ALLEN
S.
WEISS
UNNATURAL HORIZONS PARADOX
& CONTRADICTION in
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Unnatural Horizons Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture
Allen
S.
Weiss
Princeton Architectural Press,
New York
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Library of Congress
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Unnatural horizons
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:
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—Design—
—
Symbolic aspects-^History.
First edition
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3.
part of this
duced
in
book
my
Gardens
Gardens
4.
United States
i.
Title.
7I2'.09— DC21
No
97-43587
be used or repro-
any manner without written
permission from the publisher, except in the
About
context of reviews.
Allen S. Weiss has most recently published
the author
Perverse Desire
Flamme
and the Ambiguous
Icon (suny,
Une poitique de
Editing and design: Clare Jacobson
1994);
Cover design: Sara
cuisine (Editions Java, 1994); Mirrors
E.
Stemen
Special thanks to: Eugenia Bell, Jane Garvie,
Caroline Green, Therese Kelly,
Mark
Lamster,
and Anne Nitschke of Princeton Architectural Press
).
History.
History.
History.
(p.
paper)
Landscape architecture
Gardens
— Philosophy—
All rights reserved
Printed and
cm.
p.
Includes bibliographical references
— Kevin C.
Lippert, publisher
Infinity:
et festin:
la
of
The French Formal Garden and ijth-
Century Metaphysics (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995);
Phantasmic Radio (Duke
University Press, 1995); he has coedited Sade
and the
Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge
University Press, 1994) and edited
Experimental Sound
Review
1ti%\,
& Radio
1996) and
(Lusitania Press, 1997).
Taste,
He
(
The Drama
Nostalgia
teaches in the
Departments of Performance Studies and
Cinema
Studies at
New York
University.
Contents
8
44
and Style
Syncretism
Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili
Italian Renaissance
Garden
Dematerialization
and the
and Iconoclasm
Baroque Azure
64
The Libidinal Sublime Libertine Gardens of the Enlightenment
84
No Mans
Garden
New England
Transcendentalism
and the
Invention of Virgin Nature
108
In Praise ofAnachronism Garden as Gesamtkunstwerk
155
Notes
171
Bibliography
175
Acknowledgments
Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax ofsplits and ruptures.
Robert Smithson
for
Ron
Scapp, Earth
Hibou
Blanc, Air
Jean-Paul Marcheschi, Fire
Mathilde Sitbon, Water
Dictating garden of lengthening dreams.
Leonard Schwartz
and Style
Syncretism
Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili
Italian Renaissance
Garden
CM ty
and
ideahrt'.
gruities
that
ost
and the
of the history of Western philosophy and
theology from Parmenides through
H^el
has
attempted to resolve the inherent contradictions
between sensation and cognition,
\Tsibih-
However, the paradoxes, antinomies, and inconin
arise
quest f)erennially inform
this
paradigms that underUe the history of art and
ideas.
numerous
—
This study
promenade through the landscapes and gardens, paintings and
poems
that have inspired
—proposes
me
a sketch of the implications
of such poh'semic and equivocal conventions histor)'
of landscape
The
origin of
as the\- relate to the
architectiu-e.
modem
European landscape architecture
vs-as
contemp>oraneous with the rediscover)' of the beaut)' of nature in the early Renaissance. In
The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Jakob Burckhardt describes the external world, the
scape" proper, was
first
this
paradigm
moment in which
Italy,
perception of
the distant Wew, the "land-
valorized:
But the unmistakable proob of a deepening spirit
shift in the
effect
of nature on tbe
human
began with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few \-igorous
lines the sense
of the morning
airs
and the trembling
light
on the
distant
ocean, or of the giandeur of the stoim-beaten torest, but he makes tbe ascent
of k)fty peaks, with the only possible obfect of en^vying the view
man, peihaps,
since the days of antiquity
who did so.'
—the
first
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
This appreciation of natural beauty, couched in the poetry of the
work of Francesco
sublime, was further instantiated in the (1304-74), often cited as the
man. His
ern"
first
humanist, indeed the
was
them
in
which
gardens for myself: one in the shade, appropriate for
my studies,
gardens at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.
letters:
my
called
I
transalpine Parnassus;
it
slopes
down
to the river Sorgue,
ending on inaccessible rocks which can only be reached by is
closer to the house, less wild,
enter
it
by a
penetrates;
I
and
litde bridge leading
believe that
times went to
Two
recite;
it is
it
The
birds.
other
situated in the middle of a rapid river.
from
a vaulted grotto,
resembles that small
I
where the sun never
room where Cicero some-
an invitation to study, to which
go
I
at
noon.^
gardens, one for each side of his temperament, inspired either
reverie or melancholy;
extensive
two gardens, one
for each
extreme of nature,
and picturesque or protective and chthonic; two gardens,
one leading towards the empirical, the other towards the For Petrarch,
as for Cicero, his
ing, the landscape
and empirical; sic culture,
and
of med-
favorite site
describes
one of his
made two
I
whose
He
own
his
"mod-
was intense and manifold,
relation to the landscape
poetic and practical, as he was a gardener itation
Petrarch
first
was
a
spiritual.
predecessor in literature and garden-
major source of inspiration, both
for while these gardens
evoked the great
sites
literary
of clas-
they also constituted a rudimentary botanical laboratory
collection,
where Petrarch experimented with
different varieties
of plants according to meteorological and astrological conditions,
He
geographic placement, seasonal growTih, and so forth. these gardens
to
amass collections of
Lamarche-Vadel demonstrates
rare
plants.
also
in Jardins secrets de la Renaissance,
such secret gardens, "appertain to the double register of the
and the ic
real,
the physical
used
As Gaetane
fictive
and the mystic; they echo with the adam-
garden, the paradigmatic place and origin from which gardens
draw
their spiritual energy."^ It
is
precisely for this reason that the
study of gardens necessitates formal, cultural, and psychological analyses: the symbolic significance
yet surpasses,
its
relation to the artistic
by the
site.
of any garden
is
derived from,
formal characteristics, and can only be grasped in
works that both inspired and were inspired
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
Petrarch's
most celebrated consideration of the landscape
the description of his ascent of
Mont
Ventoux, recounted in a
Borgo San Sepolcro, written
to Dionisio da
wish to see what so great an elevation had to inspired
by
Rome^zx
literary
motives
—
offer. "4
attendant views
its
literary to the sensory,
the
Though
specifically, the tale in Livy's History
recounts Philip of Macedon's ascent of Mount
Thessaly, with
he
in 1336. In this text,
"My only motive was
explains the reason for this difficult ascent:
—
is
letter
Haemus
of in
the experience shifted from the
where revelation becomes
visual.
Indeed, the
subsequent history of landscape architecture often reveals mythical tales, literary inspirations,
and
tual density
by being couched
in
is
already predisposed to concep-
myth and
unaccustomed quality of the
to the
sweep of view spread out before me, the clouds under our
Olympus seemed things from a
The
less
feet,
models behind the creation
pictorial
of gardens; here, Petrarch's vision
I
effect
beheld
myself witnessed the same
I
force of the poet's vision surpasses it
all
at
is
work
here?
third term that mediates the poetic imagination letter
previous literary
the poet's unique, hyperbolic sensibility, or the
inherent magnificence of nature, that
The
I
had read of Athos and
I
mountain of less fame."^
descriptions. Is
world?
owing
of the great
stood like one dazed.
and what
incredible as
history. "At first,
and the
air
Or
is
there a
and the natural
continues with a detailed appreciation of the mul-
and uniqueness of the natural world Petrarch witnessed,
tiplicity
until the
moment he
realizes, in a flash
of intuition, that the ascent
of the body must be accompanied by a concomitant ascent of the soul.
Thus, opening a copy of Saint Augustine's Confessions he had
with him, he
men
felicitously
chanced upon the following passage: "And
go about to wonder
mighty waves of the
sea,
at the heights
of the mountains, and the
and the wide sweep of the
of the ocean, and the revolution of the
circuit
they consider not."^ This
is
the ironic
stars,
rivers,
and the
but themselves
moment of revelation, where
experience becomes allegory and visibility becomes a metaphor for spirituality: I
dosed the book, angry with myself that
things
who might
I
should
still
be admiring earthly
long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers
Mont
Ventoux seen from Malauctne
View from peak ofMont Ventoux
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
that nothing
is
itself.
of the mountain; not a syllable
The
when
wonderftil but the soul, which,
ing great outside
I
turned
from
fell
Then,
my
in truth,
my
was
I
great
satisfied that
itself,
finds noth-
had seen enough
I
inward eye upon myself, and from that time
lips until
we
reached the bottom again.
three major realms that informed early
humanist
sensibility
were thus interwoven in an allegory of spiritual revelation: inspiration
from
antiquity,
sensitivity
would be added
ations atize
and
salvation within financial consider-
to these preconditions to localize
and system-
such apperceptions in the creation of the Italian Renaissance
garden.
The consequent
symbols and impelling
ly
and
nature,
to
Christianity. Certain technical, mathematical,
allegories
transmigration and intercommunication of
would henceforth enrich
some of them towards
Within these
rubrics, the
their
all
modern
the
arts, radical-
forms.^
major influences on the Renaissance
transformation of man's relation to nature could be schematized as
The
follows.
(1181-226)
Creatures" tion to a
—
nature's
cosmos
in
which
book
life
His "Canticle of
—
expressed a mystical rela-
nature was a reflection of God; thus
the foundation of spiritual values. As Ernst Cassirer
explains in The Individual
a
all
of grace.
state
indeed, every act of his
itself was
nature
of Saint Francis of Assisi
revolution
theological
redeemed
and the Cosmos
in Renaissance Phibsophy,
that will serve as a metaphysical guide to the current study:
With
his
new. Christian ideal of love, Francis of Assisi broke through and rose
above that dogmatic and rigid barrier between "nature" and sentiment ticularity
tries to
permeate the entirety of existence; before
and individualization
dissolve.
between
man and man,
moon,
to the elements
and the natural
In this unscholastic "nature mysticism"
it
remain confined
and
plants, to the
we
find one of the origins of
a
postlapsarian
picturesque and
in 1979
proclaimed Francis the patron saint of ecologists.)
more immediately, he not only redeemed the
Yet,
in
11
sun and
forces.
Western ecological and environmental thought. (Indeed,
Pope John Paul
of par-
an immanent ethical relation-
as
ship. It overflows to all creatures, to the animals
the
Mystical
barriers
Love no longer turns only to God,
the source and the transcendent origin of being; nor does to the relationship
"spirit."
it,
world,
but praised nature
fertile central Italian
—
landscape of
state
of nature
specifically
the
—with
Umbria
a
UNNATURAL HORIZONS and
glorious
who would new
beatific lyricism that has inspired those
transform nature according to
human
desire
and
volition into a
form that would become the "humanist" garden. Yet the major paradigm at
work
in establishing
new ways of
experiencing and re-creating the landscape did not stem from theological transformations; rather, they arose
from the rediscovery of
antiquity and the consequent valorization
pagan mythology. This
is
and appropriation of
especially the case insofar as such
myths
express a profound connection to the natural world, as evidenced
most notably
in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Apuleius's
Virgil's Eclogues
and
Horace, with the
of a new cific
The Golden
Ass,
and the writings of Pliny, Cicero, and
Georgics,
latter's crucial
literary scenarization
notion of ut pictura poesis.
The
rise
accounted for the expression of a spe-
sense of place within nature such that the genius A?a
would once
again have a voice, as in Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Decameron (describing the Villa Palmieri near Florence), Erasmus's Convivium
and
religiosum,
"The
especially in Petrarch, for
mood
lyrical
reality; rather it feels
of the
whom,
as Cassirer notes:
does not see in nature the opposite of physical
everywhere in nature the traces and the echo
For Petrarch, landscape becomes the living mirror of
soul.
the Ego."^° If
one were
to formulate this sensibility in relation to the his-
tory of landscape architecture,
garden
it
might be
no longer delimited by
is
cosmological symbolism (the
said that the
new form of
either cloister walls or restricted
latter allegorically
corresponding to
the medieval hortus conclusus, or closed garden), but rather by the limits
of the imagination responding to the very act of human per-
ception. Rather than serving as a static allegorical form, the garden reveals the
The view rior,
dynamic, creative relation between humanity and nature.
shifts
from the
interior (the cloister, the soul) to the exte-
encompassing not only the ambient scene, but
views; space localized
is
and
no longer
treated as metaphoric, but
particularized reality.
tiplicity, offers sites
is
also distant
revealed in
Nature incarnate, in
its
vast
of pleasure and wonder, terror and awe
—
its
mul-
prefig-
uring the fiiture aesthetic distinctions of the picturesque, the beautifiil,
and the sublime.
—
14
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
Coincident with
this
new
and refinement of
was the development of
sensibility
a system of pictorial representation
— —
the quattrocento rediscovery
linear perspective
that both
drew upon and
informed the multifarious Renaissance modes of appreciating the landscape."
The
that articulates the reciprocal influences literature,
and
intersection of mathematics, technology,
thetics in perspectival representations constitutes a
aes-
major structure
between landscape, garden,
and painting, one that marlcs the subsequent history of
landscape architecture. Here, the varied and often incompatible beauties (ancient
and modern) of nature and painting interacted and
enriched each other's iconographies. Specifically, three
works of Leon
Battista Alberti (1404-72)
codified the intricate interrelations between perspective pictorial representation
famiglia
and landscape
1430), a treatise
(c.
architecture:
on family
life
and
vision,
Delgoverno
delta
that celebrated the advan-
and the
tages of country living, thus instilling a taste for gardens
landscape; Delia pittura (1436), which codified the system of linear perspective; "rational"
and De
re aedificatoria (1452),
architectural
rules
which, in establishing
based on ancient models (notably
Vitruvius), necessarily dealt with the question of gardens
with a particular attention to and fondness for the scape.^^ For Alberti, the
ing
site
was a sloping
and
most important aspect of choosing
a build-
with open perspectives from which the
terrain
countryside could be seen.
sites,
Italian land-
Though
the view into the garden was
protected by enclosures, the slope of the terrain established views of the distant landscape. Furthermore, the garden was conceived in direct relationship with the villa as a sort
architecture, thus bringing the outdoors in,
cultivated garden with the wild spaces
beyond
tectonic continuity between the natural
Such
strategies,
of prolongation of the all
the while linking the to establish
an archi-
and the human realms.
both structural and narrative, offer a dynamic, com-
plex synthesis linking the constructed, geometrized spaces of habitations with the non-geometric, organic realms of the natural world. Alberti's
text
proffers
humanist gardens of the in the
many
of the characteristics of the
Italian Renaissance:'^ the use
of perspective
deployment of objects and space, grottos and the
"secret
Villa Medici, Fiesole
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
garden," symmetrical plantings, groves, clipped and sculpted plants (topiary logical
and
espalier), architectural details,
and
statues of
mytho-
invocations of ancient culture, surprise effects
figures as
caused by both perspectival and technical means, and especially the
—
myriad uses of water
fountains, pools, canals, panerres, troughs,
water staircases and theaters, hydraulic organs and automata, even artificial rain
and water jokes
of water that both scaf)e architecture,
illusion
{giochi d'acqua). It
was through the use
and motion were introduced into land-
creating the sort of instability, surprise,
evanescence that would become central to the baroque
with
its
taste
for motion,
dissimulation,
dematerialization,
and
sensibility,
and
contradiction.'**
This irmiijdng of
and nature was well
artifice, theatricality,
expressed in that epoch by the sixteenth-century philosopher JacofK)
Bonfadio, influenced by Petrarch:
combined with an, has turned emerged a
which
'third nature,' to
"third nature"
might well be
ever "natural" a garden
"I
a
have done
I
much From
into artifice.
can give no name."'' Such a
synonym of the garden
may be
(as in
tury EngUsh garden, where the desire to dissimulate
for
how-
its
all artifice
estab-
forms always evince
even painterly, paradigms (even true for the notion of "vir-
gin" nanire in the
North American landscape,
a subsequent chapter). Yet this "third nature"
mal
itself,
the ideal of the eighteenth-cen-
hshed a simulacrum of wild nature), aesthetic,
that nature,
the two has
artifact: it is
as will is
be explored in
never a purely for-
always enmeshed in both philosophical and narra-
tive systems, as exemplified
by
Petrarch's appreciation
of the land-
scape. Henceforth, the history of landscape architecture will entail
the intertwining and hybrid histories of poetry, literature, philosophy, painting, sculpnire, architecture, surveying, hydrauhcs,
and
botany. In order to grasp the conceptual and cultural systems that
influenced the sensibilities, as well as the forms, that underlie the Italian Renaissance
humanist garden, a synopsis of the philosophical
trajectory of the Platonic
Academy of Florence
(c.
1462-94), found-
ed by Marsiho Ficino under the auspices of the Medici,
is
in order.
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
The
principal foundational tenets of Renaissance ontology
temology were expressed by Nicholas Cusanus (1401-64)
in
and
epis-
De docta
ignorantia (1440), the initial systematic philosophical study that
began to modify the hairsplitting
relatively rigid
and often dogmatic closure and
of medieval scholasticism. According to medieval
thought, the closed, ordered, hierarchical universe, that "great chain
of being" of ecclesiastic Aristotelianism, was one with a moral and of judgment and salvation in which the role of epis-
religious system
temology was a ftmction of man's limited place
Though of
this
in that system.'^
Cusanus's writings never called the theological foundation
system into question, they did entail a radical epistemologi-
cal shift, insofar as the relation
between absolute divinity and
humanity was no longer taken rather analyzed according to
as
human
finite
dogmatically posited, but was limitations.
ontological ratio between the absolute
indeterminable conceptual relation to
This revision of the
and the empirical implies an infinity.
ple
—expanding on
no
possible proportion between the finite
Cusanus's key princi-
certain nominalist analyses
—
and the
is
that there exists
infinite,
thus loos-
ening the bond that had held together scholastic theology and logic within a homogeneous system. As a result of realms
(human from
divine, relative
this separation
from absolute
of
infinity), the syl-
logistics
of speculative theology and metaphysics would henceforth
become
disciplines distinct
from
logic
and mathematics, prefiguring
the materialistic quest for a universal systematization of knowledge that culminated in the ideal of the Cartesian mathesis universalis.
The amor Dei
intellecttmlis (the intellectual
component of the
love
of God, prefiguring the notion of "Platonic love" that inspired the neoplatonism of the Florentine Academy) established a theology. Yet, ological
by
domain
absconditus, the
sciences
strictly
—
delimiting such mysticism to
new
its
mystical
proper the-
the ultimately unknowable realm of the dens
hidden god
—
the ftiture development of the worldly
would not be impeded. Theology and mathematics would
henceforth proffer incompatible yet complementary worldviews. Central to this speculation
is
the principle of the docta
ignorantia, a "learned ignorance" based not
on
passive mystical con-
templation but on active mathematical thought, revealing the
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
unknowable nature of divinity, which can only be expressed tradiction
and
antithesis.
This
results
in con-
from the unfathomable nature
of God, such that the maximal ontological conditions of existence are constituted
by
a qualitative, not a quantitative, determination
whence the cognitive paradoxes
from
that result
intellectual
all
human
attempts to resolve the divine mysteries. All
thought oper-
ates according to finite determinations, generating predicable
and
measurable differences; yet beyond any given determination, an absolute term can always be postulated, even if
it
not deter-
is
minable. However, between the finite and the infinite there
common
term, thus
no
possible predication. This
of maximal contradiction, of complicatio, not ty of the
godhead
is
between the
necessity of differentiating
wherein the mutually exclusive relation between the
ditioned, determinable realm of the
knowledge of mathematics
fails,
no
infini-
Whence
and the
infinite
tioned, indeterminable realm of the divine
The
explicatio.
unpredicable and inexpressible.
is
is
a metaphysics
the
indefinite,
ideal,
uncondi-
and the empirical, con-
human. Where the axiomatic
the limits of comprehensibility end,
and the realm of negative theology begins. Knowledge, towards
its
Cusanus, was the progression of thought
for
incomprehensible
limits, in the
attempt to understand
Whence
the fundamental ontological contradictions of existence.
the notion of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites
—
this
new metaphysical
the very form of such ignorance
—which
is
the
outcome of
speculation, revealing the limits of the ancient
philosophical dichotomy of immanence and transcendence, thought
and being. The ent to
infinity
of the godhead
human knowledge
is
indeterminable yet appar-
precisely in terms of
our "learned igno-
rance,"
which evolves an intuition of what surpasses the
human
cognition.
As Karl
must remain the thinking of the unthinkable, unresolvable tension. cal.
"'7
Thus
the
limits
it
must preserve an
The fundamental concept remains
paradoxi-
docta ignorantia establishes a worldly,
domain of knowledge, tiating the calculable
of
Jaspers explains: "Speculative thinking
human
apart from theological speculation, differen-
and operable mathematical
infinity
from the
impenetrable infinity of God. Here, knowledge becomes an active
—
19
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
function of the dynamics of attempting to connect the imperceptible universal to the sensible particular,
with
attendant concrete
its
symbolizations.
Not only did
modern
and mathematical speculation, but
science
system offer a foundation for
this
also estab-
it
lished the grounds for a new, "rationalized" aesthetics, as explained
by
Cassirer:
The De docta
ignorantia had
begun with the proposition
definable as measurement. Accordingly,
it
that
had established
all
knowledge the concept of proportion, which contains within tion, the possibility
proportionis it is
uteris.
of measurement. Comparativa
But proportion
also a basic concept
omnis
est
knowledge
is
medium of
as the
as a
it,
condi-
inquisitio,
medio
not just a logical-mathematical concept:
is
of aesthetics
Thus, the speculative-philosophical,
the technical-mathematical, and the artistic tendencies of the period converge in the
concept of proportion.
form one of the
In the
arts, this is
practice in
central
And
this
convergence makes the problem of
problems of Renaissance
most apparent
Leonardo da Vinci and Leon
of whom had direct links with Cusanus, tions in his
own work.
role
Academy of
of beauty
between theory and
Battista Alberti, the latter
utilizing Cusanus's specula-
Yet while Cusanus was mainly preoccupied
with mathematical and cosmological Platonic
culture.'^
in the relation
issues, the
philosophers of the
Florence were especially concerned with the
as a spiritual value
and so extended
other realms. Following Cusanus, beauty was
his studies into
deemed an
objective
value determined by measure, proportion, and harmony. Beauty
might
exist as
an
intelligible sign
to
human
A
year before his death,
of God, but
it is
gauged according
proportions, values, and limits.
Cosimo de Medici wrote,
Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), "Yesterday
not to cultivate the
fields,
but
my
I
arrived at
soul. "'9
in a letter to
my Villa Carreggi,
This sentiment
—where —was
inner and outer nature exist in reciprocal symbolic resonance fully in
accord with Ficinos philosophical temperament, as
in the Medici's Villa Carreggi in Florence
his
it
was
where Ficino founded
famed Academy. Here, the gardens provided a
site
of
retreat.
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
inspiration, meditation,
and
discourse, while the villa ofifered a ver-
itable
compendium of the arts, with
leries
of artworks. This would suggest not only that nature and
its library,
aesthetic simulacrum, the garden, played a
music room, and
major
galits
role in Ficino's
philosophy, but also that a consideration of his philosophical system
might bear upon our understanding of the landscape and develop-
ments
of the period.
in landscape architecture
On
the basis of an expanded
model of the
principle of the
coincidence of opposites, Ficino demonstrated the central place of
man
in the universe. In his cosmology, the soul
midpoint between the the higher
intellectual
and the
is
the privileged
sensible world, mediating
and lower realms, dynamically embracing the universe
through the process of knowing and self-determination. The soul the
means by which the universe
dynamic ticism.
opposed to the
unity, as
Whence
the
new
status
reflects
static
upon
itself
is
through a
hierarchy posited by scholas-
of the dignity of man,
who
seen
is
(following Plato's tripartite schematization of the soul) to share
both the lower and the higher beings, midway
attributes with
between the cosmic mind and the cosmic soul above, and the realms of nature and of pure, formless matter below. As the terms of
this
hierarchy are emanations of God (following Plotinus's mystical read-
ing of Plato, and hardly distant, either intellectually or geographi-
from Saint
cally,
ticipate in,
Francis's nature mysticism),
and somehow symbolize, divine
existence are therefore interconnected,
mos
reflected in the
is
God says: filled
I
am
"I
fill
because the
I
and the cohesion of the
microcosm of human
writes of a Ficino dialogue between
fullness itself.
I
I
penetrate and
contain and
fact
now
all
equally attributable to the
becomes
truth,
ative,
objects,
and
and not merely
As Cassirer
am
am
earth;
I fill
and
am
human
not
not penetrated, because
not contained, because
I
by the
these predicates claimed
soul}°
and the world becomes meaningful,
through the ^rf of cognition; symbols can be all facts,
of
cos-
the soul:
and penetrate and contain heaven and
am
power of penetration.
divinity are
intelligence.
God and
myself am the faculty of containing." But
As such,
cosmic zones par-
all
creation. All realms
events; thought
is
reflective, activity.
effectively derived
liberated to
become
from
a cre-
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Inspired by the theory of love developed in Plato's Symposium
and Phaedrus, Ficino places mystical love ent from that of Saint Francis's itive
(in a
manner very
more immediately
sensual
differ-
and
intu-
mysticism) at the center of his system, as a cosmological, and
not a psychological, principle. Erwin Panofsky elaborates: Love
the motive
is
power which causes
—
God
or rather by which
—to effuse His essence into the world, and which,
God
caus-
es
Himself
es
His creatures to seek reunion with Him. According to Ficino, amor is only
another
name
the world
inversely, caus-
for that self-reverting current {circuitus spiritualise
and from the world
to
God. The loving individual
from
inserts
God
to
himself
into this mystical circuit.^'
Whence
the
much misunderstood
love, "Platonic love," that "divine
poetic inspiration
and genius
Plotinus, Augustine,
as
notion of ;he highest form of
madness" which
is
the source of
introduced by Plato, enriched by
and the twelfth-century Neoplatonists, and
transformed by Ficino. Such love entails a desire guided by cognition,
which seeks
the universe.
The
beauty diffused throughout
as its ultimate goal the
contradictory and oppositional totality of love
symbolized by the two Venuses,
celestial
and
is
natural, representing
sacred and profane love: beauty as supercelestial, intelligible, and
immaterial,
and beauty
poreal world.^^
amor
Within
as particularized
and perceptible
this context, three sorts
amor humanus
divinus (divine love, ruled by the intellect),
(human
love, ruled
ferinus (bestial love,
by
all
in the cor-
of love are possible:
amor
the other faculties of the soul), and
which
tantamount
is
factor that mediates the higher
to insanity).
Love
is
the
and lower worlds, transcendence and
immanence, cognition and perception. Cassirer
stresses the
import
of this theory for an incipient humanism: This contradictory nature of Eros constitutes the truly active Platonic cosmos. verse.
is
motif penetrates the
The world of appearance and
opposed
Love
A dynamic
static
the world of love
moment
of the
complex of the uni-
no longer stand simply
to each other; rather, the appearance itself "strives" for the idea.^'
both psychological and theological,
human and
templative and active, intellectual and passional; epistemological status due to
its vast,
it
divine, con-
achieves a central
synthesizing function;
ontologically all-encompassing precisely because of
its
it
is
profoundly
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
paradoxical nature a
manner
—
a
complex scenario that
crucial to the subsequent history
Colonnas Hypnerotomachia
in Francesco
will
be dramatized, in
of landscape architecture,
Poliphili, discussed later in
this chapter.
In this context, the entirety of creation
God,
therefore the realm of nature
nonbeing
the
Realm of Nature, so
the "divine influence,"
of sheer matter,
and
distress,
is
an emanation of
no longer deemed
only
evil, for
Panofsky:
is evil.
Thus
is
is,
when
when
at the
full
of vigour and beauty
as a
manifestation of
contrasted with the shapelessness and lifelessness
same time, a place of unending
contrasted with the
celestial, let
struggle, ugliness
alone the super-celestial
world.^
The human
soul
is
the
site
of the reflection and expression,
if
not
quite the resolution or synthesis, of these universal antinomies and oppositions.
The
spiritual
nature offers
fortiori,
is
present in the natural world, such that, a
itself for
human
expression in terms of
what
Panofsky terms zpaysage moralise {moraliTjed landscape). As such, theological
and cosmological symbolism
is
not
ism and perspectivalism of quattrocento offers a
at all obviated
art.
by the
real-
Quite to the contrary,
it
supplemental semiotic layer to imagery and allegory, adding
the realm of "perspective as symbolic form," as Panofsky stated
previous symbolic systems. In all symbols
and
fact,
within
this theological
objects are simultaneously moralized
it,
to
cosmology,
and humanized.
This transformation of vision and knowledge holds great promise for the
arts,
and
especially for landscape architecture,
benevolence of the natural world divine love,
and thus connected
to
is
now
what will
In this theory of Platonic love, the
found a system that expressed
later
human
the rubric of the sublime through the
act
artists
be subsumed under
of contemplation. of the Renaissance
most profound
their
cerns, notably that the eternal values
insofar as the
theorized as a modality of
aesthetic con-
of beauty and harmony they
sought need be expressed through material forms. Thus the necessarily a mediator of the spiritual
very nature of multiplicity,
and the
artistic creativity, in all its
was expressed
—
23
The
complexity, paradox, and
therein. Cassirer delineates
thetically at stake:
artist is
sensible realms.
what
is
aes-
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
The enigmatic double
nature of the
seemed to be comprehended, and through for the first time.
of Eros had, of the rate
dedication to the world of sen-
artist, his
appearance and his constant reaching and striving beyond
sible
The
at the
and opposed.
comprehension
theodicy of the world given by Ficino in his doctrine
He
that of Eros,
is
it
seeks the "invisible" in the "visible," the "intelligible"
Although
in matter.
task
always to join things that are sepa-
his intuition
and
his art are
vision of the pure form, he only truly possesses this pure realizing
now
it,
really justified
same time, become the true theodicy of art. For the
artist, precisely like
in the "sensible."
this
The
artist feels this tension, this
elements of being more deeply than anyone
else.
determined by
form
if
his
he succeeds
in
polar opposition of the
^5
This new metaphysics of art was in great part based upon the notion of the representable order of nature.
