Rob Bartram

Nature, art and indifference

This paper explores possibilities associated with contemporary explanations of nature through a consideration of the nature-based art of Damien Hirst. I argue that this art poses fresh and challenging questions with the potential to destabilize dominant explanations of nature. His art affords nature the transformative qualities that rupture both its unproblematical differentiation from society and the belief that nature can be represented as an objectified truth through art. We can best explore these ideas in relation to Hirst's art by 'using' an interpretative strategy akin to Baudrillard's 'mysterious rules of indifference' -the exploration of art's capacity to activate and trigger metaphors, motifs and plays on meaning that form the ebb and flow of the cultural sign system, where attention is paid to the relational order between the components of meaning, rather than the material composition of specific objects. I argue that we should reconceptualize nature in terms of its alterity and undecidability, cultivating explanations based on indifference so that we do not succumb to the seduction of locating the meaning of nature.

I n this paper I want to explore the possibilities of discharging some of the tendencies associated with contemporary explanations of nature. To do this, I am not going to turn to the post-structuralist critique of social and cultural theory that appears to be unfolding in geography. [START_REF] Doel | Poststructuralist geographies: the diabolical art of spatial sciences[END_REF] Instead, I will turn to the contemporary nature-based art of Damien Hirst, the British artist associated with the sobriquet 'Young British Artists' or 'Brit Art'. [START_REF][END_REF] I argue that Hirst's art does not attempt to appeal to a generalized sense of what nature might mean (or, indeed, what art might mean), but instead strikes out beyond the conceptual limits of nature. That is, Hirst's art forces us to question dominant modes of explanation used to comprehend nature. In the realms of academic debate for example, the dominant mode of explanation has been typified by dialectical enframement. 'Nature-society' dialectics have been employed to equate the representation and meaning of nature with the ordering principles of commodification and capital accumulation. It is a mode of explanation that has left us with two distinct impressions: that there is a diversity of contested natures, [START_REF] Macnaghten | Contested natures[END_REF] and that nature is nothing more than a capital accumulation strategy because of its supposed role in the material reproduction of society. [START_REF] Smith | The production of nature[END_REF] Thus, it has been argued that nature can be found 'deeply embedded' or 'ingrained' in the grand narratives of capitalism and modernity. [START_REF] Harvey | Justice, nature and the geography of difference[END_REF] Whilst there are notable critiques that counter this dominant mode of explanation, [START_REF] Haraway | Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature[END_REF] there has still been a tendency to assume that nature has an original, unitary condition that defines its reality, or that there is a version of nature that is distinct from its social construction and its formation of social identities. Subsequently, nature-society dialectics have never been far away from the mode of explanation. Hirst's nature-based art poses fresh and challenging questions that potentially destabilize dominant explanations of nature. His art affords nature the transformative qualities that rupture both its unproblematical differentiation from society and the belief that nature can be represented as an objectified truth through art. Importantly, it allows us to think of nature, not as an ontological world on which we impose value and meaning, but as something that we continually configure through the production of images and ideas. By interpreting his work, we can begin to conceive of a natural world that is not fixed or differentiated from society and culture, but indifferent to them. Nature in this way of thinking is not so much a fixed point in the polarized nature-society frame, but a circulatory process of intensity and affects that are provisional and emergent in their configuration of meaning. We can best explore this idea in relation to Hirst's art by 'using' an interpretative strategy akin to Baudrillard's 'mysterious rules of indifference'. [START_REF] Zurbrugg | introduction: 'Just what is it that makes Baudrillard's ideas so different, so appealing?[END_REF] The mysterious rules of indifference allow Hirst's art to be understood in terms of its ability to activate and trigger metaphors, motifs and plays on meaning that form the ebb and flow of the cultural sign system. More precisely, the mysterious rules of indifference emphasize the relational order between the components of meaning, rather than the material composition of specific objects. [START_REF]Thrift discusses this issue in relation to non-representational theory, by drawing upon Goodwin's work on organisms and ecosystems: N. Thrift, 'Steps to an ecology of place[END_REF] Or, as Baudrillard explains, the mysterious rules of indifference allow us to understand the production of meaning in terms of the matrix of the appearance of things, and the matrix of the distribution of forms. [START_REF]Baudrillard's argument has been sustained through a number of published works in the last ten years, notably The transparency of evil[END_REF] So rather than assume that art (or any social and cultural form) can be a reflection of nature, or even a component part of its social construction, art becomes a new capacity for nature. However, the 'rules' in the mysterious rules of indifference are not rules that can be applied according to a priori analytical frameworks and explanatory conventions. Indeed, the rules disrupt the notion of there being a unified position from which to command interpretation because it is assumed that this cannot be preconditioned. Instead, the rules are subject to reformulation through the practice of interpretation. 10 Whilst this creates a deliberately unstable formula for the interpretation of Hirst's art, in practice it allows us to see the failure in attempting to 'locate' meaning that enables the distinction between nature and art, or nature and society. It means that in practice the interpretation of Hirst's art is like working with the indifferent signs of nature, because there is no dialectical polarity with which to reformulate distinctive versions of nature, either with reference to the ontological or unitary meaning of nature or by opposing versions of nature's social construction.

In terms of interpretive strategy, this leaves us with the task of describing Hirst's art in terms of its momentum or pace of revision, and the unpredictable ways in which this happens. In projecting nature as a capacity rather than an objectified truth, as simulacra that blur boundaries between the real and the virtual, and as active and transformative in its relation to meaning, we necessarily free nature from its conceptual anchorage in social and cultural difference. This paper will begin by chronicling the career of Damien Hirst and will make reference to the development of style, form and content in his work. I will consider Hirst's preoccupation with the themes of birth, death, love and life which have been worked into his nature-based art. I then discuss the manner in which Hirst's work prompts reflection on the perfected yet generalized 'signs' of nature, and the irreconcilable contradictions brought about by the co-presence of real and virtual natures. I do not intend to undermine nature's reality, nor to suggest that nature has lost its social and cultural potency. On the contrary, through an interpretation of Hirst's art I intend to argue that the meaning of nature has intensified because it has been endlessly perfected in relation to an idealized version of itself, through scientific, technological and media reproduction. [START_REF]On the tendencies simultaneously to duplicate and perfect nature[END_REF] I explore how Hirst's art mimics nature's 'minimalist' status and high point of definition, and how the glass vitrines that accommodate Hirst's work parody the spectatorial traits associated with nature.

I then direct attention to Hirst's nature-based conceptualization of death, and particularly Western culture's denial of its erratic tendencies. I am particularly interested in exploring how perfected ideas of nature find little room for unpredictable events such as death, and how the matrix and distribution of meaning in contemporary culture can detach representations of death, indeed nature itself, from their own referents. An important aspect of this discussion is conceptualizing Hirst's art as being 'active' and at work: Hirst uses live insects in one installation, and his installations in general are designed to assault the viewer's senses. Hirst demonstrates how nature can be conceptualized in terms of multiple trajectories of sensory perception, recollection, memory and affectivity. [START_REF]Deleuze has long argued for this kind of explanation to be worked through the analysis of cultural form[END_REF] In the penultimate section of this paper, I evaluate the destabilizing influences of Hirst's work by considering some of its critical reception, the role of hype and the 'wow' factor that his work is supposedly indicative of, and how Hirst has resisted attempts to be pinned down according to a specific artistic genre.

Damien Hirst, unforeseen spin

Damien Hirst became widely known in the 1990s as an artist and a curator for exhibitions such as Freeze, staged at Surrey Docks, London, in 1988 and Some went mad, some ran away, staged at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1994. His international reputation was greatly enhanced at the Venice Biennial in 1993, where the installation Mother and child divided (Figure 1) was exhibited. After winning the Turner Prize in 1995, Hirst took part in the 1997 Sensations exhibition, first staged at the Royal Academy of Art in London and then at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The controversies surrounding the exhibition prompted television and newspaper journalists to write features on his lifestyle, and not simply his art. More than 100 000 people attended the exhibition titled Models, methods, approaches, assumptions, results and findings held at the Gagosian Museum, New York, and the popularity of his current exhibition at the new Saatchi Gallery in London make declarations about his artistic bankruptcy look rather premature. [START_REF] Serota | quoted in Gibbons, 'Britart is out of the picture[END_REF] Hirst's numerous detractors have suggested that his work is highly derivative, and that there is little more to his work than tabloid and populist hype. 14 For Stallabrass, Hirst is simply a vampire drawing lifeblood from the already anaemic body of British working class culture -even the well-publicized 'laddish' acts of behaviour are highly contrived and designed to court controversy. [START_REF] Stallabrass | High art lite: British art in the 1990s[END_REF] Other critical appraisals have pointed to the patronage and business acumen of Charles Saatchi as the principal explanation for the inflated prices that Hirst's work now commands. As art critic Edward Lucie-Smith has suggested, the publication on British art entitled the Saatchi Decade seems to imply that the important art of the last ten years can be referred to just one man's investment. [START_REF]Critic's diary'; E. Lucie-Smith, 'It's all about control[END_REF] Although Hirst has suffered at the hands of the media, he has still pandered to the mechanisms of celebrity and fame by broadening his interests. In 1997 his 'autobiography' was published, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, and in 2001 he co-authored On the way to work with George Burns. [START_REF] Hirst | I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever[END_REF] He has also designed album covers, directed a short film, invested in a London restaurant business that utilized Hirst's decorative style and recorded two pop singles with musicians and actors that form part of his close-knit social clique.

