Robert Hughes - American Visions - Episode 3 (part 1/5)

Episode three of the television series, "The Wilderness and the West", covering The US West, Manifest Destiny, and national identity.

Go here for a playlist of all the "American Visions" uploads: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DF4A4CCB9DB13FEF

"The new world has something better than ruins and history," it has natural beauty through which "God had writ the immensity of his plan right here in America."

Kaaterskill Falls and the Mountain House, Thomas Cole and the Catskills,

.....

And we therefore remain faithful to the inspiration of the savage mind when we recognize that, by an encounter it alone could have foreseen, the scientific
in its most modern form will have contributed to ligitimize the principles of savage thought and reistablish it in its rightful place.

---Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Savage Mind"

originally aired on US television in 1997

ROBERT HUGHES: Well, the idea that you redeem yourself from the sins of Europe; that you can leave the past behind, while at the same time bringing elements of culture, its cultural baggage with you, is very important to Americans. I mean, the Puritans thought that they could do it by, you know, by means of the religious revolution. Then when it became apparent that the--there was this immense field outside of the coastal settlement into which Americans, into which new Americans could move, which they could conquer, dominate, appropriate, and displace the original inhabitants of, there was this almost religious search for the image of landscape, you know, for the discovery of the image of God in the landscape, and, as it were, the appropriation of divine will into human will. This echoes through and through the paintings of the 19th century, and, you know, you might say that landscape painting is the great religious art form of America. And it became so really as early as the 1820's with Thomas Cole. The reason why the wilderness has always played such a vast part in the American imagination is not just because it was there. It's because the constructions that European Americans made of it.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Robert
• Hughes
• American
• Visions
• Art
• History
• Thomas
• Cole
• Catskills

[nujac321]

8:32 "...evolved into industrialized society"

As evidence by her manufactured clothing and jewelry.

[fluorogoat]

Well. Some people like trees.

[buckeyeinblack]

"and the life of this rock..." Don't kill the rocks! Whatever you do!!! Lol!

[carsanookdotcom]

"The new world has something better than ruins and history," it has natural beauty through which "God had writ the immensity of his plan right here in America."

American Vision

Posted by John K Lindgren

Carsanook, Bangkok

[maxamillianm]

Yeah talking and praying to god is completely normal? It is just as ridiculous.

[graphichic]

Screaming ninnies. Not a short distance from speaking in tongues. Freak show.