The subsequent imaging of the
world became a function of the profound
affinities
between mathe-
matical research and aesthetic production, insofar as they both share a sense of form, based
on the newly representable order of the
mos. Cassirer: "For now, the mathematical
idea, the a priori'
portion and of harmony, constitutes the empirical reality and of artistic beauty. "^^
cos-
of pro-
common principle of And as Cassirer insists,
regarding the primacy of form in the Renaissance poetry of writers
such
as
Dante and
istent reality
giving
it
Petrarch, such lyricism does not express a preex-
with a standard form, but creates a
new form:
a
"stylistics
theory of categories."^'' This claim al arts
(philosophy, rhetoric,
new inner
reality
becomes the model and guide
and
may
by
for the
be generalized for the textu-
dialectics)
and extrapolated
new
for the
visual arts.
It
was, indeed, a model for the
where
is
not a formal effect bounded by the limitations of sheer
style
representation, but rather
Within as
where representation
this context, the
nature of thought,
itself is a creative act.
garden would no longer be conceived
merely a microcosmic or Edenic symbol, nor
as a theological alle-
gory of the body of the Virgin. In a sense, every theory of the micro-
cosm
is
there
would be
ity
a theory
of mimesis, of levels of representation. Henceforth,
a reciprocal relationship between the mimetic activ-
of art and the perception of nature, such
would attempt
to represent nature,
according to the work of
art.
that, concurrently, art
and nature would be seen
Consequently, mimesis would play a
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
decreasing metaphysical role in the light of the
human
creativity
and
productivity.
Mediating
this
reciprocity,
nature," simultaneously patterned
reinventing the thetic
was
way
many
been, and
The
and
was experienced. This
aes-
in Eroici furoi: "Rules are
the source of rules,
rules as there are real poets. "^^
would always
perpetual reinvention,
thematized
is
as a
its
be, invented.
a "third
idealizations of art
summed up by Giordano Bruno
not the source of poetry, but poetry are as
theories of
would be
the garden
upon the
that the landscape
new
and there
"Nature" had always
But now, the
cultural inexorability,
of
verity
this
was recognized and
function of artistic creativity.
ultimate extrapolation of this
mode of
philosophical specula-
tion was achieved by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), a disciple
of Ficino
century after
its
who
Academy
joined the Florentine
inception. ^9
Xhe
radical aspect
the reversal of the relation between being
on the
role
In the scholastic universe, every being, including the
tion
fixed place in the
Ficino, to the contrary,
in
of freedom.
human
being,
cosmic hierarchy; the sphere of human
and cognition was
of a
and becoming or acting
the cosmic hierarchy, a problem predicated
had a
a quarter
of Pico's thought was
voli-
delimited and conditioned. For
strictly
though man's
role in the universe
ognize and celebrate the entirety of creation,
human
was
to rec-
difference
and
dignity consisted in man's role as a metaphysical mediator between
the higher and lower realms. Pico radicalized and potentialized this
mediative role by positing the entirety of the cosmic hierarchy as
man's proper place. Thus man, endowed with no essential particularities,
no longer had
a fixed place in the
cosmic hierarchy: the
placement of each person within the cosmos was a function of individual activity, so that
man
could degenerate towards the beasts or
ascend towards God, according to the value of his
acts.
Human
nature consisted precisely in not having a predefined nature or form. In this proto-existentialist philosophy, man's being as
becoming; man's essence
is
is
defined
constituted by the unique trajectory of
—
25
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
each individual existence. In this system, where existence precedes essence, coincide the roots of both Pascalian anguish
optimism; the origins of both a theological anxiety
God and
the joys of a radical liberation of the
the system
human
operated within a Christian ethos,
still
and
existential
of
at the eclipse
it
soul.
Though
established the
preconditions for a secular realm of thought. This openness towards the world implied that
human volition and knowledge must
traverse
the entire cosmos in order to achieve individual spiritual fiilfillment.
As Pico wrote, concerning the creation of man,
in his Oration
on the
Dignity ofMan, At
last
the best of artisans ordained that that creature to
whom He
had been
able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of what-
He
ever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being.
took
man
as a creature
the middle of the world, addressed
form that thee,
therefore
of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place
him
thus: "Neither a fixed
we
thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have
is
Adam,
to the
end that according
to thy longing
in
abode nor a
and according
given to thy
judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire.
The
nature of
all
other beings
is
limited
and constrained within the bounds of the laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by
no
limits, in
accordance with thine
own
free will, in
whose hand
We have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the
worlds center that thou mayest from thence more
observe whatever
is
in the world.
We
easily
have made thee neither of heaven nor
of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor,
as
though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion
thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
Thou
shalt
degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish.
power, out of thy
soul's
have the power to
Thou
shalt
have the
judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which
are divine. "'°
This self-transforming, metamorphosing nature establishing
no
total potentiality ativity,
is
ever-changing,
fixed form. In the aesthetic realm, Pico's theory
and mutability justified a renaissance of artistic
with a newfound juxtaposition and inmixing of forms,
and symbols. This metaphysics of action and
creativity
is
of
cre-
styles,
at the ori-
gin of an aesthetic lineage leading to the baroque and culminating
26
—
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
in romanticism.
It is
interesting to note that Pico's philosophy
was
dramatized by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-540) in
Fabula de homine
man
gamut of
the
(c. 1518),
are acted out
on the
where the
natural forms,
man
mimetic powers of protean
full
Roman
stage of the
gods. After imitating
"The
achieves a quasi-apotheosis:
gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes when, behold, he
was made into one of their own
and
relying entirely
upon
race, surpassing the
mind
a very wise
Man,
nature of just as
man
he had
watched the plays with the highest gods, now reclined with them
at
the banquet."^' But this theatricality did not end with the allegori-
of theology in a mythical
cal staging
setting; Vives also considered
the implications of this apotheosis, entailing
newfound powers of
human
of the natural world,
creativity in relation to the observation
claiming, that
all
is
wanted
is
a certain
power of observation. So he
will observe the
nature of things in the heavens in cloudy and clear weather, in the plains, in the mountains, in the woods.
things about those ers,
who
Hence he
will seek
inhabit such spots. Let
husbandmen, shepherds and hunters ...
for
out and get to
him have
know many
recourse to garden-
no man can possibly make
all
observations without help in such a multitude and variety of directions.'^
This protean ontology was not
lost
on the
natural sciences.
The
of landscape would be determined with increasing preci-
specificity
sion following the development of the
new
sciences of geography,
astronomy, meteorology, botany, zoology, etcetera; furthermore, the physical sciences ological
Already in ter
would
increasingly serve the arts, with
all
their the-
and metaphysical symbolism, however archaic or obscure. this
epoch, the hortus conclusus, the enclosed
gardens of the medieval monasteries, gave
dens of the Renaissance, and
later to the
way
more
clois-
to the secret gar-
systematically orga-
nized botanic gardens, initiated in Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their increasingly
digenous and exotic plants.
was created lic
in
Padua
When
the
first
open
collections of in-
public botanic garden
in 1545, the secret garden gave
way
to the
pub-
garden. As explained by Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel,
The of
secret
all
garden henceforth became a laboratory of minutious observations
the states of plants' growth, of their reactions to the seasons, climates,
— 27
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
and adoptive
soils.
Petrarch already gave himself over to such scrupulous
experimentations and annotations in his gardens
at
Vaucluse,
The
attempts at
transplanting pursued a century later accelerated and changed in scale: the
exchanges were no longer local but intercontinental. ''
Unknown
from the
roots
exotic herbs, spices,
found
New World
arrived to be planted in the
Old World; new names of
ancient earth of the
and produce transformed
plants abounded;
cuisine; old maladies
What
cures; the eye received novel pleasures.
arrived to incite
mystery and wonder slowly gave way to knowledge and order: the notion of the world as a closed microcosm was replaced by the concept of an infinite universe, open to sensory observation and increasingly rational classification.
Each new botanical discovery demand-
on the cosmic
great chain of being; as the examples
ed
a place
became more and more numerous, and
less
and
less
coherent with
the previously contrived system of botanic knowledge, the old categories
became
classification
mos
insufficient to the task, forcing
and ultimately an
entirely
both a new system of
new conception of the
cos-
(coherent with analogous discoveries in the other sciences,
notably those of the great Copernican and Galilean astronomical revolutions).
Under
the stress of an
increasingly heterogeneous
empirical field of objects collected, beginning in the fifteenth century,
from the corners of the earth
vegetable, mineral
—
—including
all
the orders: animal,
the old system of classes was subverted
and
transformed. These objects decorated both cabinets of curiosity and
gardens
(living,
outdoor cabinets of
—including garden —
ing the order of nature nature that
is
the
curiosity), radically transform-
the aestheticized reordering of
in a scenario
of hybridization beyond any
adequately totalizing knowledge. Hybrid species gave
rise to
hybrid
thoughts. However, as this process of demythification was a slow one (evolving over the centuries), each epoch bore a particular ratio of the
inmixing of myth and science all
aesthetic representations
—
Ficino's notion that all
opened the way
a ratio that
would remain
crucial to
and transformations of the landscape. of creation
for the historicizing
is
divine and beautiful
of knowledge, which
is
one of
the key tenets of humanist thought, no longer restricted to the
Christian limitations of scholastic scholarship. For
— 28 —
if all
cosmologi-
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
cal levels
of the universe participate in divine goodness and beauty,
then by extension
all
moments of thought
historical
albeit partially, in universal truth.
most immediately
effected
The
by Ficino
and Aristotelian systems, but
result
participate,
was a new syncretism,
in a reconciliation of Platonic
also extending to the positive recon-
Hermes
sideration of such thinkers as Plato, Moses, Zoroaster,
Trismegistos, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Virgil,
and Plotinus. Further-
more, the implications of
openness and mobility
this intellectual
were vast for both philosophical historicism and a theory of natural religion: the fact that consciousness
must survey the
entirety of the
universe implied the necessity of discerning the truth value of every
system of thought. Christian or otherwise, insofar
as
they
all
partake
of a vaster universal truth. Pico's syncretism was even greater than that of Ficino, including not only Ficino's sources but also the
Greek, Latin, and Arabic commentators of Aristotle, as well as the Jewish Cabalists. Furthermore, and crucial for modern hermeneutics,
Pico went beyond the medieval scheme of interpreting scripture
at four different levels
—
literal, allegorical,
moral, and anagogical
according to a hermeneutic centered on the master narrative of the Bible. Rather, as
he argued for a multiplicity of meanings to scripture,
heterogeneous and polyvalent
as the
complexity of the universe to
which they pertained.
In Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, Edgar
Wind
discusses the
implications of Pico's conceptual revolution for art and aesthetics.
The notion of the
tally
God, implies
deus absconditus, the hidden
single symbolization
of God can be adequate, for
God
is
nonrepresentable. Witness Cusanus's discussion, in
ignorantia, of the All these as the
many names
names
name
names derived from
name
is
multiple,
related to the true
God
is
De
docta
of the one ineffable name, and in so infinite,
particular perfections.
and always capable of
and
no
of the pagan gods:
are but the unfolding
truly belonging to
that
fundamen-
ineffable
name
29
it
far
embraces innumerable such
Hence
the unfolding of the divine
increase,
as the finite
and each is
single
name
is
related to the infinite.^'*
Hypnerotomachia PoUphili
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
As Wind radical
suggests, "Poetic pluralism
is
the necessary corollary to the
mysticism of the One."^^ This polytheistic, or at
least poly-
morphic, vision of the deity achieved the reconciliation of theological opposites in the
hidden God, necessitating an application of the
intellectual syncretisms
of Ficino and Pico. Yet those irreconcilable
opposites, w^hich previously could only have been united within
God, could now be ness.
But insofar
stated in the
human
provisionally reconciled in
form of
a paradox,
its
conscious-
could only be
as this central theological doctrine
manifold expressions, whether
conceptual, symbolic, pictorial, or ornamental, needed to share the
conceptual and ontologicaJ equivocation of
would be the source of a new iconographic
foundation. This
its
richness in the arts.
Pico was intimately familiar with the ancient pagan mystery religions being rediscovered
during his time,
as well as
with the role
of initiation in the acquisition of knowledge; indeed, he had
planned to write a book on the subject entitled Poetica theobgia. discerned the various formal levels of these mysteries
and magical
figurative,
—
all
—
He
ritualistic,
of which were continuously intermin-
gled during the Renaissance. Within these systems, truth was always
hidden, to be revealed only to the initiated through hieroglyphs, fables,
and myths. The dissimulation of truth was a protection
against profanation; revelation
was thus a function of disguise,
dis-
simulation, concealment, equivocation, and ambiguity.
Wind's analysis of the much-admired Renaissance maxim, ^^-
(make haste
tina lente
Nodes Atticae
which originated
slowly),
(Attic Nights),
moron simultaneously sums
is
in
Aulus
Gellius's
a concrete case in point. This oxy-
up, at a poetic level of understanding,
the metaphysical principle of divine totalization, the epistemological principle of the limits of ical
human comprehension, and
a certain eth-
principle for regulating one's earthly existence. Here, the meta-
physical
is
hensible)
reduced to representable (and thus apparently compre-
oxymoronic hieroglyphs or emblems
around an anchor, countless others ripeness
is
—
a butterfly all
on
—such
a crab, an eagle
as a
dolphin
and a lamb, and
intended, "to signify the rule of
life
that
achieved by a grovi^ih of strength in which quickness and
steadiness are equally developed. "^*^ Metaphysics
is
thus expressed in
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
the
realm of popular imagery by reducing philosophy to the
emblematic. is
The
result
of this reduction of the cognitive to imagery
that while aesthetics always implies a metaphysics, metaphysics
is
no longer the prime guarantor of aesthetics. This
apparent, for example, in a seminal^''
is
tory of Western gardens, Poliphili
(The
oi festina
Strife
of Love
in a
explains, these
mechanism of the The
Dream). Here numerous versions
emblems
demands of
its
own
—
secret destiny
little
i,ros funeraire)
also
is
to "initiate" the
served as a poetic image.
where the very
already foreshadow the ultimate mystery oi Adonia,
which
is
The way
first
steps
the sacred mar-
of Pleasure and Pain.^^
coincidence of opposites
tions,
read,
the final union of Love and Death, for
leads through a series of bitter-sweet progressions
riage
As
of the initiatory
allegory.
which Hypneros (the sleeping
The
the narrative.
in fact serve as part
plan of the novel, so often quoted and so
soul into
in the his-
each one provides a unique nuance to
lente are illustrated;
the idea, specifically attuned to the
Wind
book
Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia
is
revealed through sundry conjunc-
such that not only the marvels and miracles of the world, but
its
most commonplace
to say, if basic
of expression
imagery
—
the
is
arts,
objects, reveal
human
destiny. Needless
thus manipulated, the most complex forms
including landscape architecture
—
^will
bear
witness to similar metaphysical formations and deformations. These
techniques lead to the realm of what, as Cassirer reminds us, Goethe referred to as
and
an "exact sensible
art coalesce in
fantasy, "^^
an empirical realm that
where
science, nature,
own
utilizes its
standards,
paradigms, and forms; where abstraction and vision merge; and
where fantasy and theory,
mon ground
literature
and metaphysics, share a com-
of expression.
If poetry
and images were but a
ertheless offered
veil
upon
the truth, they nev-
an alternate entry into the theological system, a
means of circumventing the obvious
social restrictions
ological approach. This syncretism
was
reciprocal:
of a more the-
"An element of
doctrine was thus imparted to classical myths, and an element of
poetry to canonical doctrines. "'^° Thus there obtained a hybridization
of elements within imagery; theological connotations were granted to
3^
—
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
secular figures, and, conversely, sacred scenes evinced secular
contemporary was
more than
in fact
and
What Wind termed a "transference of types''"^'
truths.
of Renaissance
a stylistic feature
art; it estab-
lished an epistemological overture that indicated the metaphysical
foundations of a major lineage of subsequent art and aesthetics.
This syncretism was not
works were evident first
in
lost
on the
arts.
Though
earlier
both pastoral dramas and mystery
hybrid
plays, the
Gesamtkunstwerk proper, in the contemporary sense of the term,
was the opera, developed
at the
end of the sixteenth century, with
the appearance of Peri's Euridice created in Florence in 1600,
Monteverdi's Orfeo created in Monteverdi
utilized
tion between old
all
Mantua
and
in 1607.
the resources of the art, ancient or new. This distinc-
and new, most honored around 1600, held
little
value for
him. Thus on every page one finds archaic connections of tunes, traditional procedures of writing and orchestration, as well as modulations, dissonances,
enharmonics, and chromaticisms engendered by
by Greek metrics,
tonality,
and by the rhythmics of declamation. But what pertained uniquely Monteverdi was all
his
to
knowledge of gauging, choosing, blending, and ordering
these elements to create a
moving and animated work with
great lyrical
inspiration."*^
Beginning with Orfeo, Monteverdi established a musical synthesis of court
airs,
madrigals, recitative, canzone, and arioso; this entailed a
corresponding scenographic synthesis of the varied
As the Cartesian
the sciences in a unified theory, so arts
on the
spatially
would the opera
homogeneous, but
stage of baroque drama.
And
stylistically
as the
syncretize the
heterogeneous,
yet, structurally speaking,
argued that the humanist garden of the
major precursor of the
arts.
mathesis universalis sought the synthesis of
Italian
it
might be
Renaissance
totalizing artwork, insofar as
it
is
the
already served
ground, synthesis, and scenarization of all the other
arts.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna (1433-527)
The
tale consists
of the phantas-
was published
in Venice in 1499."^^
mic quest of
Poliphilus, presented as an initiatory erotic
drama
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
couched
in the
and
riences
Beginning he
forest, tiful,
form of a dream, recounting the protagonist's expe-
tribulations
in the
as
he searches for his beloved
emerges, by invoking divine guidance, into a beau-
finally
sunny landscape of absolute
world
filled
Polia.
anguishing soHtude of a wild, dark, labyrinthine
Here he discovers a
perfection.
with gardens and palaces, containing enigmatic and
emblematic monumental sculptures and ruins representing the of the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, such mids, obelisks, and temples,
all
temporary epoch. The archaic arcane.
The
allegory then
arts
as pyra-
evincing a perfection lost in the conis
brought into the service of the
thickens as Poliphilus continues his
Neoplatonic quest towards love and truth, encountering
five girls
representing the five senses, a queen symbolizing free will, and finally
women
two young
symbolizing reason and volition. After visiting
the palace, guided by the latter
which
palace gardens,
two women, he
and gold. This passage
gardens of
glass, silk,
length,
the descriptions of gardens in
as
Poliphili are
is
taken to the three
of
are ultimate expressions is
human
artifice:
worth quoting
the
at
Hypnerotomachia
of inestimable importance in the subsequent
history,
imaginary and practical, of landscape architecture.
When we
arrived at the enclosure of orange trees, Logistic said to me:
you have already seen many singular
"Poliphilus,
more no
less
singular that
you must
see."
Then
things, but there are four
she led
me
to the left of the
palace, to a beautiful orchard as large in circumference as the entire dwelling
where the queen made her residence. Around
it, all
parterres planted in cases, intermixing box-trees
two
cypress between leaves ural.
es
cypresses, that
and branches of pure
is
to say a
gold,
and
of glass so perfectly imitated that they could have been taken for nat-
The
box-trees were topped with spheres
with points twice
glass,
box-trees, with trunks
along the walls, there were
and
in
many
as high.
colors,
There were
forms and types,
one foot high, and the cypress-
also plants all
and flowers imitated
resembling natural ones.
in
The
planks of the cases were, as an enclosure, surrounded with slides of glass, gild-
ed and painted with
beautifiil scenes.
The
borders were two inches wide,
trimmed with gold molding on top and bottom, and the corners were covered with small bevels of golden leaves.
truding columns
made of
The garden was
enclosed with pro-
glass imitating jasper, encircled
34
by plants called
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
bindweed or morning glory with white flowers and of the same colored
relief
modeled
glass
similar to small bells,
These columns rested against squared and ribbed
made of the same
porting the arcs of the vaulting
trimmed with
Upon
glass
all
in
after nature. pillars
of gold, sup-
material. Underneath,
was
it
rhombuses or lozenges, placed between two moldings.
the capitals of the protruding columns were placed the architrave, the
and the cornice
frieze,
around
moldings
in glass, figures in jasper, as well as the
golden rhombuses with polished and hammered
it,
foliage,
such that
The
the rhombuses were a third as wide as the thickness of the vaulting.
ground plan and the
made of compartments
parterre of the garden were
composed of knotwork and other
mottled with plants and
graceftil figures,
flowers of glass with the luster of precious stones. For there was nothing nat-
an odor that was pleasant, fresh and
ural, yet there existed, nevertheless,
ting the nature of the plants that were represented, thanks to
with which they were rubbed.
and found
The
brilliance
it
I
long gazed upon
and genius of
While
pure
this
this
models
for
both
details
pastry making, with
just
same its
invokes Poliphilus's
artifice
artificiality
its
—
it
his-
of
Poliphilus's discovery
of
parallel history.
wonders continued: is
and
size as the
no
less
delectable than the
one which
side of the palace, of the
one made of glass, and similar in the disposition of
beds, except that the flowers, trees,
ors imitating those of nature. as in the
is
totality,
its
as well as in the subsidiary art
showed him." This garden was on the other
style
of mimesis
and many of its elements have served
"Let us go to the other garden, which
we
of gardening,
and major elements throughout the
tory of landscape architecture
these artificial
sort
garden was never imitated in
established a certain sensibility, as
new
to be very strange.^^
admiration and wonder; the inherent revealed.
this
fit-
some compound
The
and plants were made of silk, the
box-trees
col-
and the cypresses were arranged
preceding garden, with trunks and branches of gold, and underneath
were several simple plants of all types, so truly crafted that nature would have taken them for her own. For the worker had odors, with
I
know not what
The walls of this
garden were
They were assembled with
suitable
artificially
compounds,
made with
singular
pearls of equal size
given
them
their
just as in the glass garden.
and
at incredible cost.
value,
upon which was
skill,
and
spread a stalk of ivy with leaves of silk, branches and small creeping runners
—
35
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
of pure gold, and the corymbs or
of
raisins
its
of precious stones. And,
fruit
equidistant around the wall were squared pillars, with capitols, architraves, friezes
and cornices of the same metal,
upon
resting
it
ornaments.
as
made of silk embroidered with gold
planks that served as slides were
The
thread,
depicting hunting and love scenes so surprisingly portrayed that the brush
They
could not have done
better.
The
resembling a beautiful
field at
the beginning of the
parterre
then enter a third garden, in which
gular obelisk, decorated
on
Logistic turned towards
its
month of April. 45
located a golden trian-
is
three sides:
me and
three figures, square, round,
was covered with green velour
said:
and
harmony
"Celestial
triangular.
Know,
consists of these
Poliphilus, that these are
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have a perpetual affinity and conjunction, signifying: 'the divine
square figure
and
is
is
unique and similar in
beginning, as hieroglyphs,
by
and
with a single essence.'
infinite trinity,
dedicated to the divinity, because all its parts.
God. Around
is
whose property
its beautifiil light,
is
its
it is
The round
produced from
figure
is
without end or
circumference are contained these three
attributed to the divine nature.
creates, conserves,
and illuminates
all
The sun which,
things.
The helm
or rudder which signifies the wise government of the universal through
The
nite sapience.
third,
participation of love
The Neoplatonic quest, Poliphilus
which
is
The
unity,
a vase full of
and charity communicated
fire,
infi-
gives us to understand a
to us
"4° by divine goodness.
resonances are worth noting. Continuing his is
confronted with three doors, representing the
major paths of life, leading towards either the glory of God, the pleasures last
and wonders of the world, or
love.
As
Poliphilus chooses the
—
most
justifying the text's extreme voluptuousness
—he
is
led to the
perfect garden of all, Cythera, residence of the goddess of Love
(and historic
site
of the Greek cult of Aphrodite): "That region was
dedicated to merciful nature, intended for the habitation and
dwelling of beatified gods and spirits."47
dens of Cythera
is
defy synopsis, yet
so it
complex
The
description of the gar-
as to escape precise visualization
has inspired
much
of landscape architecture. Here, the
new
Renaissance sense of nature
combines with the contemporary exigencies of the
symbolism of nature
is is
and
of the Western imagination
reflected in architectural detail, the
arts:
cosmic
fecund sensuality
circumscribed by the most rigorously geometricized
37
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
geography, and the beauty of the landscape
accentuated, or even
is
simulated, by the most refined artifice of the artisan's
Each aspect of to
become
this site inaugurates a type
stereotypical.
The
island
beaches surrounded with ambergris, and
its
later
with crystalline earth,
circular,
is
craft.
of perfection
circumference
is
defined
by ordered plantings of cypresses and bilberry bushes trimmed perfection every day.
The
island's river
to
has a shore adorned with
sand mixed with gold and precious stones, and banks planted with
and
flowers ically
citrus trees.
The
island's
major divisions are mathemat-
organized and separated by porphyry enclosures of
artificial
and knotwork decorations interspersed with marble
pilasters;
foliage
each of these divisions delimits a different sort of planting: oak,
fir,
shrubs formed into figures representing the powers of Hercules, pine, laurel
and small shrubs, apple and
and wild-cherry, plum, peach and ate, chestnut,
pear, cherry, heart-cherry
apricot, mulberry,
fig,
pomegran-
palm, cypress, walnut, hazelnut, almond and pista-
chio, jujube, sorb, loquat,
dogwood,
service, cassia, carob, cedar,
ebony, and aloes. In what appears as a prototypical version of Michel Foucault's
"Chinese encyclopedia"
ments are
no
—where
shatters empirical less diverse,
—
the animals to be found there
so as to maintain the Utopian aspect of the
fauns, lions, panthers,
satyrs,
the introduction of fantastic ele-
taxonomy
snow
site:
leopards, giraffes, elephants,
griffins,
unicorns, stags, wolves, does, gazelles, bulls, horses, and an
infinity
of other species (excepting only those that are poisonous or
ugly).
Furthermore, the decorations within the sundry orchards,
prairies,
and
parterres offer nearly the entire
become the standard trellises,
bowers,
features of
altars,
architectural features,
gamut of what
shall
Western landscape architecture:
decorative bridges, topiary, sculptural and
and fountains. There
are herb gardens con-
taining a variety of medicinal plants as vast as that of medieval cloister gardens, devil's
including absinthe, birthwort, mandragora, fiimitory,
milk, sumac, betony, calamint, lovage, St.-John's-wort, night-
shade, peony; and also aromatic and edible plants such as lettuce, spinach, sorrel, rocket, caraway, artichokes, chervil, peas, broad beans,
purpura,
pimpernel,
anise,
39
melons,
gourds,
cucumbers.
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
watercress,
chicory,
The
etcetera.
flowers
whose
the prairies,
in
description evokes the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval tapestries
such as the unicorn
cycles, are
no
less varied,
and the
parterres, plant-
ed with extremely complex, interlaced, and varied patterns of flowers
and other
plants,
have become
Finally, there
is
classic
models
the veritable "source"
quest, the mystical fountain of Venus (which, unillustrated, but for a schematic
ground
for
subsequent gardens.
and destination of the most
remains
tellingly,
plan), with
columns made
of precious stones, detailed carvings, and zodiacal and mythological
The
symbols.
source of the water could
itself
be seen as an allegory
for the "third nature" that characterizes the art
The
cover of this marvelous fountain was
overturned coupe without a foot,
all
of gardens:
made of a rounded
of a single piece of
vault like an
crystal,
whole and
massive, without veins, flaws, hairs, kerfs, or any macula whatsoever, purer
than the water spouting from the nature
The
Italian
made
solid, artless, raw,
unpolished rock, just as
it."**
Renaissance produced copies, however flawed, of certain
aspects of these gardens. Henceforth, mathematics
would
and mythology
join within the art of landscape architecture. Yet,
however
imperfect the imitation, an entire worldview was evident in these gardens.
As Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel remarks,
The also
visions freed
by the
reveries are not always
images of paradise
Poliphilus ends his journey
is
one of
those: Venus, in concert with
matical reason, conceived the plans for this garden. Fecundity order, measure,
The
and
may
tain
machia
is
mathe-
allied
with
always upheld by the most extreme sen-
one of the inscriptions on the foun-
"Delectation
is
like a sparkling dart."^°
synopsis of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili can
due
—through
object,
is
serve as an epigraph for the entirety of the Hypneroto-
precisely
acter
they
proportion."*?
preciosity. Indeed,
Poliphili:
No it is
and
metaphysical allegory
suality
lost;
sometimes prefigure models of a perfection yet to come. The island where
to the eccentricity
satisfy, for
of its quasi-encyclopedic char-
the heterogeneous allusions and evocations of each
and the symbolic
interrelations
between these objects
—
that
the nature of this synthesizing, moralizing, and aestheticizing symbolic system appears.
