Landscape as Weapon: Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal

Description

Once the playgrounds and raw material for the avant garde, abandoned places and things - decommissioned military sites, postindustrial spaces, contested and forgotten edgelands - are now just as likely to be seen as assets for entrepreneurs or connoisseurs of the authentically worn-out. This is the age of patina, where the material remains of times past - the fields and factories, test sites, back alleys, machines, and statues - are coveted, adored, mourned, and commemorated, as well as sometimes despised. Through an exploration of a wide range of recent film, photography, art, and writing about place, Landscape as Weapon argues that these abandoned sites are a critical arena for debate about the meaning of space and time under late capitalism.

John Beck is professor of modern literature and director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. His many books include Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature.

"How landscapes and their histories are depicted matters profoundly and it matters politically. . . . In this wonderfully wide-ranging critique, Beck challenges the easy packaging of landscape and its history as tourist 'heritage' sites, film locations, edgy ruins, or icons of national identity. Exploring pastoral landscapes, industrial sprawl, abandoned ruins, bunkers, and much more, Landscape as Weapon is an essential reminder that how we think of places and their pasts is pivotal to how we live now. Essential reading."--Stephen Graham, author of Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers "Beck's Landscape as Weapon is a tour de force of reflective writing that scrutinizes recent artistic, literary, and cultural negotiations with the infrastructural netherworlds and landscapes of late modernity. Developing his arguments with subtlety, criticality, and wit, Beck uses the claims made upon these spaces of contested memory and experience to skillfully build what amounts to a symptomatology of our contemporary historical imagination."--Mark Dorrian, professor and Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh