6.

The balance between the specific and general is what makes this place important. Perito Moreno is just like many other glaciers, except that it has a vantage point that sets it exactly perpendicular to the perspective of the visitor, empowering our gaze as if it were placed for us to stare at. It moves imperceptibly through the water and crawls up the hill before pulling back, and at one specific moment challenging the vagueness of its movement, it violently shatters.

Similarly, in representations of landscapes, we look through a specific window on the chaos of nature. Friedrich used fog to diffuse that specificity into a void, something that was pushed even further by J.M.W. Turner, which then opened the door for impressionism and finally abstraction. The etymology of the word landscape further reveals the dodgy parameters that it implies: it comes from the Middle Dutch (1100-1500) word landschap, which meant “region” or “tract of land”. When Dutch painters came to prominence around 1600, the word in English came to be known as a purely technical term for those types of paintings. The English word is not recorded as being used to describe physical landscapes before 1725, as if it took landscape painting itself to give us a sense of difference, to imbue features of the natural world with an inner knowledge and to make them objects of our gaze. Now we see the world in cinemascope, a format created to mimic the aspect ratio of our eyes.  

This weirdness about reality and artifice in relation to landscape also happens in the etymology of reality itself. It’s a word that came about in 1550 as a legal term that meant “fixed property”. Real estate. That’s where our concept of reality comes from, as if space didn’t exist before it was delineated. We may need these edges of definition, but I think it’s useful to remind myself that it’s all just an endless sum of textures; there are variations of densities.