The heterogeneous enumeration
shatters the
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
of mimesis, giving
effects
rise to art as
imagination. Such a pluraUstic
an activity of the autonomous
mode of Usting and
narrative para-
conceptual expansion of horizons, utihzing pre-
taxis operates as a
vious symbols, forms, and taxonomic schemes retrospectively to recreate their classic origins; proleptically, they create a
modern
aes-
Here, a vast syncretism rules the combination of botanic
thetic.^'
Greek, Syrian,
Cypriot,
(Egyptian,
architectural
etc.),
and
(ancient
Greek,
Roman,
Virgil,
Dioscorides, Theophrastus, etc.) elements, establishing a
totality
imbued
And yet,
it is
Italian,
Gothic, monastic,
w^ith the
most extreme, and
transfiguring
motives.
textual (Pliny,
anachronisms.
fruitful,
perfectly coherent with the Neoplatonic metaphysical
speculation of the epoch; for tic,
etc.),
classicism
all
ancient forms
we can
precisely here that
It is
is
inherently revisionis-
according to contemporary appreciate the allegorical
weight of ruins in landscape architecture: signs of an ideal and ide-
now
alized past
that recuperates
combines and
disappeared, symbols of a creative consciousness
and transforms, indices of an
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili thus
and general models arts
—
—based
on
offers
not only specific details
a synthesis of the contemporary
subsequent history of landscape architecture;
for the
proffers
aestheticization that
refines.
it
also
an aesthetic of complexity, contradiction, and paradox that
will inspire,
both consciously and unconsciously, the most profound
garden creations.
and characterizations
Its style, plot,
are
complex
and heterogeneous; ancient, medieval, and Renaissance objects
are
contemporaneously juxtaposed and overlaid with both sacred and profane symbols; multiple discourses interweave ism, erotic
drama and mundane
myth and
description, fantasy
rational-
and
utility,
nature and geometry; varied, often contradictory, ideals of beauty are interwoven. Furthermore, the is
metaphoric dimension of artifacts
always apparent, revealing the landscape
symbolic,
or
allegorical
Poliphilus, in
2i
the narrative,
Colonna
that
space
parallel
itself as
to
the
an emblematic,
mental
state
of
psychomachia that organizes the dynamic principle of as
—
subjects, science
Gilles
Polizzi
explains:
"Such
in the problematic conjunction of
and
desire, the
book of
is
the
its
books and
its
Apuleian weave of its mysteries and
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
the experiment with natural hieroglyphs that
makes
a
it
Crucial for the present study
and
is
the fact that Hypnerotomachia
significance of gardens in general. For not only
the garden a reflection of mental states, but is
opens to a polysemy
it
importance of narrative in establishing
Poliphili stresses the central
the structure
—
world-book or a monster-book. "^^
is
allegorical structure
its
based upon the active, and not merely mimetic, aspect of vision as
a creative,
dynamic, mutable process. This pertains to the garden's
and mathematical forms
visible
Thus
logical dimensions.
as well as to its visionary
and mytho-
the "objective" geometry and sciences
behind these inventions, the "third nature" realized from combining artifice
and nature,
narrative
are instantiated or activated, as
who
phantasms of those
quently by the phantasms of those
machia
Poliphili, the
garden
is
who
literally
of the imagination
—
a dream; the real gardens of
The
liberated plas-
a major consequence of the
physical system elaborated by Cusanus, Ficino,
sponds to the historic
and
relativity
and subse-
enter them. In Hypneroto-
the world, conversely, are sites that evoke reverie. ticity
were, by the
it
created the gardens,
new meta-
—
and Pico
alterability
corre-
of truth in
its
manifold and often contradictory manifestations. For the conditions
of the possibility of any work of
and
not only the material
art include
of the period, but also
spiritual traditions
phantasms, misreadings, variants, and heresies
and paralogisms
—of
are foundational
the paradoxes
of an epoch. complexity,
principles in both the genesis
The
the conceivable
all
the arcane and often unstated traditions that
Contradiction,
architecture.
all
—
and paradox
fundamental
are
and the structure of Western landscape
coherence, formalism, and
stylistic
closure
all
too
often sought by historians of gardens in fact dissimulates the inco-
herence,
most
and conceptual
heterogeneity,
great gardens.
The
intricacies
always at odds with the geometric,
static,
tasy,
and
in
its
human and
destiny, or in
its
growth, decay and death thetic, syncretic entity,
underlie is
mathematical space of
conceptual form. "Worked through by the
whether
that
organic, dynamic, chaotic space of nature
Demon
of
Time
historical manifestations as narrative, fan-
natural manifestations as seasonal change,
—
the garden
escaping
all
is
a fortiori a dynamic, syn-
formalist definition.
Tell
me which
universe; earth's
is it
infinity
is
yours,
the infinity
of the
and
I will
know
sea or the sky,
the
is it
meaning ofyour
the infinity
of the
depths or that of the pyre?
Gaston Bachelard
Dematerialization
and Iconoclasm Baroque Azure
^^ %
m ^ l^^
m
M
M
laise Pascal
(1623-62) observed, "Reason never totally
surmounts the imagination, but the opposite
is
com-
mon."' This theological pessimism, the nostalgia for an
^
unadulterated
at the origins
faith, established a
new phantasmic
space
of the modern age. For while seventeenth-century the-
ology and scientism are at the antipodes regarding epistemology and ontology, they share a quite decided aesthetic iconophobia. its
of the seventeenth-century imaginary
a Jansenist theology according to
bolic space or function, a mathesis universalis,
which
narization of the imagination
scientific epistemology,
is
visuality to logical
and
diminished or denied,
reduced to discourse, to symbol, or to mere divertissement.
commonly
of
principles obstruct the sce-
by reducing
schematization. Aesthetics
rhetorical
lim-
God no longer has any sym-
and a new Cartesian
whose axiomatic
The
exist at the intersection
accepted that French formal gardens
dens" such as Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles
—
—
It
is
"Cartesian gar-
represent the ratio-
nalized aesthetic epitome of the mastery of nature, where the garden serves as an instrument of
knowledge and power. Here,
—not only paradox—of what would
as a rhetorical flourish,
pose the question cognitive
I
wish to
but also
as a
constitute a "Pascalian garden."
In the French formal garden, the panoptic Utopia of a single, perfect viewpoint
would seem
to present the landscape in
an unam-
biguous pictorial unity. This ideal viewpoint, situated, for example,
Versailles,
the
Versailles,
Grand Canal seen from
the Fountain
the chateau seen from the Fountain
ofApollo
ofApollo
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
at
the ballroom of Vaux-le-Vicomte or the Hall of Mirrors at
of what the
Versailles, reveals the visual representation
Simon
referred to as
''
la
Due
de Saint-
grande mecanique" symbolizing the moral
imperatives of both the royal court and the aesthetic geometrization
of nature. The geometric, perspectival construct of the formal gar-
den
creates a "captured view^." But, unlike the symbolic views orga-
nized by the Chinese garden or the pastoral scenes captured in the Italian
and
later in the
English garden, what
scheme thanks
is
circumscribed in the
itself,
brought into the garden
to the optical exigencies
of linear perspective. The
French formal garden
is
infinity
horizon between earth and sky, punctuated at the vanishing point by the frontal visual axis of the garden composition,
is
a
major feature
of the formal composition. While the geometrization of the earth well as the position of infinity have received
much comment
as
in the
history of landscape architecture, the role of the baroque sky in the
symbolic landscape warrants further study.
Erwin Panofsky has shown
how
in Perspective as Symbolic
Form
one-point linear perspective permits the empirical representa-
tion of
God, inscribed
at infinity.
The same
as the
vanishing point of the pictorial space
observation obtains for the role of infinity in
the formal garden, where, as in
projections in linear perspective,
all
there exists "the concept of an infinity for
model
in
Whence
God, but which
is
which there
not only a
the symbolic existence of such a garden as a "moralized
landscape," proffering what, to invent a theorem, "optical proof"
to the
I
would term an
of the existence of God (based on the symbolic value
of infinity manifested as the vanishing point).
added
is
actually realized in empirical reality."^
more
classic
The
Cartesian proofs, and
latter
may
may
be
stand as an
ironic introduction to the Pascalian garden, in counterdistinction to
the extreme baroque pictorializations of the Counter- Reformation.
The baroque
mobility of the body as
effects at the core
baroque insinuates
anamorphic
itself at
distortion,
mental perspectives are synthesized
it
traverses the garden establishes
of the geometrized French garden. The the very center of neoclassicism as
where the multiple, incompatible, supple-
(frontal, oblique, transversal, aerial, isometric)
by the deployment of the
47
spectator's
body and the
UNNATURAL HORIZONS concomitant idiosyncrasies of perception. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the aesthetic closure of the garden space ty
is
a fiinction
of the reversibiU-
between viewpoint and vanishing point. This reversibiHty
Hshed by the garden's formal constraints: the major visual pels
is
estab-
axis
com-
the spectator to walk towards the vanishing point at the
promenade
horizon; this
reveals a series
symmetries in the landscape;
of the garden
is
of optical illusions and
end of the walk the extreme
at the
dis-
limit
reached, where the topographic feature of a lawn in
and view
the shape of a natural amphitheater motivates one to turn
the space just traversed.
The
ontological suppleness of space
is
revealed through the unfolding of depth, such that the ruses of
bidimensionality (the
"perfect"
initial
view of the garden) are
exposed: the chateau, originally the viewpoint, the
new
vanishing point.
perspectival distortions,
The
is
transformed into
multiplicity of divertissements, the
and the disparate symbols
are
all
unified
by
the instability of motion and temporality, by the ambiguity and fragility
of perception.
Examination of the symbolic attributes of landscape architecture
may
be advantageously informed by the methodology of
Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The
book opens with tecture:
ness of
a manifesto entitled "Non-Straightforward Archi-
A Gentle Manifesto," meaning
in
which he exclaims,
function as well as the explicit fiinction. "either-or,"
am
for rich-
I
prefer "both-and" to
black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or
white. "^ This irrational,
"I
rather than the clarity of meaning; for the implicit
is
a theorization of inclusion, not exclusion; of the
not the rational; of discontinuity, not continuity.
It is
no
accident that the baroque, which celebrates the architecture of tension, complexity, ambiguity, contradiction,
major
and paradox, plays a
role in his analysis.
The
very conception of the formal garden
rests
ambiguity between baroque and neoclassic modalities of
Consider the
fact that
Andre Le Notre drew the plans
upon the spatiality.
for his gar-
dens in mixed perspective, combining in the same drawings both
ground plan and
perspectival projection.
The topography of
the
landscape corresponds to the ground plan, while objects (such as
48
—
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
buildings
and
relief, also
which
all
accentuated by shadows) are drawn in isometric
trees,
known
as "parallel perspective," that
parallel lines
ishing point
remain
and without horizon. Thus there
tion of two-
a projection in
is,
parallel, a representation
and three-dimensionality
same
in the
without van-
an apparent confla-
is
representation.
Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier explain: "As objectified representations, isometry
and axonometry occupy the ambivalent
space opened
up between the geometries of [Gaspard] Monge and
[Jean-Victor]
Poncelet, oscillating between the extremes of self-
evident representation (accurate description) and self-referential for-
mulation (freedom from representation). ""^ The symbolic space of the landscape thus exists at the intersection of description
mulation,
ground plan and axonometry,
—
abstract mathesis
lived
and
for-
and
experience
a symbolic matrix radically transformed
by the
ambivalent limitations inherent in the differing modalities of perspectival projection,
and continually haunted by the imperious need
to represent the unrepresentable site
Did Le Notre
utilize this sort
of infinity.
of projection for practical or for
symbolic reasons? While "central perspective" (one-point frontal ear perspective) privileges those immeasurable,
lin-
incommensurable,
hyperbolically phantasmic baroque views where the entire scene
seems to be fleeing towards a sacred and ever-vanishing point, the "parallel perspectives"
of isometric and other types of axonometric
projections offer a measurable, proportional representation of objects, field.
its
independent of the exigencies and distortions of the visual
Such representations thus correspond
of view (being drawn
as if the eye
to
no
were placed
theoretical constructs used for practical purposes.
implies that they are without their
single visual point
at infinity): they are
But
own symbolism.
this in
no way
It is as if
such
representations created a tension or equivocation between the lofty, yet
embodied, overview inherent in
aerial projections
of ground plan,
and the disembodied, dematerialized view-without-a-vievi^oint of axonometric projections
—
the vision of a purely spiritual being.
Just as optics, geometry,
and perspective played
a
key
role,
both practical and symbolic, in the formation of the French garden, so too did considerations of technology
49
and engineering. The
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
geometrization of the landscape necessitated surveying techniques
whereby
straight Hnes could be established for the realignment
of
topography and the orderly disposition of objects. These techniques
—
to connect distant spaces, or, in their aesthetic version, to
harmony of disparate
create a
parts
—were
in great part appropriat-
ed from contemporary military engineering, since landscape archi-
same problems
tects faced the
ent reasons. (In this regard
as military engineers, albeit for differ-
it is
interesting to note that, perhaps not
coincidentally, in 1640, at the age of twenty-seven,
Fran^oise I'Artillerie ty,
daughter of the
Langlois,
Le Notre married Ordinaire de
Conseiller
de France.) Helene Verin explains: "The greatest difficul-
according to the engineer Fabre in 1629, concerned 'continuous
lines'
which 'exceed 100 or 120 even to the extent of 200
yards] for a certain proportion
toises
[400
must be observed between the place
defended and the distance of the places from which comes their defense.' "5
Taken into account
ical features,
in such
measurements were topograph-
the disposition of buildings
direction of fire,
and
apertures, angles
and questions of ballistics. What
est in the present
context
—beyond
is
of sight,
of special
pertaining to the construction of landscape architecture
—
inter-
problems
that of the technical
is
the fact
that considerations of ballistics linked visible lines of sight to invisible places, ible
where death determined the articulation between the
and the
invisible.
The symbolic
correlates
revealed an iconoclasm that simultaneously stressed ity
and
vanity,
human
mortal-
and ultimately manifested the theological sublime.
The problem of the dynamism of the human body within formalized, geometric garden tics.
The
vis-
of this invisible space
was thus prefigured by
issues
the
of ballis-
optical rigidity of the "perspective cavaliere" or "military
perspective" (versions of axonometric projection) used to represent static fortifications
projectiles
Comar explains, "the goal
connoted the extreme, mortal dynamism of the
intended to destroy such
was
to construct the
an entire strategy."^ jections
fortifications.
Here, as Philippe
the drawing served an operational, tactical purpose;
Comar
image not of a simple
rightly suggests that
were pragmatic, since they represented the
of the objects and spaces depicted, they were
50
—
far
edifice,
but of
though such projust proportions
from symbolically
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
neutral,
due
to the inaccessibility
of this
infinite
(axonometric) view-
may be
point to any spectator except God.
The symbolic
drawn from such representations
that they are "visionary" precise-
ly
is
because they are divorced from
value that
—
visionary according to
visibility
the eternal, mathematical rhythms of measure
and proportion inde-
pendent of all perspectival limitations and mutations. This axonometric representational space
is
a function of the
control of spatiality central to Cartesian rationalization. Here, depth is
effectively suppressed;
intuited
depth
is
conceived
as the third
dimension,
from the primary dimensions of height and width. Depth
becomes a function of reasoning; depth of perception; depth lectualized,
because
exists
exists
man
is
due
mathematized, technocratic space
neous, quantifiable,
isotropic,
is
and unambiguous;
clear,
to the limitations
not God. Such an
it
intel-
homoge-
a projection
is
of
cognition, not a topology of perception.
To
the contrary, the very existence of the baroque
is
a fianction
of the primacy of spatial depth, implying the inherence of time in space, the existence of ty
of motion.
hidden objects and scenes, and the
Dynamism
possibili-
replaces static geometrization in a scenario
of perpetual motion and metamorphosis.
It
is
no accident
that
descriptions of baroque spatiality are ofi:en couched in military
metaphors: baroque space
is
described as "dynamic, in perpetual
morphogenesis and 'catastrophe,' point
is
force. "9
Depth
dimension of lived ities
"^
where "the
experienced as the
line
is
first,
spatiality. It creates the possibility
vector and the
not the third, of all possibil-
according to which a world takes form: a reversible spatiality
that surrounds
and
is
reveals
an
and includes the invisible,
spectator; a spatiality that maintains
encompassing transcendence that
mately related to immanence. In Vaux-le-Vicomte, the
dynamic combine:
static
is
inti-
and the
lived vision traces a flexible, serpentine, disequi-
librious optical line across the geometrized axis of the garden's concrete configuration.
Whence
the ambiguity of this space, where the
epistemological scenario and metaphysical allegory of the garden arise
from corporeal presence and mobility. Thus the poetic
the French formal garden
equivocations of
stasis
is
logic of
not purely visual, but synaesthetic; the
and motion, two- and three-dimensionality,
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
viewpoint and vanishing point, geometry and chaos, are only through active spectatorship.
body
in space creates a veritable instability
perspectival projection,
from mobility
The
The baroque
all
resolved
trajectory of the
within the neoclassic
where the dynamic anamorphosis resulting
establishes the synthesis of the different perspectives.
fantasy of neoclassic proportion, closure,
and perfection
is
sub-
tended by a baroque instability that renders any such closure impossible.
In
La
du
folie
voir,
baroque ordains a
Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains,
'retreat
of being,' an
"The
'insufficient reason' at the
heart of the neoclassic epoch. "^° Indeed, if the baroque fascination
with infinity tence of retreat
considered in terms of my "optical proof" of the exis-
is
God, then we cannot avoid
Pascal's
of God, deus ahsconditus. This anguish
mortal condition of
man
anguish regarding the is
created by the finite,
situated within "those terrifying spaces of
the universe that surrounds me,"" located between two invisible, unlocalizable,
God. For
unknowable, incalculable
infinities:
nothingness and
Pascal, theology necessitates the consciousness that
"True
conversion consists in annihilating oneself before that universal being
whom we have
irritated so often
us at any moment."'^
and who could
Only an
metaphysics of insufficient reason
Were we
is
adequate to
would
fall
victim to an intensely iconoclastic
But entering the realm of poetics
ferent term: sublimation. In L'air et
explains rise to a
how
this situation.
to remain strictly within the realm of Jansenist the-
ology, the imagination spirituality.
legitimately destroy
anti-aesthetic, counter-perceptual
the symbolism of the
air,
necessitates a quite dif-
les songes,
Gaston Bachelard
the sky, and the heavens gives
dynamic mode of the imagination characterized by the
mobility of images: a fleeting, vectorial imagination. priate that the
Fontaine's Le Songe de Vaux, relations
It is
thus appro-
major celebration of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Jean de La
commences with
a recognition of the
between the conjuration of dreamful sleep and the
windswept summer
night:
52
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
When
the Year
renewed,
is
In that lovely season
Where
Flora brings with her
The Zephyrs on
A night when Charms I
all
the Horizon,
silence
by her presence,
conjured up Sleep
To
my
defer
awakening
Well beyond Aurora. '3
While the empty black sky of night brings with
it
rest
and dreams,
the azure daytime sky induces an extreme, vibrant energetics. ferent contrast
of darkness and
light
A dif-
expressed in a letter written in
is
1660 by Andre Felibien, chronicler of the court of Louis xrv. Felibien describes Charles Le Brun's painting for Vaux-Ie-Vicomte, L'Apotheose
Fouquet alluding
d'Hercule, a portrait of Nicolas
non
Le Brun paints Fouquet
ascendet.
to his motto,
Quo
Hercules ascending to the
as
heavens in an attempt to render his hero in victory over his passions.
The
black horse and the chestnut horse
sent man's
two principal
chestnut signifies love.
under Louis xrv
also
who draw
his chariot repre-
passions, for here black signifies hatred
Though
and
the early iconography of Versailles
symbolized the king as Hercules,
this
was soon
surpassed by a ubiquitous solar symbolism, though the scenarization
was
Consider La Fontaine's description, in Les amours de
similar.
Psyche et de Cupidon (1669),
which
the Bassin d'Apollon at Versailles
celebrates the sculpture located in
and the sun
itself:
There, in golden chariots, the Prince and his Court
Come
to taste the freshness at day's decline.
One and
the other Sun, each unique of
Display to the onlookers their
Phoebus
shines, envious of the
Often one does not know
Both
are full of radiance
its
pomp and
kind.
richness.
French Monarch;
whom
to applaud:
and resplendent with
glory.'**
Like the golden fleurs-de-lis on an azure background that symbolizes
sun
the
House of France, the
itself,
Prince's
golden chariot, contesting the
traverses the celestial regions
gardens at Versailles.
forming the roof of the
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
The
dynamism of the imagination
mutability and
traces the trajec-
tory from the real to the imaginary, from transcendence to
The
nence.
blue sky
imma-
the basis of a quite special imaginary,
is
Gaston Bachelard terms the
what
"dynamics of dematerialization"
aerial
where there obtains "the fusion of the dreamer with a universe that is
as little differentiated as possible,
infinite
and formless, of minimum
beneath the cloudless, azure sky
know like
with a soft and blue universe,
substance."^'^
—
for, as
This occurs a
poets, artists,
fortiori
and dreamers
so well, clouds are already the prototype of images; clouds,
smoke and
fire,
are
among the
The
natural sources of figuration.
dematerializing, celestial imaginary
is
of the most extreme solitude,
resulting in the dissolution of matter, the erasure of images, a pure
transparency represented by the empty, azure sky. Appearance
is
reduced to an imagination without images. This purest form of poetic meditation
is
not
far
from the consciousness of religious tran-
scendence and mysticism, entailing, according to Bachelard, the replacement of the "method of doubt" with a "method of erasure."'^ Before the Renaissance geometrization of space, with
sequent materialization of infinity as vanishing point,
empyrean azure that most divine. Indeed,
it
closely symbolized the infinite
one of the subde sources of
its
con-
was the pure
and the
aesthetic tension in the
French formal garden consists of the opposition between azure and infinity,
between
pictorial
openness and geometric closure, where the
ambulatory experience of the gardens depth destroys the
illusive pic-
torialism inherent in the initial viewpoint. For Bachelard, the infinite
expanse of the open sky implies one-dimensionality, where unframed space attains cosmic proportions:
"The dream
escapes from the
flat
image. Soon, in a paradoxical manner, the aerial dream has nothing
but the dimension of depth.
The two
other dimensions enjoyed by
picturesque or painted reveries lose their oneiric interest. "'^
The
stages
of visual reduction are transfigured into a meta-
physical declension: contemplation of the sky leads ty to blueness to discoloration to
from uniformi-
depth to the void to the unreal.
This ultimately attains the most extreme reduction of dimensions, a
— 54 —
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
non-dimensionality that "gives the impression of an absolute
mate subhmation."'^ Such a poetics
is
no longer limited by
physical "kinophobia," that anxiety about depth
a
inti-
meta-
and motion inher-
ent in Cartesian philosophy. This pneumatological, moral imaginary
alone
is
sufficient to manifest the formless,
nonsymbolic infinitude
of the universe. For Pascal, too, theological infinity
exists in a
non-
dimensional space beyond the limits of the imagination, an infinite sphere whose center
is
everywhere and whose circumference
nowhere: "In short,
is
the greatest perceptible aspect of God's
it
omnipotence that our imagination should thought.
lose
in
itself
this
"''9
One
limit of this modality of the imaginary
clasm; the other
is
the
where the azure sky
unbounded
sheer icono-
is
iconophilia of the aerial sublime,
serves as the ultimate background.
On
the one
hand, the azure sky of Jesuit iconology designates a sacred dome, the
unclouded vault of the heavens, where mirages of holy visions govern the flight of angels, the ascent of saints, and the
damned
in a celestial whirlpool
of unmediated depth.
fall
On
of the
the other
hand, given the Jansenist disdain for the depiction of the sacred, there can be
no adequate representation of the deus
pictorial designation
aesthetically
absconditus.
The
of God's infinitude can reveal no more than the
and geometrically perfect vanishing point of perspecti-
val space: such
would consist ofthe impossible
icon
ofa vanishing point
without a picture. Between the baroque and the neoclassic, between the Jesuit ias
and the
Jansenist, the fate of miracles
of representation. However, the
an equivocation between the
visible
antithetical cases, supporting
aerial
is
tied to the apor-
imagination, governed by
and the
invisible,
mediates these
both Jesuit fabulation and Jansenist
elimination.
Consider in comparison the stage of seventeenth-century comedy
and drama. The creation of the proscenium arch
(codified in 1619
with the creation of the Teatro Farnese in Parma, but already in use in the Italian court theater
of Francesco
Salviati nearly fifty years
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
was a key technical feature guaranteeing the
earlier)
possibility
of representing a rationalized theatrical and operatic space. Subsequently, the heterogeneous, polymorphous outdoor space of
and secular
religious
of the theater;
festivals
spatial
gave
way
to the unified, isotropic space
homogeneity was accentuated by suppressing
spectatorial mobility in the theater. ^°
and place depends upon
a
This newfound unity of space
double binary that replaces the polymor-
phous, and often participatory, spatiality of previous
The
festival
and
auditorium/scene and scenic on-stage/scenic off-stage.
spectacle:
and the
visible
articulated
invisible (in their
by discourse; the
phantasmic space
invisible,
sundry manifestations) are
visible action
of the play determines the
off-stage; diegesis regulates mimesis.^'
This invisible off-stage space becomes the topography of the
most disturbing phantasms, those that
stage
a fortiori the space
is
defines the tragic
teleologically guide the pro-
As Roland Barthes suggests
tagonists' destiny.
in
Sur Racine,
a fianction of the intertwining of
is
off-
of death. The inexorable death that
two
invisible
domains, immanent and transcendent: uncontrolled libido and divinely ordained destiny. Yet this obviates the presentation of what
may
literally
be termed "spectacle," insofar as off-stage theatrics are
always transmitted on-stage via dialogue, resulting in a disquieting incertitude about the veracity of such information. Indeed, off-stage
phantasms go ic
far
beyond the complexity and contradiction of trag-
dialogue and plot: they manifest, as Barthes explains of the
of Jean Racine, "the
art
of
failure,
work
the admirably twisted construc-
tion of a spectacle of the impossible. "^^
One may go imaginary, of what there
is
fiirther: insofar as off-stage is
space
is
the
site
a radical ontological rupture
between on-stage and
off-stage.
This obtains despite the putative homogeneity of theatrical ty,
of the
forbidden or impossible to represent on-stage,
spatiali-
implied by the scenic unity established by the proscenium arch,
and the spatial/temporal unity established by psychological scene": as off-stage
is
characterization.
opposed
Off-stage
to the verisimilitude
narrativization
and
determines the "other
of on-stage scenarization,
the phantasmic space of illusion, distortion, obsession,
mortality, madness, eroticism, transgression, crime, dreams, visions,
56
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
the
miraculous,
monstrous
—and
the
spectral,
death.
We
the
the
fantastic,
grotesque,
the
find in Racine's Phedre, for example,
kingdom of
reports of hell, the labyrinth, the
and dark
the dead,
infernal night. ^^
Heaven and
hell are thus
prime paradigms of off-stage space,
where the unrepresentability of a
detds absconditiis
supplants the pre-
vious baroque representability of a dens ex machina, which
denly appear from the residual, ater,
interstitial
may sud-
space existing in the the-
hidden between stage and auditorium. This technical space
permitted the baroque spectacle of the miraculous, the marvelous,
and the
illusionistic
—
spectacles suppressed
phantasmic off-stage in neoclassic
and relegated
to the
theater. In this sense, off-stage
space preserves baroque phantasms at the heart of neoclassic scenarization
and psychologization. Indeed,
precisely off stage
it is
where
the tumultuous forces of the libido materialize in their phantasmic manifestations. This
is
a key to understanding the radical transfor-
mation of the structures of fascination from the sixteenth to the
sev-
enteenth century: the unification of scientific method in the quest for a mathesis universalis
brought with
tional space, time, mimesis,
and
it
a unification
narrative.
of representa-
The epistemology of
causality superseded the epistemology of resemblance; narration dis-
placed spectacle; the camera obscura replaced the cabinet de curiosites as the
prime paradigm of representation. Yet
titious,
all
the while, a surrep-
supplemental, disquieting, unrepresentable space haunted
systems of representation. Centuries
later,
this
space
all
would be
renamed the "unconscious." It is
theatrical
within this context that the Jansenist disdain for
and representational must be understood. As
"Everything in the world
is
life.
Libido sentiendi, libido sciendi,
This can almost serve
classic tragic theater, the earliest stage
ater into
things
concupiscence of the flesh or concupis-
cence of the eyes or pride of libido dominandi."^^
all
Pascal insists,
as a description
of neo-
of the transformation of the-
psychodrama, where the dramaturgy of the passions
enjoyment, knowledge, and domination imagination within a unified narrative.
and Jansenist theology
sets
—
guides and codifies the
The iconoclasm of Pascalian
the stage, as
it
were, for the ultimate
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
interiorization
made
of tragedy. Yet
is
it
not curious that no mention
here of the libido vivendi, the desire to Hve, which
the irrational animal passion that has all
come
is
is
precisely
to be seen as underlying
other manifestations of libido? Regardless of this omission, the
space of libido
is
the space of the unrepresentable, of passion, a space
metaphorized by the impossible bodies and scenes of off-stage theatricality.
This hidden off-stage space
exists as dramatically
homoge-
neous with that of on-stage drama, accessible to the characters, but inaccessible to the spectators; yet they
do not
exist in a relation
of
epistemological reversibility. As John Lyons explains, "the verbal
account
able to use space without being subject to the centraliz-
is
ing control of spatial uniformity imposed the theater as an art of space. "^^
of theatrical space
is
yet
There
is
plete; the
as
fabulous
still
and on
one further
illusion manifesting the divine
common
of yet no
plastic arts
implied, putative homogeneity
chaos that undermines and uproots the ae.
on the
The
lives
of the dramatis person-
locus; interiorization
exists apart
is
not com-
from the personal unconscious.