Despite the ongoing media and public pressure to become more artistically productive, and perhaps more thematically varied, [START_REF] Searle Claimed | The market and the media wants a constant stream of novelties, rather than an increase in creative sophisti-cation or thoughtfulness': 'The relentless litany of self-abuse[END_REF] Hirst's instincts have been to persist with the themes and techniques that were evident in the formative years of his career. His installations and paintings have consistently operated through a thematic matrix of birth, death, love and life, and often through nature-based subject matter. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about these themes, or the fact that Hirst prefers to interpret them through nature. However, Hirst has managed to give these fairly conventional artistic themes an unforeseen spin. He has become adept at activating the reconfiguration of the contemporary signifiers of nature, although this has often been mistakenly referred to as a parody of Duchamp's 'ready-made' art. This ascription implies that there is a greater purpose to Hirst's art. For Hirst, art can not be so readily located: exhibitions and individual works of art might instigate the revision of ideas through bursts of interpretive and creative energies, but beyond that, meaning and signification take random trajectories that could well defy the interests of curators and artists alike. Thus, he once claimed that curating an exhibition was like watching objects proliferate through 'additional' interpretation. [START_REF] Hirst | I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere[END_REF] Whilst it has often been claimed that Hirst's art confronts or reflects the 'big' or 'tough' themes of birth, love, life and death, [START_REF] Collings | Blimey! from bohemian to britpop: the London artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst[END_REF] Hirst himself has often refused to confirm or deny such interpretations. If the themes are addressed in his work, then they emerge in multiple and varied forms, from the controversial visceral works involving dead animals such as pigs, sheep, cows and sharks suspended in formaldehyde, to the medicine cabinets, ashtrays and human anatomical structures. His 'spot' and 'spin' paintings perhaps allude to the same ideas, although the chemical and pharmaceutical titles, rather than the content alone, help to conjure up such thoughts.

Nature, even better than the real thing

Hirst's natural history installations can appear as a play or visual pun on the idea of nature: he works with the most frequently duplicated and highly visible ideas of nature as if to make them all the more transparent. In The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he has suspended a tiger shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde (Figure 2). Like the various other animals that have been vitrified by Hirst, such as sheep, cows and pigs, the shark is shocking in the sense that it is 'real', but it has a FIGURE 2 The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living (reproduced by kind permission of the Saatchi Gallery, London) crispness and precision that suggests that it is more like an advertising image. Its high definition inspires thoughts of the 3-D glass-wearing visual experience presented in the movie Jaws 3-D.

The neat, clean-cut lines of the vitrine itself enhance a sense of the 'suspension' of the image: it is free of its natural surroundings -and we might add, its referents -and yet can be viewed in close-up and from a multiplicity of angles. Like many spatial artists, Hirst likes to work on an individual sense of embodiment and the capacity for proprioception, [START_REF] Self | A steady iron-hard jet[END_REF] as his remarks about the shark installation suggest: I like the idea of a thing to describe a feeling. And a shark is frightening . . . it can kill and eat you. [START_REF] Hirst | Review of sensations: Young British Artists from the Saatchi collection[END_REF] The shark looks alive, you expect it to look at you and yet it's dead. It looks like it's in its natural surroundings and yet it clearly isn't. We see more of the shark like this, understand it more and yet we've had to kill it in order to achieve this. [START_REF] Hirst | Introduction[END_REF] The shark, as with the other natural history installations, is less an imitation of nature than a hologram version of nature itself. Hirst does not proclaim this as a new vision of nature, nor does he seek reconciliation with nature in the spirit of the Romantic art tradition. There is no suggestion that the vitrified animals are symbolic of a metaphysical, transcendent order. For Hirst, nature is hyper-realized, 'perfected' by the gradual elimination of defects and impurities, and by its endless duplication through science, technology and the media. Hirst appears to be mimicking nature's 'minimalist', banal status in Western culture where its plight becomes all too apparent through momentary glimpses of documentary film, cinema, advertising and consumer good packaging. In the installation Mother and child divided (Figure 1), Hirst entices us to think about how this signification process works. The installation comprises a cow and calf cut lengthways so that each half carcass makes up four separate vitrines. The grotesque beauty of this work lies in the invitation to the spectator to participate, to wander between the divided animal bodies. Critics have tried to draw Mother and child divided into the art-historical traditions of the Madonna and child, and have even pointed to the installation's anti-English pastoral resonances. 24 Yet Hirst only wishes to assert its kitsch, trivial banality by declaring, 'It's just nothing. It doesn't mean anything.' [START_REF] Hirst | Interview with Damien Hirst[END_REF] As with nature itself, Mother and child divided might lure us into the search for specific meaning, but there is no thing there to see -or at least, there is too much to see because of the constellation of signs that are in a constant state of becoming. This does not mean that nature has lost its symbolic power. On the contrary, the meaning of nature proliferates, and is more capable than ever of inspiring the illusion of its inherent sanctity. We only have to recall the incredible repercussions when British national newspapers published half-page colour images of an angel-white calf called Phoenix, standing over its slaughtered mother at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis in April 2001. Images of the forlorn calf caused widespread anger and upset, and propelled an already emotionally charged issue to new levels of public anxiety. Within twenty-four hours of publication, the government made a U-turn on culling practices. This is not so much confirmation that a politically sensitive issue found potency in an image as the confirmation that the signs of nature have an infinite capacity to connect and reconfigure to other signs.

Nature, art and indifference

In this sense, the signification of nature has reached a point of high definition, but it remains in a state of symbolic generality. Nature is both explicit and seductive, yet detached from relative value and reference to the real. Some observers such as Paul Virilio find 'brevity of the sign' problematical because it implies that contemporary culture has slipped into the constant displacement of 'direct observation', or the truth in what one sees, [START_REF] Virilio | The information bomb[END_REF] or that the transformation of the object of vision into 'information' has denigrated the object's cultural and historical specificity. [START_REF] Jenks | Visual culture[END_REF] What Hirst's work encourages us to think is that brevity of the sign of nature is symptomatic of the fatal tendencies of the cultural sign system. This extends to Hirst's belief that the installations work equally well without the vitrified animals because the vitrines and the formaldehyde themselves convey the same sorts of ideas about nature, only in 'shorthand'. [START_REF] Self | A steady iron-hard jet[END_REF] They communicate ideas about Western culture's disastrous preservationist tendencies. Rather like the paradox of using highly toxic liquids such as formaldehyde to preserve life forms, Western culture appeases itself with conservation ideals that fashion 'perfected' notions of nature that subsequently enact the final act of severance from nature's reality.

It has been suggested that Hirst's formaldehyde installations parody popular British taxidermy. For Brian Sewell, installations such as This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home and Mother and child divided supposedly recall the stuffed pike, rabbits and hares found in British pubs, museum displays and private collections. [START_REF] Sewell | Damien Hirst[END_REF] But I would argue that Hirst's installations inspire more obvious connections to the virtual, technical and scientific view of nature that appears as a recurrent theme in contemporary culture. The animals in these installations have been bisected perfectly; there is no hint of blood or disembowelment to suggest brutality. Instead, the installations attest to the scientific and clinical formality typified by Western culture's fascination with genetic and cryogenic research and modern medicine. Even the vitrines suggest bleak laboratories, life support machines and medical survival. They are cold and hygienic, reminding us of the scientific and medical obsession with categorization of the natural world in which the chaotic and dysfunctional are not allowed to exist. The vitrines parody the idea of nature being interpreted through systems, processes and equilibriums that all have their rational, scientific normativities.

At the same time, the installations play on the confusion over 'real' and virtual versions of nature. The simple and deliberate use of real rather than artificial animals has managed to heighten sensitivities about the work and has generated the kind of emotionally charged responses that are impossible to reconcile. 30 The animal rights protests at the Sensations exhibition in New York and London only confirm this view. However, Hirst used real animals to make the art more real, to extend levels of morbid curiosity in dead animals presented in contexts that we are not quite prepared for. [START_REF] Hirst | I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere[END_REF] The installations remind us that real and virtual images and experiences of nature have become indistinguishable in recent years. This is no better illustrated than by recalling that Hirst's emergence as an artist coincided with the London Natural History Museum's decision to replace the stuffed animals accumulated and displayed over the last century with computer simulations. Clearly, 'real animals' no longer suffice to meet public expectations of natural history. Nature's reality is better served by virtual means.

