Archives for December, 2011
Iain Baxter&’s Landscape of Information: In, Between, Over and Around
Posted: December 21, 2011The definition of a “thing” is effected by means of continuity and of correlations which have a certain differential independence of other “things”. That is to say, given a particular in one perspective, there will usually in a neighbouring perspective be a very similar particular, differing from the given particular, to the first order of small quantities, according to a law involving only the difference of position of the two perspectives in perspective space, and not any of the other “things” in the universe. It is this continuity and differential independence in the law of change as we pass from one perspective to another that defines the class of particulars which is to be called “one thing”.
─ Bertrand Russell (1915)
If I disregard the practical value of a science I do see a similarity between the scientific and the artistic activity. Both attempt to assemble from parts a whole which by itself is indistinct ─ in such a way that the resulting order creates distinctness and clarity.”
─ Albert Einstein (1964)
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First Proposition (Prospect):
One quart of white outdoor paint poured into a circular hole of one quart capacity. 1965.
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Second Proposition (Prospect):
Landscape identification, permanent location. 1968.
Photo made and location documented; it is reproduced on metal and placed back in landscape on post, at same height as camera took photo, and left permanently as record of the arrest of this particular time and position; landscape changes, photo remains; others can be taken at yearly intervals, same general site.
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Third Proposition (Prospect):
“No trespassing” parallelogram − laid out in large field with signs at corners and along each side − demarcating area as negative place. 1969.
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Fourth Proposition (Prospect):
BASICS. 1980.
[Proposal for a University of Lethbridge open-air site. Lethbridge, Alberta.]
Blue triangle (cylindrical, plastic),
6.09 m., height;
Yellow cube (triangular, wood),
4.57 m., height;
Red sphere (square, steel),
3.05 m., height.
“The cube, triangle and sphere constitute the basic building blocks of society which man discovered he could use to build a reality beyond his dreams.
“The materials used for BASICS describe an evolution from the most time honored wood; through the compounding of nature’s metal ores into the versatility of steel; to the modern synthesis which is the virtually indestructible plastic. … All these basic qualities have been mixed and interplayed in this sculpture. The 10-foot red sphere is constructed of square steel tubing. The 15-foot yellow cube is constructed of triangular wooden beams. The 20-foot blue triangle is constructed of cylindrical plastic. In concept the sculpture BASICS represents the structures of our universe that are at once deceptively simple yet represent unlimited potential. These same three forms, colors, and materials … will serve future generations in their quest for discovery.”
− Iain Baxter& (1980)
The Vegetative Universe opens like a
flower from the Earth’s center /
In which is Eternity. It expands
In stars to the Mundane Shell /
And there it meets Eternity again,
both within and without …
− William Blake (1804)
__________
In its translation from concept to context, Iain Baxter&’s landscape-related viewpoint is at once a projection of immanence and the generative source of new perspectival correlations ─ an orientation beyond stillness and motion.
David Bellman
December 2011
New Definitions of Nature: Language in the Landscape
Posted: December 14, 2011“Between the mine and the garbage dump runs the one-way street of modern industrial civilization, whose expansive growth victimizes an ever increasing number of lifelines in the ecological system.”
– Joseph Beuys
“The old dualistic notion that the interior and exterior forces of the world are segregated is perilous nonsense. There never was any dualism in nature.”
– Richard Neutra
In the first centuries of the past millennium, a pervasive European worldview supported the conviction that an original home for humankind had lain in a real, albeit extraordinary, garden – a site where the climate was always mild and the trees flowered continuously. In the Christian imagination, The Fall and the Expulsion were held responsible for differences between the seasons, and for the disordered world which lay between the frozen wastes to the North and the scorching deserts to the South; for the need to toil in the fields, for pain, for sorrow, and for death.
Writing in 1700, Matthew Prior (an English poet and diplomat whose country residence had been enhanced by a finely cultivated garden) articulates a harmonious, self-regarding appreciation of Nature (a generous force in relation to a benevolent Creator) when he declares:
GREAT MOTHER, let Me Once be able
To have a Garden, House, and Stable;
That I may read, and Ride, and Plant,
Superior to Desire, or Want;
And as Health fails, and Years increase,
Sit down, and thin, and die in Peace.