This scenographic and psychological binarism
is
illuminated by
Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, where he describes Cartesian subjectivity as
an empirical/transcendental doublet, determin-
ing a heteroclitic space where the radical ontological difference of sites
excludes a
theological
Descartes; Pascal.)
common
discourse
and
is
locus of truth. ^" still
possible
(It is
in
that a scientific discourse
for this reason that a
the
writings
makes sense
of Rene
in those
of
Such heterotopisms undermine the structure of myth,
knowledge, and language; tragic drama denies the possibility of Utopia, as mortality guarantees the ultimate dystopian disposition of
the subject anguished about death
psychologization of theater,
The
fragile
all
and damnation. Until the
remained
realist
vanity.
but inexorable relations between phantasmic space
and death show the interconnections between landscape architecture, and engineering,
tragedy, theology,
revealing variations
of
anguish based on the sundry modalities of the unknown. For these diverse scenarizations
all
contain an invisible locus that
is
identified
with our mortality: the off-stage of tragic drama, the theological
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
heaven or
the perspectival infinity of landscape architecture,
hell,
and the object of ballistics site-specific
and
The latter two
in military engineering.
two
perspectival; the former
non-site-specific
are
and
non-perspectival. These differences will guide the conclusion of this
study of the imaginary space of the formal garden.
In The Earth, the Temple,
and
the Gods, Vincent Scully explains the
symbolic relations between sacred
classic
Greek architecture and the
natural setting:
Not only were as expressive
certain landscapes indeed regarded
of specific gods, or rather
also that the temples
formed
as
by the Greeks
as
holy and
embodiments of their presence, but
and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so
in themselves
and so placed
in relation to the landscape
and
to each
other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic
The symbolic
meaning
was
that
felt in
the
land.''''
significance of each religious sanctuary differed
from
place to place, according to the specific relations between the attributes of each
god and the symbolic
aspects of the topography.
Thus
the relations between landscape and architecture were fully reciprocal in
both meaning and form: the gods existed
and the
localized entities, fice
site-specific articulation
as determinate,
of nature and
arti-
were central to the theological experience. But these relations
obtained in the
classic
Greek
era,
before the retreat of the gods,
before the final, ironic, ontotheological, neoclassic dissimulation of
God. In the
classic
epoch, the gods were everywhere manifested in a
profoundly symbolic landscape. In the neoclassic epoch, recounts,
God surpasses
as Pascal
the very limits of the imagination, as well as
the topography of the surrounding world, resulting in the total dis-
proportion of man. For Pascal, the visible world in a nature that
is
whose circumference omnipresence of
is
God
logical personification
In
a
is
"an infinite sphere whose center
neoclassic
nowhere. "^^
The
but a speck withis
everywhere and
ubiquity of
infinity,
in geometric symbolization, renders
and
all
all
the
theo-
symbolic landscapes obsolete.
rhetorical
—
59
flourish
of personification. La
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Fontaine, in Le Songe de Vaux, depicts the abode of Morpheus, god
of sleep, within the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte: "The abode of the
god
that
in the
is
their
home;
hewn by
a cavern
nature with her
own
hands, such
the entrances are protected from light and noise."^^ Such
all
respite
depths of the woods, where silence and solitude make
it is
—
giving rise to dreams, to the space of the imaginary
—
is
impossible in the civilized, geometrized, panoptic space of the for-
mal garden
Morpheus's
itself In
sure, all
is
libido. Fate
suspended,
is
mythic, pagan woods, the
classic,
melange of lyric and epic precludes the if
tragic. All
is
plea-
not altogether avoided.
One
is
elegy, all
cannot sleep on-stage in the garden proper; oneiric space
par
exists,
excellence, off-stage.
This localized, sylvan calm
is
very different from Pascal's sen-
timent that "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces dread. "^° fiil
While La Fontaines Morpheus
sleep in a protective forest solitude, Pascal's
fear
and trembling
depths of the soul, in the universe:
when he
"He seeks
me with
hidden
God
incites
paranoid emptiness of an infinite uni-
in the
not to the depths of the
verse. Pascal refers
fills
invites the visitor to rest-
it
forest,
but rather the
writes of man's search for his true place
everywhere, with disquietude and with-
out success, in impenetrable shadows."^' For Pascal, not only universe empty; not only
but nature
art,
space, including that of the garden, as
suspicion
his
of
all
must
divertissements
Jansenist distaste of representation.^^ for
itself, is
The
also
is
the
corrupt; theatrical
remain uninhabited,
shares
the
iconoclastic
hyperbolic Jesuit passion
baroque representations of the miraculous and the sacred
countered by the sober Jansenist considerations of the imagination, Pascal,
representation,
one of the
effects
futility
and symbolization. According
of recognizing the disproportion of man
the veritable dissolution of the figural imagination: faith
and
is
of to is
visual
imagination are incompatible. In Mirrors of Infinity
I
investigated the
manner
in
which the
ultimate scenarization and symbolization of Le Roi Soleil as divine
monarch obtains Versailles,
axis
in the
where the
topographic disposition of the gardens
celestial trajectory
at
of the sun follows the central
of the garden. Infinity penetrates the domain of Versailles; the
— 60 —
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
King
is
sun and its
incarnate as Divine, due to the symbolic conjunction of the infinity.
But
inherent anguish.
this celebration
of Le Roi
The sun
its
disappears "off-stage," as
framed by the groups of This
is
it
traces
Soleil
is
not without
path beyond the canal and
were, setting at the vanishing point
trees
known
as the Pillars
described by La Fontaine in Les
of Hercules.^^
Amours de Psyche
et
de
Cupidon:
The Sun, weary of seeing Hastens on
its
this barbaric spectacle,
way; and, passing beneath the waters.
Leaves to bring light to other peoples:
The
horror of these deserts increases in his absence.
Night
arrives
on
Bringing with
This
is
it
a chariot led by Silence; fear into the Universe. '^
moment of
the
the tragic flaw in the gardens of Versailles,
Might
offered as an unmitigated representation of vanity.
it
be sug-
gested that, to grasp the metaphysical contradictions that establish the dialectic of seventeenth-century metaphysics,
it
would be neces-
sary to mediate the seemingly irreconcilable differences between onstage
and
off-stage,
between the baroque and the neoclassic,
and representation?
iconophilia and iconophobia, imagination All this, however,
then,
would
is
scenarized by the Cartesian garden.
constitute a Pascalian garden?
ed to search for the solution to
this
What,
A pagan might be tempt-
enigma
in that
which
is
not gar-
den, in that realm from which the garden makes a lucid, marvelous
appearance: the mythical
domain of the woods
or the wild forest,
evoking both the bounty of nature and the attendant anguish of the
unknown. But
Whether
this
would maintain
a visual, representational logic.
the imagination treats nature as pure chaos, or rather
reveals the subtly beautiful order that nature
can attain in the hier-
archy of aesthetic objects, the garden cannot avoid the metaphysical traps
of symbolization. In response to the conundrum of the
Pascalian garden, Pierre
We
Saint-Amand suggests the following:
must imagine a garden of anguish, a garden of the weakness and misery
of the broken
self,
bridled by
its
desire for infinitude.
The promenade would
everywhere reveal an ontological proof of the limits of humanity.
A garden no
longer inhabited by the pathos of disproportion, but rather by that of
6l
—
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
restraint
and
fiirnish the
would no longer
suffering. Perspective
unique figure of subjectivity.
.
.
reign,
no longer
would no longer
self-reflexive certitude,
but the agonizing finitude of the subject.''
Here, where the
real
is
not equivalent to the rational, the Pascalian
garden would be totally unrepresentable.
It
is
an impossible
where the heterotopic spaces of human finitude and divine tude meet, beyond itable Bachelardian
which tragedy
all
possible phantasms, within language, in a ver-
"method of
itself is
site,
infini-
erasure."
As such,
it is
the space in
abolished not merely by rationalized Cartesian
doubt, but by the incertitude and anguish inherent in Jansenist faith.
While we might approach the darkest
forests that exist
beyond
the borders of every garden with fear and trembling, this does not represent, however, the "Pascalian garden." For, as Pascal insists,
"Nature
is
corrupted,"
a
impervious to Cartesian
corruption
schemes to master nature.^^ The Pascalian garden diction:
it is
paradise, forever lost;
it is
forever sinful, forever postlapsarian;
exists in contra-
the garden of earthly delights,
it is
the thrust of chaotic nature
that inwardly corrupts the beautifiil artifice of every earthly garden.
I
would
like to
— —taken from Gerard de Nervals
conclude with an allegory
mad
ing, iconoclastic,
anachronistic, disturblast
work,
Aurelia:
The woman I was
following, displaying her slender waist in a
mirrored the folds of her shifting
taffeta dress, gracefully
movement
that
enwrapped the long
stem of a hollyhock wdih her bare arm, then, beneath a bright ray of light, she
began to grow, such that
litde
by
litde the
garden took on her form, the
flower-beds and the trees became the rosettes and festoons of her clothes, whilst her face
and arms imprinted
their contours
upon the purple clouds of
the sky. She disappeared from view in proportion to her transfiguration, for
she seemed to vanish into her
—
In this passage
own
written at the
grandeur.'^
moment
of the nineteenth century
immediately predating the restoration of Vaux-le-Vicomte only it
is
the garden scenarization symbolized by the
actually
becomes indistinguishable from
62
it.
human
The body
— not
body, but
here serves
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
system of symbols to represent the world: simultaneously the
as a
garden
is
Nerval s ic
personified as the
tale
would be the
human body
is
metaphorized. As such,
perfect allegory of the garden as symbol-
where the transformation of sensible data
space,
proportion to divinization, or
exists in direct
Person-
at least to dematerialization.
age becomes cloud; the dreamer becomes his world.
This scene presents an archetypal paints things in so vivid
and energetic
and transforms
as if before one's eyes,
hypotyposis.
a fashion that
It is
places
is
an
the true madness
precisely within this figure that the visual
confounded with the
them
a tale or a description into
image, a painting, or even a living scene."^^ Such
of vision.
"Hypotyposis it
rhetorical image, placing
it
image
at the threshold
is
of
the hallucinatory. Neither Jansenist erasure nor Cartesian certainty,
but poetic madness. the subsequent paragraph
Inauspiciously,
offers a tragic finale to this otherwise
a bit
of damaged wall,
Upon is
picking
it
up,
I
at the foot
of Nerval's text
sublime vision.
"I collided
with
of which lay the bust of a woman.
was convinced that
it
was
hers."^^
Sublimation
countered by desublimation; euphoria becomes tragedy, the gold-
en sun and azure sky are clouded by the black sun of melancholia
and death. At
this
point
finitude of the subject,"
—he
cide
we have
—beyond hope, and prefiguring
hears voices that reveal to
him
revealing "the agonizing Nerval's
already seen in La Fontaine and Pascal, one
lugubrious
mood
imminent
sui-
the unavoidable finale that
which
sets
the
of the Pascalian garden: "Night has fallen on the
Universe!"4°
63
A degraded paradise is perhaps
worse than a degraded
hell.
Robert Smithson
The Libidinal Sublime Libertine Gardens of the
Enlightenment
/n
his
his
will
last
and testament, written
imprisonment
Francois,
at
Charenton,
Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) gave very
instructions about his burial. at his
He
wished
be
to
explicit
laid to rest
property at Malmaison, without ceremony of any kind, in the said
wood
dividing
is
it.
The
ditch
opened
The
as
I
it,
trust the
the traces of
memory
ertheless for those
of whom
Coming from
I
carry
few
of
way of the broad
dug by
in this copse shall be
become green
again,
shall fade
in their
lane
the farmer tenant
acorns shall be
it
and the copse grown back
my grave may disappear
me
who
from the
face of the earth
out of the minds of all
goodness have loved
away a sweet remembrance with me
me
men
save nev-
until the last
and
to the grave.'
the author of The 120 Days of Sodom (1784), Justine
(1791), Philosophy in the
—
copse standing to the right as the
ditch once covered over, above
strewn, in order that the spot thick over
first
entered from the side of the old chateau by
of Malmaison
words
1806 during
in
Donatien Alphonse
Bedroom
(1793),
and
Juliette (1798), these
suggesting his desire to create an anti-monument, in tacit
defiance of the monumentalization of figures such as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
—might appear
strange, disingenuous, excessively literary,
even romantic. They were, in
fact, at least partially in
accord with
the sentiments of the time. In his study. The Architecture of Death:
The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Richard A. Etlin traces the history of the
65
shift:
from the
Paris,
ideals
and
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
practices of intramuros burial in churchyards to burial within land-
scape gardens, revealing the conflicting paradigms of city versus countryside, formalism versus informality in landscape architecture,
public versus private property and space.
The
origin of this transformation
was inspired by the writings
of the Swiss pastoral poet Salomon Gessner, whose Idyllen received the greatest admiration
1756)
landscape architects,
Rousseau),
spawned many
day
life,
stressing
and gentle
public,
and
This work established
on Arcadian values and the
virtues of every-
exemplary domestic behavior, sweet melancholy,
nostalgia.
sentimental
and the general
imitators, especially in France.
a sentimentality based
(Idylls,
from writers (including
visits to
Idylls that
the practice of making
tomb of the beloved
arose; this inspired, for
It is
the
from the
the rich, a transformation of landscape architecture such that the
funerary
monuments
had previously graced the landscape
that
(notably in the English garden)
As
and
these beliefs
would be replaced by
actual tombs.
were contemporary with catastrophi-
practices
worsening conditions in the insalubrious and lugubrious
cally
Parisian cemeteries, there developed a strong practical impetus to transfer death
macabre
The
picturesque replaced the sublime, vanitas and
memento mori disappeared,
The epitome of inspire
with the consequent attenuation of
to Arcadia,
terrors.
in
this
an Edenic scenarization of death.
which has never ceased
practice,
both landscape architecture and
literature,
is
to
the burial place
of Rousseau at Ermenonville, the estate of the Marquis de Girardin,
where the author spent the 1778 in a
tomb
age and artistic inspiration. to
weeks of
last
that immediately
(particularly
Rousseau's
own
Temple of Vesta
island,
estate at
follies.
is
indebt-
gar-
The Leasowes) and
the landscape contained a copy of the
at Tivoli,
the
Tower of Gabrielle
Gabrielle d'Estrees), an Indian teepee, a hermitage,
other
in
the He des
by both the English landscape
William Shenstone's novels,
and was buried
of touristic pilgrim-
taste for the picturesque
was buried on a small poplar-encircled
Peupliers, in a landscape inspired
den
site
The author of Z,^ Nouvelle Helo'ise (1761),
which so much of the French
ed,
his life
became a
Etlin describes the
—
monument
(>(>
—
(inspired
by
and numerous
to Rousseau:
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
At Ermenonville, the Marquis de Girardin offered an Arcadian version of Stowe s Elysian
Fields. In place
Lycurgus, Socrates,
of a Temple of Ancient Virtues with busts of
Homer, and Epaminondas, Girardin
Modern Philosophy with columns (Physics), Voltaire (Satire),
the
The
monument
erected a
Newton
last
column dedicated
(Justice),
and
to Rousseau, this unfin-
stood as an incitement for future generations to complete
work through
further contributions to mankind.^
property also included other
monuments and tombs,
one that commemorated a spot where Rousseau often his
Temple of
(Light), Descartes
Penn (Humanity), Montesquieu
Rousseau (Nature). With the ished
consecrated to
notably-
rested during
promenades, the Alter of Reverie, a red brick obelisk dedicated
to poets
"who
excelled in presenting the sweet
Theocritus, Virgil, Gessner, and James sality
image of nature":
Thomson.^ Here, the univer-
of rational knowledge combined with the sundry inspirations
of poetry to celebrate, within the garden
itself,
those sources that
served as the aesthetic and intellectual paradigms for the contemporary landscape.
tomb immediately
Rousseau's
inspired the development of
funerary architecture and cemetery landscaping, both theoretically
and
practically.
On the one hand, it served as a model for works such (1779-85),
Abbe
poem, Les Jardins (1782), and Bernardin de
Saint-
as Christian Hirschfeld's Theorie Delille's influential Pierre's
Etude de
la
I'art des jardins
de
nature (1784). Etlin describes the
common
themes
of these works:
common
All three authors shared a
pastoral
and
conviction about the moral force of the
elegiac landscape garden.
None of them coiJd
anglo-chinois,
which was becoming so popular
scenes from
all
kiosks
and
countries
bridges,
—Greek
Gothic
in France,
tolerate thejardin
with
its
mbcture of
temples, Christian hermitages, Chinese
ruins, Turkish tents,
Egyptian obelisks, and assort-
ed tombs. Delille explicidy condemned gardens that assembled the "four corners of the world into one park.
"4
Rather, they called for a pictorially coherent pastoral setting, with
both visual and poetic unification.
And
yet,
another sort of hetero-
geneity prevailed in these Elysian Fields, as Bernardin insisted: In the cemetery individual tastes and caprice tional Elysium,
one had
would ensure
variety. In a na-
to legislate against the ever-present threat
67
—
of visual
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
monotony. Thus
monuments were
types of
all
columns, pyramids, urns,
—
to be erected here
"obelisks,
medallions, statues, pedestals, peristyles,
bas-reliefs,
and domes." The tombs and mausoleums would be fashioned from stones of all
One
colors so that they
would not seem
to have
come from
the same quarry.'
subtle aspect of the reaction against the geometric formality of
manner of amalgamating
the jardin a lafrangaiseyfzs this ferent tastes
and
cemetery with the landscape. death would,
be no
ideally,
vastly dif-
confluence that would harmonize the
styles in a
The
considerations informed the
variety of individual styles in
than that in
less
life.
In practice, these as a landscape
cemetery designed
first
garden, P^re Lachaise, established in 1804 in Paris. Here was found
poem
penciled in 1813 a telling the
home of the dead
And landscapes,
human
yet,
a
Eros would share
where the originary
mortality
would be
libertine scenarios.
new Eden."^
its
place with Thanatos in these
of
sin
Adam and
Eve that led to
infinitely repeated in the
most extreme
For the great French parks of the eighteenth cen-
while providing the
tury,
that concluded with the line, "For
become
has
sites for
tombs and monuments, were
and pleasure houses of the
settings for the follies
also
aristocracy, the
locations par excellence for the ultimate refinements of the arts de vivre
of the ancien regime. Typical
is
the Pare de
designed by Carmontelle in 1773 for the contained a Bois des
was conceived
Tombeaux
as a veritable
Due de
Monceau
it
monuments,
it
that sheltered varied
amusement
in Paris,
Chartres; though
park. Carmontelle offers the
rationale for this creation: It
was hardly an English garden that one was hoping to create
but exacdy what
it
times and places.
It is
den, a pure
was being
why
not do
If
one can transform
so, since
most accomplished painters
offer
...
we should
—
on canvas
all
reality,
bring
what
periods and places.
valorized as a fianction of pleasure, seduction,
Here, heterogeneity
is
and
of the totalizing
libertinage, not
Monceau,
a picturesque garden into a
only illusions amuse
the changing scenes of opera into our gardens, letting us see, in the
at
one garden of all
a simple fantasy, the desire to have an extraordinary gar-
amusement
land of illusions,
criticized for, the uniting in
effects
of Enlightenment
egali-
tarianism or universal reason; taste follows both fashion and the
sundry demands of the passions. Based on an assembly of ephemer-
68
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
al
fashion and artistic style, the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos
in these gardens
Among
would
the
serve worldly, rather than spiritual, desires.
noteworthy
other gardens
in
regard
this
is
Maupertuis, designed in the decades of the 1770s and the 1780s by
Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart for the Marquis de Montesquieu. This estate contained two
stylistically antithetical
gardens linked by
an underground passage: a formal garden, attached to the chateau designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and a pastoral anglo-Chinese
garden
—
referred to as the "Elysee" because of
its
—
beauty
was
that
entered through a pyramid designed according to Masonic princi-
The latter contained a tomb, erected near the pyramid, in memory of the Protestant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, killed during the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Another garden in this lineage, albeit in a much lighter symples.
bolic
mode,
existed at the estate of Betz
and was created by Louis-
Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Conde, for his mistress, MarieCatherine de Brignole, Princesse de Monaco.
It
was designed
by the landscape painter Hubert Robert, according turesque melancholy of his painterly
Gothic
turret,
Column, and an
Two
obelisk.
Temple of Friendship
love)
The
gardens contained a
an Oriental kiosk, a Chinese bridge, a druid's temple,
a pavilion of repose, a ruined
the
style.
in part
to the pic-
Roman of
its
bath, a hermitage, Tancred's
most important
features
were
(often characterized as a parthenon of
and the Valley of Tombs, which contained
several
monuments
taken from the recently dismantled Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, including a sixteenth-century obelisk
and ancient
tombstones.
It
must be remembered
served both as mementi In L'Invention de la
The ness
liberte,
poetics of ruins It
that such artificial ruins in the landscape
won and as symbols of the
is
"work" of nature.
Jean Starobinski explains. always a reverie before the invasion of
forgetfiil-
has been said that in order for a ruin to appear beautiful, the act of
destruction must be far removed, and
69
its
precise circumstances
must be
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
forgotten. Henceforth, less
it
can be ascribed to an anonymous power, to a face-
transcendence: History, Destiny.^
Starobinski cites the author
powers of these However,
as
that,
from
fall
amorphous
into an
nature's point
sible, differentiated.
of view,
is
to
tence
—
this
is
of raw matter; a new form
is
its
it is
cre-
its
material.
both a sign of meaning
lost
come. As in the experience of the sublime,
but on a more intimate will
state
Nature has made of the artwork the matter of
ruin evokes melancholy because
and an omen of death
omnipotent
uncanny
absolutely significative, comprehen-
ation, just as previously art used nature as
The
to explain the
one can speak of ruins and not of heaps of stone, nature does not
permit the work to
born
Georg Simmel
effects,
scale, the ruin offers a spectacle
of the
nonhuman dimension of
of nature, of the
exis-
the prime emotion of the Gothic sensibility.
Yet Sade was not a Gothic author; his conception of nature
was
terrifyingly mechanistic
and modern. None of Sade's
properties
shared these ostentations; rather, his theatricality was focused,
on the
private theater in his chateau at
La Coste
in the
first
Luberon
region of Provence, the place of his greatest libertine freedom, and later in the
even more private theater of his novels. Furthermore,
it
should be noted that upon his death in 1814, Sade's will was not respected, since the estate of earlier.
Malmaison had been sold four
After receiving a religious
ceremony he was buried,
years
against
cemetery of the hospice of Charenton,
his express wishes, in the
where he had long been imprisoned. His grave bore a simple headstone bearing a simple cross, with no
Petrarch's
name engraved upon
many during
For Sade, and for
it.'°
the eighteenth century,
passion for Laura was the most extreme and perfect
expression of romantic love. Ermenonville, for example, contained
among
its
ftinerary
monuments
a factitious
tomb of Laura
di
Audiberto di Noves, engraved with verses by Petrarch and symbolically situated at the source
nection was even
of a spring. But for D. A.
more profound,
as
Laura's
husband, the proven^al nobleman
alogical
connection was not
lost
upon
who had written Memoires pour la
F.
Sade the con-
he was directly descended from
vie
Ugo
di Sade.
Sade's uncle, the
This gene-
Abbe de
Sade,
de Frangois Petrarque (1J64.-J).
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
One
night,
wife,
penned
D. A.
F.
Sade had a dream, described in a
me.
All of a sudden, she appeared to
not at
all
altered the
when
fire as
letter to his
of Vincennes on 17 February 1779:
in the prison
I
saw
her!
The
tomb had
horror of the
glow of her charms, and her eyes
still
retained as
upon which her
beautiful blond hair loosely floated.
It
seemed
that love, in
order to render her even more beautifiil, wished to soften the lugubrious in
which she offered
asked.
herself to
"Come join me. There
discord in the vast space
This might well be seen romantic
this vision
my eyes. "Why do you is
no more
inhabit.
I
Have
suffering,
lament your
no more sorrow, no more
it
dream. Yet, however
did not thematically inspire
would not be through
a romantic nostal-
gia for love, unrequited or otherwise, that this prisoner
would dream
his freedom. Rather, in a gesture that reaches the limits
ary imagination, Sade
—
milieu of the prison into
—^would
er
its
the
closed
opposite, a totally eroticized universe.
emblematic of a
as
literary
any case that had already been accomplished by
dawn of the
Renaissance),
his prison walls.'^
we might
captivity: a picture
image that graced Sade's
adorned
transform
thought
Rather than looking towards Laura
Petrarch at the
liter-
from the ancien regime and a philosophy
materialistic
enterprise (for in
of the
^whose sensibilities were divided between an
aristocratic style derived
by
attire
fate?" she
the courage to follow me.""
as a classic prisoners
might have been,
Sade's literary endeavors. It
inspired
much
Petrarch glorified them. She was entirely shrouded in black satin,
Here the
spectacular, rich, fertile land-
scapes of Provence, adored by both Petrarch
—
another ideal of nature
consider anoth-
of Vesuvius that
and Sade, gave way
accursed,
terrifying,
and
to
destructive.
Consequently, the implicit morbidity whereby love and death were symbolically joined in the contemporary landscape garden was here
made
hyperbolically explicit. In his Voyage
visits
to several
d'ltalie,
famed volcanoes of that country.
Sade describes
He
first
saw
Pietramala:
The
terrain
around
it
is
sandy, uncultivated, and full of stones.
As one
advances, the excessive heat and the odor of carbon and charcoal that exhales
is felt
for
more than
a
hundred
the hearth that perpetually burns, with
heanh
is
steps around. all
presendy open for only about
71
the
Coming
closer,
more ardor when
fifteen or
it
one
rains.
it
sees
This
twenty paces around. But
Chateau de Sade, La Coste
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
the totality of
its
circumference
approximately double that, which can be
is
confirmed by digging into the earth to the extent within
ment used out,
and
The
for digging.
black.
same odor
burnt.
The
mention. As one excavates
earth at the middle of the hearth
That around
it,
though
with a certain moistness that makes the
I
appears and seems to light up under the very instru-
this circle, fire
as the volcano,
it
which
still
possible to shape
it
baked, burnt is
flame that comes out of the hearth
is
extremely ardent; it.
like clay,
one wishes.
as
not the case for that which
is
taneously burns and consumes everything thrown into
and similar
is
within the volcano,
It is
It
has
is
already
it
instan-
violet in color
to that of a flamed spirit of wine. ^'
Later during his voyage he visited the volcano of Solfatare, and finally that
of Vesuvius, which he describes
We
as follow^s:
climbed for two hours, of which the second part was the most
For the
quarter hour the sand was very hot.
last
ing one discovers a large
number of small mouths of smoke
and the atmosphere an unbearable funnel or flange of the ancient valley
taste
mouth
of
The
sulfur.
is fiill
that give the air
entire surface
of sulfur and
One
flange of the
first
little
descends into
is
mountain, from which one then looks straight into
noise arises from there,
smoke of considerable
to time thick flames shoot out
con-
and then ascends on the
this litde valley
horror of the terrifying abyss that serves as reservoir for the hearth.
from time
of the
saltpeter; the little
formed by the accretions of the new mouth or new mountain
siderable.
ful
difficult.
A hundred steps before arriv-
all
the
A fright-
thickness issues forth, and
with great force and throw forth
very large stones, in an altogether horrible spectacle. '4
These descriptions
most of the
rest
the sublime
—
—where
of Voyage
picturesqueness
the
certainly correspond with
encountered in
but not quite, gives way to
d'ltalie almost,
what most
travelers
of the
period would have noticed. '5 However, these descriptions were
transformed in Sade's novels into symbols of the most extreme counter-sublime of the
erotic.
Nature shows her true
For
face: that
Roger
as Philippe
suggests.
of indifference to humanity, of havoc, of
Therefore, there exists a proof by volcano.
destruction
And
even, by
means of the volcano, the suggestion of a counter-progress, of a march towards cataclysm
The
progress of volcanoes
of Tuscany begin with Pietramala, and philosophy
is
built.'^
it is
is
upon
the advent of
this evil
evil.
