like these, you will often read them multiple times and focus on different aspects.