Being familiar with a recent history of closely controlled (aesthetically unwavering), formal garden schemes in Britain and continental Europe, Prior was acquainted with Charles Bridgeman, a landscapist who had helped to establish the earliest tradition of naturalist garden design. Bridgeman was commissioned to design the grounds of Prior’s residence (Down Hall, Essex), which he had purchased in 1720 (a year before his death).
From a long-established Christian perspective, it was impossible to separate reality from allegory in contemplating a Garden of Eden – and so it was not known for certain if the earthly paradise had been in fact swept away by the divine retribution of the abstract-real Flood from the time of Noah. In fifteenth century Europe it was generally assumed that an earthly paradise still existed – and in keeping with the spirit of then-current voyages of exploration and discovery, hopes ran high that the Garden of Eden (enigmatically preserved, contrary to the destructive, less expansive image of antediluvian force majeure) might be rediscovered. Christopher Columbus, for example, believed that he had identified its location in the New World, in 1492. The latitude of the Garden was in the southern hemisphere, just below the equator. He did not attempt to enter it, however, because this act would have required supernatural grace to do so.
Two centuries later, the French poet Saluste du Bartas was still discussing the woes of humanity in relation to original sin. Writing in 1700 (from a standpoint that warrants comparison with Mathew Prior’s overconfident self-centredness) he avers:
Making all Natures Children turn his foes,
‘Cause Man Himselfe from God was now declin’d,
God made the Creatures all goe out of kinde.
He curst the Ground, or with Sterility
Or else with hurtfull weeds fertility.
The Living-creatures also, once all tame,
Now refractory, and all wilde became.”
By the fifth decade of the sixteenth century – with no authentic Paradise to be found – a new social / scientific aim had developed: the search for scattered pieces of the creation that could be collected and brought together into Botanical Gardens. Associated with university faculties of medicine, the first European botanical gardens in Southern Europe (all of which still exist) were founded in Northern Italy. They included Orto botanico di Pisa (1544), Orto botanico di Padova (1545), Orto Botanico di Firenze (1545) and Orto Botanico dell’Universita di Bolognia (1568). Comparable gardens were established across Northern Europe and Great Britain, including: Alter Botanischer Garten,Tübingen (1535), Alter Botanischer Garten, Zürich (1560), Jardin Botanico, Valencia (1567), Hortus Botanicus Leiden (1587), Alter Botanischer Garten, Basel (1589), University of Oxford Botanic Garden (1621), Jardin des Plantes, Paris (1635) Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam (1638), Botaniska trädgården, Uppsala University, Sweden (1655), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (1670), Botanischer Garten, Berlin (1672), Chelsea Physic Garden, London (1673).
A guiding aspiration throughout the early seventeenth century came to rest in precincts beyond progress – in variously distributed versions of a so-called “Garden of Re-Creation” – manifestations of a matter-of-fact Museum of Nature. When the University of Oxford Botanic Garden appointed its first curator, in 1642, it had already committed itself to setting up an exploratory place with its own aesthetic / scientific programme intended for “the glorification of God and for the furtherance of learning.” From those points of origin, Oxford’s botanical garden (the oldest in Great Britain) remains committed, in futuro, “to promoting learning and glorifying nature.”
Greenwich Park (London) has never sustained the strictly scientific / educational functions of a botanical garden. But it does, nonetheless, reflect one aspect of a universal cultural phenomenon: the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) with its inventory of “exotics” (non-native plant introductions from around the globe). Additionally, this particular place guides the long-established working traditions of two investigative researchers: the gardener and the astronomer. With reference to the Greenwich Observatory − an allegorical monument defining the conceptual core of the Park itself − Nathaniel Hawthorn (in the course of constructing a series of sketches that were published in 1863) has remarked: “I used to regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the observatory wall, and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time and Space.” (Charles II appointed his first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, in 1675 – the year in which the Royal Observatory was built. This pragmatic creation was intended to improve navigation at sea. More specifically, the Observatory would serve to “find the so-much desired longitude of places’ – one’s exact position east and west, while at sea and out of sight of land, as obtainable by astronomical means alone.)
Hawthorn widens his grasp of the Prime Meridian by locating the limitlessness of consciousness in pending alignments of place, position, centre and margin. Of the Zero Degrees Longitude site, he observes:
Greenwich … is beautiful – a spot where the art of man has conspired
with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together
how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest river of the two had
faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional
charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the people’s
property …. It affords one of the instances in which the monarch’s
property is actually the people’s and shows how much more natural
is their relation to the sovereign than to the nobility, which pretends to
hold the intervening space between the two: for a nobleman makes a
paradise only for himself, and fills it with his own pomp and pride,
whereas the people are sooner or later the legitimate inheritors of
whatever beauty kings and queens create, as now at Greenwich Park.
One of the Royal Parks of London, Greenwich Park is emblematic of a social aesthetic that bases itself on the landscape image of paradise and its two inherently contradictory dynamics: the centrifugal and centripetal forces of openness and closure.
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Beyond the narrow compass of the walled garden there exists a history of utopian radicalism that positions the supporters of gardens, parks and green spaces at the leading edge of a new, more generously co-operative culture. For example, in 1652 a book by Samuel Hartlib was published under this provocative title: A designe for Plenti, by an Universall Planting of Fruit Trees. According to the author’s conception, every headland, and every piece of waste ground was to be enriched with apples, pears, quinces and walnuts, “for the relief of the poor, the benefit of the rich, and the delight of all.”
In his essay “Of Gardens” (1625), Francis Bacon prompts potentially progressive gardening practitioners to discover an immanent intelligence behind the life-force of perpetual Spring (Ver Perpetuum). Of this theme, he aptly asserts:
God Almightie first planted a Garden. And indeed, it is the Purest of
Humane pleasures. It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of Man;
Without which, Buildings and Pallaces are but Grosse Handy-works:
And a Man shall ever see, that when Ages grow to Civility and Elegancie,
Men come to Build Stately, sooner then to Garden Finely: As if Gardening
were the Greater Perfection. I do hold it, in the Royall Ordering of Gardens,
there ought to be Gardens, for all the Moneths in the Yeare. In which,
severally, Things of Beautie, may be then in Season. For December and
January, and the latter part of November, you must take such Things, as
are Greene all Winter: Holly, Ivy, Bayes, Juniper, Cipresse Trees; Eugh,
Apple-Trees; Firre-Trees, Rose-Mary; Lavender, Periwinckle, the White,
the Purple, and the Blewe; … . There followeth, for the latter Part of
January and February … Crocus Vernus, both the Yellow and the Gray;
Prime-Roses; Anemones; The Early Tulippa; Hiacynthius Orientalis;
Freteilaria. For March, there come Violets, specially the Single Blew,
which are the Earliest; the Yellow Daffadill; the Dazie; The Almond-Tree
in Blossome, The Peach-Tree in Blossome; Sweet-Briar. In April follow,
The Double white Violet; The Wall Flower; … the Couslip … & Lillies of
all Natures; Rose-mary Flowers; The Tulippa, The Double Piony; the
Pale Daffadil; The French Honey-Suckle; The Cherry-Tree in Blossome;
The Dammasin, and Plum-Trees in Blossome; the White-Thorene in
Leafe; The Lelacke Tree. In May, and June, come Pincks of all sorts,
Specially Blush Pincke; Roses of all kinds, except the Muske, which
Comes later; Hony-sucklles; Strawberries; … Columbine; The French
Mary-gold; Flos Africanus; Cherry-Tree in Fruit; … Figs in Fruit, Raspes,
…. The Apple-Tree in blossome, Early Peares, and Plummes in Fruit….
In August, come Plummes of all sorts in Fruit; Peares; Appricockes;
…. Grapes; Apples, Poppies of all colours; Peaches, …. Grapes; Apples, Poppies
of all colours; Peaches, …. Nectarines; comes Services, Medlars,
…. Roses Cut or Removed to come late; Hollyokes, and such like. These
Particulars are for the Climate of London. But my meaning is Perceived,
that you have Ver Perpetuum, as the Place affords.
Such glimmerings function as simultaneously perceptive / pragmatic connections to on-going social / ecological horizons: they locate aesthetic / economic fundamentals beyond the polluted, de-humanized sphere of global depletion that currently precedes them. For as Ian L. McHarg (a ground-breaking pioneer of mid-twentieth century landscape architecture and ecological planning) reminds us: “Clearly the problem of man and nature is not one of providing a decorative background … or even ameliorating the grim city: it is the necessity of sustaining nature as the source of life, milieu, teacher, sanctum, challenge and, most of all, of rediscovering nature’s corollary of the unknown in the self, the source of meaning.”
McHarg’s standpoint revitalizes the parallel importance of Uvedale Price’s late eighteenth century world-view concerning the aesthetic dimension of language in its visibly definable relationships to landscape. Price expands upon this specific theme by stating:
According to the idea I have formed of it, intricacy in landscape might
be defined that disposition of objects which, by a partial and uncertain
concealment, excites and nourishes curiosity. Variety can hardly require
a definition, though, from the practice of many layers-out of ground,
one might suppose it did. Upon the whole, it appears to me. that as
intricacy in the disposition, and variety in the forms, the tints, and the
lights and shadows of objects, are the great characteristics of picturesque
scenery; so monotony and baldness are the greatest defects of improved
places ….
PICTURESQUENESS, therefore, appears to hold a station between
beauty and sublimity, and on that account, perhaps, is more frequently
and more happily blended with them both than they are with each other.
It is, however, perfectly distinct from either; and first, with respect to
beauty, it is evident, from all that has been said, that they are founded
on the very opposite qualities; the one on smoothness, the other on
roughness; – the one on gradual, the other on sudden variation; – the
one on ideas of youth and freshness, the other on that of age, and
even of decay ….”
“Paradise” is one of the very few English nouns to have been adopted from the Persian language. Deriving from Pairidaeza, the noun is evolved from pairi (“around”) and diz (“to form” or “to mould”), and the word itself meant an enclosure or park. The original Greenwich Park landscape (prior to being formally laid out and developed as an architectural scheme, from the 1660s to the present) was first enclosed to create a controlled environment for resident deer – wild game to be hunted (in leisurely equestrian pursuit) by Humphrey, Duke of Glouceser. In 1433, Henry VI, with the assent of Parliament, had granted to the Duke a “licence to enclose two hundred acres of park in Greenwich”. There are no records of tree-planting in Greenwich Park before the seventeenth century; but there survives an account of 1515 for “enstocking with deer”. As late as 1597, game was still plentiful – for until then the Park was clearly regarded as a private domain supporting the Royal sports of hunting and hawking. It was not until about 1660 that tree planting began in earnest.
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Elisée Reclus (a major contributor to nineteenth century anarchist theory) has precisely conceptualized the interaction between human beings and their extended geographical environment. Writing in 1864 (a year after Nathaniel Hawthorn’s reflections on the origins of Greenwich park), that commentator observes:
The barbarian pillages the earth; he exploits it violently and fails to restore
Its riches, in the end rendering it uninhabitable. The truly civilized man
understands that his interest is bound up with the interest of everyone
and with that of nature. He repairs the damage done by his predecessors
and works to improve his domain. As a farmer and an industrialist, he knows
how to use more and more of the earth’s resources; and as an artist he also
knows how to enhance his environment with charm, grace and majesty.
Having become “the conscience of the earth,” the man worthy of his mission
assumes responsibility for the harmony and beauty of nature.
Reclus published these remarks three years prior to the printing of the first volume of his own momentus contribution to the field of physical geography – The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe (two volumes, 1867-68).