Those
stone that Sadian
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Consider the passage
in Juliette, in
Olympe up
the unfortunate
which Clairwil and JuHette lead
the slope of Vesuvius, to rape and tor-
ture her: At length, her
after
two hours of unremitting vexations, we picked her up by
bound hands and
feet, carried
her to the brink, and
she went into the volcano, and for several minutes
we
let
her
fall.
listened to the
Down sounds
of her body crashing from ledge to ledge, being torn by the sharp outcropping rocks: gradually the sounds subsided, and then we heard nothing
more. '7
The awe and
terror that traditionally characterized aesthetic expres-
sions of the sublime are here ironically inverted that
by making
literal
which underlies the inherent power of the sublime, the anxiety
related to mortality;
pretense to higher values
all
is
consequently
undercut. Clairwil, perpetrator of this crime, then exclaims, "Well, I
say, if
avenge
what we have done herself, for
lava boil
our
up from
lives this
possibility
she can
is
a true outrage to Nature, then
if
she wishes;
that inferno
down
let
there, let a cataclysm snuff
out
very instant."'^ Indeed, Sade had always imagined the
of an apocalyptic eruption of Vesuvius, one that would
bury the entirety of Naples in molten lava and black forming
it
her
let
an eruption occur,
let
into an unfathomable mortuary.
terrifying, in
The 120 Days ofSodom, one
ash, trans-
Even more cosmically
character, Curval, imagines
the ultimate crime, to attack the sun, either to deprive the world of it,
or else to use
Nature
its
flames to destroy the earth.
as a destructive principle
ontology. Philippe Roger
is
the foundation of Sadian
sums up the implications of this
claiming, in regard to Vesuvius, that "Sadian eros
is
vision
by
this volcano."^^
This extreme symbolization of the relations between libertinage and nature implies a cosmology described throughout his writings, based
on the ultimate tic,
extrapolation of contemporary atheistic, materialis-
and mechanistic principals derived from works such
Ofifroy de la Mettrie's
L'Homme-Machine
Thiry d'Holbach's Systeme de
la
(1748)
as Julien
and Paul Henri
nature (1770). Sade's perverse version
of these theories can be gleaned from the following excerpt from Justine,
which regards the "sublime and sure manner"
nature attains
its
ends:
74
in
which
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
The primary and most tates
her at
all
crimes, she conserves
one whose most .
motion
.
active agitation will
crimes serve Nature;
And who
become
else
Never has the sentiment "everything fying expression; even the Hbertine's
who most
near-
the cause of
many
crimes.
is
demands them,
can be offended
if
she
if she desires
is
not?^°
permitted" had a more
most wanton deeds
terri-
are justified,
can only serve nature's bhnd purposes, according to which
the destiny of every individual
appearance.
never anything other than total dis-
is
—among
The volcano
the greatest destructive forces
both symbol and active principle of
this philosophical system, the
this
mechanistic universe. In
sublime disappears, becoming just
one more instance of a universal
causality.
Sade situated the Chateau of Silling, the isolated in
agi-
can only be preserved by crimes; there-
it
if they serve her, if she
them, can they offend her?
is
motion, which
by means of crimes only; the person
it
Equilibrium must be preserved;
fore,
as they
is
simply a perpetual consequence of
is
resembles her, and therefore the most perfect being, necessarily will be the
ly
.
beautiful of Nature's qualities
times, but this
of debauchery
site
The 120 Days ofSodom, on top of a mountain in the Black
Indeed, the description of the
site
place of libertinage, but also precisely to
imagine
as
what many
an ideal refuge for meditation. Yet
turesqueness that
is
attractive in
that the chateau exists
beyond
all
Forest.
corresponds not only to an ideal
it
writers is
not
would pic-
its
both regards, but rather the possibility
fact
of communication with
the outside world:
He ed
will observe
with what great care they had chosen a remote and
retreat, as if silence, distance,
cles,
and
as if
stillness
were
isolat-
libertinage's potent vehi-
everything which through these qualities
terror in the senses
charm upon
and
had necessarily and evidently
to
instills
a religious
bestow additional
lust.^'
Here, the natural sublime coincides with the existential antinomy of
Eros andThanatos.
gam of
The
architecture of Silling
is
a phantasmic amal-
the prison (Vincennes, La Bastille) and the theater (La
Coste)." Rarely would the
literary effects
75
—
of sublimation disclose
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
scenes of such intense desublimation as those narrated at SiUing,
with such conviction that Sade's name became synonymous with the
How,
perversion of sexual cruelty.
then, could such hyperbolically
dystopian erotic fantasies inform landscape architecture?
"Utopia" implies a
finite spatial or
systemic closure that per-
The
mits an infinite affective or imaginative openness.
of any icon, architectural or otherwise,
open-ended
The rant,
is
of the narratives to which
variability
architectural icon
is
fixed nature
always perturbed by the susceptible.
it is
sublated, often effaced, in perverse, aber-
and abnormal stagings
in the theater
of desire, where the trau-
mas, enigmas, and joys of sexuality are abreacted and narrated. Such mutability would seem to be antithetical to the inherent solidity of architecture, suggesting a paradox at the core
of any utopianism.
Architectural erotics evinces the contradictory need for a public,
communal, (for
and
utilitarian,
mercantile, statistically determined realm
example, the variegated yet stereotyped erotics of the brothel) a
private,
domain (such
phantasmic,
solipsistic,
idiosyncratic
fetishistic,
quotidian counter-architectural darkness of the
as the
bedroom).
A
resolution to this problem, however improbable,
an architecture or landscape architecture that is
hinted at by Chantal Thomas,
who
the "theater of cruelty," that "the
lows step by step the path increases in intensity riches in
all
new
insights into
in a Sadian
garden
fol-
pain that, to the extent that
'a
and penetration, multiplies
its
avenues and
it
its
the circles of sensibility.' "^^ In Sade, however, only in
very rare instances allegorical, site
is
that evening
with Hiac bushes seats
the garden depicted as a narrative,
One
of libertinage.
The weather
our
of,
that offers
promenade
This
uncommon
suggests, in a not
amalgam of Sade and Antonin Artaud
would be
exists as narrative.
was
around
all
of
its
fauhless;
us; a
few mentions
we were beneath
a
is
much
bower of
multitude of candles furnished the
were three thrones supported on
artificial
less
in Juliette: roses light,
clouds whence came the
scent of the most delicious perfumes; in the center of the table was a very
mountain of the lain
rarest flowers, set
cups and plates
gold.
No
we were
sooner had
we
amongst which were the jade and porce-
to drink
from and dine
off;
the service was of
taken our places than the bower opened overhead
— 76
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
and before our
eyes there descended a fiery cloud:
upon
it,
the Three Furies
and, imprisoned in the coils of their serpents, the three victims destined to
be sacrificed
at this feast.^4
Iconographically, this eminently synaesthetic scene
is
informed by
baroque theater more than by landscape architecture or gastronomy; here, in a perverse symbolization
garden itself
is
and the
is
is
both destructive force in
setting for the subsidiary, but not negligible, destruc-
of the libertine imagination. For Sade, funerary architec-
tive forces
ture
of the Eros-Thanatos connection,
equivalent to cemetery. Nature
never nostalgically soothing, but actively disquieting, dystopi-
an rather than Utopian.
The French
scenarization of the passions as landscape was not
literature.
paysan de
Paris,
This
parallel
"Opposed
is
to received opinion,
tatious display that Louis xiv built Versailles, also majestic,
with
its
nades in grottos, and
(1607-1701) in her royal gardens
its
was not
in
to
Le
for osten-
love,
insane population of statues."^^
which
its
The
is
promeliterary
was defined by Madeleine de Scudery
La Promenade de
were represented
which the
Versailles (1669), in
as a lieu
galant in a narrative that
served a double role: the detailed descriptions site,
it
but for
hiding places of trimmed hedges,
origin of such a position
new
summed up by Louis Aragon
documented the
real
while the plot utilized the garden as both background for
events and symbolic space.
The
codes of gallantry were regulated by
the festivals and divertissements of the gardens; the hyperbolic praise of Versailles allegorically reflected the ideal perfections of literature;
and the psychological development of character,
ly Cartesian analysis
in a near-
of the passions of the soul, was proffered
in the
context of an etiquette and a value system manifested in the context
of the gardens and the palaces of the epoch.^^
The documentary
realism of
La Promenade de
Versailles
is
counterbalanced in another of Scudery s works, Clelie (1654-60),
one of the
best-selling novels
of the seventeenth century, in which
the geographical allegory of La Carte de Tendre, included in the form
of a map, offers the fantasy of an imaginary country, a masterpiece in the genre
of alternate worlds.^7
What began
as a parlor
game
tracing the progress of the protagonist Pelisson's attempts to gain the
77
—
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
friendship of
Sappho
was engraved
—was
—an allegory of friendship
The
when
eventually concretized
map
the
1660 and subsequently incorporated into
in
Clelie.
rather than love
Pays de Tendre
—
is
bordered on the west by the Sea of Enmity, on the east by the Lake
of Indifference, and on the north by the Dangerous Sea separating it
from the Unknown Lands of passionate
by Gratitude; the routes
New
from
love.
The voyager may
Love by Esteem, Love by Inclination, and Love
travel to three cities:
are varied,
Friendship
and one may
Complacency,
to
Attentions, Assiduousness,
Haste,
pass, for
example,
Submission,
Little
Great Services, Sensibility,
Tenderness, Obedience, and Confident Friendship to arrive at Love
by Esteem;
or, to
the contrary, one
may
travel
through the
distress-
ing ways of Negligence, Inequality, Lukewarmness, Levity, and Forgetting to arrive at the Lake of Indifference; or one
low the more painful path of Indiscretion,
Wickedness to
finally
reach the tormented
Scudery s work, the garden allegory of literature,
two extreme
states
and we
—
(The
and phantasm.
Little
more
love, in a decidedly
also evident in Jean-Fran9ois
libertine
de Bastide s La petite maison
House, 1879), where the veritable co-protagonist
of erotic seduction
is
in a tale
an eighteenth-century maison de plaisance, a
pleasure house, epitomizing
what Gaston Bachelard
in
The Poetics of
Space celebrates as "topophilia," the love of "felicitous space." seduction
is
orchestrated according to the
ious aspects of the houses
engage the of lighting" light,
five senses. is
as
reminded that between the
those of the melancholy artist and
narrative, symbol, allegory,
is
of Enmity. In
Isle
the garden variously exists in the role of
This narrativization of
mode,
—
fol-
and
of friendship also serves
are always
of the soul
the worldly courtesan
poem,
as allegory
may even
Perfidy, Slander,
in
which the
The var-
and gardens constructions variously
The famous quip
apposite here
manner
—
for
that "eroticism
where there
is
is
a matter
architecture there
is
designed according to structural and existential needs. As dusk
descends, the seducer Tremicour leads the innocent Melite into the exquisite salon where, "These thirty candles reflected in the mirrors,
and
this
added
brilliance
made
the salon seem larger and restated the
object of Tremicour s impatient desires. "^^
78
The
seduction then
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
continues in the boudoir, where there
between the two major The
explicit equivalence
walls of the boudoir were covered with mirrors
cealed by carefully sculpted, leafy tree trunks. illusion
The
an
is
of seduction, bedroom and garden.
sites
The
whose joinery was con-
trees,
arranged to give the
of a quincunx, were heavy with flowers and laden with chandeliers.
light
from
their
many
candles receded into the opposite mirrors, which
had been purposely veiled with hanging gauze. So magical was eflFect
that the boudoir could have been mistaken for a natural
this optical
woods,
lit
with
thehelpofart.^9
But
it
this simulacra! space that the
not within
is
denouement where,
occurs, for they leave the house to attain the garden
itself,
upon entering on
cannon shot
a narrow path, a well-orchestrated
throws Melite into the Marquis's arms, tightly:
at
which point he holds her
"Affronted by this intimate gesture, she was about to free
when
herself with equal vivacity
the sudden flash of fireworks
revealed in the reckless man's eyes a deep
Here, light
an expedient
and submissive
love."'°
—somewhat on symbolic form. While than — the erotic/ontological
of chocolate or alcohol
level
for
is
a
rather
Madeleine de Scudery the garden served
as
an
allegorical site, for
Bastide architecture constituted an operative co-protagonist. Yet,
while the strict
"little
house"
sense of the term:
architecture,
perhaps
is it
ideal,
proffers but
it is
one
one
narrative,
one
one seduction.
In contradistinction,
Anthony Vidler
Sade and Charles Fourier, "the fiction of
suggests that in both
'architecture' as tradition-
understood, was dropped in favor of an art of endless mechani-
ally
cal
hardly Utopian in the
fantasy,
—
manipulation of space
nization
a
kind of
literal parallel
systematization."^^
Such architecture
is
mecha-
contemporaneous with the
anti-Enlightenment inauguration of a modernist fied
to the
of eroticism in their texts through repetition and
erotics,
exempli-
by the combinatory system of the simple and complex passions
developed in The 120 Days ofSodom. Unlike delicately decorated and orchestrated libertine sites such as the Silling liaisons.
constitutes
The
"little
house," the Chateau of
the scandalous extreme of the most radical
apparently panoptical organization of the chateau
ultimately belied by
its
secret
is
chambers of indeterminable form,
79
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
where unseeable pleasures and unspeakable horrors
places
which the
ed, into
are heard,
untold
libertines lead their victims,
and of which no
tales are told.
These
invisible, dark,
constitute a textual supplement that,
activities
are enact-
from which screams
if
deter-
minable, would totalize the erotic combinatory system. As Barthes suggests, "all
of Sadian syntax
But such
erotic closure
is is
nitely malleable, conjunctive,
thus in search of the total figure."^^
impossible because the libido
is infi-
and copulative and because not
all
things erotic have their place: Eros exists as the aporia between the
imaginable and the unimaginable, gesture and speech, desire and act. In
Sade, the
all
terrors
its
richness
fiill
and
delights.
because haunted by death,
and ambiguity of eroticism
reigns,
with
Sade wrote of spaces that are obscene sites fascinating
metamorphosis, scenes excessive because
because ruled by pure necessarily
literature
extends beyond the limits of any single imagination, realms seductive
because they permit phantasmic projection, theaters porno-
graphic because of the unspeakable promiscuity that
of the
domains
libido,
articulation
is
no longer
the essence
is
transgressive because adequate symbolic possible.^^
In the Encyclopedic, Denis Diderot defines "libertinage" as "the practice of yielding to the instinct that carries us to the pleasures of the senses;
it
to defy them:
without delicacy and
its
it is
inconstancy;
it
does not respect mores, but
it
does not pretend
justifies its
choices only by
holds the middle line between voluptuousness
and debauchery. "34 According manifested in Sade's
life
in
to this definition,
no way corresponds
the libertinage
to the debauchery
manifested in his writings, which certainly surpassed
all
limits
of
defiance and voluptuousness. Rather, in Sade's erotic theatricalizations, eroticism
was
physical libertinage sistic
raised to the level is
scenarized in
architecture that reverses the
theatricality, since the staging
of epistemology. This meta-
what Vidler suggests
of desire by the
rules Silling conflates author, spectator,
lubricious tales inflame the masters'
and
elite
actor.
a solip-
brotherhood that
As the
storytellers'
imaginations, the narrated
scenes are forthwith enacted by the masters
Whence
is
modes of eighteenth-century
and
their victims.
the key to this architectural paradox: in Sade, language
is
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
theater
is
architecture
Only through
eroticism.
is
this conflation
of
ontological realms can a truly erotic architecture exist.
This "solution" was hinted
at
by Roland Barthes,
who
ex-
plained that in Sade the enclosure circumscribes the imaginary sys-
tem, which in turn permits and organizes the speech that gives to,
and pervades, Sadian Eros. This subversive
perpetual erotic motion
deformation
—
—where
representation
Barthes concludes that the Sadian
city,
tantamount to
is
the Chateau of Silling, 'story.'
"3*^
ethical level, that in literature, destruction
indistinguishable. ture
rise
machine of
"always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis."^^
sanctuary not of debauchery, but of the
on the
textual
From
is
One might
"the
add,
and production
are
the aesthetic point of view, cannot architec-
and gardens be productively contaminated and perverted by
these lessons in erotics
and
rhetoric?
Architecture as phantasm, architecture as theater, architecture as language: these three
paradigms,
when
conflated, offer an incon-
though unbuildable anti-utopia and, when separated,
trovertible offer partial
and unsatisfactory
Bastide's "little
Yet this does not
realities.
mean
that
house" and gardens offer a mere architectural dandy-
ism that can never equal the hedonistic delights of the most banal
darkened bedroom in a bleak, anonymous hotel. For sex without
symbol
entails a
repression
the
arts.
that
pantheon without Eros, inviting the worst forms of
and threatening the very existence of the imagination and
In this regard, the link between Eros
and Thanatos
—
a task
any valid metaphysics must attempt, and one that Sade accom-
plished in so awe-inspiring a
—
manner
is
crucial. Erotic Utopias
always approximate shadowy necropolises.
In
December
1937,
Maurice Heine drove Georges
great interpreters of Sade)
Peignot), to the spot
grounds of
Leiris.
Bataille's
March
Malmaison.
1938, this
There was not much
Bataille (both
companion Laure (Colette
where Sade had wished
his property at
the journey in
and
to be buried,
Bataille
on the
and Laure repeated
time in the company of Michel
to be seen.
That night Laure was taken
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
ill
with violent
worsened in the weeks
fever; the illness
to follow,
and
she suffered greatly, referring to her agony as a "flowery corrida." She
died on 7
November
Mount
ascent of
Soon
1938.
towards the cemetery to
visit
ascent of Aetna,
and
felt
as subtly inftised
up the
hill,
feeling increasingly lost,
with terror
on
as
dawn on
hill
that night
recalled the just as black
when Laure and
I
climbed
the crest of the vast, bottomless crater
exhausted, with our eyes almost starting out of their sockets in a soli-
tude too strange, too catastrophic. There was that shattering
we
I
suddenly overwhelmed. Everything was
Arriving at
Aetna's slopes
we were
climbed the
Aetna:
After a long while, halfway
and
after, as Bataille
her grave, he reminisced on their
leaned over the gaping
wound, the crack
in that star
moment when
on which we drew
breath.'^
Bataille continued, in truly
Sadian fashion, to remark,
"One could
not possibly imagine a place which demonstrated more clearly the
of things. "^^
fearful instability
in the
He
then entered the cemetery, where
extreme darkness the graves appeared
as
vague white forms,
with only one exception: "But Laure's grave, overgrown, formed
—
do not know why
ny how
Laure's
the only absolutely black area. "^9
tomb had come
desired, a coincidence that
more
—
was uncan-
one Sade had
might permit one to evoke the lamenta-
tion of Petrarch's Fourteenth
bled flesh in a
to resemble the
It
Ode, "nor could
quiet grave."
82
it
ever leave the trou-
/ confess that I order of time
am
partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the
and development. Henry David Thoreau
No Mans
Garden
New England Transcendentalism and the Invention
m
TT"
enry David Thoreau (1817-62) detested gardens. In
M^^^J m
the forests of Maine he discovered remote, "virgin"
m
^L
of Virgin Nature
nature,
-^
inspired
and the view from atop Mount Ktaadn
him
to v^rite, in
The Maine Woods:
This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor land.
It
for ever
was the
and
fresh
lea,
was not
It
nor arable, nor waste-
and natural surface of the planet Earth,
as
it
was made
ever.'
The geometric garden
in particular
was anathema
explains in his essay "Walking" (originally entitled
celebrated "A people
to
him,
as
he
"The Wild"). He
who would begin by burning the
fences
and
let
the forest stand!" I
saw the fences half consumed,
and some worldly miser with
their ends lost in the
middle of the
prairie,
a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heav-
en had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro,
but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise.
and saw him standing
again,
ed by
devils,
where
in the
and he had found
a stake
his
middle of a boggy Stygian
fen,
bounds without a doubt, three
had been driven, and looking
nearer,
I
saw
I
looked
surround-
little
stones,
that the Prince of
Darkness was his surveyor.^
Thoreau described himself
as a mystic, a transcendentalist,
natural philosopher, and, like his
and a
mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
New
founder of
England transcendentalism, he believed that there
communion with
exists a
metaphysical need for
ifested
by a romantic individualism stressing personal autonomy in
nature, a need
man-
opposition to the social conformity and nascent commercialism of
American
culture.
This reformist philosophy, imbued with a panof creation,
theistic belief in the unity
attuned to sensitivity than system; al
it
insight as a direct access to truth
England transcendentalism
lated
—
by one foundational
more
primacy of person-
at its ontological core. Indeed,
a philosophy in
and ontology
aesthetics, epistemology,
a moral philosophy
and beauty, with the experience
of a sublimated, spiritualized nature
New
is
stresses the
which
ethics,
—
articu-
are indissociable
is
principle: nature.
For Emerson and Thoreau, to philosophize was to poetize.
Thoreau consummated
this
communion by means of
sophical practice of walking or sauntering,
his philo-
which provided him
contemplative link with nature. While the meditative
direct,
hardly
uncommon
writers
to
and philosophers, walking,
Thoreau, was raised to the form of an as indicated in a
poem
stroll
art. It is
an
art
a is
for
of transience,
included in "Walking," entitled "The
Old
Marlborough Road," which defines the road: What
is it,
what
is it,
But a direaion out
And
there,
the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
The poem
suggests that every direction
concludes with the
is
of equal value, since
it
lines.
You may go round the world, By the Old Marlborough Road.'
And though
Thoreau's
own
experiences
at
Walden Pond,
the
Adirondacks, and the Maine woods suggest that the natural settings
of the East Coast offered sufficient scenarios to support his transcendental philosophical values, ural setting,
one beginning
it
was
in fact towards another nat-
to excite the
American imagination,
which he looked (even though he only once voyaged Every sunset which distant
and
I
witness inspires
as fair as that into
me
with the desire to go to a West
which the sun goes down. He appears
86
to
there): as
to
NO MANS GARDEN migrate westward
whom
Pioneer
daily,
The
his rays.
to follow him.
We
dream
He
the Great Western
is
night of those mountain-
all
though they may be of vapor only, which were
ridges in the horizon,
ed by
and tempt us
the nations follow.
island of Adantis,
and the
last gild-
and gardens of the
islands
Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West
of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.
when looking
ination,
the foundation of
How
those
all
Who
has not seen in imag-
into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides,
and
fables?"*
diflFerent is this
sentiment regarding the setting sun from La
whom
the disappearance of the solar orb resuked in
Fontaine's, for
on
the anguishing thought that "Night arrives Silence; Bringing
sized the
West
with
it
moment
at the last historic
unknown
signified the
a chariot led by
Thoreau
fear into the Universe" ?5
in
that
it
fanta-
evoked wonder and
European and American thought; the
hyperbole in which the West was rhetorically and poetically figured
symbolized a form of the imagination that had very definite practical effects
on
its
representation and the struggle for
its
—Europe—was equated with
For Thoreau the East
and
history;
was the West,
it
to the contrary, that offered the pure
setting for the transcendental spiritual values to
he
preservation.
art, literature,
which he
aspired.
As
insisted: I
trust that
fresher,
we
shall
and more
be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be
ethereal, as
our
sky,
—our
sive
and broader,
like
our thunder and lightening, our
our hearts
shall
like
our
plains,
clearer,
—our understanding more comprehenintellect generally
rivers
on a grander
and mountains and
forests,
scale,
—and
even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our
inland seas.^
This psycho-geography his sense
is
as telling for
Thoreau's poetics as
of nature: his ideal was the poets
primitive senses" and for natural that they
whom
who
"nailed
words
it is
for
to their
"words were so true and fresh and
would appear
to
expand
like the
buds
at the
approach of spring."7 The apparent naivete of these sentiments corresponds with his continued metaphorizing of American nature in terms of paradise (an allegory already evident in Elizabethan ture), ical
though
it is
astuteness
an idealization most certainly belied by
and
litera-
his polit-
radicalness, as well as his recognition of the
87
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
He
country's ascendant technology.
always already paradise it,
or
more
lost,
and
that
understood that paradise can only be regained in
it
and not
precisely in writing,
in
any worldly
is
spir-
For
site.
example, the complexity and ambivalence of Thoreau's reaction to the railroad
is
evident in the following citation, where
—
extreme example of mixed metaphor ously allegorized in cosmological,
the locomotive
meteorological,
is
—
an
in
simultane-
mythological,
biomorphic, and anthropomorphic terms:
When
meet the engine with
I
motion,
—
velocity
and with
or, rather,
does not look
that direction
it
I
demi-god,
set sky for the livery
echo with fire
of
and smoke from
race
into the
—with
with that its
orbit
ip steam cloud like a banner
many
silver wreaths, like
when
his train;
its
downy cloud
a
masses to the
I
hear the iron horse
shaking the earth with his
his nostrils
light,
make
feet,
—
as
to inhabit
I
don't know),
it
seems
the hills
and breath-
(what kind of winged horse or
new Mythology
now worthy
if
cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sun-
his snort like thunder,
on they will put had got a
this
with planetary
oflf
knows not
will ever revisit this system, since
have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding
if this travelling
ing
for the beholder
like a returning curve,
streaming behind in golden and
which
of cars moving
train
its
Hke a comet,
fiery drag-
as if the earth
it.
Indeed, Thoreau was well aware of the advances of technology; he
wrote of the railroad, which passed quite close to his Pond,
"We
have constructed a
fate,
idyllic
Walden
an Atropos, that never turns
aside."^
Thoreau grasped nature
in terms
of
its
wholeness, not in terms of
picturesque, aestheticized scenery. This plenitude literally
America's "manifest destiny" and transformed
The
first
opment
and
totality
divided and parceled out by the railway, which
American railway system was
its
was
fulfilled
aesthetic future.
built in 1829,
and
its
devel-
increased exponentially beginning around 1844, at the onset
of the American industrial revolution. Indeed, the parceling out,
and ultimately the preservation, of vast in part a direct result
tracts
of Western lands was
of the incursions of the railroad, for not only
NO MANS GARDEN were huge rights-of-way granted to the raihoad companies by the
government
in
exchange for their
but the companies were
service,
also given vast tracts for logging.
The
irony
is
apparent, and catastrophic: the raihoad despoils
the very landscapes
it
makes
Though many
accessible.
areas ulti-
mately had to be saved from hideous spoilage by the railroad and
lumber companies, the constitution of both an
logical
more
activist
of untouched, virgin nature was the
thetic notion
advances and incursions. As the railroad
accessible,
it
made
also transformed the very structure
creating the sort of mobile, panoramic
and an
result
aes-
of technothese areas
of perception,
mode of visibility homolo-
gous with the vastness of these newfound spaces. The railroad dialectic
was
tragic:
while
it
emblematized panoramic space,
ing the paradigm of the vast scale of nature
Park system could be conceived, territory to exploitation,
(which was, needless to
interior
new
creat-
the National
simultaneously opened up this
it
necessitating a consequent preservation say,
conflict
The myth of pure, moment of its decline,
always belated).
untouched nature was inaugurated expressed by the
upon which
at the
between nature and technology
at the
of the sublime.
As Leo Marx demonstrates historic juncture,
North American
The Machine in the Garden,
in
which coincided with the writers,
first
this
great generation of
was marked by intimations of tragedy and
loss regarding the natural setting:
Much rupted noise,
of the singular quality of this era idyll.
is
The
is
conveyed by the trope of the
locomotive, associated with
the leading symbol of the
new
fire,
smoke, speed,
the
and
industrial power. It appears in the
woods, suddenly shattering the harmony of the green hollow,
ment of history bearing down on
inter-
iron,
like a presenti-
American asylum.
Like the incursion of city politics at the opening of Virgil's Eclogues (a
major source of the pastoral sentiment in the history of European
and American
literature), the synaesthetic
presence of the railway in
the landscape motivated feelings of dislocation, alienation, intrusion,
anguish, and conflict, both psychological and social.
Emerson noted
in his journal entry
"Dreamlike traveling on the
railroad.
89
of 7 February 1843,
The towns which
I
pass
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
berween Philadelphia and
They
are like pictures
what imprecise,
on
New
York make no
such views in
as
distinct impression.
a wall."'° This description fact
in fact
some-
cannot be perceived
like a
is
painting on a wall. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space
in the 19 th Century, describes
the transformation of perception caused by the constantly increasing
quotient of speed in the industrial
The
era.
through the window of a fast-moving train
gaze of the spectator disoriented by the
is
effect that precise definition in visual perception velocity. is,
Thus, when the spectator
the faster
Victor
Hugo
it
is
in
is
diminished by
motion, the closer the object
appears to pass by, and the
less detail is visible."
window
described such a view from a train
in a letter
dated 22 August 1837: The
flowers by the side of the road are
streaks,
no longer flowers but
streak; the grain fields are great shocks
green
flecks,
or rather
of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a
tresses;
of yellow
of
hair; fields
alfalfa,
long
the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling
dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shadow, a shape, a specter appears
and disappears with lightening speed behind
This
effect utterly transforms
framed by the
"picture" of the landscape,
a
window:
train
train traveler
is
a railway guard.
window,
ontological relationship between the spectator
The
it's
"'^
both the nature of the consequent as well as the
and the landscape.
cut off from immediate contact with the land-
scape being traversed, both by being encapsulated in the speeding train
and through the
continuity
is
visual disappearance
of the foreground.
A dis-
thus created between the spectator and the distant
landscape, such that
it
is
only at the horizon that the landscape
seems stable and motionless. This effect
immediacy of all poreal
exists
in
earlier types
counterdistinction to the perceptual
—most
of mobility
dynamism of walking
European Romanticism, and
that
New
especially the cor-
marked baroque
aesthetics,
England transcendentalism. The
speed of foot, horse or stagecoach travel was such that the voyager
was not perceptually dissociated from the foreground and thus remained integrally connected to the landscape. Beyond a certain perceptual threshold
—one augmented with 90
every acclimatization to
NO MANS GARDEN increased speed of travel
which
scene,
—
the observer
is
consequently offered
is
cut off from the observed
as
a distant
and
distinct
panorama. Space becomes dynamic; distances shrink; the
scale
of
landscape becomes geographized; the "picture" through the train
window appears
as
panoramic; and the traveler
is
accorded the novel
ability
of what one contemporary of Thoreau described
thetic
philosophy of the blink of an
eye."'^
Through
as "the syn-
this aestheti-
foreground becomes abstract while background becomes
cization,
panorama. The French journalist Jules Claretie accurately described this effect in 1865: In a few hours, infinite
Of a
it
shows you
all
of France, and before your eyes
landscape
it
shows you only the great outlines, being an
the ways of the masters. Don't ask
The
it
unrolls
panorama, a vast succession of charming tableaux, of novel
railroad established the
it
world
artist
its
surprises.
versed in
for details, but for the living whole. '^
as a
panorama, where the combi-
nation of speed, enclosure, and framing created a
new modality of
landscape such that both the monotonous and the marvelous were
"choreographed." As Schivelbusch comments, the "evanescent ty
had become the new
belies the
reality."'^
Romantic condition of the organic
observer and landscape. In this
new
totality constituted
that assimilable
The scope of the
by
aesthetic, the circumscribed
view always implies a greater and more distant cal transcendence.
reali-
This transformation of vision
reality,
an ontologi-
"organic" becomes broader than
by instantaneous perception, since increased speed
condenses space. Speed establishes a compression of locales that brings into contact, through rapid succession, aspects of the land-
scape that had hitherto been unrelated. Ultimately, these
eflfects
of motion increase the limits of scale
beyond perceptual, and often beyond imaginative, apprehension. Speed
incites aesthetics
organic
(as in
towards greater modes of synthesis, whether
the landscape) or dissociative (as in modernist collage
and cinematic montage);
making
possible the
it
transforms the notion of the garden by
imagination of a landscape once invisible
because so distant, forbidding, and vast. Remote, pure, untouched, virgin, infinite nature
was imaginable precisely due to these modern
forms of alienation and dissociation. Transcendence became a
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
function of a certain loss of immanence, a certain loss of innocence.