The vitrines themselves are 'at work', activating and cultivating meaning that necessarily disrupts conventional understandings of nature. They play on ideas of distance and spectacle, the important philosophical grounds on which nature has been conceptualized. [START_REF] Cronon | Uncommon ground: human place in nature[END_REF] The vitrines make the viewer aware of the act of viewing, of the spectatorial traits that are associated with nature. The glass cases and the formaldehyde liquid allow perfect visibility and viewing from all angles, and from all distances. They create a viewing space which is an almost pure visual space that is conducive to movement: the viewer circles around the vitrine quite freely, moving closer and then further away, without ever being allowed physically to touch the preserved animal. In The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living (Figure 2), the combination of bulging glass case and formaldehyde liquid refracts the view of the shark as you walk around the tank. Momentarily, the shark appears to move, causing you to glance back and forward to confirm that this is just an optical illusion. It is in performing this movement that you become aware of how nature is enacted through visuality, [START_REF]Visuality has been described as 'distinct, but not opposed to the physical act of seeing, and comprising the technologies that allow us to view the world, and its discursive determinations[END_REF] and how visual space enables nature to become more accessible, yet more prolific, in the trajectories of sensory perception, recollection, memory and affectivity. Hirst's installations, then, allow us to see nature for itself, as seductive and photogenic, and conducive to the pursuit of definitive viewing angles and close-ups, and where the comprehension of nature is allied to the creation of new visualizing technologies. As Virilio and others have long argued, it is visual technologies that have created the sight and site of nature's 'new' realities, [START_REF] Virilio | 35 Garnett[END_REF] as can be most readily witnessed in the development of wildlife documentary 'cams' that capture nature at its most natural, from every conceivable angle.

Nature, mock shocks and death

Hirst's installation work is shocking, conceptually, in a manner that has been attributed to referential, avant-garde tendencies. 35 But it is a kind of 'mock shock' that reminds us of Benjamin's argument that beauty and repulsion, disgust and pleasure can be easily aligned in the same image. [START_REF] Gould | Pursuing the popular[END_REF] If it is that we are meant to feel uncomfortable in the presence of Hirst's art, [START_REF] Hirst | I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere[END_REF] then it is perhaps the unaccustomed and disturbing context to his work that draws our attention, where proximity to the vitrified animals makes for a harrowing experience. As Hirst has stated: It's like being interested in nature's more grim details. . .like the best nature programmes: animals destroy each other to stay alive, we're interested in it, but only at a distance. 38 Hirst's work deals with one of the most fundamental aspects of nature -death. For Hirst, death has become 'hi-tech', where medicine and life-support machines simply draw out the process. His installations do not offer an alternative to this. Instead, they encourage us to think about Western culture's fascination with medical science and the attempts to deny life's fundamental transience. According to Hirst, death is unacceptable in Western culture -we tend to deal with it by detachment or amusement. [START_REF] Hirst | I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere[END_REF] Hirst Nature, art and indifference offers a pertinent yet succinct view of Western culture's confused responses to death in relation to the shark in formaldehyde: I like ideas of trying to understand the world by taking things out of the world. You kill things to look at them. You have to preserve a shark in liquid which looks very similar to its natural habitat. It has to be that size. You expect it to look back at you. I hope at first glance it will look alive. It could have to do with the obsession with trying to make the dead live or the living live forever. 40 Hirst has alternative takes on death: in A thousand years (Figure 3), he prompts us to think about Western culture's obsession with the 'end' of nature, and specifically the illusion the end of nature can be forestalled. Here, the end is played out over and over again: there is no beginning or end, just a series of bodily functions. A thousand years is a sealed-off, two-metre-high vitrine that presents birth, reproduction and death played out by the maggots, flies, cow's head and an ultraviolet 'insectocutor'. Importantly, it can only be experienced in the present and in person, it has no second life in the media, only as an idea through the cultural sign system. Through the media, it becomes something additional or supplementary. Seeing it in the flesh is like experiencing the exhilaration of waiting for something terrible to happen. The smell, even with an artificial cow's head, is intensely pungent. The smell of rotting cow flesh causes most spectators to grimace and wince as they approach the case. Morbid fascination encourages most people to follow the flight paths of individual blue bottle flies, to see if they survive the insectocutor. The vitrine is smeared in blood, and there is a thick blanket of dead flies on the floor. It reminds us that nature's reality can be grim and gory, and that despite Western culture's obsession with longevity, and with cryogenic and genetic research, the moment of death is a completely random and sometimes unpleasant process.

This installation is significant in terms of its activation of the senses. Quite simply, it is a piece of art that jumps out and grabs you. [START_REF] Hirst | [END_REF] To experience this installation is to become aware of the various 'valves' of human sensation that can be released. Through this release we can comprehend nature as the connectivity between the object of nature and our sensory being. If nature can be forged through the co-joining of subject and object and the images and experiences that unfold, then nature is only ever in our=the the making. [START_REF] Thrift | The object of nature[END_REF] This interpretation throws into question a fundamental principle associated with the dominant explanation of nature: that nature's reality is contained within its materiality, or -to put it simply -that there is a truth in the object of nature. A thousand years allows us to think again about the truth in nature's materiality. Indeed, Hirst has played with this notion by replacing a real cow's head with a prosthetic head, and smearing it with dog food and tomato ketchup to keep the installation experience alive. But the power of this piece of art does not rely on the use of real or artificial cow body parts; it relies on the sensory capacities of the viewer, and specifically on what can be termed the 'being' of the sensible: the ability to anticipate experiences of the natural world such as pungent smells or gory scenes of death, but not having the capacity to predict how the sense might unfold. [START_REF] Deleuze | Bergsonism[END_REF] Even the unwieldy titles of his work, designed possibly to explain things, fail to ground meaning. It then becomes a more fruitful task to think of Hirst as attempting to direct artistic, aesthetic and sensory energy, rather than paint notional realities. Inadvertently, critics have stumbled upon the precise value of Hirst's art by attempting to dismiss his installations as providing nothing more than a 'wow' factor. [START_REF] Freeland | But is it art?[END_REF] This form of reasoning is built on the premise that art should only be considered of value if it demands more complex or detailed explanation and understanding. Put simply, the wow factor is not enough, and it reduces art to nothing more significant than popular cultural form. But there is a power, longevity and transformative quality in the wow factor of Hirst's art. For commentators such as Jean Baudrillard, it is these qualities that ultimately define the significance of the artist. 45 To begin with, Hirst's art emulates the precise role of nature in its contemporary mediated form. Nature has become 'sensational' through documentary film and photography, and even through conservation theme parks such as the Eden Project in Cornwall. [START_REF]A post-structuralist critique of the Eden Project can be found in R. Bartram and S. Shobrook, 'Endless, end-less nature: environmental futures at the fin de millennium[END_REF] More specifically, Hirst's conceptual art prompts us to think about the connections and relationships forged by nature's proliferation through the cultural sign system, and specifically the form of ambiguity that is implied by Hirst's challenge to nature's reality through the use of real animals as art. His conceptual art undertakes a kind of aesthetic 'reversal' that destabilizes notions of nature and draws attention to nature's transformative consistency. And despite the best efforts of some art critics, Hirst's interpretation of nature cannot be pinned down. [START_REF] Wilson | Out of control[END_REF] Indeed, he responds to questions about his work in almost entirely pragmatic terms, to reinforce a sense of the lack of philosophical and aesthetic anchorage. He projects himself as ambivalent and a little surly in interview and chooses to discuss colour, content and scale rather than embark on the intellectualizing of his work -such approaches are 'boring'. [START_REF]A steady iron-hard jet[END_REF] Accurate interview transcripts read like a mixture of incoherent anecdotes and aphorisms spun between glottal stops. This tempts critics into employing their own arcane language born of the codes and conventions of traditional art criticism, although these are the very things that nullify comments on his work. Instead, Hirst prefers a form of populist interpretation that he calls 'description'. 49 I want the viewer to do a lot of work and feel uncomfortable. They should be made to feel responsible for their own view of the world rather than look at an artist's view and be critical of it. 50 Even when he is drawn to make reference to the intellectual and artistic context to his work, he makes a statement and then adds the proviso, 'Well, sometimes I would say that' [START_REF] Bowie | (s)Now[END_REF] as if to suggest a constant flux in his ideas, which itself denies any normative position. For some commentators, this attitude is indicative of the recent 'dumbing' down of art by 'Young British Artists'. [START_REF] Millard | Champagne Charlies[END_REF] But by serving up wonderfully complex banalities about his work, Hirst allows meaning and signification to escape the clutches of conventional art criticism. As he has continued to remind us, his work is 'bright and zany -but there's fuck all in it'. [START_REF] Hirst | quoted on Life, death and Damien Hirst[END_REF] So what we are left with is not a form of art that purports to represent nature's reality, or even its demise. What Hirst's art encourages us to think about is the manner in which nature is simultaneously perfected and duplicated in Western culture. Indeed, the nature-based subject matter that he chooses to present as his art already speaks to us through the cultural sign system because of its prevalence. Rather like Baudrillard's notion of simulation, [START_REF] Interestingly | Baudrillard once acknowledged that contemporary artists were turning to his notion of simulation rather than Derrida's notion of deconstruction, despite Derrida's more focused attention on artistic practices, genre and aesthetics[END_REF] Hirst presents the idea that we are approaching the absolute limits of nature's authentic representation, the stage of its high definition. The paradox of this is that the closer we come to perfecting the image of nature, of adding to the real, the more nature's power of illusion is lost. Or to be more precise, the power of illusion has become just too powerful.

Nature, art and indifference

To propel some of the ideas discussed here yet further, I would like to talk about nature and art simultaneously, and refer to 'nature-art' forthwith. Nature-art cannot be separated out into autonomous entities that figure within the rigid geometries of 'dominant' structures of power, where the gallery or the national park, for example, reinforces established patterns of consumption and production. As I have tried to suggest here, we do not gain 'deeper' understandings or acquire an additional purchase on natureart by simply following the fixed points of an explanatory structure. We are following the rules of a well-practised analytical game. But as Baudrillard has reminded us many times in the last ten years, we need to play the whole game, [START_REF] Baudrillard | The transparency of evil; The illusion of the end; The perfect crime. 56 Doel, Postructuralist geographies. 57 Baudrillard[END_REF] to go beyond the meta-narratives that no longer serve to answer questions that we might ask. Instead, we might try to understand nature-art in terms of transformative energy flows, rather than as a reflection, refraction or distortion of notional realities.

'Hype' is a much-hyped term, and is equally applicable to nature and art. Much has been made of the hype surrounding Hirst's art, and it is precisely this cultural mechanism that allows us to see the play and parody of ideas. It allows us to acknowledge the capacity of nature-art to turn back on itself and to spark off the kinds of implosion that destabilize established modes of explanation. It forces us to realize that Hirst's art is not about nature at all. It is about the ironic stagings of abstract ideas of nature -and the capacity of Western culture to reconfigure nature's reality. If I can splice this thought with the words of Marcus Doel for a moment, it is not the ideology of an over-arching structure of power that manipulates the truth or clarity in nature-art, it is the practice of spin-doctoring, and we can only put a spin on nature-art by releasing it, by discharging its obvious energy. 56 So, the shock of nature's destruction, which has been endlessly rehearsed through the cultural sign system, is no longer a shock as such. Like Hirst's killer sharks, we have 'mock-shock', the terms and conditions of which are determined by the context of the art, rather than a supposedly authentic human response to something gruesome. Somewhere along the line, nature-art has became abstract and what we are left with are spec-Nature, art and indifference tral versions of the original. Form and content have been substituted for a networked alternative, a simulacrum, where nature-art signifies Western culture's need for their existence rather than their reality. This in itself forces us to think about nature-art beyond a polarized form of debate and its fake resolutions, clarity and foreclosures. What should remain is a nature-art of alterity and undecidability, where 'difference is no longer differentiation between subjects, but the differentiation between manifestations of the same subject'. 57 I have tried to use the idea of indifference to generate explanations of nature-art that are different from those already given, and that have been all too frequently bound by the constraints of prescriptive and predictable forms of sociocultural analysis. For some time now, Baudrillard has argued for the 'cultivation of indifference', so that we might not succumb to the seduction of 'locating' meaning that putatively reifies social and political modality. [START_REF] Baudrillard | Fatal strategies[END_REF] For him, this is a positive (albeit fatal) strategy that should, and can only ever, fail because of the impossibility of detachment from explanation itself. 59 But as Rojek and Turner and others have pointed out, it is a strategy that is still worth pursuing because it short-circuits the functioning and utility of enclosed analytical frameworks that merely exist to confirm their existence. [START_REF]Forget Baudrillard?[END_REF] We might be sceptical about the argument for strategies of indifference, and more specifically about the tone of Baudrillard's writing. [START_REF]Whilst we might think of Baudrillard as an intellectual dandy, or simply as overly declarative, we should perhaps accept him on his own terms, as provocateur. Baudrillard's views on this matter are[END_REF] But it allows us to think again about the deception of nature's reality and the limitations of its contemporary explanation. [START_REF]The transparency of evil[END_REF]

cultural geographies 2005 12 : 1 - 17 #

 12117 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 2005 10.1191/1474474005eu320oa

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1Mother and child divided (reproduced by kind permission of Damien Hirst and Science)

FIGURE 3 A

 3 FIGURE 3A thousand years (reproduced by kind permission of the Saatchi Gallery, London)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sarah Shirley for undertaking important archival work in preparation for the writing of this paper, and Peter Jackson for providing constructive feedback on an early draft. Many thanks to Damien Hirst and 'Science' for allowing me to reproduce The physical impossibility of death in someone living and A thousand years, and for being continually supportive of this work. Finally, thanks must go to the White Cube Gallery for allowing me to reproduce Mother and child divided.

Notes


Kenneth R Olwig

Representation and alienation in the political land-scape

The question of representation in the definition of landscape is arguably at the nexus of important theoretical issues in the social sciences and humanities, and is in evident need of clarification. A key but largely overlooked concept in the debate on landscape and representation is the concept of alienation and, by extension, the concepts of commodification and reification. This paper will first examine the relation between landscape representation and alienation in terms of its substantive historical meaning, the transferral of ownership of rights in the land=property and the loss of rights which effectively makes one an alien, or foreigner, in the land. It will then examine this relationship in terms of the philosophical concern with alienation and objectification, particularly as explicated by the literary scholar and philosopher Georg Luk a acs.

 The question of the role of representation in the definition of landscape, which has been brought to the fore by Daniels and Cosgrove, has thus come into conflict with an approach to landscape that emphasizes the phenomenology of landscape experience. A key to understanding this debate over landscape and representation, I will argue, is the concept of alienation and, by extension, the concepts of commodification and reification.

This essay will first explore the representation of landscape in connection with alienation in the substantive historical sense, meaning the alienation of land, and in relation to its meaning as estrangement. It will then conclude with an examination of the representation issue in relation to the philosophical concept of alienation, particularly as elucidated by the twentieth-century literary historian and philosopher Georg Luk a acs, whose work helped stimulate a renewed interest in the concept. The role of representation in objectifying the meaning of landscape, and hence the link between landscape and alienation, becomes clearer, I will argue, when the word is broken down into its component parts, land and -scape. When the two are examined separately and then reconstituted, it becomes easier to understand the substantive importance of the landscape concept, and to comprehend why its meaning is necessarily so difficult to define and objectify (''substantive'' is used here to mean real rather than apparent, belonging to the substance of a thing as used in the legal sense of creating and defining rights and duties). [START_REF] Olwig | Recovering the substantive nature of landscape[END_REF] The land in landscape, and the -scape of the land

The land in a statement such as ''The land rose in rebellion'' is a social phenomenon, a country or a people. [START_REF] Merriam-Webster | Webster's third new international dictionary of the English language[END_REF] Land, in this sense, is something to which a people belong, as to a commonwealth. It is in this sense that a land is constituted by the people that belong to it (England is the land of the English). They belong to the land insofar as they have ''become attached or bound [to it] . . . by birth, allegiance, residence, or dependency''. 8 The land of a people was historically divided into smaller lands, which might belong to a communality (e.g. the common lands belonging to the village community) or to a figure seen to represent or embody the land (e.g. the lands of the prince). The term land is applied here not just to the people of a land in the social sense, but also to the material substance (e.g. dry land) that is encompassed by such a land. In its original, substantive sense alienation means the transferral, and hence loss, of rights in the land=property. If one has a sense of belonging to the land, as the place of one's family, community and heritage, such loss is also psychologically alienating. One becomes estranged from the land to which one belongs -an alien is a foreigner or a stranger, and alienation literally means to be made foreign, to be estranged.

Landscape is distinguished from land by the suffix -scape, which is equivalent to the more common English suffix -ship. This suffix generates an abstraction. Thus, there might be two friends, comrades or fellows in a room, both concrete beings, but between them they share something abstract and difficult to define, friendship, comradeship or fellowship. The suffix -ship designates ''something showing, exhibiting, or embodying a quality or state'' of being, in this case that of a friend, comrade or fellow. [START_REF]sheep, money þ -lagi (akin to Old Norse leggja to lay) -more at FEE, LAY[END_REF] -Ship thus designates the abstract ''nature'', ''state'' or ''constitution'' of something.

In this text I have repeatedly condensed these various synonyms to the trilogy nature, state and=or constitution in order to bring home the way these words are interlinked both as abstract essences (e.g. the nature, state or constitution of something) and as concretized and institutionalized entities (e.g. nature, the state and a constitution). 10 Citizenship thus carries some of the same abstract and ideal qualities identified with friendship and fellowship, but also suggests a more institutionalized quality, related originally to the existence of a polity, of which one might be a citizen. A land, in the sense of a country, is likewise something of which one can be a citizen, or landsman (a fellow countryman), and in this context it is important to have a sense of the nature, state or constitution of that land. Knowledge of what constitutes the abstract nature, state or constitution of being friends, fellows, citizens or landsmen belonging to a land is clearly important to an understanding of the functioning of these relations, but such abstractions are inherently difficult to grasp. This is where objectification through representation comes in.

Representing the land

The suffixes -scape and -ship stem ultimately from an ancient Germanic root, spelt shape in modern English (basically a Germanic language). 11 The power of this sense of shape lies in the dynamic relation between the meaning of shape as, on the one hand, an expression of -ship as an underlying nature, state or constitution which manifests itself through an active, creative, shaping process and, on the other, the material form which that process generates -its shape. By representing the abstract nature, state or constitution of the land in a more concrete objective form one concretizes it, and makes it easier to both grasp and facilitate the process by which the land is shaped as a social and material phenomenon.

Representation can take a number of forms. The representative body of a land provides a means by which the abstract collective will of the citizenry or landsmen can be objectified and made manifest through the verbal discourse of a parliamentthe parlia deriving from the Old French parler, parlier, 'to speak'. The constitution of something is by nature an intangible essence, and when English jurists refer to the ''ancient constitution'' they refer to something that has not been written down, but which can be extrapolated from custom and legal precedence going back to a time out of mind. [START_REF] Pocock | The ancient constitution and the feudal law[END_REF] It was this ancient constitution that legitimated the existence of the English parliament. The constitution of the land, however, can also be represented in written graphic form, as in the United States, where it was based on the reasoning of a body of men, and served to institutionalize the nature of a modern federal state.

Through representation the nature, state or constitution of the land is concretized and can be acted upon. The constitution thus provides the foundation for a formalized state that can act on behalf of the people as represented in a representative body. The map provides a tool for administering that land, and the visual landscape representation provides a basis for comprehending the land's physical and social makeup. There is thus a certain circularity between the abstract, ideal nature of the land, its representation, and the shaping of the land. This circularity, however, is greatly influenced by the way in which the land is represented, because the mode of representation (as will be seen) is not neutral. This can be exemplified through a comparison of discursive verbal representation with perspective pictorial representation.

Discursive verbal representation

The ancient Germanic name for the representative legal and political body of a land was the thing or moot -the root of the modern words thing and meeting. It is the deliberation of the thing that builds the land as a polity or res publica, known in the Germanic languages variously as a landschap (Dutch), Landschaft (German), landskap (Swedish) and landscipe in the Old English spelling. This is landscape in the modern sense of a ''political landscape'' as ''a particular area of activity''. [START_REF] Merriam-Webster | Collegiate dictionary and thesaurus: deluxe electronic edition[END_REF] The philosopher Martin Heidegger delved into the meaning of the thing during the later years of his life. In this analysis the thing is not the physical object, to which authentic being is attached as in his phenomenology, but a representative gathering facilitating the discourse upon which the res publica as a social entity is built:

To be sure, the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter. In consequence, the Old German words thing and dinc become the names for an affair or matter of pertinence. They denote anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse. [START_REF] Heidegger | The thing[END_REF] We still use this meaning of thing when we say that someone ''knows his things'', or we speak of ''things in law''. In this context, ''things'' do not have social lives; they are the essence of the social, the res-(meaning ''thing'' in Latin) in res publica.

The Romans called a matter for discourse res. The Greek eiro (rehetos, rhetra, rhema) means to speak about something, to deliberate on it. Res publica means, not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public. 15 As a matter for discourse, res thus meant thing in the same deliberative context as the notion of thing that gave its name to the Germanic representative body. Representatives of the land met at the moot or thing to discourse on things in law, or realis (the real) in medieval Latin. 16 The thing thereby laid down the law of the land according to which the use of the common material and social resources of the land was regulated. Material objects thus become endowed as real things (in law) that are capable of being ordered and laid in place as the common wealth of the res publica.

The common law of the land is rooted in custom, which is an expression of community practice. The legendary seventeenth-century English jurist Edward Coke stated that custom is ''defined as a law or right not written; which, being established by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practised''. It is because custom is rooted in this ''common usage'' for ''time out of mind'' that ''custom lies upon the land''. [START_REF] Thompson | Customs in common[END_REF] Coke seems to have weighed his words carefully when he writes that custom ''lies'' upon the land. The word law derives from the Old Norse liggja, meaning to lie, and is akin to the plural of lag, meaning ''due place, order''. The law, this suggests, was laid down, layer-like, through practice, thereby establishing a sense of emplaced order -the lay(out) of the land. It was in this way that customary rights in the land, such as rights in the commons, created a sense of belonging to, and having a place in, the land. Such emplaced rights could give rise to relatively egalitarian medieval republics with representative legal and political institutions, as in Switzerland or the Frisian lands. More usually, however, they constituted part of a larger, complex organization in which the rights of the differing estates (the nobility, the clergy, the burgers, the farmers and the prince or king) worked together, or opposed each other, in a creative (or destructive) tension that often involved representative legal and political bodies. [START_REF] Olwig | Landscape, nature and the body politic: from Britain's Renaissance to America's New World[END_REF] Even under rather despotic conditions, customary rights, particularly in the commons, could form the basis for a moral economy that has acted as a bulwark for the poor up to the present. Though the commoners were individually weak they were numerically strong, and they ferociously exercised and defended their customary rights and the habitus generated by those rights. 19 As time passes, the physical appearance of the land is increasingly shaped in the image of the laws of the land as formalized by the thing. The physical land, thus -scaped, becomes an expression of the nature, state, or constitution of the land as the embodiment of a res publica or commonwealth. The law, then, does not just lie upon the land; it shapes the land, and that shape will in turn have an effect upon the law. The creation of dykes under the customary law of a Friesland Landschaft polity will thus build the land in a concrete way. The consequent dependency of the Landschaft commonwealth upon those dykes will in turn shape that community, its customs and laws, and can lead to the writing down of its by-laws and the institutionalization of the power of the bodies that manage the dykes and use the water. [START_REF] Dowdall | The word ''state[END_REF] This will, again, influence the future shaping of the land. The landscape geographer may, then, study the land as thus shaped; but the goal from this perspective, should be not simply to comprehend the land as a physical thing, but rather to comprehend the more abstract -ship of the land, its substantive nature, state or constitution as a polity interacting with its place. 21 The perspective of graphic representation: this is not a pipe landscape ''It is well known'', Denis Cosgrove tells us, ''that in Europe the concept of landscape and the words for it in both Romance and Germanic languages emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery.'' 22 It is certainly true that the concept of landscape as scenery emerged at this time, even if the older political meaning of landscape pre-dated the pictorial meaning. Daniels and Cosgrove also argue that landscape is ''a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing or symbolising surroundings''. 23 While this is not untrue, the Belgian surrealist painter Rene ´Magritte provides a key to understanding just why the full meaning of landscape should not be defined simply as a form of representation, an image or picture, and why that picture is not simply a symbolic representation of ''surroundings''.

Magritte's most famous artwork might well be his 1929 painting of a pipe with the text written on the canvas, ''This is not a pipe''. The painting is entitled The treason of images. The image is treasonous because it is not a pipe, even if it looks like a pipe. The picture is, in fact, a representation of a pipe -to be more precise, it is a representation of the idea of a pipe -an ideal, archetypal pipe, as Michel Foucault points out in a book on various versions of this painting. [START_REF] Foucault | Dette er ikke en pibe[END_REF] This point is brought out in a version of the painting in which the image of the pipe, and the text that tells us that this is not a pipe, is placed upon the image of a canvas lying on an easel (Figure 1). Above the easel another image of the same pipe floats freely in space like an idea in a cartoon. By the same logic, it would be appropriate to write, ''This is not a landscape'' on a landscape painting, because it is not a landscape tout court, and as an artwork it need not simply be a symbolic representation of something concrete (like ''surroundings''). It is likely to represent, rather, an abstract idea of the nature, state or constitution of the land as concretized and objectified through visual reference to surroundings. A pastoral landscape painting thus uses visual reference to grazing land to create an image of the natural human fellowship represented by the pastoral ideal in the iconography of classical antiquity and Christianity. [START_REF] Olwig | Nature's ideological landscape: a literary and geographic perspective on its development and preservation on Denmark's Jutland Heath[END_REF] The artwork, however, represents this symbolic ideal not just in its subject matter but also in its form and structure.

In another artwork by Magritte, Where Euclid walked (Figure 2), we see an easel in a room upon which stands a painting of an urban landscape. The same landscape, which is the subject of the painting on the easel, is simultaneously visible through a window in the room in which the painting stands. The painting is positioned in such a way that the representation on the canvas overlaps the scene viewed through the window, so that one blends into the other. In this case Magritte's artwork seems to be making the point that both the landscape on the easel and the landscape seen from the window represented in the painting are (like the pipe) not landscapes, but representations of landscape. The painting is not just a representation of a landscape however; it is the symbolic representation of the idea of landscape as an expression of an ideal geometric archetype. The painting has a subtext, which reads 'Where Euclid walked', and if we look closely we see that the tower of a building has the same Euclidean shape as the boulevard that stretches from the window out to the horizon. The painting is thus not just a representation of landscape, but a representation of the way a perspective representation of landscape is generated through the use of Euclidian geometry as framed by a square window.

