Nature As Artifice. New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video

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. The 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.