The traditional view of nature in art is the landscape.
The modern
American landscape is the suburban lawn.
One cannot escape the judgment of one's neighbors,
if one does not observe the civic duties of lawn maintenance.
The front lawn is seen as a democratic and public space.
Nature
in this instance is on a leash and heavily groomed to
over-perfection. This American cultural phenomena reflects the desire
to
claim and conquer wild land. The new manifest destiny.
Any privileged person can stake out a plot for his/her own to define
private paradise for themselves,
but in compliance with neighborhood standards, of course.
"It
seems, in essence, natural-
so integral to the organizing assumptions
that the make up a culture that we who have learned to behave
within its systems of meaning can rarely,
and only with great effort,
recognize it at all."
"In
the context of American cultural history in general,
and in the realm of American art history in particular,
the term has come to cover a wide variety of meanings-
from John Brinkerhoff Jackson's definition of
' a
composition of man-made or man-modified spaces,'
to the art historian's notion of a painting in which nature is the primary
subject,
to the vague cliche by which social scientists refer to all that is
'out there.'"
-Peter Hales, "William Henry Jackson and the
Transformation of the American Landscape"