Art historians will know that Magritte's window cannot be just any window, but must be the famous window described in Leon Battista Alberti's Renaissance classic On Painting, which provided the first written instruction on the geometric laws of perspective drawing. [START_REF] Alberti | On painting[END_REF] Alberti was, among other things, a cartographer, and there is much to indicate that the techniques of perspective drawing were extrapolated from the sciences of surveying and cartography -the landscape drawing is thus basically a map projected from an oblique angle, rather than from the top down. [START_REF] Cosgrove | The geometry of landscape: practical and speculative arts in sixteenth-century Venetian land territories[END_REF] Central to Alberti's construction of the perspective illusion was the frame: ''I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint.'' [START_REF] Alberti | [END_REF] The quadratic frame of the painting is thus not simply a parergon, an ornamental accessory or embellishment. It provides the framework for the lines of perspective, in the process creating, as Jacques Derrida has shown, the means by which the work of art is set apart, as representation, from the world that it presents. [START_REF] Derrida | The truth in painting[END_REF] Alberti was not just a cartographer; he was also a painter and architect (like his friend Fillippo Brunelleschi, from whom he learnt the technique of perspective drawing), and he was deeply concerned with the importance of geometry. ''It would please me'', he wrote, ''if the painter were as learned as possible in all the liberal arts, but first of all I desire that he know geometry.'' [START_REF] Alberti | On painting[END_REF] Geometry, to the neo-Platonists of Renaissance Italy, provided a means of expressing the archetypal Platonic ideas. ''For Plato,'' the art historian E. H. Gombrich writes, ''the universal is the idea, the perfect pattern of the tree exists somewhere in a place beyond the heavens, or, to use the technical term, in the intelligible world.'' He continues:

Individual trees or horses or men, such as the painter may encounter in real life, are only imperfect copies of those eternal patterns . . . It was on these grounds that Plato himself denied art its validity, for what value can there be in copying an imperfect copy of the idea? But on the same grounds, Neoplatonism tried to assign to art a new place that was eagerly seized upon by the emerging academies. It is just the point, they argued, that the painter, unlike ordinary mortals, is a person endowed with the divine gift of perceiving, not the imperfect and shifting world of individuals, but the external patterns themselves. He must purify the world of matter, erase its flaws, and approximate it to the idea. He is aided in this by the knowledge of the laws of beauty, which are those of harmonious simple geometrical relations, and by the study of those antiques that already represent reality 'idealized', i.e. approximated to the Platonic idea. [START_REF] Gombrich | Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation[END_REF] According to the literary theorist J. Hillis Miller, the word 'idea' comes from the Greek idein, to see. An idea was a visual image, the image something made on our eyes and therefore on our power of seeing . . . But for Plato, the priority of things over its idea was reversed. The idea came to be 'seen' (in the sense of 'conceived') as the origin of the thing, its archetype or celestial model, therefore as invisible. [START_REF] Miller | Topographies[END_REF] The invisible lines of perspective that structured the perspective drawing of an artwork, or the painted backdrop of stage scenery, which focused upon the eye of the beholder, could thus be seen to represent abstract Platonic ideas, and ideals. [START_REF] Cosgrove | Platonism and practicality: hydrology, engineering and landscape in sixteenth century Venice[END_REF] They thereby gave order and meaning to the image of the material world represented on the surface of a painting -perspective painting thus represented a Platonic perspective on the land. [START_REF] Corner | Eidetic operations and new landscapes[END_REF] The material objectification of a Christian version of this ideal is made manifest, for example, in the popular Italian Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, in which the idea of the incarnation of the godhead in the material body of Christ as an earthly being is depicted in scenes where the announcing archangel and Mary frame a space in which the eye is drawn out into the material world by invisible geometric lines of perspective that penetrate and structure an idealized pastoral nature. Seeing was believing.

Perspective scenery came to play an important role in an elite form of theatre that emerged in the Renaissance, the masque, with evident reference to the Greek theatrical use of masks in prosopopeia, ''meaning the ascription of a voice or a face to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead''. [START_REF] Miller | I am indebted to Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen[END_REF] The mask, as used in Greek theatre, or in medieval seasonal rituals such as carnival or theatre, was worn by individual performers who interacted with a surrounding public. [START_REF] Bakhtin | Rabelais and his world[END_REF] The masque performed in the new Renaissance perspectivistic theatre, framed by the proscenium arch, did not necessarily require the individual actors to wear masks, however, because the entire stage functioned as a mask for the representation of the landscape of the state. 37 The mask, when expressed in perspective scenery, provided a means of representing to the eye a visualization of the invisible -and hence absent -idea of the state. As the French philosopher Re ´gis Debray remarked, because nobody has ever either seen or heard a state, a state must, at any price, make itself visible and let itself be heard: ''It is the theatre of the state which creates the state, just as the monument creates memory.'' [START_REF] Debray | L'e´tat se´ducteur: les re´volutions me´diologiques du pouvoir (Mesnil-sur-l'Estre[END_REF] The architect of the stage and its scenery thus emulated the supreme architect (God) in creating the theatre of state, through which the monarch, as head of state, speaks through the masks of those who work and speak for the state.

In the Renaissance masque the land as polity is reified as the material scenic groundwork upon which the edifice of the state as an absolutist national unity is built, and the parliament is marginalized, if not abolished. Land becomes one with the physical property of the state, and with those who serve its political estate and hold a share in that property. Landscape as scenery thus provides a means of masking and envisioning the land as a national territorial unity, its boundaries (rather than its parliament) defining its state. 39 The landscape scene, however, both objectifies the abstract ideas behind the state and simultaneously masks them behind the aesthetic form of the ideal national image it presents to the public. In this way ideas can become ideology, in the sense of false consciousness. Thus, when such landscape representations are conflated with the object represented (''This is a pipe landscape'') the abstract and essential nature, state or constitution of the land, symbolized in the representation, becomes reified as scenery, giving birth to essentialism, and to the ideologized landscape. A staged landscape scene might thus signal an ideal national peace and harmony, but it may also conceal the oppression of an extremely hierarchical society under the supervision of a surveillant state. It becomes even more difficult to penetrate the mask when these staged representations of an ideal landscape are used to model the transformation of actual physical environments outside the theatre, as was the case with British landscape gardens. [START_REF] Barrell | The dark side of the landscape: the rural poor in English painting 1730-1840[END_REF]

Enclosing landscape

Perspective landscape representation, and the cartographic techniques upon which it was based, not only provided a means of demarcating the land of the Renaissance state in terms of its physical property. It also provided a means of subdividing that land into smaller properties under the control of a propertied class or estate. The art historian Samuel Edgerton argues that the use of surveying and maps to demarcate geometrically measurable parcels of private property fitted in well with the growing mercantile economy of the age, as did the use of the same techniques to visualize and objectify the land as scenery. [START_REF] Edgerton | The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective[END_REF] In such an economy, the abstraction of money reduced the exchange value of goods to the measure of a monetary-economic common denominator, measured according to the physical common denominator of an abstract unit of weight or space (as in the case of land) which was quite different from the equivalency of use values that characterized barter. The continuing erosion of medieval strictures against the alienation and sale of land made it possible, in practice, to transform land into property, even if this violated mores sanctioned by ancient custom. [START_REF] Bloch | Feudal society[END_REF] Cosgrove's work on the relationship between the emerging graphic techniques of landscape representation and cartography and the transformation of the Venetian terra firma is illustrative of the early connection between the origins of the idea of landscape as scenery and the desire to enclose and transform land as property. [START_REF] Cosgrove | The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy[END_REF] This geometric ideal, furthermore, continued to inform the ideology of enclosure. For the thinkers of the Enlightenment, writes Basil Willey, ''The laws of nature are the laws of reason; they are always and everywhere the same, and like the axioms of mathematics they have only to be presented in order to be acknowledged as just and right by all men.'' The vision of an ideal state of nature constituted by these laws was used in the eighteenth century ''as a means whereby the new ruling classes could vindicate, against the surviving restraints of the old feudal and ecclesiastical order, their cherished rights of individual freedom and of property''. [START_REF] Willey | The eighteenth century background[END_REF] One consequence of enclosure was that land that might previously have been held in common was alienated from the commoners, becoming something that belonged to individuals as property over which the owner had exclusive rights. The transformation of land into private property was also alienating in the psychological and social sense, particularly for the poor, whose rights in common land disappeared when that land was enclosed. This not only reduced their resource base, leaving them much more dependent upon the property owners, it also estranged them from their sense of having a place in the land as a polity. This is well illustrated in John Barrell's classic study of the relation between enclosure, the idea of landscape as scenery, and the estrangement and madness experienced by the early nineteenth-century English agricultural labourer and poet John Clare. [START_REF] Barrell | The idea of landscape and the sense of place[END_REF] In Clare's day, the land was not merely transformed into private property, to be exploited for agricultural ''improvement,''; it was also transformed into vast pastoral pleasure parks, ideologically shaped to resemble an idealized commons, while, at the same time obliterating ''real'' (in law) working commons. [START_REF] Bermingham | Landscape and ideology: the English rustic tradition[END_REF] In this way the representation of ideas of the ideal nature of the land in landscape art and gardening, in the Renaissance Italian tradition, creates an ideological landscape which is doubly alienating to those, like Clare, whose lives are attached to the working pastoral landscape. The social reality defined by shared rights in land is here transformed into private realty and its accompanying scenic landscape backdrop. ''Land'' and ''place'' became equated with ''propriety'' -meaning in seventeenth-century English both property and knowing one's place.' [START_REF] Turner | The politics of landscape: rural scenery and society in English poetry 1630-1660[END_REF] Whereas the term estate had once referred to one's place in the polity, landed property itself now became known as an estate, the seat of one's status in the countryside and nation; one's place in the country was thus effec-tively defined in terms of the possession of a country place. 48 Those to whom property did not belong thus tended to be disenfranchised as citizens, as with regard (for example) to participation in representative legal bodies. They were thereby largely estranged from the democratizing process that swept through nineteenth-century Europe, and excluded from the sense of identity engendered by participation in this process. The solution for many workers was to seek to reclaim their rights in the land.

