In 2020, Frank Burridge interviewed philosopher Jacques Rancière about his new book, The Time of Landscape, an original study into the art of gardens, landscape, and landscape painting in 18th-Century Europe.
In it, Rancière elaborates his concept of art as a set of competing "regimes" intimately bound to the social and political relations of their time and place. Rancière's work is often of interest to architects because it offers salient insights on aesthetics and politics as a framework to think through the relationships between architecture, politics, and social change.
In the era Rancière studies in the book, landscape became an idea and an artistic practice that traversed disciplinary boundaries and social strata. It was a site for the contestation of ideas of nature, both human nature and the nature of the universe, and it became a metaphor for imagining society itself as a social or political “landscape”.
The idea and practice of the arts landscape reconfigured the very modes of perception and collective experience of these times.