PASSAGES

Writing on the Landscape:

“Nature is a language - can’t you read?” [1]

Sea birds are swooping and shrieking overhead - one, it seems, in particular.  He glances up: its wings came close that time, and he does not like the look of its beak.  It soars off into the sky, and he shields his eyes and follows.  Far now, just a speck, it swings in great looping circles, drawing O’s and O’s against the blue.  On and on they go, those circles, graceful and languorous…

Suddenly, with an irrepressible surge of ego, of desire, of wild awful need, Ovid believes the O is for him.  Immaculate, principal, ovate letter!  Yes, it is - it is a sign - showing that he shall be fixed in the sky as he so awfully longs to be: borne aloft, transfigured, forever.

Jane Alison (2001) The Love-Artist.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  p. 237

Image:  J. Bowring, Passages: A Sermon in Stone, Punakaiki, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2005

And this our life exempt from public haunt,  

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,  

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.  

I would not change it.

William  Shakespeare, As You Like It, Duke (senior) in the Forest of Arden, Act II. Scene I.   

 Image: J.Bowring, Sign of the Traveller: X Track, Gilbraltar Rock, Port Hills, Christchurch, 2006

In Novalis’ The Novices at Sais, one of the travellers refers to nature’s own language, “that great cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings, egg-shells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice-covered waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, plants beasts and men, in the lights of heaven [...]” in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine.  (1990) Romanticism and the Sciences.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.6.   

To be continued …

[1] From the song, “Ask”  on the album Rank, by The Smiths, Rough Trade Records, 1988. 

The Scene and the Unseen:

Regarding Representation

Painters see gardens as an issue of values, of colour, light and perspective.  This is their right.  But there is another way to make gardens which, for the sake of clarity I would call the gardener’s way.  This is difficult to explain in words, because it is something very closely linked to the earth, to water, to the sap of plants, to the air, to sunlight, to blowflies and worms … something non-verbal and unreasonable. … It cannot be defined by arguments, or by a ruler and compass.  Seen in ground-plan and section form, one of these gardens is very little.  I should like to avoid the obligation of drawing it or tracing it out, even with a reed, scratching the earth among manure and flies.  Drawn on paper, the garden is an X-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing.

Rubió i Tudurí [1]

‘Representation’ presupposes the visual.[2]  And the visual presupposes the visible.  Representation is therefore at once problematic for a compelling conception of landscape. Yet, the predilection for seductive representation remains a driving force in contemporary landscape architecture education and practice.  This visuality is subsequently translated into form, and the impoverished experience of landscape is reinforced, on and on.  Authentic landscape experience is not solely the visual.   Aesthetics is not simply about what is seen.  Aesthesis originally referred to a taking in of the world, a phenomenological in-breath, a sensational experience.

I. The Mirror and the Screen

The primacy of the visual, and the falling away of the extravisual, is an eighteenth-century legacy.  Perhaps the most effective evocation of this is the Claude Glass, a small, polished convex mirror used to transmute the environment into landscape, into scenery.  The convexity forces the landscape into a repoussoir or framed composition, while the dark colour of the speculum produces a reduced spectrum, mimicking the sepia tones of the paintings of Claude Lorraine.  The expansiveness of the landscape, in time and space, is reduced to something to be held in the hand. The detachment from the landscape thus occurs not solely through these transmutations and reductions, but also through the mode of looking, where the glass was held out in front of the viewer, in order to view the landscape over their shoulder, behind them. 

The Claude Glass was a compositional application of  convex, black mirrors, which had a dark history extending back into antiquity.  Mirrors of polished coal or obsidian, or with black tains, produced images that were indistinct, enigmatic and shadowy.   Used as sites for divination, a place for sigilistic vigils, the glasses were seen as being haunted by a metaphysical presence.  These spectral manifestations were evicted through the adoption of the black glass by the followers of the Picturesque.  Instead the glass became a tool for viewing the landscape, an optical device, instrumental in the editing of the world.

There are uncanny echoes between the Claude Glass and the virtual world as experienced through the interface of the computer, most distinctively a laptop.    Like the entrapment within the scotomatous scopic realm of the Claude Glass, valorized within the picturesque’s reign, the current passion for seeing the landscape in the screen of a computer forces the continuation of ocularcentrism.  Within landscape architecture programmes, “visualisation” is one of the commonly taught courses.   (There is even a “Claude Glass” function on Photoshop). While animated ‘fly-throughs’ and ‘drive-bys’ might be accompanied by a pulsating sound track, the question of a re-presentation of phenomenological richness remains.

The Claude Glass as ‘mirror’, and the laptop as ‘screen’, embody two recurrent tropes of representation that are conceived of as ‘black boxes,’ in the sense of over-looking the intricate nature of the body in the world.  The presence of other dimensions, beyond a simple flattening of three or four dimensions upon a screen or mirror, is a consuming problem. The mirror induces paradoxes of recognition and illusion, for example in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage.  The screen similarly embodies conflicting theories of representation, from the veiling of being hidden by a screen, to the revealing of being screened, or projected. The challenge, in critical practice, is to revive the darkness of the mirror and screen, as sites of revelation and obscuration. 

Image: In which Narcissus and Echo are threatened by a Claude Glass and a Laptop causing them to ponder further upon the nature of representation.

Collage: J. Bowring, based on Claude Lorraine’s Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644

II.  The Tinder Box, the Smelling Salts, and the Blindfold

Through reinforcing the predilection for visuality, the discussion of representation is a disabling topic.   On one hand the challenge must become a phenomenological one, to redirect the experience of landscape beyond the visual into multi-sensory responses.  Yet, even phenomenology cannot fully answer the question of what it is to engage with the landscape, it becomes a metaphysical question, one that seeks dimensions beyond the realm of the senses, into the intellect, and beyond.  It is here that the mirror begins to look back at us, and this gaze is one that is not about visuality, but an engagement with landscape in its fullest and most truly sublime sense.

While the Claude Glass and the computer screen might represent two black-box tropes, or devices for representation, the proposal is to add three further metaphorical aids to the landscape architect’s toolkit for re-presenting the landscape as an experiential sensorium, for the re-claiming of landscape architecture as a critical practice:

Tinder Box, for fires within.

A small box which holds all of the essentials required for starting a fire.

Fire as an aesthetic object, opens landscape experience out onto a different plane.  The failure of the visual to re-present fire, as with other ethereal phenomena, has obscurred this play of passion within the imagination of the landscape.  Landscape architects do not often play with fire, yet, metaphorically, metaphysically, it is a profound fund of experience.  Lightning as celestial fire brings to mind landscapes such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico, USA, a place that is in most frequently encountered as flattened out onto the pages of a book, represented without all of those aspects which are its phenomenological breathing, becoming a mere X-ray of experience.

Smelling Salts, to bring us to our senses.

An aromatic preparation of carbonate of ammonia, used as a restorative when feeling faint.  

The potency of smell, and the allied sense of taste, was crystallised in Marcel Proust’s intense recall of memories triggered by a simple cake dipped in tea [3], and Gaston Bachelard’s recollection of how the smell of raisins connected him with a cupboard from his childhood.[4]   At the Hamanako Hanahaku international gardening expo in Japan in 2004, Kuryu Architect  and Associates, Masayuki Kakiuchi and Tadashi Saito designed a pavilion made entirely of cedar scraps within metal cages.  The pavilion became a space which was both peaceful and imbued with the scent of the cedar chips.[5]   Giuseppe Penone’s project Respirare l’Ombra (To Breathe the Shadow) created an aromatic and acoustically profound space through lining gallery walls with cages of bay leaves.  The installation was first installed in a castle in Avignon in 1999, and has been re-exhibited at the Tate Modern (significantly in the Rothko Room, one of the most potent proponents of ‘nothingness’, which is to say, everything), and in Barcelona.  Reviews of the exhibition comment on the effects of the aromatic space upon visitors, instilling a sense of calm and tranquillity, such that ‘viewers’ would simply sit upon the floor of the galleries in silence.[6]

Blindfold, so that we might see.

A strip of dark cloth to be tied tightly around the eyes, thereby excluding the visual domain.

 It is impossible to know just how blinding the visual is until it is removed.  Suddenly the other senses, including the invisible presences beyond surface` phenomena, come forwards.  This is a necessary defence against the hegemony of the visual.  The challenge is to undo the link between the visual and the real, and the visual and ‘truth’.  This is no small task, as the connections between seeing and knowing are entwined in language.  Even the ability to divine messages on other channels is linked with sight, as in clairvoyance, or clear-seeing.  However, the disruption of this connection throws light on how much might be revealed by not seeing.  Democritus, after all, wanted to blind himself, so that he could see, and the painter Gustave Moreau, said “I believe only in what I cannot see.” 

A landscape opens on to the unknown.  It is genuinely the place as an opening to a “taking place” of the unknown.  It is not so much the imitative representation of a given place; it is rather the presentation of the absence of a given presence.   

Jean-Luc Nancy[7]

A version of this paper was recently published in Kerb 14

[1] Rubió i Tudurí quoted in Eduard Bru (1997). Three on the Site / Tres en el Lugar.  Barcelona: Actar, 26-27.  (Rubió i Tudurí’s words are from the 1931 report on the Duchess of Gramont’s garden in Vignoleno, Italy, planned in 1931, and originally published in Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Barcelona).

[2] Although ‘representation’ is a term of many senses (the OED supplies some eight definitions of the word), the common connection is with the sense of an “image, likeness, or reproduction in some manner of a thing.”

[3]  Marcel Proust (1996). Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way.  Trans C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmarton.  (Originally published in French as Á la Recherche du temps perdu, Du côté de chez Swann, in 1913).  New York: Vintage, 51.

[4] Gaston Bachelard. (1958) The Poetics of Space.  Boston: Beacon Press, 13.

[5] See Hamanako Hanahaku, Works of Kuryu’s Team.  (2004).  Japan Architect, 56, Yearbook 2004, 47.

[6] See, for example, David Frankel, ‘Giuseppe Penone’, ArtForum, November 2000.

[7] Jean-Luc Nancy. (2002/2003) Landscape with a Disorienting Change of Scenery.  Pages Paysages,  No.9, 174-181, 178.

The Sound of Shadows: On the Speaking of Things

“To the deep-seeing eye, caves are screams.”[1]

 ”… the Shadow Cave projects both the exteriority of the cosmos out there and affirms the interiority of the mind within.”[2]

 ”…the poetic remaking of the world is not via the silent word, nor even via the materialisation of the spirit in breathing, but consists in the act of sounding.”[3]

“All the being of the world, if it dreams, dreams that it is speaking.”[4]

The Sounds of Shadows drift at the edges of known space.  The penumbral rumble of the most intangible of presences.  To listen, seeing, to challenge one’s self to admit this apprehension, to step to the edge of the ‘rational’ … to hear this surrational susurration.   

Image: J. Bowring, May 2006, Sydney.

[1] Victor Hugo, ‘What the Mouth of the Shadow Says’, in Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (trans Anne A Davenport).  Fordham University Press, New York, 43.

[2] Eugene Yuejin Wang (2005).  Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China.  University of Washington Press, Seattle, 296.

[3] Paul Carter (2002), ‘Speaking Volumes: Gaston Bachelard and the Showing of the Word.’  In Leon van Schaik (ed) Poetics in Architecture, Wiley Academy, New York, 13.

[4] Gaston Bachelard (1971 [1960]) The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press, Boston, 188.

Melancholic Dispositions: Landscape, Architecture, Photography, Phenomenology

Melancholy is an aesthetic sensibility, a love of loss, of longing.  Within the phenomenology of photography the distance becomes shaped in light and dark, sculpted, palpable.  Infused with the ache of absence, photographs of landscape and architecture are portals to the fugitive moments of melancholy.  The paradox of the desire for distance, for longing, is an echo of the Sublime’s love of awe, a necessary fear.  Photography becomes the liminal zone that is the surface of phenomenological condensation, remembering the root of ‘aesthetic,’ in aisthesis, in the breathing-in of the world.  Photographs are a site of relay between invisible and visible, a ‘crossing of the visible’.  Inherent in the work of Michael Kenna (English, based in USA), Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, based in USA), Patrick Reynolds (New Zealand) and Anne Noble (New Zealand) is a profound sense of the metaphysics of melancholy.  Working in black and white, the images sculpt light and darkness, intuiting senses.  Noble’s photographs are “sliced from blocks of sheer light,” and Kenna’s “insist[] on the existence of a phantom presence within reality.”  The photographer, like the painter, contributes to the phenomenological rendering of the visible, where in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, “He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible.”  There is a spirituality which saturates these surfaces, as in Noble’s photographs where: “black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness of suspicion, doubt, despair … white the overwhelming presence of light, announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss”, and that white is apprehended as a “spiritual value.”  In Reynolds’ work, “Vision is burdened with a corporeal melancholy,” and in Kenna’s there is “an aura of intense melancholy,” both hovering within the ether of perception.  Against the grain of technique, Sugimoto’s out-of-focus architectural images and Reynolds’ vignetted shots from a disposable camera, bring form to the foreground.  The reduction of technique is a means of bypassing artificial nostalgia, avoiding the mannered use of introduced sepia tones or distressing of the surface which are often used to, as Noble puts it, “hurry an image into pathos.”  Instead these photographs, these sites, suggest a melancholy topology, inhabiting the zone of the subconscious, calling to mind both the reverie of Bachelard, and the dreamwork of Freud.  In reverie, in dreams, in the liminal zone of the photograph, the double pull of melancholy is felt.  At once pushing and pulling, intimate and immense, a withdrawal from the world of things and presencing of that very world, and within such doubling a realisation of what Bachelard has termed a “penumbral ontology.”  It is within this penumbral place that the phenomenology of melancholy dwells.

References

Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The Poetics of Space.  New York: Beacon Press.

Jenkinson, Megan.  (1981)  Anne Noble: Landscapes & Portraits.  Art New Zealand, 20: 54-55.

Keith, Sheridan.  (1983).  Anne Noble’s Wanganui.  Art New Zealand, 27: 24-25.

Kenna,  Michael; Bunnell, Peter C.; Bernhard, Ruth.  (2002).  Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective.  Tuscon: Nazzraeli Press.

Marion, Jean-Luc.  (2004).  The Crossing of the Visible.  Trans. James K.A. Smith.  (originally in French, La Croisée du Visible, 1996, Presses Universitaires de France).  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 Paton, Justin; (ed). (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace.  Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press.

Smith, Allan.  (1992). Romanticist and Symbolist Tendencies in Recent New Zealand Photography.  Art New Zealand, 64: 80-84, 111.