Three hundred years after the formal laying out of Greenwich Park, which itself indicated a shift
in proclivity, from chase to promenade, amongst the socially privileged, in their fashionable orientation towards cotrolled, circumambient scenery (from rustic “wilderness” to prepared “design”) the modernist landscape architect Alfred Caldwell could still question, with precision and abiding insight, a dominant cultural assumption concerning relationships of natural and social environments. Writing in 1989, he remarks:
A work of art is always contra natura – against nature. What we imagine
to be nature in the work of art is not nature at all. It is our interpretation.
A respected collaborator with Jens Jensen, Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilbersheimer, Caldwell shared with these colleagues a new orientation to his field – conceiving it to be essential to the related horizons of teaching / research and public / private design practice. His illumination concerning our interpretation of nature connects directly with Joseph Beuys’s pragmatic / idealistic use of the aesthetic in relation to the creative momentum of its own social radicalism ─ persistent, creative opposition to confusion, indecision, and disorientation.
The complex body of work that comprises Joseph Beuy’s unfinished programme of
attentive / thought-provoking research and collective activism remains continuously contemporary in its capacity to sustain the integrated functions of creativity and envisagement ─ the contrarian social sculpture.
In a statement from 1984, Beuys has summarized his pivotal theory concerning connections of creativity to crisis. He observes:
… WE PLANT TREES, AND THE TREES PLANT US, SINCE WE
BELONG TO EACH OTHER AND WE MUST COEXIST. THIS IS
SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS WITHIN A PROCESS THAT MOVES
IN TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS AT THE SAME TIME. THUS THE
TREE IS CONSCIOUS OF US, JUST AS WE ARE CONSCIOUS OF
THE TREE. IT’S THEREFORE TREMENDOUSLY IMPORTANT TO
TRY TO CREATE OR STIMULATE AN INTEREST IN THIS TYPE OF
INTERDEPENDENCE. IF WE DON’T HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR THE
TREES AUTHORITY, SPIRIT OR INTELLIGENCE, WE’LL FIND OUT
THAT IT IS SO INTELLIGENT IT WILL DECIDE TO SEND A
COMMUNICATION ON THE SAD HUMAN CONDITION. THE TREE
WILL COMMUNICATE THIS TO ANIMALS, MOUNTAINS, CLOUDS
AND RIVERS; IT WILL DECIDE TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO
GEOLOGICAL FORCES, AND IF HUMANITY FAILS, NATURE WILL
TAKE TERRIBLE REVENGE, A VERY TERRIBLE REVENGE, WHICH WILL
BE AN EXPRESSION OF ITS INTELLIGENCE AND AN ATTEMPT TO
BRING HUMAN BEINGS BACK TO THE LIGHT OF REASON BY USING
VIOLENCE. IF ALL MAN CAN DO IS REMAIN IMPRISONED IN HIS
STUPIDITY, IF HE REFUSES TO SHOW A CAPACITY FOR
COLLABORATING WITH NATURE, THEN NATURE WILL RESORT TO
VIOLENCE TO FORCE HIM TO CHANGE COURSE. WE HAVE REACHED
A POINT WHERE WE HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION. EITHER WE DO OR
WE DON’T. AND IF WE DON’T, WE’LL HAVE TO FACE A SERIES OF
HUGE CATASTROPHES IN ALL FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH.
THE COSMIC INTELLIGENCE WILL TURN AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE.
AT THE MOMENT, HOWEVER, WE STILL HAVE TIME TO COME TO A
DECISION FREELY ─ THE DECISION TO TAKE A DIFFERENT ROAD
FROM THE ONE WE HAVE FOLLOWED TO DATE. WE CAN STILL
DECIDE TO ALIGN OUR INTELLIGENCE WITH THAT OF NATURE.
Proposing an evolutionary dimension to aesthetic purpose, Beuys secures a solution to the problem of cultural amnesia and its two most persistent complements (command and subjugation), by defining the impetus of a realizable future ─ beyond the impasse of larger-than-life alienation.
In relation to this strategy ─ Beuys’ plan of action for intended social amelioration ─ Mies van der Rohe (writing in 1923) advances a fundamental glimmering of confidence ─ a source of inspiration for a transformative status quo, when he notes, “Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form.”
David Bellman
December 2011