29.3.11

Place is always being born


I finally found a text that really captures the intention of my project.

Place is always being born. A landfill or an abandoned nuclear test site may appear to be at the ecological end of the line, but both are filled with latent possibilities for sustainability and transcendent function. 
 Rozelle, L. RESURVEYING DELILLO'S "WHITE SPACE ON MAP": LIMINALITY AND COMMUNITAS IN UNDERWORLD Studies in the NovelWinter2010, Vol. 42 Issue 4, p443-452

In the Don DeLillo book Underworld, the protagonist comes at one point upon a scene of B52 bombers reworked by an artist as part of an installation. Rozelle describes this in terms of landscape as a liminal space.

'Standing on a ledge to see a landscape art instillation(sic), Nick Shay is astonished by the mass of abandoned military aircraft "arranged in eight staggered ranks" and painted in "[s]weeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light" (83). In this landscape painting that uses "the landscape itself" (70), colors "did not simply draw down power from the sky or lift it from the landforms around us....They pushed and pulled" (83). This seminal moment when vision of terrain, sky, and artwork becomes unfixed is fundamental to my study of liminality because it enables Nick "to see a thing as something else" (64).What was once military waste is now art, and what once had the capacity to drop atomic bombs now offers aesthetic catharsis...Liminality in this instance enables place to defy designation as it rejects normalization and colonization narratives.'
Rozelle, L. RESURVEYING DELILLO'S "WHITE SPACE ON MAP": LIMINALITY AND COMMUNITAS IN UNDERWORLD Studies in the NovelWinter2010, Vol. 42 Issue 4, p443-452


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