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A free public lecture by Ian Wedde
Fulbright New Zealand and Penguin Books invite you to a free public lecture by 2006 Fulbright Travel Award recipient Ian Wedde. Ian will discuss his Fulbright experience in the US and launch his new novel The Viewing Platform. For some years Ian Wedde has been looking at how landscape viewing is used in nation building and national branding, how it produces cultural attitudes captured for example in the architectural concept of the 'picture window' and in New Zealand's '100% Pure' marketing campaign. Looking at wonderful views can be inspiring. It can also transform views into assets, generate cultural and ecological exploitation and make for dissociated consumers of commodified vistas. There are dozens of 'viewing platforms' between Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound alone, driven between at speed by coachloads of photo opportunity 'view tourists'. What are they seeing? Important corollaries to the New Zealand experience of landscape viewing and its commodifications as tourist attractions include the nineteenth century Hudson River School of painters in upstate New York and its Rocky Mountain and Western counterparts. These great American landscapes continue to be mined for national values and packaged as tourist experiences - including 'wilderness' experiences of hiking in national parks and scenic reserves. With assistance from Fulbright New Zealand in 2006, Wedde was able to extend his previous research into classic American landscapes and representations of them, on location and in museums and archives. Looking at the actual views, tramping in the iconic terrains, viewing the works of art by great nineteenth century American landscape artists, helped him to get a perspective on equivalent experiences in New Zealand.
His new satirical novel The Viewing Platform (Penguin Books) imagines a dysfunctional research team coming spectacularly to grief while researching New Zealand's tourist landscape attractions. The book incorporates Wedde's experience in Bangladesh, a country whose international image is (unfairly) characterised by natural catastrophes rather than natural wonders and whose national tourism agency, Parjatan, employs the breathtakingly unoptimistic slogan, "Get here before the tourists do." The novel and Wedde's Fulbright-assisted experiences of America's landscapes
draw on the same quest: they come together in this talk. "Lalon says,
fortunate are those who see," wrote the great Bengali Baul poet Lalon
Shah (1774-1890).
Download invitation as a PDF: ENDS Links:
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