As every
increase in technology entails a corresponding increase in
anxiety about the loss of the natural, so too does every such increase in
speed transform the perceptual apparatus so as to overcompensate
for
such
The
loss.
ontological takes refuge in the phantasmic.
took some time for these
It
appear in poetry, though
effects to
the effects of speed already existed in the writings of Victor
Alfred de Vigny, Gerard de Nerval, and
Hugo,
Thomas de Quincy. One of
the finest, though relatively late (1870), examples
is
the untitled sev-
enth poem, an "impression," from Paul Verlaine's La bonne chanson: Through
the door's
window frame
the landscape
Furiously rushes by, and entire plains
With
and sky
their water, wheat, trees,
Are swept up
in the cruel
whirlwind
Where
fall
Whose
wires bear the strange air of a paraph.
An
those thin telegraph posts
odor of coal that burns and water that
The
noise as
Howled
And
if
made by
a
boils,
thousand chains
whose ends
at
thousand giants being whipped;
a
suddenly, the prolonged cry of an owl.
—
^What's
all this
The white
to
Since the soft voice Since the
me, since
vision that
Name
makes
still
I
my eyes
have in
my heart joyful,
murmurs
for
me,
so beautiful, so noble,
and
so sonorous,
Mingles, pure pivot of all this swirling,
With
the
rhythm of the
brutal coach, suavely.'^
Here, a Baudelairian system of synaesthetic correspondences evokes the perceptual effects of railway travel
of the world, of erotic
reverie.
moralized ized"
—
all
—
and
its
transformative vision
the while utilizing this dizzying trance as a
Thoughts of the beloved
or perhaps
it
would be more
means
are incorporated into a
precise to say "immoral-
landscape.
The
relatively late incorporation
might be explained by the
of such
effects into
poetry
fact that poets are often less precisely
attuned to unusual visual effects than are painters, for technical
9i
NO MANS GARDEN reasons determined by their metier.
The problem of framing and
motion was already circumscribed,
in a
invention of the "Claude glass,"
named
Lorrain, that,
which consisted of
when confronted with
rudimentary manner, by the for the painter
a small, tinted, framed,
a picturesque landscape, concentrates
the scene into a private, transitory image. John cusses
one
Claude
convex mirror
Dixon Hunt
dis-
particular function of such mirrors:
Similarly, in
one of William Gilpin's accounts of using
but while riding in his chaise,
we
his mirror, not while
images "are
like
visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms,
and
stationary,
and
colours in brightest array, fleet before us;
learn that
if
its
the transient glance of a
composition happen to unite with them, we should give any price to
good
fix
and
appropriate the scene." Cognitive and creative processes seem to unite there,
exemplifying the sense, which Martin Price drew to our attention in the picturesque
moment, of play between
and the "imaginative power of tions."
"the
need
for reasonable
arbitrary structiues
Because of their rapid passage across the
and
common
truths"
accidental associa-
glass in this instance, the
forms and colours are both objective and dreamlike. '^
As
Gilpin's observation
sonable
common
was made
in the eighteenth century, the "rea-
truths" did not yet include those experienced dur-
ing the epoch of greatly increased speed of the railway journey, and the desire to "fix
and appropriate the scene" was not yet
through photography. Yet the use of the
glass as
realizable
frame offered the
requisite "objectivity" to capture the "arbitrary structures
and the
accidental associations" that were so crucial to the constitution of
the picturesque; the relations between speed and vision
—
disrupting
the aesthetic effects of the stationary painterly position that deter-
mined most of the previous tation
—produced
history of
European
pictorial represen-
extreme, "dreamlike" effects. These dreams
would
be objectified in the following century.
In "Walking"
ma
Thoreau
relates that
one day he went
of the Rhine, which appeared to him
Ages, of interest mainly for
its
ruins.
93
like a
"Soon
to see a panora-
dream of the Middle
after, I
went
to see a
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
panorama of the in the light
and
Mississippi,
as
I
my way
worked
up the
river
of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted
the rising cities."'^ His description
is
interesting not only as yet
another celebration of the mythic America at the center of his thoughts, but also as an indication of the importance of motion,
change, and time in contemporary representational systems.
panorama was
to travel vicariously.
untouched nature and
To
see a
Thoreau, despite his fantasies of
a transcendental terrestrial paradise, certainly
noted the encroachment of technology on that purity and grasped the essential aspect of that very
same technology
in relation to the
construction of a distinctly American imagination and poetics.
The popular fascination great extent
a
for
panoramas and dioramas was to a
due to the novelty of motion
motion adding temporality, and thus
tational scene.
The
in pictorial reproduction,
narrativity, to the represen-
and panorama was
difference between painting
explained by an aesthetician of the period, E.
J.
Delecluze, in his
Precis d'un traite de peinture (1828):
The
continuity of the apparent horizon line
is
what
essentially distinguishes
painting in panorama from a framed painting. In the
latter,
one only
sees the
portion of the horizon line included in the angle of vision, and there
one point of view. In the panorama, whose surface
is
circular,
is
only
one works from
one angle of vision to another, and consequently from one point of view to another.
To
the extent that the spectators gaze
other, the eye, ly
moves from one
by means of the multiplication of points of view,
is
side to the successive-
submitted to the optical phenomena that appertain to each angle of vision. "^
Yet the panoramas gain in horizontal and horizonal richness does
not produce a richness of depth perception. Either foreground and
background
are equally,
and thus
unrealistically, represented, or else
the use of atmospheric perspective to create a loss of detail in the
represented distance (the sfixmato technique painters at least since lioration of the
Whence
known
to landscape
Leonardo da Vinci), does not permit any ame-
view
as the spectator
approaches the panorama.
the spatial "hybridization of the gaze," whereby the hetero-
geneous topoi of foreground and background are cognitively assimilated in
ization
simultaneous but contradictory manners. ^° This hybrid-
also
included the temporal dimension, as the pictorial
— 94 —
NO MANS GARDEN progression of the represented scene accorded with the physiological
mobility of vision.
Thoreau's vicarious panoramic experience of the Mississippi was, in any case, epistemologically anachronistic, since the age of the
diorama and panorama, though
active,
still
explains that the fascination with dioramas
ended
in Paris
around 1840,
at the very
ney changed
rise
which was
of French
at the
transformed the spectator's relationship to
making
distant destinations
more
easily accessible.
nineteenth-century eye needed to become accustomed to the
The
from
increased speed of railway travel; this alteration of visibility led loss
time
and occasionally dangerous. The railway jour-
all this; it
the landscape by
at the
Schivelbusch
and panoramas (which
moment of the
railway travel) was a substitute for sightseeing, expensive, difficult,
was no longer
of visual representation.
forefront
technological
of detail ("the face of nature, the beautiful prospects of hill and
dale, are lost or distorted to
traveling
becomes
new aesthetics
our view"),^' through boredom
dull in exact proportion to
("I love to
dream through
its
("all
rapidity"), ^^ to a
these placid beauties whilst
sailing in the air, as if astride a tornado") -^^
The mastery of
space and time central to European meta-
physics since Descartes's postulation of a mathesis universalis^'^also
transformed
art
and
The
aesthetics. ^^
natural sublime, central to the
previous experience of the
Romantic imagination, was
by the interference of a new modality of wonder and the technological sublime, which early
and high modernism.
in a section
of
It
came
entailed, as
his autobiography.
(1900), the difference
to play a
assailed
terror, that
major
Henry Adams
allegorized
The Education of Henry Adams
between the Virgin and the dynamo.^"
types of knowledge, empirical
and
of
both
role in
poetic, pragmatic
Two
and mythic,
conflicted in the imagination of American pastoralism.
The
ultimate representative of this transformed visualization
in relation to landscape architecture
ways
built after the
is
that of the
American park-
Second World War, perhaps best defined
"picturesque expressways." These scenic routes were
meant
as
to be
experienced at constant high speeds with only occasional pauses. Perspectives
are predicated
on motion, and the picturesque
95
is
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
constructed according to a
strictly
motorized sequence of perspec-
framed by the car windows. Indeed, one of the most beautiful
tives,
of these roads, the Taconic State Parkway lOO miles north of of,
the
Hudson
New York
River
—
—which
recently
had
its
panoramic
so that stationary views of the scenery are
stretches nearly
though not
City, parallel to,
in sight
rest stops closed,
no longer
possible.
These
parkways offer the epitome of the "captured view," for despite the
minimal landscaping along the borders of the road, the "park" does not materially
itself
exist; the "park" is actually
immaterial, consisting
scenery. In the case
of the Taconic State
of the distant views of the
Parkway, the captured view
that of the
is
Hudson
River Valley,
famous through the school of painting that bears
its
made
name.
Increase in speed transforms the relationship between perceptual reactions to
motion and the
pictorial imagination.
Thus each
moment demands the recodification of visual representasystems. The eighteenth century incorporated reactions to
historic tional
foot
and stagecoach
travel in
its
aesthetics; the nineteenth century
struggled with the increasing speeds of train travel; the early twentieth century celebrated the then extreme speeds of wartime mechanization;
and the
late
twentieth century attempts to assimilate the
near precision of computerized military tactics, the distances of space travel, and the instantaneity of virtual speeds, distances,
and
scales
reality, all
that far surpass
human
implying
perceptual
thresholds.^7
Thoreau extrapolated and
allegorized
East Coast of the United States his solitary existence at
from
his experiences
—
especially the
Walden Pond between 1845-7
vision within the context of the nineteenth-century
of "manifest destiny."
He made
this clear in a
metaphor, reaching well beyond the range of his I
on the
narrow confines of
—and
cast his
American sense
bold geographical
own
hikes:
must walk towards Oregon, and not towards Europe. The Adantic
Lethean stream, get the
in
our passage over which
Old World and
its
we
institutions. If we
— 96 —
is
a
have had an opportunity to for-
do not succeed
this time, there
is
NO MANS GARDEN perhaps one more chance for the race
and that
Styx;
is
in the Lethe
of the
left
before
Pacific,
it
which
on the banks of the
arrives is
three times as wide.^^
Thoreau makes
his
assumptions about the Western landscape quite
one of
his
most famous sentences: "The West of which
clear in
speak
name
but another
is
preparing to say
is,
that in Wildness
World."^9 This West, this Wild, beauty
is
and what
for the Wild;
is
is
the preservation of the
grandeur, and
ideal; its scale,
hyperbolically described in the
I
have been
I
same
text,
where Thoreau
quotes Sir Francis Head, a prescient and atypical English traveler
and governor-general of Canada: The heavens of America appear fresher, the cold
thunder
is
is
intenser, the
infinitely higher, the
moon
louder, the lightening
heavier, the
mountains
is
sky
bluer, the air
is
is
looks larger, the stars are brighter, the
vivider, the
wind
is
stronger, the rain
is
are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the
plains broader.'°
In terms of the history of gardens is
—
the term "landscape architecture"
inappropriate in this context, barring consideration of the "divine
architect"
—
those Western natural
sites that
became the American
National Parks were, in a sense, beyond comparison with their nineteenth-century European counterparts.
The
situation in France
is
an interesting case in point. If the
Romantics epitomized the vastness of nature tains, as representatives
in the
Alps (moun-
of the sublime, were often the prime sym-
bols of natural powers), the quotidian mid-nineteenth-century idealization
of nature was considerably more bourgeois, to a great
extent based
on the popularization of the
the Barbizon school of painting, in his
Promenade dans laforet de Fontainebleau
voyageur et de
I'artiste
ten in a style no Bleu,
and
it
was
a Fontainebleau
more left
(1850).
all,
(1844)
and Guide du
These guides were writ-
poetic than today's Guide Michelin or Guide
this relatively
that this French notion of "nature"
were, after
of Fontainebleau by
to the gardens themselves to inspire the artists
and poets who hiked through ic
forests
and by Claude Fran9ois Denecourt
tame nature.
—
iron-
near Paris, attached to a royal palace with a formal
garden designed by Le Notre, and that had served
grounds
It is
was informed by lands that
as
hunting
thus having a very definite and refined cultural context
97
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
rather than areas of France that were minimally settled ically
and
aesthet-
underrepresented, such as the relatively wild and certainly pic-
turesque Ardeche, Aubrac, Auvergne, or Cevennes. appreciation of these picturesque
would long remain
and
confidential,
The
aesthetic
and often sublime landscapes especially unappreciated in the
popular imagination.
This attitude
ment de
is
explained by
Renaud Camus
where he reminds us that
la Lozere,
in
Le Departe-
in the late nineteenth
century, the residents of the Lozere expressed a decided lack of aesthetic interest in the landscape, as well as
amazement concerning the
then recent celebrity of one of France's natural wonders, the Gorges
du Tarn, which was beginning tic site.
He
cites
to
become
Emmanuel de
a
much
frequented touris-
Las Cases, writing of his voyage
through the region by motor car near the turn of the century: "The rare inhabitants living there considered this splendid erosion to
sort of hell, in
which they saw nothing but misery, and
appreciated nothing of
took the
points out,
it
appreciate
such
Camus
splendid wildness." Rather, as
its
literary sensibilities
natural
beauties,
of a foreigner to
specifically
be a
their souls
Robert
first
Louis
Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879).^'
On ic
the other hand, the aesthetically and physically hyperbol-
American National Park
also bore litde
comparison with the
English garden, which was not an example of untouched nature, but rather an idealized
simulacrum of nature modeled on the
sources of mythology
civilized
and landscape painting. While the English
garden was a simulacrum of nature, the American "garden" was nature itself
The complex American landscape Garden.
The
history of is
European characterizations of the
documented by Marx
in
The Machine in the
Elizabethan imagination (and the European imagina-
tion in general) conceived of nature as a spectrum ranging
hideous wilderness to civilized garden. terms
—what Marx —
phors"
refers to as "ecological
to describe a
new
Elizabethan
from
choice of
images" and "root meta-
setting determined specific social ideals
in the context
of an entire ideology.^^ In the age of British coloniza-
tion, to depict
American land
as a
garden was to celebrate a pastoral
— 98 —
NO MANS GARDEN Utopia centered on aspirations of freedom, abundance, and existen-
harmony;
tial
denounce
to
the primitive, the libidinal, cise
it
as a
hideous wilderness was to imply
and the anarchic, thus
to justify the exer-
of power and domination on both psychological and
political
Crucial in this regard was the fact that the American land-
levels.
scape supported both of these conflicting interpretations, however
tendentious either one alone might have been, and however few
people realized the implicit equivocations that often entered into
such descriptions. seemed to promise everything that men always had wanted,
If America
threatened to obliterate
dox was
much of what
they already had achieved.
to be a cardinal subject of our national literature,
complexity.
experience.
the
It
Not
that the conflict
had always been
New World
invested
it
was
in
at the heart
with
new
theme
ence.
Marx
relations
in
in all
any sense peculiar to American of pastoral; but the discovery of
relevance, with fresh symbols.''
This aporia was not only evident in opposing ideologies; existed, tacitly
also
para-
and beginning
the nineteenth century our best writers were able to develop the its
it
The
it
also
and unconsciously, within the complexities of experi-
analyzes at length one of the
first
works discussing the
between the colonial experience and the pastoral
Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia
book opens with
ideal,
This
(1705).
a celebration of the bounteous state of nature in
which the Native Americans of Virginia
offering
lived,
it
as
an
Edenic setting for European settlement, couched in the metaphor of Virginia as a vast garden. Yet the discourse reveals a subtle uncertainty or ambiguity, since the very richness of the natural setting,
bringing with to be is
er
it
an ease of existence unknown to Europeans, seems
somehow contrary to European
stated towards the
made than
hadn't
The
there, either for Fruits, or Flowers
many Gardens
Beverley's use
aspirations.
end of the book, "A Garden
in the Country,
of the term "garden"
is
fit
is
contradiction
no where soon-
And
yet,
they
to bear that name."^'^
equivocal, creating the appar-
ent paradox that the paradisiacal nature-as-garden that
is
Virginia,
inhabited by "noble savages," precludes the possibility of the existence of the civilized garden proper,
two meanings of
'garden'
is
"The contradiction between the
a perfect index of the larger difference
99
—
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
between the primitive and the pastoral
and the colonizers destiny
specific,
ideals. "^^ Beverley's soul in
in general, existed in the context
of a struggle between the wild and the
between scenarios
civilized,
of primitive instinctual gratification and those of civilized values. In this struggle
—whose
could either be the mediation of nature
finale
and culture or the brutal repression of one of the terms
—
the garden
served as a symbolic battleground.
The social and and the
between the primitivist
political contradictions
civilizing, in regard to the colonial
apperception of the land-
scape, were resolved with the liberation of the country, only to give
new
a
rise to
set
of contradictions. As Marx points out,
Jefferson's evaluations
of the landscape,
Virginia, established the
in
Thomas Notes on
foundation for the mythologizing of nature
American context,
the
as described in
mythologizing that would inform
a
Thoreau's philosophy. According to Marx, the naturalistic basis of
antiurban politics and ethics can best be termed "pastoral"
Jefferson's
(utopian and quietist) rather than "agrarian" and "pragmatic," as so
much less
most
"But the physical attributes of the land are
literature claims.
important than is its
its
metaphoric powers.
—an image
function as a landscape
resents aesthetic, moral, political,
and even
by transfiguring
finally matters
in the
mind
It is
vationist,
practice
the
and
this pastoralism into a
metaphysics, one that
preservationist
—one of
theory,
whose
American
naturalist
A
and conser-
the earliest practitioners of ecological
efforts greatly influenced the creation
American National Park and Wilderness systems
entitled
rising con-
movements.
interesting that the great
John Muir
and
It is
England transcenden-
had unquestionable influence on the pragmatics of the servationist
that rep-
religious values. "^^
New
precisely this function that obtained in
talism
What
Thousand-Mile Walk
Gulp7 The
to the
"walk," one-third the length of the
—wrote
a
of
book
very scope of this
North American continent, can
but be contrasted with the intimate
strolls
recounted in Thoreau's
"Walking"; Muir undertook the prodigious walks of which Thoreau dreamt.
Muir was deeply
inspired
by Thoreau, especially by
"Walking," and he was certainly in accord with Thoreau's claim, in
The Maine Woods, that America should create
its
own
protected,
NO MANS GARDEN
wild, natural preserves. Yet
Muir was not
a transcendentalist,
and he
took exception to what he understood to be Emerson and Thoreau's overtly metaphysical foundation for the appreciation of nature;
Muirs was a more
intuitive
own deep
given his
and
practical approach. Furthermore,
relationship with the vast wilderness of the
American West, he declaimed
that,
"Even open-eyed Thoreau would
perhaps have done well had he extended his walks westward to see
what
God had
to
show
in the lofty sunset
mountains. "^^ Muirs
experience was the empirical double of Thoreau's metaphysical hyperbole. For Muir, the wilderness was ultimately unfathomable, unrestricted, unconditioned, boundless, bilities
—
yet always inviting discovery.
something of infinite possi-
Though he
lifetime exploring, enjoying, celebrating,
was
in principle theoretically
park
areas,
fenced
in,
opposed
spent his entire
and protecting
nature, he
to the notion of protected
claiming that the wilderness must not be circumscribed,
and thus bounded. Unlike Thoreau's, the hyperbolism of
Muir's dream was practical; though in principle, the entirety of the Sierra
Muir
believed that
Nevada Mountain Range should remain
undeveloped and be preserved in
natural state, in fact he did
its
all
he could to protect whatever he could of it. Yet while
boundless and
Muir conceived of and experienced nature
infinite, the creation
ever large in relation to
of the
first
European gardens and game
essarily belied this fantasy.
Furthermore,
it
as
National Parks, howpreserves, nec-
was not only the natural-
and transcendentalists who shared Muir's concerns. Frederick
ists
Law Olmsted,
the great American landscape architect of the nine-
teenth century, author of Walks
England
(1852),
was not
and
Talks
a naturalist:
of an American Farmer
he was best known for
grating landscape design with a nascent urbanism.
New
York's Central Park (inspired
in
inte-
He designed both
by the tradition of the English
picturesque garden) and the Washington D.C. Capitol grounds
(shaped by the rationalized geometry of Le Notre's formal gardens).
Olmsted was the
first
influential in the preservation
protected
site,
of what was effectively
Muir's beloved Yosemite, in California.
Yosemite, discovered in the mid-eighteenth century, was revered for its
extraordinarily picturesque natural beauty,
which was the reason
View ofMinor Lake.
Yosemite, Califot
NO MANS GARDEN
for
salvation;
its
it
was protected by an
much
under Muir's influence a
act of
Congress in 1864, and
greater surrounding area
was pro-
tected in 1890, while the boundaries were definitively set in 1906, so that today the park consists of approximately 1,200 square miles (as
opposed to the
6.3 square miles that constitute the present reserve
the Forest of Fontainebleau, established in 1953).
of
To conceive of
Yosemite in the context of the history of Occidental landscape architecture, albeit
it
in a
ly alter that history.
mode of minimalist
intervention,
is
to radical-
Here, the beautiful and the sublime are exalted
by a transcendentalist metaphysics and an American pragmatism, resulting in a
new ideal of natural beauty:
a nature pure
and untrans-
formed.39
There was a time when the American West was ed and unimagined,
as
is
historically late, citation
largely unrepresent-
poetically evident in the following, albeit
from Willa Gather:
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as
if,
with
desisted, er,
all
the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had
gone away and
left
everything
on the eve of being arranged
was
still
waiting to be
made
into
on
the point of being brought togeth-
into mountain, plain, plateau. The country
a landscape. '^°
Visual representations of the natural landscape west of the Mississippi
began
afi:er
1830,
when
the
Rocky Mountains became an icon
for the
"West." This was soon replaced by views of Yellowstone, which be-
came the
first
National Park in 1872 and consisted of approximately
3,500 square miles located in earliest
major practitioner of
training in the for the Swiss ic
and
Wyoming, Montana, and this
Idaho.
The
genre was Albert Bierstadt, whose
German Romantic
tradition
and whose predilection
Alps offered a model, however limited, for his dramat-
large-scale representations
of the American Rockies.
The advent of photography American West, beginning with the
visually
great
opened up the distant
government surveys orga-
nized between 1867-79 and continuing with
army
explorations.
Notable was the participation of the photographers Timothy
103
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
O'Sullivan and Jack Hillers, as well as the later works of William H. Jackson, initial
Henry H. Bennett, and Eadweard Muybridge. After
government explorations,
lands accessible to
sorts
all
it
of exploitation and representation, from
gold mining and ranching to tourism, the
latter
of which motivated
West
for the pur-
large
numbers of
the railway companies to hire artists to depict the
poses of publicity.
The
the
was the railways that made these
commissioned
railroads
images of the natural landscape in the 1870s and financed painters as well as photographers to accomplish this task; the results were
immensely popular. The painter Thomas Moran,
and
his travels to the
had
for example,
by the Northern
his trip to Yellowstone financed
Pacific Railroad,
Grand Canyon financed by
the Atchison,
Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad; both resulted in works that were used for promotional campaigns. Moran's paintings were repro-
duced and widely distributed posters, calendars,
natural scenes ria
by
many
in
forms, such as guidebooks,
and chromolithographs. Representing such
utilizing
what were,
vast
essentially, the aesthetic crite-
of European landscapes and landscape painting posed novel
problems. Edward Buscombe explains: In 1873
Moran was
explorations of the
by [John Wesley] Powell
invited
Grand Canyon
of the Colorado, on a similar
owed much the
to photography.
Grand Canyon posed
anyone
who
a
scale to his painting
Moran and
problem
for
Hillers
has ever tried to photograph
Moran succumbed
sky, suggesting the vast distances
The
of the Yellowstone, again
worked
closely together.
But
both painters and photographers. As it
being captured within the frame, however logical exactitude,
to join his continuing
His subsequent painting, The Chasm
area.
will
large.
know,
its
sheer size resists
Despite his claims of geo-
to the romantic allure of clouds
and
of the scene by obscuring the detail in haze.
distances also tended to defeat the attempt of photographers at accurate
representation, since, inevitably, the furthest parts of the view fused. Perhaps the
most
telling
became
photographic view of the canyon
Jackson, dating from considerably later and to the inevitable blurring of distance
made
in 1892,
is
dif-
one by
which surrenders
and makes the focus of the picture the
observers' sense of wonder. •'
This incompatibility of natural, cognitive, and aesthetic systems evident in the fact that, as
Buscombe mentions,
ro4
the
first
white
is
men
NO MANS GARDEN saw the Grand Canyon
as early as 1540,
but were not particularly
impressed, probably because they were unable to
fit
the spectacular
scene into any available visual, aesthetic, or natural framework.
Needless to
the invention of panoramic photography hardly
say,
alleviated the problem, as the gain in breadth
was not equaled by a
corresponding gain in depth. "Nature" cannot be adequately represented in any frame.
which
Perspective,
since the Renaissance has been a central
consideration of painting and aesthetics,
beginnings of modernism,
when
here at stake. At the very
is
perspectival projections began to
be surpassed by an incipient impressionism and abstraction structural features of representation, the talist
New England
conception of nature also surpassed
all
as
prime
transcenden-
possible perspectival-
ism, though in a very different context: through the ideal of the
untouched
awe and
March 1842 sion,
of a boundless natural magnitude that inspired
forest,
bliss rather
than Pascalian anguish. In a journal entry for
sums up the various
that
Thoreau wrote, There seem
we
two
to be
see things in
of the poet,
as
sides
of
God
sees
as pausing,
gressing, she
Whence
is
this
world, presented us at different times, as
growth or dissolution, them,
the historical eye, or eye of the
Nature
all
in life or death.
things are alive
and
For seen with the eye
beautiful; but seen with
memory, they are dead and
immediately
all
mortifies
offensive. If we see
and decays; but seen
pro-
as
beautiful. '^^
the role of the poet in regard to the transcendental dimen-
sion of the natural world: to
higher order,
make
visible the invisible beauties
among the last aesthetics
to
attempt
of a
this millennial task.
At roughly the same moment, Edgar Allan Foe composed meditation on landscape architecture, "The
Domain of Arnheim,
the Landscape Garden" (1846), the tale of an immensely rich
who
13
aspects of the present discus-
his
or
man
constructs the perfect garden. His discussions with the narrator
offer a metaphysical,
What we
only the moral or
may
indeed supernatural, theory of gardens.
regard as exaltation of the landscape
human
may
possibly effect a blemish in the picture, if
viewed
at large
—
in
mass
be really such, as respects
point of view. Each alteration of the natural scenery
—from some point 105
we
distant
can suppose
from the
this picture
earth's surface,
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
although not beyond the limits of its atmosphere.
what might improve a general or ings,
human
disorder
more
a closely scrutinized detail,
distinctly observed effect.
once, but
may seem
now
invisible to
humanity, to
—our unpicturesqueness more
especially than
may
death-refined appreciation of the beautiful,
easily
at the
understood that
same time
There may be a
order
eanh-angels, for whose scrutiny
God
It is
may
class
whom, from
injure
of be-
afar,
our
picturesque; in a word,
our own, and for whose set in array
by
aesthetics are seen to be a fixnction
of
have been
the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.'*'
Here the lineaments of human
the Hmitations of the perceptual apparatus. In an age of precipitous scientific advances,
when
the senses were continually
increasingly powerful prosthetic devices (and
when
augmented by
architecture per-
fected axonometric systems of representation, void of
any point of
view), the sense of natural perfection was relegated to a transcen-
dent,
and eminently inhuman, domain.
conservation
moment, in
It is
no accident
and preservation movements arose
at
that the
that
very
ultimately to offer another vision of the natural world, one
—shown by —found coherent
which the human being
one of the animals
Charles Darwin to be but place within the natural
a
scheme. This effected a reversal of possible perspectives on nature: not a view from without, but from within; not a God's-eye view, but multiple points of view from the sundry eyes of all the other animals that inhabit the natural landscape.
Such
is
landscape seen from an
ecological perspective.*^
A
book published
U.S. Bureau of responsible for
in the early part
Land Management
of the twentieth century by the (the federal
term "wilderness" that "while the word tive.
There
is
government agency
managing the National Park system) explains of the
no material object
that
noun
an adjec-
is
a
is
wilderness. "'*' This bizarre
it
acts like
claim sums up the epistemological status of the notion of pure nature as transformed by those technological advances that motivat-
ed the creation, and guided the perception, of the National Parks.
This idea seems to echo the explanation of the ontological
io6
effects
of
NO MANS GARDEN photography offered by OHver Wendell Holmes text
on photography, "The
"'Form
is
Stereosco|>e
henceforth divorced from matter^^^
a perverse technocratic distortion, nature
image or spectacle step
away from
its
in his
famous
and the Stereograph"
in order to guarantee
collation in archives,
It is is
as
though, through
transformed into
its purit)'; its
early
(1859):
this
is
its
only one
consumption, and
its
ultimate disappearance. Here, the eternal becomes terribly evanescent.
As Thoreau might
say,
such
is
107
"no man's garden."
The certainty of the absolute garden will never be regained. Robert Smithson
In Praise ofAnachronism Garden as Gesamtkunstwerk
^^^^y ^\ ^ £ im Wy
hile the
g
J
^^^^^^
problem of garden
aesthetics at the
the modernist epoch might have offered oretical vistas,
end of
new
the-
the issue of gardens themselves are, for
the most part,
excluded from the art historical and aesthetic canons.
A case in point
were hardly changed: they
that exemplifies this problem, as well as provides the opportunity to
consider the
relations
Rosalind Krauss's
between gardens and the other
article,
arts,
is
"Sculpture in the Expanded Field."' This
text, briefly stated, illustrates
how
during the
rise
of sculptural min-
imalism towards the end of the modernist epoch certain works were
produced precisely
to contest
and expand the
traditionally consti-
tuted limits of sculpture, such that sculpture engaged contemporary
much
theory perhaps as
as
it
did the sculptural tradition
stake were certain dichotomies that
had
itself
At
articulated previous artistic
production, reconstituted in investigations that would ultimately serve as the theoretical hinge between
modernism and postmod-
ernism: monumentality and sitelessness; referentiality and self-referentiality; the built
and the unbuildable;
ism; site specificity
and the nomadic.
universality
This reconsideration of sculpture reveals intricate relations
between
site, sight,
an aggressive, contentious, and sibility that
and
how
regional-
the already
and sign were complicated by
ofi:en
politicized sculptural sen-
surpassed the nature/culture distinction at the core of
[09
—
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
and hermeneutics. Attempting
classical structuralist categorizations
to portray
possible terms of this
all
expanded sculptural
field,
Krauss
on the mathematical "Klein
constructs an analytic grid (based
group" that informed Algirdas Julien Greimas's theory of semiotic constraints) that purportedly circumscribes
nomenological
possibilities
the logical and phe-
all
of sculptural construction.
The terms of
the primary grid are defined by "landscape," "architecture," "not-
The expanded
landscape," and "not-architecture."
grid proffers
mediations of these terms: "landscape" and "architecture" are mediated by "site-construction"; "landscape" and "not-landscape" by
"marked
sites"; "architecture"
structures"; "not-landscape"
and "not-architecture" by "axiomatic
and "not-architecture" by
"sculpture."
Krauss explains in detail that Though
sculpture
may
be reduced to what
term of the not-landscape plus the imagine an opposite term
—which within
ture
plex
is
to
hibited
The
this
—one
schema
thiat
is
is
in the Klein
not-architecture, there
is
group the neuter
no reason not
would be both landscape and
But to think the com-
called the complex.
admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been pro-
from
it:
fact that the
landscape 3rA architecture}
conjunction of landscape
be used to expand the sculptural in a
^W architecture should
mode
defined as
no reason whatsoever,
—one
as
is
indeed
Krauss suggests, "not to imagine an oppo-
would be both landscape and
site
term
this
term need not be hypothesized or renamed:
that
con-
"site
struction" presents an intriguing categorial irony. For there
it
architecture''
synonym
plexities.
and
for "garden," in
Of the complex constituted
aesthetic
and
structural
may
com-
by the mediation of landscape
architecture, Krauss claims. Because
it
was ideologically prohibited, the complex had remained excluded
from what might be
had not before been thought
and It is
its full
But
already exists, as
"landscape architecture" (however misleading this conjunction be), a
to
architec-
this
called the closure of post-Renaissance art.
Our
culture
able to think the complex, although other cultures have
term with great
ease.
Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape
architecture. Japanese gardens are both landscape
and
architecture.'
perfectly coherent with this schematization (especially in the
context of late-modernist American sculpture), that of
all
the
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
possibilities
of landscape architecture existing within
complex,
this
Krauss includes works of another culture (specifically Japanese gardens) or details of European gardens (labyrinths and mazes).
mention of Japanese gardens it
The
emblematic: though not specified,
is
can be presumed that what are referred to are "dry" or Zen gar-
dens, since to Western eyes they are particularly esoteric, sculptur-
and apparently changeless. In these gardens, nothing can be
al,
added or subtracted, form and
detail
remain constant, they usually
cannot be entered, and natural growth
is
kept to a
strict
minimum,
limited mainly to the infinitesimally slow accretion of moss
on ancient bronze
rocks, not unlike the highly valued patina tures. "^
and
These
are, therefore,
limit of
the most "sculptural" of all landscapes,
of the expanded sculptural
in the context
on
sculp-
what constitutes gardens
in the
field
they define a
modernist Eurocentric
sense of the term.
One might
conclude either that an ideological prohibition
within the "closure of post-Renaissance art" simply wrongfully denies gardens the status of art (a ry),
common
or else that "landscape architecture"
synonym
for "garden," a veritable
and heterogeneous conceptual
is
occurrence in art histoa structurally inaccurate
oxymoron But
field.
this
up
that opens
a
new
would beg the ques-
neither linguistic nor categorial, since one
may
well speak of "sculpting" a landscape. Rather, the reason that
it is
tion: the
problem
is
structurally impossible for gardens in their full scope to appear in this
the
schema
is
because gardens are precisely the existential ground of
schema itself. This
article,
is
even
tacitly
suggested in the
where one would only need
to
value of the "expanded field" for
its literal
order to thematize the problem.
The
in the grid precisely because
it is
title
of Krauss s
exchange the metaphoric equivalent, the "field," in
field itself
cannot be included
tantamount to the
grid. It
is
the dis-
sembling, rich ambiguity of the term "field" that epitomizes the
problem of contemporary landscape the garden specificity
is
of the
entail the collapse
of
its
architecture: the exclusion of
necessary for the very constitution of the sculptural grid.
For to include gardens in this
field
would
of the entire grid and the consequent conflation
constituent terms with their very ground, thus obviating the
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Whence
usefulness of the categorization.
of
construction," which
"site
sets limits to a
something
to
is
group that necessarily
less
the need for the category
more than mere circumlocution:
than gardens. In
restricts its
parallel, the
it
component works
category "landscape"
inadequate to the complexities of "landscape architecture."
is
Semantic slippage
The
reveals ontological
heteromorphism.
fact that all categorization entails limitation, serving par-
ticular polemical
and
theoretical purposes,
is
beside the point here.
My interest in this particular schematic grid is extreme because what it
excludes or displaces necessitates recognizing the garden as a prin-
cipal site of heterogeneity. this
diagram
is
The
exclusion of "gardens" as a term in
explicable because of all the
modes of sculptural pro-
duction, only that of landscape architecture can serve as the inclusive, if ical
not totalizing,
ground.
The
site
of aesthetic heterogeneity
—
as its ontolog-
physical existence of the expanded field
would thus
be equivalent to the garden.
To thus "ground"
the expanded field
would be
to place the gar-
den within the paradigm of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which
manner of "thinking the complex." This paradigm ed in European
name
at
opera.
art since the late Renaissance,
though
one of the originary moments of modernism,
To
rethink the garden in this
phic, polyvalent,
and equivocal
manner
—might
—
potential role as the unstated
cretizing site
ofall sites. There
kunstwerk: as synaesthesia
kunstwerk to sculptural field
its
is
site
exist
received
Wagnerian
arts, precisely itself,
its
due
to
as the syn-
discrete elements in a Gesamt-
to each of the senses, so
constituent artworks. Therefore,
must
it
in
increasingly polymor-
of heterogeneity
no
another
well explain the historic
exclusion of landscape architecture from the fine its
is
fianctionally exist-
in turn be problematized, to a
is
the Gesamt-
the expanded
second degree, by
considering the virtual field of the garden as the heterogeneous
ground that permits the
direct confrontation,
recombination of the disparate elements of this not only for sculpture but for the other
conjunction, and
grid, establishing sites
arts as well.
Such
a Gesamt-
kunstwerk \s a dialectical system, where the significance of every term
depends upon the existence of all other terms, and where each gory
is
transformed as
it is
situated within the garden context.
cate-
The
ANACHRONISM
PRAISE OF
[N
Gesamtkunstwerk, thematized contemporaneously with
the notion of synaesthesia in the mid-nineteenth century,
most acutely prefigured
in Charles Baudelaire's notion
perhaps
movements
spondences," which had a vast influence on
attempted to synthesize the
is
of "correthat
within a single rubric. Yet there
arts
developed an analytic, dissociative, detotalizing
mode
of such work.
This tendency took on a new form in the varied Happenings and
multimedia presentations of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the
famed 1952 "concerted
Mountain College, which
mixed-media event
a
action,"
at
Black
model by
shattered the previous synthetic
establishing the possibility of an aleatory combination of artforms.
As most of the works circumscribed by
Krauss's grid react precisely
against this genealogy of aesthetic totalization,
it
is
not surprising
that the totalizing, or at least synthesizing or amalgamating,
the garden
excluded from
is
its
form of
purview.
Every epoch since the baroque has elaborated the dream of a
work of art,
a
work encompassing
all
total
forms of art. Richard Wagner,
whose increasing chromaticism inaugurated the breakdown of tonality
in
European music, mused upon the
between music and landscape architecture in If architecture and,
still
more
so, scenic
relation
specific
this totalizing system.
landscape painting can place the dra-
matic actor in the natural environment of the physical world and give him,
from the inexhaustible font of natural phenomena, a background constantly rich
and
relevant, the orchestra
what may be
The
.
.
.
offers the individual actor, as a support,
called a perpetual source of the natural element of man as artist.
orchestra
is,
so to speak, the soil of infinite universal feeling
the individual feeling of the single actor springs into dissolves the solid motionless floor
full
bloom;
of the actual scene into a
yielding, impressionable, ethereal surface
from which it
somehow
fluid, pliant,
whose unfathomed bottom
is
the
sea of feeling itself"^
In this text, the use of metaphors concerning the natural landscape is
not coincidental, and serves both to establish a corporeal reference
for the abstract
forms of music, and to thematize the mythological
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
substructure of his music in a celebration of earth, blood, and pas-
Compare Leonard
sion.
Bernstein's
comments
The Unanswered
in
Das Lied von
Question, specifically in relation to Gustave Mahler's
der Erde, but
ment
much more
broadly applicable to the musical senti-
in general: I
believe that
of
its
from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which
And by
sources tonal
is
by the nature
that metaphorical operation there can be
devised particular musical languages that have surface structures noticeably
remote from their basic
The
earth
but which can be strikingly expressive as long
origins,
as they retain their roots in
earth7
believed to resolve contradiction, from the aesthetic
is
aporia between tonality and atonality, to the ontological and theological opposition
Yet
and
its
it is
between
life
and death.
not the opera, with
its
stage strictly limited in space
representations relatively limited in time, that
avatar of such a totalizing project. Rather,
the ultimate
is
the garden
it is
—
in six-
teenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century France, with Vaux-le-
Vicomte and
Versailles as
its
quintessence
original Gesamtkunstwerk. For the garden
is
—
existing simultaneously as an artwork in itself
representation, conjunction,
Nothing
less
is
and synthesis of
under the generic
torian,
all
as the site
stage,
of the
the other
arts.
Soleil. Versailles as a
unique work
indicated by the series of texts written by Louis xrv as guides title,
Maniere de Montrer
Versailles as totalizing site
Andre
and
could have been expected in the context of the court of
Louis XIV, Le Grand Louis, Le Rot
of art
that constituted the
both spectacle and
is
les
Jardins de
Versailles;
described in several works by the art his-
connoisseur, and Historiographe des Batiments Felibien: Relation de la fete de Versailles
du i8
du
juillet
Roi,
1668
(1668), Description de la grotte de Versailles (1672), Description som-
maire du chdteau de
Versailles (1674),
Versailles
donnes par
Comte en
I'annee 16/4 (1674).
The
le roi
au retour de
and Les Divertissements de la
conquete de la Franche-
gardens of Versailles, the creation of which was a collab-
orative effort
between the king and
his gardeners, sculptors, hy-
draulic engineers, surveyors, etcetera, were the site of vast festivals,
combining
all
the arts into a grandiose spectacle of royal inspiration
—
114
—
IN PRAISE OF
and divine
right.
ANACHRONISM
Here, the works of the epoch's greatest
as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Baptiste
were performed, and the king himself took center ratively
and
In Relation de la fete de
literally.
rated the events of Le
artists,
such
MoUere, and PhiUppe Quinault, stage,
Versailles,
Grand Divertissement Royal de
both
figu-
Felibien nar-
Versailles, cele-
brating both the king's victory in Flanders and the ascendance of
Madame
de Montespan.^ Following the sequence of promenade,
and
collation, theater, waterworks, dinner, ballet,
fireworks, this fete
took place from before dusk to dawn, revealing a structural continuity and coherence worthy erary narratives la fete
de
of,
and even
surpassing,
many of the
lit-
and operatic scenarizations of the period. Relation de
Versailles
may
be read variously
as a historic description
of
the events; as an alternate, albeit phantasmic, itinerary through the
gardens of Versailles; as an allegorical legend; or as a literary work in its
own
right, revealing the relations
power couched
We
between representation and
in a hyperbolic quest for beauty. ^
are constantly
reminded that the garden of so
visual spectacle, as the abstract theorization
studies focused mainly
on design seem
thetic logic of the garden necessitates
melange of use-value,
than the is
and culminating
this richer experience,
and
instantiates a synaesthetic
model
in
an aesthetic experience that
for
combining
and mythology,
art
is
saw, emerging
Versailles
from the
classic in
terrible, also revealed its
some snaking from one
night
own
beauties. For,
from
some
place to another,
115
set
upon
that,
while
and muzzle of the dragon
thunderbolts and a thousand flashes of lightening, air,
fifth
which arose a thick cloud of smoke
bluish clouds like those seen during great storms, there
in the
formalism and
are effectively allegorized in
of 1674:
eyes, nostrils,
the canal, a torrent of fire from
being quite
greater
described by Felibien,
of the extraordinary fireworks of the
of Les Divertissements de
We
is
historic parts. It
understanding the limits of landscape architec-
These synthesizing tendencies
Felibien's description
and
and magic, fascination and
that
baroque in dynamism and complexity,
elegance.
art historical
to suggest. Rather, the aes-
sensory, sensual, symbolic,
observation, history
ture,
not merely a
the senses, guided by a specific, highly symbolized
all
sum of its
offering a
is
many
its
huge red and
emerged
a
thousand
describing long
some
first rising,
trails
to then
Les Buttes-Chaumont: belvedere, forest,
and
"suicide bridge"
IN PRAISE OF
plunge into the water, and nite
number of
canal,
all
ANACHRONISM
creating a thousand different effects.
similar fireworks simultaneously
playing or battling together.
The entirety of the water was
works that shot forth to the end of the canal and, either
on
after
sprites
covered by the
fire-
having meandered
the surface of or in between the two pieces of water, they rose in
whirlwinds of fire and, making a thousand turns
a terrifying noise, producing at the
ating
infi-
during which time the dragon vomited forth such a huge quantity that
muzzle seemed a chasm from which emerged a thousand enflamed
his
tle
An
emerged from around the
new
more than
effects.
three
in the air, they burst
same time an infinitude of other
lit-
with
fires cre-
Everything that could be seen within the great extent of
hundred fathoms was neither
fire
nor
air
nor water. These
elements were so completely mixed together that, being unrecognizable, a
new element of a to be
quite extraordinary nature emerged from them.
composed of a thousand sparks of fire
seemed
It
that, like a thick dust or rather
an infinitude of atoms of gold, sparkled amidst an ever greater
light.
'°
In this spectacular pyrotechnic celebration of the cosmogonic ers
pow-
of the Sun King, the nearly apocalyptic dissolution of the world
into flame
The ture
was a harbinger of the new
arts to
come.
heterogeneity and hybridization implicit in landscape architec-
—
fested styles
exemplified by the taste for exoticism in gardens and mani-
by the garden
—was
made
that simulated various international
follies
explicit in the late-eighteenth
teenth centuries." Typical
is
and early-nine-
the extremely picturesque park in the
nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, Les Buttes-Chaumont, constructed from the old site.
gypsum
quarries that previously occupied the
This park, created between 1864-9 by Jean-Charles-Adolphe as part
of the Hauss-
an amalgamation of
styles. Its rela-
Alphand and Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps mannization of
Paris, contains
tively small surface juxtaposes
an area approximating the open
fields
of the English garden bordered by lush, informal, flowery parterres a small waterfall; a grotto with a larger
traversed
by a brook fed by
waterfall,
not unlike those of the Jura that offered Gustave Courbet
some of
his
most famous
subjects; a somber, miniature evergreen
117
VHlandry: vegetable garden
Villandry: ornamental garden
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
forest; soaring,
dramatic rock formations in the style of Chinese
crowned with a Greco-Roman belvedere;
landscapes, paradoxically
and a modern suspension bridge traversing Alpine landscape
minated
One
by
at night
though,
qualities
lafrangaise. Indeed, the intensely
of nature,
as
evidenced by an anecdote
from Frederick Law Olmsted's The The
landscape-architect [Edouard Francois]
suburban plantations of
Chaumont
Park, of
Deschamps], when
I
I
Spoils
of the Park:
Andre formerly
was walking with
Paris,
which he was the designer
me
[after
confess that
it is
its
age,
I
in charge of the
through the Buttes-
Alphand and
said of a certain passage of it, "That, to
best piece of artificial planting of said, "Shall
modernity. Missing,
of Les Buttes-Chaumont were abetted by the
aleatory, informal effects
culled
its
an
illu-
by a mostly subter-
traversed
metaphorize
line, as if to
any hint of the jardin a
is
artificial
is
when
by Arnold Bocklin).
electric lamps, as if painted
should not forget that the park
ranean railroad
a lake appropriate to
Louis Aragon declared was,
(a lake that
have ever seen."
Barillet-
my mind, He
is
the
smiled and
the result of neglect?"'^
Artifice simulating nature has nature as
its
guarantor. Perhaps the
sentiments evoked by this garden were best described by Louis
Aragon
in
Le paysan de
Paris,
where the
Buttes-Chaumont was summed up
promenade
surrealist passion for Les
in the following praise: "Let us
in this decor of desires, in this decor full of mental
offenses
and of imaginary spasms. "^^ Rarely were the
in tune
with baroque and
classic
surrealists
more
emotions, and rarely did popular
urban geography correspond so closely to the aspirations of avantgarde poetics.
One of the most extreme, though cussed, examples of historic
design
dens
is
and
relatively
unrecognized and undis-
aesthetic heterogeneity in garden
that of the restoration (or rather reconstitution) of the gar-
at the
chateau of Villandry in the Loire River
valley, generally
recognized as containing the finest extant decorative vegetable gar-
den
in France.
The
restoration
was accomplished between 1907-24
under the direction of Joachim Carvallo,
—
119
—
who had
acquired the
Villandry: alley
Villandry: water parterre
IN
rundown chateau and
ANACHRONISM
PRAISE OF
gardens. Carvallo, writing of his
its
work
transforming the chateau of Villandry, celebrated the building claim equally true of its gardens) as a ry of France
site that
in
(in a
synthesizes the histo-
from the twelfth through the eighteenth century.
Rather than restoring the gardens according to any single historic period, Carvallo renovated
on a ity,
belief in the necessity
them following
a religious ideal, based
of harmony between nature and human-
inspired in part by readings of Saint Fran9ois de Sales
and Saint
Teresa d'Avila. These beliefs are exemplified by Carvallo's claim that "Art proceeds
the
human
ences
its
from
a long contemplation
spirit penetrates the
poetry,
and
rises
of nature, through which
intimate essence of things, experi-
towards
Despite, or perhaps because
God
in a
of, this
supreme
effort.
"'4
naive and potentially reac-
tionary aesthetic, Carvallo created a garden that was hardly a restoration,
but rather an idiosyncratic twentieth-century creation, a fanta-
sy inspired
by numerous
historically
(though not aesthetically)
incompatible traditions: the hortus conclusus of medieval monasteries
—
a tradition preserved in the Benedictine
gallicanum
—
volume Monasticon
offered models for both the herb garden
and the enclo-
sure in general; the indigenous gardens of the peasantry
and the
landed gentry of the Loire River valley revealed specific botanic possibilities;
Du
the illustrations of Jacques Androuet
excellents bdtiments
parterre patterns in the vegetable
and Andalusian
Cerceau's Les plus
de France (1576) was the direct source for the
and decorative gardens; the Arab
traditions (including the representation of gardens in
mosaics and tapestries)
familiar
to
the
Spanish-born Carvallo
inspired certain aspects of the garden ornamentation;
and the
classic
French tradition, despite Carvallo's reticence, suggested the uses of water and open spaces. Carvallo excoriated the English garden, citing an English gen-
tleman
who
became
fashionable: "Sire, your gardens are extremely easy to make.
It
said to his king, at the
suffices to get the
moment when
such gardens
gardener drunk and to follow him. "'5
Xhe
French formal garden received no better estimation: "The gardens of Louis XIV are a beautifiil cemetery."'^ To the contrary, Carvallo cherished the vegetable garden of King Francois
i
at Blois, also in the
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Loire valley, which
unique in that
is
its
vegetables were treated as
The contemporary
flowers in the organization of the parterres.
incarnation of Villandry effected by Carvallo emulated that ideal,
and
has been referred to by one specialist as "the most elaborate
it
and unusual of
all
model of formalism text,
formal gardens,"''' suggesting an alternative
French landscape architecture. In
in
this
con-
Francois Carvallo, son of Joachim and successor to Villandry,
offers a description that
ed his
father,
an avid
is
certainly close to the vision that motivat-
art collector, a description that gives a fine
sense of the form of his sensibility:
The as
end of July, change color
vegetables, particularly those arriving after the
they develop.
bright red. itable
the "Green
A row of tomatoes,
work of art,
a brilliant
Thus
and
since each
Tomato" becomes
brilliant yellow,
topped oflFand thinned out,
carefully
tomato appears, upon
Empire green
color.
.
.
.
The
earth.
No
from glaucous green
Christian Dior dress
is
to
.
.
.
The
light green leek darkens
ends in the colors of ancient tapestries laced with ble beet goes
at first gray-green,
is
then bluish, and finally sumptuously red: "Veronese red." surprisingly
then a ver-
a very beautiftil green, like
The cabbage
satiny Delft porcelain
is
silver threads
celery has a
with age, and
The hum-
Bordeaux red spangled with ochre and
made,
if
I
dare say so, with as sumptuously
varied colors.'^
The chromatic metaphors
particularly
are
apt.
Not only did
Carvallo paint with vegetables at Villandry like Claude
Monet
painted with flowers at Giverny, he also drew by means of his complex parterres.
Villandry
is
historically
heterogeneous and anachronistic,
containing elements from diverse traditions, such that the park is
itself
divided into three major sorts of gardens: vegetable garden
(medieval), ornamental garden (Renaissance),
and water garden
(French formal). Italianate elevations and views are offered from
both the chateau terraces and the
alley set into the
woods above the
chateau; a labyrinth was constructed at one corner of the property.
The is
theoretical
and
practical question
of authenticity in restoration
exacerbated at Villandry, where a historically incoherent project
culminated in the creation of one of France's most beloved and most visited
contemporary gardens. While debates about authenticity are
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
often couched in the antipodal terms of restoration or transformation, gardens themselves simultaneously
embrace both terms of the
debate, as they are doubly dynamic, naturally
and
are culturally transfigured over time
and the general
forces
constitute, a fortiori,
due
grow ^«<^they
to fickle aesthetic vogues
of historical change. ^^ All gardens therefore
what Umberto Eco
referred to as
multiple, changing, virtual entities existing
Gardens
"open works":
and changing over time.
are, essentially, anachronistic.
Throughout the twentieth
century, the notion of
what constitutes
landscape architecture was problematized by the subversion
and otherwise
—of
where every
garde,
sooner
They
historically.
are organically transformed as their constituent plants
is
The debate
the genius
loci.
practical
and
a limit set than
it is
is
theoretical limit
transgressed in
—
word
is
contested:
no
One
or work.^°
might imagine that fiindamental questions of ontology and
mology could no longer
ironic
typical of the avant-
episte-
legitimately be avoided in the history
and
theory of landscape architecture; yet the discourse of this domain has, for the
most
rization that has
part,
remained impervious to
informed the other
The expanded
field
much of the
theo-
arts.
of gardens that has transformed contem-
porary paradigms includes numerous cross-media hybrids, some modernist, others postmodern. Certain modernist gardens do
more than mimic the forms and the historic avant-garde,
effects
and thus
little
of either historic gardens or
offer litde to the debates that
must
inform contemporary transformations of landscape architecture.
These include the works of Roberto Burle Marx
whose ground plans and use of color bear
in
South America,
features in
common
with
abstract painting;^^ the highly geometrized gardens at the Villa
Noailles at Hyeres, designed in 1925 by Gabriel Guevrekian,
and the
cubist garden designed for the Noailles in Saint-Germaine-en-Laye in 1926
by Andre and Paul Vera, which may be considered the
ulti-
mate, and somewhat decadent, extrapolation of the formalism that characterizes the French garden;^^
123
and the numerous
—
"art brut,"
Erik Samakh, Pierre sonore (ippi)
Ellen Zweig, Botanizing
on the Asphalt
(detail,
ipps)
IN PRAISE
OF ANACHRONISM
"outsider art," or eccentric gardens recently being catalogued. ^^ All these works, despite their avant-garde, experimental, or marginal nature, are but variants of traditional gardens or aggrandized ver-
sions of other art forms. ^4
Other works, often materially more modest though concep-
more
tually
daring, better describe state-of-the-art landscape archi-
tecture at our fin-de-siecle.
based on
ism,
the
The
radical situationist analysis
notion of psycho-geography,
libidinal/political critique utilizing
of urban-
established
a
mental cut-ups of the cityscape.
Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden of Litde Sparta in
Scodand proffered
the prototype of conceptual gardens, including a quasi-militarist sculptural presence that both
the French formal garden tions
Centrale (1970-1)
—
focal lengths,
—
and
at different speeds
different
during day and night in an empty Canadian wilder-
alternately transforms the scene into
and kinetic
rela-
Michael Snow's
art. ^5
consisting of 190 minutes of the
camera rotating nearly 360 degrees
ness
the symbolic history of
between myths of nature, power, and
La Region
film
comments on
and demands a reconception of the
abstractions.^*^
both
static
landscapes
Michael Heizer's transformation of the
ha-ha into artwork in his trenchlike incisions redefine the term "landscaping." Robert Wilsons hallucinatory staged vistas, as in Einstein on the Beach, transmogrify theatrical time
and
space.
Ana
Mendiata's body imprints in the earth examined notions of femininity
and
traditional earth symbolism. Erik Samakh's ultra-mini-
malist
and
ecologically sensitive trompe
utilizing recorded
I'oreille
and displaced natural sounds
sound
installations,
in garden environ-
ments, offer models of minimal intervention and ambiguous significance, such as the "electric frogs" he installed in the
designed by Alexandre Chematoff in the Pare de
bamboo garden
la Villette in Paris
(1990), or his gallery installation Pierre Sonore (1993),
rock
sits
dens),
on volcanic ash
and
frog-
room diminish
and
in a
cricket-like
—
a
a top-lit
sounds heard from outside the
as the spectator enters
and approaches the
Lothar Baumgarten's Theatrum Botanicum garden Cartier in Paris
where
dark room (recalling certain Zen gar-
at
rock.
the Fondation
contemporary urban hortus conclusus resembling
a wild prairie but actually containing a botanically heterogeneous
—
125
—
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
mix of
species,
both indigenous and exogenous to
Duchampian
particularly
work contract
clause in his
Paris
—
bears a
that transforms
the ontological status of the garden into an "artwork," a jardinoeuvre,
which thereby accords the
one of the consequences
tion:
site
exceptional status and atten-
that
is
no other artworks may be
exhibited within this "art-garden," thus restricting
while increasing
its
exchange- value. ^7
Moshe
use-value,
its
Ninio's works incorpo-
rating Persian rugs (depicting stylized representations of gardens) are
comment on
placed in situations where they
and
recent environmental
adding a contemporary
political catastrophes in Israel,
of
level
radical signification to a traditional genre. Ellen Zweig's Botanizing
on the Asphalt (1993) creates a Joseph Cornell-like storefront garden
microcosm
in the
midst of Manhattan. Most recently, innumerable
variants of imaginary gardens have
these include
Rand and Robyn
the K.RT. Bryce program that
As a
been developed in cyberspace;
Millers
is
cd-roms Mystssxd Riven^^znd
used to create virtual worlds.
theoretical introduction to the vast variety of
rary landscape transformations interferences, fantasies
and
follies,
one particular trope
investigated: the use of glass in the landscape rates,
frames, magnifies, and focuses
tion),
but
case that is
glass that traces,
we both
see
both artwork and
and site,
alternating transparency
contempo-
and constructions, interventions and
(all
—not
fiinctions
then the use of
and
work of art,
glass,
reflectivity, offers
gory for the history of gardens
—
with
field.
its
if
if
it is
the
the garden
variable
an appropriate
especially in light
notion of the garden as a syncretizing
deco-
of representa-
marks, signals, and signs. For
see according to a
be
will here
glass that
and alle-
of the expanded
This analysis will begin
obliquely, in a gastronomic digression that examines the interrelations
between gardens and
cuisine, culminating in the vision
glass wall that articulates nature
and
culture, garden
of a
and kitchen.
