Geography and art. An expanding field

Abstract

Over the past two decades, geographers’ attentions to the ‘visual’ arts have broadened considerably. From a tightly focused study of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings this engagement now encompasses: a temporal reorientation towards 20th-century art practices; an opening out of concerns beyond the thematic frame of landscape; the embrace of a wider variety of artistic media beyond painting practices; and a shift in modes of engagement that sees geographers taking up a range of creative practices. In this paper I do not want to further expand the field, but rather to draw attention to how and with what effect these engagements have proceeded. Discussion is framed by Rosalind Krauss’ influential exploration of art’s ‘expanded field’, itself an attempt to rethink art as an analytic object in the face of a multiplication of artistic practices, materials, operations and sites. The body of the paper explores three analytics that mark intersections of art’s expanding field of theory and practice, and geography’s own expanding field of operations: these are, artists’ changing orientations towards ‘site’, a phenomenological critique of the ‘body’, and the ‘materialities’ and ‘practices’ of making (keywords that have usually been articulated as intrinsically geographic, and applied to the art world). Synthesizing these perspectives with current geographical engagements with art and broader disciplinary debates is, I suggest, to affirm the place and value of the study and practice of art within key disciplinary concerns.