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Towards a Theory of Landscape Iconoclasm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2015

José Antonio González Zarandona
José Antonio González Zarandona*
Affiliation:
The University of Melbourne – Art History, Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

‘Landscape: the land escapes (1) when we try to seize it with our maps, satellites, geographic information systems and Street Views, land is what evades our surveillance (2) land is the terrain of escape.’ (Cubitt 2012)

‘Since the middle of the twentieth century, the claim that something is art does not imply what it might have meant at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was made out to be a hallmark of European high and bourgeois society.’ (Heyd 2012, 287)

The destruction of Indigenous rock art sites in the Pilbara district in Western Australia has become a natural sight within the mining landscape of the area. Whilst much of the destruction is explained as acts of vandalism and as a result of the industrial activities that are propelling the Australian economy, I claim that a new theory of iconoclasm is needed to explain fully this disastrous example of heritage conservation. Henceforth, in order to explain the destruction of the Murujuga/Burrup Peninsula petroglyphs, the largest archaeological site in the world, this paper develops the theory of landscape iconoclasm. This theory states that the destruction of Indigenous landscapes can be compared to the destruction of religious images, by analysing the inherent symbolic functions of iconoclasm, together with those of heritage, the better to elucidate the state of affairs in the Murujuga/Burrup Peninsula. Furthermore, by drawing from Aboriginal mythology and art-historical and anthropological theories, the theory of landscape iconoclasm is able to explain the destruction of archaeological sites within a framework that falls outside prevalent discourses of heritage.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 461 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2015 

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