Representing commons landscapes as public parks

Long after enclosure, the idea of common land tended to carry symbolic meanings that drew upon earlier notions of shared resources and regulatory regimes expressing participatory forms of governance rooted in custom. Examples of this kind abound in Western society. In Copenhagen, as in many European cities, the workers active in the labour movement parade through the streets on the first of May. Many bear budding branches reminiscent of folk rites of spring, and all finally congregate at a park called 'The Commons Park' (Faelledparken) (Figure 3). In the late nineteenth century, when the labour movement began, this place was not the manicured park that it is today, but a shaggy commons, and it is likely that many of the workers, fresh from the countryside, would have had memories of socially levelling, carnivalesque rural spring festivities held on a local commons. [START_REF] Bakhtin | On the levelling practices associated with carnival[END_REF] Initially, government troops were mobilized to disperse the workers, and the latter had to fight to win the right to meet on the commons. [START_REF] Oakley | A short history of Denmark[END_REF] The British agitation for access to the country, which took place during the first decades of the twentieth century, was often spearheaded by leaders of the labour movement who expounded on the working class's unjust loss of rural rights in the land to workers who may well have known rural life first-hand. An example of this was the famous 1932 mass trespass of the Kinder Scout moorlands adjacent to the village of Hayfield, organized by the Manchester Area committee of the British Workers' Sports Federation. The high point of the trespass occurred when its secretary, Benny Rothman, climbed up on a ledge and made a rousing speech outlining ''the history of the injustice of enclosures, which had stolen Common Land from the people'' (Figure 4). [START_REF] Rothman | The 1932 Kinder trespass[END_REF] After the trespass Rothman was arrested; the court, it turned out, did not share his beliefs concerning ''the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times'', and he was sentenced to four months in jail. 52 The Kinder Scout trespass set a precedent for a series of demonstrations and trespasses in the same year, such as the demonstration at Winnats Pass, Castleton, which was held on 26 June and reportedly attracted 10 000 ramblers, and a trespass along Stage Edge on 16 October, which was broken up by mounted police and foot patrols with Alsatian dogs. 53 This movement countered contemporaneous right-wing 'back to the land' movements with a nationalist cast, for which the issue was blood and soil rather than class. [START_REF] Bramwell | Ecology in the 20 th century: a history[END_REF] The mass trespasses led by the leaders of the labour movement were a deliberate attempt to regain what was believed to be ancient customary rights of commons. This movement was as much about enfranchisement in a country long dominated by the propertied classes as it was about the desire for physical exercise on often cold, windy, damp and soggy moorlands. This movement, though controversial, mobilized a political clout which was to achieve the establishment of national parks in Britain. [START_REF] Darby | Landscape and identity: geographies of nation and class in England[END_REF] The movement, however, was broader than this, and it also included less radical organizations, such as Lord Eversley's Commons, Forests and Footpaths Society (now known as the Open Spaces Society), which were able to effectively use English common law to argue for the preservation of common land as parks, particularly in urban areas. [START_REF] Clayden | Our common land: the law and history of commons and village greens (Henley-on-Thames[END_REF] A contemporary visitor to many of England's city parks is likely to forget that these places were once working commons; but the idea that cities and nations ought to have shared landscapes, to which the larger citizenry has rights of access, springs from a long heritage of ideas rooted in shared rights to common land. A park of this kind is a far cry from the private landscape parks created by estate owners on what was often enclosed common land.

The landscape of alienation

Alienation has here been discussed in terms of its substantive historical meaning: the transferral of ownership of rights in the land=property, and the loss of rights which FIGURE 3 Scene from May 1 demonstration on the Copenhagen commons. The sign reads 'Take the grass roots seriously', reflecting the symbolic importance of the level swathe of leaves of grass that constitutes the commons. Unfortunately, this symbolic act of demonstrating on the green is a bit hard on its symbolic referent, the actual grass of the commons, which is being trampled into the mud. (Photograph by author.) effectively makes one an alien, or foreigner, in the land. Alienation, however, is also a philosophical concept, with implications for the analysis of the historical role of landscape representation. Alienation is a vital theme in the tradition of the early nineteenth-century idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in which the material being of humankind is seen to be foreign (or alien) to the ideal natural realm of pure ideas; and a century later it was revived again as a central philosophical concept. [START_REF] Lefebvre | Marx's theory of alienation[END_REF] I will largely take my point of departure in the influential work of the literary scholar and philosopher Georg Luk a acs, who helped spark the renewed twentiethcentury interest in alienation, and whose ideas are of clear relevance to the analysis of landscape presented here.

Alienation is implied in Platonism, where the ideal realm is identified with the archetypal geometric forms linked to astronomy and the elevated utopian nature of the heavens. The Christian neo-Platonist artists of the Italian Renaissance brought this realm down to earth by using geometry as an invisible framework through which to create a scenic objective space in which the ideal is made visible by the lines of perspective focusing on the eye. Visual space distances the viewer from the ideal scene, while simultaneously creating an image of a tantalizingly objective utopian ideal. It was this utopian expression of the ideal nature, state or constitution of the land that Renaissance architects sought to realize in their geometric city plans, and in their mapping and landscaping of the countryside into regular geometric parcels. Though the use of cartography to survey the land as alienable property is identifiable with the new mercantile spirit of the Renaissance city, it also has a long idealistic heritage. This is because the alienation of land was initially encouraged by the Church, the keeper of Roman legal tradition, with its concept of possessio in relation to land as property. [START_REF] Bloch | [END_REF] The alienation of land, though in violation of custom, provided a means of facilitating the transferral of the possession of land to the Church as a gift to an unworldly God, thereby providing a means to buy entrance to the heavenly realm and an exit from the material world and body. The alienation of land thus provided a means of countering alienation from God, one of the earliest uses of the word alienation. 59 The dialectical process whereby the painting of landscape scenery distances the viewer from the natural, while simultaneously making possible the perception of the land as nature, is well described in a passage from George Luk a acs' History and class consciousness, which draws its inspiration from an unnamed work by the philosopher Ernst Bloch:

When nature becomes landscape -e.g. in contrast to the peasant's unconscious living within nature -the artist's unmediated experience of the landscape (which has of course only achieved this immediacy after undergoing a whole series of mediations) presupposes a distance (spatial in this case) between the observer and the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all. If he were to attempt to integrate himself and the nature immediately surrounding him in space within ''nature-seen-as-landscape'', without modifying his aesthetic contemplative immediacy, it would then at once become apparent that landscape only starts to become landscape at a definite (though of course variable) distance from the observer and that only as an observer set apart in space can he relate to nature in terms of landscape at all. [START_REF] Luk | History and class consciousness[END_REF] The objectified representation of landscape achieved by the artist is dependent, in Luk a acs' view, upon the alienating effect of distance. Luk a acs perceives such alienation as a historically positive force in the philosophical tradition of Hegel. In this tradition the subject-object unity of (in this case) the peasant's unconscious living within nature is replaced by an antithetical distancing, through which the nature of the land is separated and alienated from the perceiving subject. It is through this process that the perceiving subject becomes aware of its nature as a subject, and thereby is gradually able to establish its ideal human nature as a reflective thinking being. The historical result of this process is thus the reversal of the original situation in which there is a subject-object unity, dominated by an unconscious living within nature. At the end of this dialectical process alienation is abolished, and there is ''the return of selfconsciousness to itself, thus realizing the identical subject object''. [START_REF]On Luk a acs' dialectic, see I. Me ´sz a aros, Luk a acs' concept of dialectic[END_REF] In History and class consciousness Luk a acs sought, in the fashion of the young Marx, to 'stand Hegel on his feet' not by emphasizing the realm of the mind, as with Hegel, but by focusing on the sociohistorical process that ''culminates when the proletariat reaches this stage [i.e. the return of self-consciousness to itself] in its class consciousness''. 62 History and class consciousness, first published in 1922, influenced many Marxists, while helping to stimulate a more general revival of philosophical interest in alienation that involved a variety of philosophies, that Luk a acs himself questioned, including the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. The philosophical discourse on alienation has subsequently had an important impact on the approach to landscape in geography, ranging from the phenomenology-inspired insider-outsider dialectic explored by Edward Relph to the Marxist analysis of the duplicity of landscape in a classic article by Stephen Daniels. [START_REF] Daniels | Marxism, culture and the duplicity of landscape[END_REF] Daniels' article in turn is inspired by a passage in a novel called Border country by Raymond Williams, an admirer of Luk a acs. In the novel the central figure, who resembles Williams himself, returns home after spending years in London to discover that the place of his childhood has become, for him, a landscape scene of a living world from which he has become alienated. This is described in a passage which reads as if it could have been inspired by Luk a acs' statement on landscape quoted above:

It was one thing to carry its image in his mind, as he did, everywhere, never a day passing but he closed his eyes and saw it again, his only landscape. But it was different to stand and look at the reality. It was not less beautiful; every detail of the land came up with its old excitement. But it was not still, as the image had been. It was no longer a landscape or a view, but a valley that people were using. He realized as he watched, what had happened in going away. The valley as landscape had been taken, but its work forgotten. The visitor sees beauty: the inhabitant a place where he works and has friends. Far away, closing his eyes, he had been seeing this valley, but as a visitor sees it, as the guide book sees it: this valley, in which he had lived more than half his life. [START_REF] Williams | The temporality of landscape[END_REF] The role of landscape representation in objectifying and distancing people from their environment is alienating when seen from both the Hegelian and the Luk a acsian perspectives; and in both cases alienation helps liberate (albeit in different ways) the subject from a state of subject-object identity. This dialectic, in either case, has the negation of alienation as the teleological movement of history. For Hegel and Luk a acs this negation is progressivist, its ideal lying in a future ''return of self-consciousness to itself''. Such a dialectic, however, can also lead to an idealization of the primitive condition of subject-object identity that precedes alienation. Tim Ingold, whose notion of landscape is rooted in archaeological and anthropological study, fits this latter mould. He criticizes the insider-outsider dualism prompted by the understanding of landscape as representation, and rejects the very ''distinction between inner and outer worlds -respectively of mind and matter, meaning and substance''. For him the experience of landscape effectively abolishes alienation because 'as the familiar domain of our dwelling', landscape ''is with us not against us, just as we are part of it''. 65 Ingold would thus reverse the Hegelian historical dialectic, by returning us to the identical subject-object relation expressed by the peasant's unconscious living within nature in the Heideggerian mould (albeit minus Heidegger's above-mentioned concern with the res publica). 66 There is now a growing literature on the phenomenology of landscape inspired by Ingold and Heidegger. [START_REF] Tilley | A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and movements[END_REF] The phenomenological literature on alienation that History and Class Consciousness helped inspire -whether or not Luk a acs himself approved -is clearly still very much with us. For this reason it is interesting to examine Luk a acs' later critique of his own use of the concept of alienation in the 1967 preface to a new 1968 German edition of History and class consciousness -which in turn formed the basis for the English translation used here.

Alienation revisited

Luk a acs, anno 1967, rejected his early interpretation of alienation within a Hegelian frame: the proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is no materialist consummation that overcomes the constructions of idealism. It is rather an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel, it is an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality and thus attempts objectively to surpass the Master himself. 68 Luk a acs argues that ''even when the content of knowledge is referred back to the knowing subject, this does not mean that the act of cognition is thereby freed of its alienated nature''. 69 Such an idea belongs rightfully to the realm of a mystical romanticism or, in his own case, to his youthful ''messianic utopianism''. 70 And he is equally critical of existential phenomenology's sublimation of ''a critique of society into a purely philosophical problem, i.e. to convert an essentially social alienation into an eternal ''condition humaine'''. 71 ''Objectification'', Luk a acs concludes some 45 years after first publishing History and class consciousness, is a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bear in mind that every externalization of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men. 72 This means that even peasants and herders objectify and reflect on the land as landscape, and thus do not exist in an ''unconscious living within nature''. Alienation comes about not through objectification in and of itself, but through the ''repressive social conditions'' (which can derive from objectification) that, according to Luk a acs, generate ''the subjective marks of an internal alienation. 73 Since objectification must be distinguished from alienation, it therefore must also be distinguished from the related notion of reification, and hence the fetishization of land, and other things, as commodities. [START_REF] Lefebvre | Luk a acs, History and class consciousness[END_REF] As Luk a acs puts it, citing Marx, private property alienates not only the individuality of men, but also of things. The ground and the earth have nothing to do with profit. . .[Profit is] a quality which the ground can lose without losing any of its inherent qualities such as its fertility. 75 This has implications for the understanding of alienation in its literal sense, as related to the alienation of land. When the land is commodified as property and landscape scenery, it is reduced to a physical thing, material land (reification literally means 'thingification'), and is estranged from its substantive social meaning, the land of a people as res publica. ''Substantive'', as noted earlier, is used here to mean real rather than apparent, belonging to the substance of a thing as used in the legal sense of creating and defining rights and duties. 76 In this sense the real is defined in terms of the things in law, realis, which determine what is real in a social and political context. Alienation means, in this context, the loss of the real through the reification of the rights in land that are the foundation of the res publica. Power then springs from the statutory right of property as a thing, rather than from the customary right of use that defines things in law, and thus the real. In this way the meaning of the real is reified, and the concept of the thing, as it defines the res publica, is itself thereby reified and alienated.

Conclusion

It is useful, following Luk a acs, to distinguish alienation from objectification as it occurs through representation. The transformation of common land into private property through enclosure is a process (as John Barrell has shown with reference to the poetry of John Clare) which can generate the subjective marks of an internal alienation. 77 For Barrell's Clare, as for Marx (as quoted above), ''private property alienates not only the individuality of men, but also of things''. Clare objectifies the land through his practice of exercising his customary rights to the commons, and through his representation, and hence objectification, of that land in his poetry. This, however, is not the source of his alienation (though it may be fuelled by his alienation). The source of his alienation is the loss, shared by many other commoners, of rights in the commons through its enclosure as private property, and its reification as the scenic backdrop, and ideological mask, for the doings of the propertied class.

Enclosure, when viewed as a progressive process by which rural workers, exiled to city factories, eventually become alienated to the inevitable point at which they can reach the ideal stage of ''the return of self-consciousness to itself '', is an example of ''imperial landscape''. 78 The vision of the imperial landscape has been a driving force in the dialectical ideology of a ''progressive'' modernity that has sought, throughout the world, to reduce the living and changing social and legal force of custom to picturesque tradition and costume, and thereafter obliterate it, often with disastrous social and ecological consequences. [START_REF] Scott | Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed[END_REF] Enclosure thus often went hand in hand with the construction of parks which transformed working commons (shaped by practice and custom) into ideal pastoral landscape scenes, while literally alienating the commoners from the land. In this way the substantive landscape, to which people become attached through working practice, is reduced to an esthetic and edifying artwork, legitimating the surveyed and planned space of the propertied. [START_REF] Olwig | Landscape, place and the state of progress[END_REF] Imperial landscape is a creature of the dialectical ideology that posits alienation as the driving force of a particular notion of progress that justifies the fate of people like Clare by making social and material loss the source of economic and spiritual liberation. But workers are also actors in their own social history, and they need not accept such alienation as the prerequisite of progress.

A later generation of British labourers eventually won back some of their rights of access to the commons by exercising their perceived customary rights in trespassing upon the land of property owners. In the process of doing this they no doubt gained insight into their abilities to act as the subjects of their own destiny as members of the labour movement -but this was not in fulfilment of historical teleology of the Hegelian or utopian sort. The ramblers' movement, and the concomitant establishment of national parks, has been socially empowering rather than alienating, down-to-earth and ''topian'', rather than utopian. 81 There is no doubt that the landscape duality and ''duplicity'', captured by Magritte, Daniels and Williams, is vital. Visual landscape representation does distance the viewer from the objective scene created, and it can facilitate a ''treasonous'' confusion between the landscape represented in the visual image, the environment to which it refers, and the ideas it concretizes. But this objectifying distancing is not alienating in and of itself. With objectification, as Luk a acs points out, ''we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men''. Alienation enters the scene because landscape is not simply scenery; it is also a substantive political landscape. In Williams's case, it is significant that the figure in the novel who experiences the alienation from the working land represented by landscape scenery is a person who, like Williams himself, has moved to England from the ''border country'' of his native Wales, a country which has been socially and politically subjugated to England for centuries. Landscape, in the substantive sense, is not just an idealized cultural image. It is also an arena for labour, social practice and speech and text, in which every externalization of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification of human thoughts and feelings -a political landscape. The political or artistic representation of the abstract nature, state or constitution(-ship) of the land, as well as the reflexive critique of such representation, is not fundamentally alienating, but empowering, as it can facilitate an understanding of the social processes by which the land has been shaped, and can be shaped. 82

Notes

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Dette er ikke en pibe (This is not a pipe) (1928) (later version), by Rene ´Magritte (# Rene ´Magritte=BONO, Oslo 2003.)

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Where Euclid walked by Rene ´Magritte, 1965 (# Photothe `que R. Magritte -ADAGP, Paris, 2004.)

FIGURE 4

 4 FIGURE 4 Scene of the 1932 'Kinder trespass', in which labourers demonstrated for the right of access to the English open countryside. (Photograph by author.)

S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, 'Introduction: iconography and landscape', in D. Cosgrove and