Some quotes from here which I am going to contrast with this kind of work and then leave you with a question.

First, these remarks made in an account of Timothy Clark's Martin Heidegger, a text in Routledge's Critical Thinkers series. The remarks below are on Heidegger's big thesis about the world picture of modernity, wherein contemporary life is caught within the instrumentalist/technological mode of being:

If Plato is the beginning of Western thought, then that beginning, Heidegger says, is still with us. Indeed it is "before us" like a predestined future. We still see the world as an object of knowledge to be understood, manipulated and utilised. It is an anthropocentric attitude that has profound consequences. Heidegger claims it set us on course toward nihilism. Eventually, everything is geared towards selfish aims with no regard for the earth or the people in it. This seems to contradict our faith in progress. As while we celebrate humankind's progress in science, medicine, technology, culture, we also lament the sublime disasters that have interrupted it. Yet "interrupted" is one of those evidences of "self-evident" truths we adopt to avoid the possibility that these disasters were a necessary part of "progress".

"art [has] shrunk to only a medium of aesthetic pleasure, a distraction from the Real World. Heidegger says art died (and turned into aesthetics and business) because it was unable to preserve its "world-soliciting force". This means the work NOT as a re-presentation of the world but as the revelation, the disclosure, of that world in the first place. Heidegger detects such a disclosing force of Greek temples (see his famous essay "The Origin of the Work of Art").

My question is: why cannot we turn to the painters? For us in Australia it is the contemporary Aboriginal painters who make sense in terms of the Heideggerian problematic:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The Emily Wall: Oudkerk Exhibition, 1994, Acrylic on canvas

Is not this painting a mode of language that engages [nihilism] by enacting the possibility of other, non-appropriative ways of knowing to that of a technological mode of being? Should we not put into question Heidegger's notion that our alienation from nature is due to instrumental theoreticism, and that only poetry can redeem the situation?

We can ask: why only poetry? Is not this a very different representation of landscape as country?:

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Corkwood Dreaming, 1991, Acrylic on canvas

Is this not a "homecoming" to the earth as Heidegger saw it? Poetically man dwells upon this earth’, says Heidegger. Is that not Clifford Possum? Is not this painting of the earth? Is not Clifford Possum or Emily Kngwarreye dwelling poetically on their earth in a time of destitution? Existence for them means to dwell. Levinas says:

To dwell is not the simple fact of the anonymous reality of a being cast into existence as a stone one casts behind oneself; it is a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome.