Paysages variations

What part does man play in landsapes? Is there such a thing as an urban landscape? Can a landscape be "national"? This book reports on various round tables held at the contemporary art center of la Maréchalerie, and addresses these questions by comparing works by artists and theoriticians. Certain anecdotes are quite clarifying, such as a Californian company that makes millions by painting in green lawns that have gone yellow during the summer, or the Gulf countries that need to import sand to make their cement. But it also shows the concept of a landscape is not set, it is constantly renewed - recently with the idea of a "sound landscape" - and it has been globalized since a long time nows. Artist Karine Bonneval organises in a video lthe absurd accompaniement of a foreign plant like the Canadian ’vergerette’ while Gilles Clément develops his notion of a "third landscape" like a "third party". This eternal but disregarded reservoir – banks of highways, slanted fields, wastelands – all appear in his remarkable project, that of a garden on a cement slab on the submarine base of the port of Sainte-Nazaire.

• Paysages variations, directed by Manola Antonioli, Vincent Jacques and Alain Milon, éditions Loco, 2014, 176 p., €28.