Nature as Artifice

In the eyes of the world, the image of the Dutch landscape has boon shape-id by the history of painting. Internationally acclaimed artists like Brueghel and Ruisdael, and later Van Gogh and the early Mondrian created an image of a picturesque rural idyll that look root in the popular imagination. This is still the image of the Netherlands in mass-media and tourism.
Nature as Artifice shows a new and different approach in photography and video art to the landscape of the Netherlands. The eighteen artists presented here in effect replace that painterly vision with an up-front and sometimes confronting image of the Netherlands as the most artificial country in the world. Under the now familiar pressures of urbanization, globalization and the restructuring of the economy, as well as the need to keep the water at bay, the Dutch have extended the human control from the landscape to nature as a whole. This industrialized, urbanized, man-controlled and artificial landscape is the point of departure for the photographers and video artists whose work is shown in this book. They do not judge, but rather observe, analyze and register, and search for new beauty in their changed surroundings.