Podróż jako teoria widzenia : co się zdarzyło pewnego lata nad rzeką Wye.

Abstract

The text of the famous at the end of the 18th century travelogue written by William Gilpin entitled Observations on the River Wye served as the basis for considerations about the phenomenon of a landscape, the way of experiencing it by a man and a transformation into scenery being a record of a perceptive and esthetic experience of the world. The reading of the Gilpin's text shows that scenery is formed in the natural environment as a result of the intervention of a man, which consists in calling what is not seen. What appears as scenery is thus not a pure visual information, but a result of a careful, though perhaps an unconscious, process of composing. The rules of a visual composition being a domain of esthetics are directly invisible in our surroundings. A traveler becomes thus liberated from the hegemony of the destination point, becoming a pilgrim conscious of the art of his times. The truth of scenery is thus only partially rooted in the nature itself; to a large degree, it is a result of our dialogue with it. The art focuses our eye; it is a transition from a comprehension of being as a disordered travel to a fulfillment of being in the ordering element of memory. It is worth mentioning, however, that a conviction that art straightens the shortcomings of nature, being forced to take this task through the limits of the surface, which it manifests on, lies at the ground of thinking and painting of Gilpin.