Table Mountain as a Landscape

Table Mountain is, first and foremost, a landmark around which we orientate ourselves. Secondly, it is a background usually visible from where we live or work. Thirdly, it is a place we associate with home. Fourthly, and for us most importantly, it is a landscape. For our purposes a landscape is an object, prospect and subject.

Table Mountain - as a physical object in nature - is merely the northern escarpment of Cabo Promontorio, a sea-bound mountain chain running the full length of the Cape Peninsula from Table Bay to Cape Point, and consisting of sedimentary sandstone layers resting on an older granite base.

Table Mountain - as a prospect seen from the bay - is most easily recognized in profile with the forward or northern table flanked by Devil's Peak and Lion's Head, and made famous through countless reproductions in early travel journals and recent tourist postcards.

Table Mountain - as a subject in art or literature - evokes 'something that is already a representation in its own right'. As Greg Meinig (1979) has shown, there is always a person present in front of each landscape. For him a landscape is always inclusive of man and nature, of the beholder and the beheld.

Each landscape evokes some prior view of nature and, more significantly, recalls previous representations of itself. Each image of the mountain is therefore related to every other depiction of the mountain and should not be seen in terms of what it alone signifies, but also in relation to what other images signify that it does not.

Each depiction of Table Mountain is culturally bound and thus reveals more about the artist than it does about the landscape itself. Every depiction of the landscape is a subjective act: there is no right or wrong way of showing the mountain, no neutral naturalism, nor any objective 'truth' behind a landscape - be it drawn, painted, or even photographed. Furthermore, there is no common meaning or correct framework for interpreting a cultural landscape such as Table Mountain. Instead, each and every representation adds something new to what we know about the mountain and, much more significantly, contributes to our understanding of the ever changing socio-political relations at the Cape.

Table Mountain and the New Dawn
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