Avant-Garde and Status Quo Landscapes: How Do They Relate?

Abstract

The history of people in nature ranges from survival to conquest, control, and manipulation, and today's hubris. Avant-garde has symbolized all of these advances. Now it may be necessary to develop a new marriage: between avant-garde inspiration and environmental defense and reconstruction. Nature is ecological process, avant-garde is cultural process. We have outgrown old-fashioned distinctions between natural and unnatural or human landscapes. The avant-garde, like busy bees, is absorbed in the ongoing construction of the House of Human Culture. Landscape is still the constantly developing total product of the interaction of nature and society. Culture is the ongoing expression of that product in its most meaningful forms and terms. Now there is a rapidly emerging problem. The accumulating inspirations of avant-garde culture collide head-on with their interpretation and use by a free-market society. Up may suddenly reverse itself into down. This is perhaps the yin and yang of natural-historical growth and change. There is not just landscape and avant-garde—there is also the status quo, or even the status quo ante. The lasting meanings in landscape are not intrinsic to it; they are given to it by human interpretation or process. The landscape is the arena within which avant-garde concepts emerge, develop, and have an impact upon development. History is a record of competitive interaction between status quo and avant-garde forces.