Consideration of cuisine holds surprising revelations for the history
of landscape architecture.
The
legendary chef Antonin
(1784-1833), usually cited as the founder of
1x6
modern French
Careme cuisine,
IN PRAISE OF
declaims in L'Art de are five in
ANACHRONISM
la cuisine frangaise
au
xixf
siecle,
"The
fine arts
number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and
which has pastry-making
architecture,
branch. "^9
as its principal
Provocative as this statement might be, this assimilation of cuisine to architecture nevertheless only confiises the issue, obfiiscating the
material specificity of cuisine
For cuisine,
among
and delaying
the most concrete
arts,
its
aesthetic liberation.
eschews mimesis, as does
music, the most abstract. Like the programmatic in music, decoration
is
incidental to the essence of cuisine, the aesthetic
al specificity
of which
is
constituted by taste
and materi-
and aroma.
It
was only
towards the middle of the nineteenth century that cuisine finally surpassed what Philippe Gillet speaks of as a mise-en-presence of foodstuffs
and
mise-en-oeuvre,
tastes to
achieve a modern, intrinsically culinary
which eschewed
Modernist
art
cuisine's
mimetic dimension.3°
and modern cuisine have a
central trope in
common,
invention, such that even structural simplification (as in
sculptural
minimalism or the nouvelle
invention. But just as the tenets of
cuisine) constitutes a
mode of
Romanticism continued
inform modernism, so too did the forms of
classical
to
nineteenth-
century cuisine inflect the history of French haute cuisine well into the twentieth century.
To
place the modernist conditions of cuisine
in their historical context,
one would have to note the
startling
coincidence between the advent of the nouvelle cuisine and the nascent discourse of postmodernism in the
arts,
both of which
share several central tenets: self-conscious reflexivity (experimentation
upon primary
realization that
inspirations based
material quaUties), questioning of origins (the
inventions are but variations, transmutations, or
all
on previous works, whence the search
for ancient
sources), hybridization (the inmixing of elements, styles, res),
and gen-
regionalism (the decentralization and relativization of tech-
niques, materials,
and
styles),
and multiculturalism,
confiised with exoticism (the juxtaposition
albeit often
and incorporation of
foreign elements). Indeed, contemporaneous with
movements of
minimalism and conceptualism, nouvelle cuisine may be deemed one of postmodernism's precursors, thus constituting a true thetic avant-garde.
127
aes-
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
This association of art and cuisine suggests a curious genealogy in which the garden of
glass in
be reconsidered insofar
it
of two
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might
served as a model for the interweaving
have only recently received their muses: landscape
arts that
architecture
as
cuisine. For while such a garden
and
of spun
glass
might
never actually have been constructed, the history of cuisine attests to its
influence in the fabulous inventions of pieces montees of spun
sugar, pastry,
and candy that evoke such
fragile fantasy worlds.
Culinary history abounds in examples of such constructions, even predating Colonna. given by
by
uscript dictated
amazing
One might
Amedee viii. Due de
spectacle.
of a great
feast
Savoie, as recounted in the 1420
man-
Maitre Chiquart.
his chef,
The main
recall the details
a miniature castle with a fountain
white wine
The meal was an
course was a centerpiece consisting of
of love spouting rose water and
of the courtyard, with a different dish
at the center
foot of each tower. Every animal was highly decorated
huge gilded boar ornamented with the
these included a
manners roast
—
The
—
fire;
guests' coats
of arms, a suckling pig, and a roast swan replumed with feathers.
at the
and spat
its
own
piece de resistance was a huge pike cooked in three
the
tail
end
fried,
the middle boiled, and the head
served with three different sauces.^' Both this dish and the
centerpiece that adorned the table simultaneously constituted a secular feast
and
contradictory
flamboyant
a
cosmic symbol, synthesizing incompatible
victuals,
modes of cooking, and heterogeneous symbols
totality.
into a
Here, the taste for miracles and marvels was
laudably manifested in a culinary instance, though one might suspect that such curiosities, mirabile dictu, often far surpassed the pleasures of the palate.
The visual
aspect o^z piece montee often takes precedence over
the gastronomic value of the dish
itself,
however
antithetical this
might seem regarding the gustatory goals of cuisine, such that symbolic-value supersedes use-value. Indeed, Careme's decorative per-
fectionism often transcended his culinary aspirations, as in the use
of inedible binding materials to guarantee the longevity of his creations.
Even more ftindamentally, he notes
third edition of his
Le
in the
foreword to the
Pdtissier pittoresque the extent
—
128
—
of his passion
IN PRAISE OF
ANACHRONISM
for landscape architecture per se: "I try
chef
if
genre, as
princes
conceive of
I
and
my
blindly gave in to
I
it
would have ceased being
a pas-
natural taste for the picturesque
embellishment of the parks of
for the
This landscape architect manque
for private gardens."^^
sublimated his untried passion into some of the most fabulous spun sugar edifices in the history of French cuisine. Consider the extrav-
agance of the following dessert, a moss-adorned grotto, described in his
Le PMssier
The
most picturesque
royal parisien as having the
grotto with
its
effect.
rock formations was composed of carefully
arranged groups of sculpted dough variously glazed with pink sugar, caramelized sugar, and castor sugar colored with saffron. These ele-
ments were spread with
crystallized sugar
Four arcades were composed of pralined fine
powdered
sugar. It
was
all
and chopped
pistachios.
pufif-pastry sprinkled
with
surrounded by glazed meringues gar-
nished with vanilla cream, and set on a base of German waffle, decorated with Genoese cake crowns and beads, and topped off with a small waterfall of silvered spun sugar.^^
This miniature landscape certainly bears comparison with the
no longer extant Grotto of Thetis grotto at Linderhof created by
at Versailles or the fairy tale blue
King Ludwig of
Careme s pieces montees was coherent with the epoch, based
on
cism linked to the
Bavaria.
The
style
of
the landscape aesthetics of
the intricate aesthetic conditions of a neoclassi-
effects
of the purely picturesque; there was no
allu-
siveness,
no symbolism, no sublime. The
pictorial
models that served such mimesis remained representational,
the gustatory
would be subservient
to design.
of pictorial abstraction could the visual serve al
its
gustatory primacy, as
is
influence of Japanese cuisine
result
was that
as
Only with
artistry
long
as the
the advent
of cuisine be freed to
manifested, for example, by the visu-
on the French nouvelle
Careme, the architectural autodidact
whom
cuisine.
one gastronome
referred to as "the Palladio of cuisine," spent untold hours studying
drawing, architecture, and garden design (notably works on garden follies) at
Paris.
the cabinet des estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale in
This
is
attested to
and Le Pdtissier ration
was both
by
his
volumes Le
royal parisien (1815), classical
where
and romantic: a
[29
P&tissier pittoresque (1815)
it is
evident that his inspi-
classicism that syncretical-
Antonin Careme, Athenian Ruin, from Le
Patissier pittoresque
[N PRAISE
ly
OF ANACHRONISM
and paradoxically responded
most anodyne picturesque
architecture
—Tuscan,
effects,
Giacomo
whatsoever. Inspired by
of
to the varied aesthetics
and a romanticism
world's great civilizations,
the
all
that w^as limited to
its
minus any Sturm und Drang
Barozzi da Vignolas five orders of
Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite
—
his
spun-sugar creations in the forms of pavilions, rotundas, temples, towers, fortresses, mills, hermitages,
and ruins of
all
sorts
were
cre-
ated in the greatest diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gaelic, and Egyptian. All this
was
combined
finally
in
an imaginative melange whose
transgressed the historical limits of both architecture
This conflation of
styles
and epochs
and
proffers, for
results
cuisine.
both land-
scape architect and pastry chef, a fantasized, schematized, stereo-
typed reduction of historical detail to imaginative fancy. In respect,
it
might be
tectonic side of Careme's sine,
which was
work was
at least as
in part a classic continuation
tocratic cuisine at the
cuisine.
adventurous
this
archi-
as his cui-
and refinement of aris-
end of the ancien regime, and
application of innovations that
modern haute
and
said that the superlatively decorative
would provide
an
in part
the foundations of
His architectural passion was not, however,
of pastry making. Between 1821-6 he published
restricted to the art
Projets d'Architecture,
which included plans
for the
embellishment of
both Paris and Saint-Petersburg. For example, he proposed for the Place
du Carrousel
French nation;
it
in Paris a
would
temple dedicated to the glory of the
display forty-eight lions' heads, twelve tro-
phies, eight statues,
and a pantheon of the names of the country's
heroes. This project
is
and constructions ary
—Utopian
as
much
in keeping
for public festivals,
architectural fantasies such as those of Etienne-Louis
Boullee, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,
with the
A
art
with the great buildings
both royal and revolution-
and Jean-Jacques Lequeu
—
as
it is
of pastry decoration.
striking
example of such architectural fantasy
reveals
strange modernity at the core of Careme's classicism, one based
on
a a
curious hybrid of styles, materials, and natural orders. In a dreamlike evocation, he described, in Le Pdtissier parisien, certain pieces montees that
would
represent rivers, cascades,
131
and waves of the
sea.
The
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
ephemeral
art
of pastry would represent the even more ephemeral,
though elemental and
eternal,
forms of water. This might be com-
pared with another eccentric and fascinating fantasy of edible architecture
from a
text
by Salvador Dali, which
celebrates the oneiric
and
troubling nature of certain creations, specifying the relations between architecture
and
and
pastry,
stressing
object of desire. "^4 in describing
an inexorable desire "to eat the
two
nouveau houses that
art
Antonio Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia explains
how one was
and the other by the tranquil waters of a These
he
lake.
are real buildings, veritable sculptures
clouds in water,
in Barcelona,
inspired by the ocean's waves during a tempest,
made
of the
reflections
of crepuscular
by recourse to an immense and extravagant,
possible
multicolored and glimmering mosaic of pointillist iridescence from which
emerge forms of still forms of mirroring
water,
water,
forms of spreading water, forms of stagnant water,
forms of water rippling in the wind,
all
these forms of
water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of bisyncopated, interlaced
reliefs
and nymphaeas concretized
melting with "naturalistic-stylized" nenuphars
in
impure and annihilating eccentric conver-
gences, thick protuberances of fear gushing from the incredible facade, simul-
taneously contorted by an utter suffering and by a totally latent and infinitely
tender calmness whose only equals are those horrifying apotheoses
floruncules ready to be eaten with a
and
However
soft
spoon
—with
and ripe
a looming, bloody, greasy,
spoon of gamy meat.^'
surreal
and nightmarish,
this passage
is
an archetypally
modernist continuation of the imaginary conflation of landscape architecture text, it
and
cuisine, typical
should be noted
of Dali s iconography. In
that, as befits his art,
actually describe the state of his pieces montees ished, leaving veritable ruins of ruins! For to
mount
to admitting the temporal
and
afi:er
bid) side of cuisine.
One
Careme
the meal
is
do so would be
fragile
nature of his
well as the inexorably mortal (and horrifyingly scatological
con-
this
never does
fin-
tantaart, as
and mor-
cannot help but remember the outstand-
ing role of the table, often depicted in states of extreme chaos, in pictorial representations
of
vanitas. Dali
any better argument
concludes his essay with the
will
no longer
be."^^
to consider cuisine as
one of the
fine arts?
claim that, "Beauty will be edible or
132
it
Is
there
[N PRAISE
OF ANACHRONISM
The genius /oa establishes restaurant Michel Bras,
named
the essence of cuisine. Consider the for
its
chef and owner and situated
near the remote town of Laguiole in the Aubrac region of Frances
One
Massif Central.
of Brass signature dishes
is
the gargouillou,
ingredients of which grace the cover of his book, Le livre de Michel Bras}'^
gling
The term
evokes the verb gargouiller, the bubbling or gur-
sound of a liquid
—an onomatopoeia
both the cooking
for
process and the streams that run through the Aubrac. But gargouillou also refers to
one of the principal regional
dishes,
an elementary
ragout of potatoes in bouillon. Rather than strive for a nostalgic and restrictive regionalist "authenticity," Bras raises this simplest
summits of the culinary
es to the
art.
of dish-
His version consists of an ever-
changing combination, culled from the daily market choices, of
many
hundred
possibilities that constitute this "virtual" recipe;
dient necessitates a separate preparation, and
moistened in a vored with
light butter sauce emulsified
ham
leaves, edible wildflowers,
many
French cuisine velle,
all
are
each ingre-
mixed and
with vegetable broth
fla-
essence, then decorated with herbs, crystallized
This dish, offered articulates
as
dozen vegetables and grains chosen from nearly a
as three
wild mushrooms, and pearls of parsley
as the overture to his tasting
menu,
oil.
effectively
of the major dichotomies informing contemporary
—
peasant/haute,
simple/refined,
traditional/nou-
regional/international, raw/cooked, wild/cultivated
—
all
the
while stressing the primacy of the seasons, revealing the gustatory
of the region (the gout du
specificity
dling the butter/olive
watershed
—
oil
line
terroir),
—roughly
and ambiguously
strad-
situated along France's
that has long separated "French"
cooking from
its
Proven9al other.
The
synthesis of contradictions in Brass gargouillou partakes
of a gastronomic symbolic system that
typifies Jean-Francois Revel's
claim that "the summits of the art are attained precisely in those periods
when
the refinement of recipes associates a complexity of
conception with a lightness of
results. "^^
provides the range of variations
on
a
Complexity of conception
theme
that permit continual
inventiveness; the lightness of realization assures the presentation of
the essential, primal qualities of foodstuffs, barkening back to a
Michel Bras: garden from
restaurant,
garden and restaurant, from within garden
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
nostalgia for simple flavors raised to their quintessential powers, as stressed
by nouvelle
Bras, sional
cuisine. Essence
dominates appearance.
an erudite autodidact (quite rare in the world of profes-
French cuisine),
sine (French
and
is
concerned not only with the history of cui-
foreign), but also
with ancient and modern botany.
Indeed, his major contribution to contemporary French cooking
and
the rediscovery
creative use
of
many
Among those common varieties),
and medicinal herbs.
wildflowers, aromatic herbs,
used in the gargouillou (besides numerous more
amaranth, orach, Basella, ironwort, white and blue borage,
are giant
comfrey, vetch, hops, pimpernel, rape, purslane, and rue. Yet at glance, his subtle culinary regionalism
located four miles outside of Laguiole.
on the west
—
The Aubrac
side
^with
of a
hill
vast,
its
boulder-strewn vistas of some austerity, and huge, open skies
that often resemble Turner watercolors
and
first
apparently belied by the
is
architecture of his restaurant-hotel, set high
rolling,
is
long-forgotten vegetables,
least
—
is
one of the most remote
populated regions of France. In contrast to the landscape,
the buildings, designed by the Bordeaux architectural firm of Eric
of
Raffy, are built
materialized as is
basalt, steel,
and
glass,
high-modernist structures
accidentally in the natural setting.
enclosed in glass walls that expectedly open
tas,
at
if
area
but the long, rectangular, glass-walled restaurant offers what first
a rather frustrating surprise:
approaching the sublime,
is
one of the hotel buildings,
windows of the
restaurant
row rectangular garden at the
the westward view,
ity is
is
often
cut off at the horizon by the roofline of letting
and the
only the sky appear. Between the initially
exasperating wall
is
that runs the length of the restaurant,
a nar-
open
northern end to visually flow into the countryside. Looking
obliquely northward, from inside this garden,
its
unmarked extrem-
continuous with the landscape beyond; looking straight west-
ward from within the
restaurant, the garden
dows and delimited by the wall. This garden not unlike if
The lounge
upon the splendid vis-
many
randomly on
of Brass dishes:
its
low
its
several
is
is
framed by the win-
stylistically equivocal,
rugged stones placed
grass field, highlighted
by wild
grasses
as
and
wild flowers, simulate the very Aubrac landscape hidden by the facing wall. Yet these stones also refer to the Japanese
—
135
—
Zen
garden.
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Microcosm
macrocosm; international syncretism enriches
replaces
symbolic regionalism.^^ Yet this simple setting offers a complex theatricality. For
— Decouverte & Nature' menu —
appearance of the ''
first
dish
upon
the gargouillou, in the case of the
the relations between the garden
what appears on the
scenario) are apparent. sorts
most condensed microcosm
plate (the
One
occasionally even served the
is
and
in this
same
of flowers growing in the garden before one's gaze. As for the
outer Aubrac scenery, of which only the skyscape
mer sun
much
initially prohibits
ularly brash, necessitating protective shades
soften
its effect.
But
as the
is
visible, the
appreciation, as the light
on the
is
sum-
partic-
glass walls to
sun reaches the horizon, the waiters, in
choreographed synchroniciry,
the shades,
raise
revealing
the
Turneresque sky with the added surprise of double sunsets (an ancient portentous cosmic sign) created by a combination of atmospheric conditions and the double plate glass of the windows.
The
symbolic, indeed metaphysical, role of the sun has played a major part in the constitution of French landscape architecture ever since
where the garden's central
Versailles,
axis
marks the
culminating at the vanishing point where the sun in
homage
Bras,
to the
where the
Sun King. This
artificial
tradition
is
solar trajectory,
sets at infinity, all
continued
at
Michel
horizon of the rooftop dissimulates and
doubles the natural horizon, articulating outer sky with inner garden landscape,
framed by the
all
glass walls that also enclose the
sun in a
"captured view."
As the sun
sets, artificial
lighting replaces natural light, with
highlights created by spotlights.
The
disappearance of the sky into
night condenses the world into the space of the garden and the restaurant, progressively
centration.
the light,
The only
first
narrowing the
natural then
artificial,
gastronomic function of which
is
field
garden
activity in the
is
of
visibility
and con-
the "performance" of
establishing a theatricality the
to turn the scene inward, towards
the pictorial and performative space of the table. In another context, this effect
looked,
is
explained, mutatis mutandis, in Looking at the Over-
where Norman Bryson writes of the "anti-Albertian genre"
of still-life:
—
136
—
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
Instead of plunging vistas, arcades, horizons, and the sovereign prospect of the eye,
it
much
proposes a
closer space, centered
of the technical curiosities of the genre,
world beyond the
suasively
is
it
on the body. Hence one
disinclination to portray the
table. Instead
of a zone beyond one finds
sometimes coinciding with
a real wall, but
That further zone beyond the
a virtual wall
must be suppressed
What
edge of the
far
a blank, vertical wall,
its
if still life
is
to create
builds this proximal space
is
its
no
less
per-
edge
table's
principal spatial value: nearness.
gesture: the gestures of eating, of laying
the table.4°
Michel
meets the conditions of
Bras's restaurant
this anti-Albertian
one
genre, a site that provides a richly
symboUc dining
fully orchestrated in relation to the
surrounding environment and
experience,
its
culinary riches.
The
sculptures of Henri Olivier constitute a realm of assignation,
not designation, of inscription, not description. art
—
specific works, interior
body mal
in motion.
attributes
As
it
—
decor
is
The
"nature" of his
conceptual works,
landscape architecture,
sculpture,
site-
a catalyst to set mind, sight,
and
were, any discussion limited strictly to the for-
of these works
variable scale, serial structures,
—minimal
forms, industrial finish,
Duchampian
titles
—would miss
the
point for the very same reasons that the minimalist sculpture and
earthworks of the
The
late
1960s and early 1970s belied formal analyses.
material existence of Olivier's equivocal (though not too anx-
ious) objects fiinctions as the articulation
of the perceptual and the
conceptual, where form follows placement. Threshold, Portico,
passage,
and Tunnel a.re
titles
liminal objects, emblematic works.
that portend, sites of
They
are aesthetic
transformers that manifest the ambiguity between entrance and exit,
viewpoint and vanishing point, seer and seen. Here, the subtle
and cunning
reversibility
of space
—
its
dent permeability
receives
—
tator to be oriented or disoriented?
immobile of
Olivier's
works,
infinite overture
and transcen-
aesthetic consecration.
Even the most
once
[37
—
set
in
its
Is
the spec-
solid, the
most
garden context.
Henri
Henri
Olivier,.
Olivier,
Untitled
Miroirs d'eau
IN PRAISE OF
becomes
fluid
ture.
is
It
and ephemeral,
ANACHRONISM
as
often the case for garden sculp-
is
transformed by the fleeting shadows of clouds and
observers, the ever-changing intensity
and quality of the
the anamorphic trajectories of the gaze. the garden
stroll,
which vision
The
is
where
visibility
traces
It
new
light,
and
itineraries for
a veritable labyrinth within
is
transfigured into symbols.
material constituents of Olivier's sculpture are archetyp-
ally neutral
and elemental
This neutrality hints phlegmatic
life
at the
and ubiquity.
in their substance, color,
very essence of matter
itself:
the stable,
of wood; the innate architectonics of stone; the
immutable, melancholic weightiness of
lead; the
baroque
virtuality
of water. As in Opus incertum, nature and culture are symbolically fused in eminently coherent and elemental works, here forming
miniature pools to collect water, creating sculptures approximating the inexorable existence of natural objects. tionships between
site, sight,
and sign
The
already intricate rela-
in the landscape are
compli-
cated by Olivier's aggressive, yet humorous, anti-mannerist sensibility that surpasses the nature/culture distinction at the core classical structuralist categorization
the
site
where memory and history
and spontaneous eroticism an
and hermeneutics. The garden
ideal
intersect,
are juxtaposed,
world and the exigencies of the
of is
where scripted theater
where the simulacrum of
real conflict.
Here, Olivier's
sculptures are equivocal signs within a greater totality.
A gory, as
certain is
minimalism
gives rise to thought, but abhors alle-
the case in Olivier's site-specific garden sculptures, which
often constitute microcosmic elements of landscape architecture: canals devolved into mirror
rainwater
filling
reduced to a word or a these
works
slits,
pools condensed into puddles of
out hollowed sculptural spaces, orchards nominally
refer
is
name
(as in
indissociable
Dans
from the
les oliviers).
Yet to what
spectators' acts
of appre-
hension and conception, whence the constitution of the garden
as a
paysage conceptualise (a "conceptualized" landscape, as compared
with Panofsky's notion of the paysage moralise). As such, Olivier's
works might be placed
in the lineage of Ian
Hamilton
Finlay's cele-
brated Stony Path/Little Sparta, the archetypal "conceptual" garden.
For both Finlay and Olivier, garden and sculpture
[39
exist in a site-spe-
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
and
cific
bolic,
dialectical relationship,
and
allegorical facets
foregrounding the conceptual, sym-
of the history of landscape architecture.
In investigating these works, one must avoid false tautologies
by extending the
list
of both sculptural qualities and subject posi-
tions to infinity. Since the terms of discourse orient the field of
must be
vision, the theoretical realm
plete as the
work
in question.
of
tional in the tide
The ical
as supple,
Whence
Olivier's Si
un jardin
c'est
and conceptual, quotidian and
aesthetic.
example, the difference between a fallen tree
an empty forest and a sculpture such
seen,
(If This Is a
Garden).
work demands an answer both phys-
interrogative aspect of this
alley
open, and incom-
the importance of the condi-
composed of lead-encrusted
What split
constitutes, for
by lightening
as Allee (Path), consisting
split
and quartered
logs?
in
of an
One
is
the other organizes sight. Occasionally, nature attains the
exceptional status and solemnity of
Mount
art.
In Japan, for example,
Fuji does not exist solely as a natural
centuries of aesthetic representation,
it
phenomenon: through
has been transfigured into a
symbolic, spiritual matrix according to which
all
other objects and
images are beheld. All sculpture might well aspire to the ontological condition of Mount Fuji. Yet now, this aesthetic situation
overlapping loci
is
moment
is
complicated insofar
as at the
of modernity and postmodernity, the genius
always potentially subverted by ironic reversals and antimeta-
physical distractions. architecture,
A
new
and landscape
theatricality
are
is
offered where sculpture,
once again united, no longer
in a sys-
tematic and symbolic totalization of reference and self-reference, but rather in the fragile complicity of intertextual cross-references, often
culminating in frustrating yet challenging aesthetic and conceptual
dead ends, paradoxes, and contradictions. The Stevens's
poem, "Anecdote of the
historians, offers
Jar,"
first
an appropriate paradigm for the phenomenology of
postminimalist sculpture in the landscape domain. I
placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round It
made
it
stanza of Wallace
not unfamiliar to landscape
was,
upon
a
hill.
the slovenly wilderness
Surround that
hill.
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
The
wilderness rose
And
sprawled around, no longer
up
to
it,
wild."^'
Compare Thoreau's
vision of the "worldly miser,"
the angels going to
and
hill in
Tennessee or the image of paradise,
on the perceptual and cognitive
monuments,
Sculptures,
mundi
—
mark
Olivier's sculptures
whose future
all
exists in the
gaze.
These
effects
milestones,
coordinates, the axis
and
val-
untouched landscape; postmodernist paradigms center
orizing the
tures
"did not see
midst of paradise. "4^ Premodernist paradigms of landscape
in the
would focus on the
ty
who
but was looking for an old post-hole
fro,
—
itself
of the
as
and the post-hole.
jar
celestial
cartographic
signs,
well as Stevens's jar
and
the inauguration of a virtual spatiali-
very lineaments of the spectator's ges-
ritualistic
cosmic landmarks inaugurate a
deconstruction of the garden's symbolic matrix.
attempt to expand the ontology and epis-
Olivier's sculptures
temology of landscape architecture insofar
as
they manifest the
modernist tenets of serialism, difference, repetition, sequence, and periodicity, all the while problematizing the relations rior
and
and
sculpture, physical
and
exterior, nature
artifact,
axiom and
between
inte-
object, landscape
and metaphysical. The miniature
reflecting
pools of his Miroir d'eau and Miroirs d'eau simultaneously establish a rhetorical condensation
and an ontological contraction of French
formal gardens; yet such works are deformalizing, operating abstract synecdoches of the garden sites in
which they
as
are placed.
Untitled,
with
canal,
a further ontological declension of this series, where the
is
water-mirror
become an Is it
is
its
mirror
slit
as the ultimate
in turn transformed into pure sculpture, destined to
abstract museological proxy for the garden.
the gaze that
cosmos that
is
is
captivated in these works, or rather the
captured and shrunk, through specular magic, into
diminutive spectacle and theoretical trope?
of vision
is
metaphor of a garden
The
infinite malleability
prodigious, engendering the picturesque, the beautiful,
and the sublime.
Do
Olivier's sculptures
etude? Are they physical or metaphysical?
evoke quietude or disqui-
Or might
it
be concluded
that they proffer a detotalizing force, an ontological tension, a
hermeneutic destabilization? Such aesthetic disequilibrium
141
may well
Bauduin, Vers Versailles
IN PRAISE
OF ANACHRONISM
serve as an overture to the landscapes, both mental this aesthetically
ambiguous
work can be
If Olivier's
characterized in terms of a
vention of gardens in the sculptor Bauduin
de pierre^^
—
and
—who
physical, of
fin-de-siecle.
field
maximal
inter-
of scidpture, the work of the French
characterizes his metier as that of a passeur
consists of an absolutely minimal, transient interven-
tion of sculpture in the landscape.
Such
is
his aesthetic process
— implying both an of placement and testimony names—whereby an deposition
act
that
object
either uniquely or in a
complex and
is
of
a statement or
set in the landscape,
serial ritual
of exchange with
other objects from the natural domain. "^^ Such a procedure estab-
landscape between presence and absence
lishes a dialectic in the
(of art object, of artist, of observer), forgetting
and
recollection,
emptiness and plenitude, measure and disproportion, activity and chance. Typical
Bauduin's
is
work
Vers Versailles, the deposition
of a
single one-square-meter sheet of transparent glass in the gardens Versailles
on
a
morning
in
November
1992, placed five times,
between the Fountain of Apollo and the canal, afterwards den's extreme limit at the
end of the
canal,
and then
of
first
at the gar-
at three sculp-
tures including the Enceladus. Here, several principle views are at
of the garden that structurally reg-
stake, following the east- west axis
ulates the
major viewpoints.
One
deposition offered views over the
canal to the vanishing point, and over the Fountain of Apollo to the
chateau in the background; another deposition offered but one appropriate view, over the length of the in the
Grand Canal
to the chateau
background, for the opposite viewpoint established a per-
spective of
what
well exclude
"Towards
it
lay
beyond the
limits
of the garden, which might
from the purview of the work
Versailles").
(entitled, after
Depending on the angle of vision, the
either transparent or reflective, either
marking the
site
all,
glass
on which
is
it is
posed or creating a mirror, a simulacrum of the canal and the pools {miroirs d'eau).
The
sheet of glass
is
t43
thus both a metaphor of vision
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
and a
work, both a gesture and an object multiplying the gar-
visible
den's signification
and enriching
its visibility.
Are the "icons" of this work the canal and pool, or rather the
and
variously transparent
seem,
as this
an
is
cation, allusion
art
reflecting sheet of glass? Both,
of process and
and conception based on the rapid passage through
a landscape. For Bauduin, to saunter
abandonment. In
the garden
sage:
is
to
is
abandon;
his depositions
placement that equals displacement,
entail a transparent gesture, a
deviation,
would
it
and equivo-
instability, ellipsis
this ritualistic art, process equals pas-
nature plus gesture, a maximal
work
distin-
guished by minimal signs. For Bauduin, the ethics of aesthetics
knowing how
One
is
to depart.
of the most radical contemporary reconsiderations of the land-
scape
is
expressed in Robert Smithson's claim.
You know, one pebble moving one to keep
me
really excited.
the action. Sometimes
foot in
two million years
is
enough action
But some of us have to simulate upheaval, step up
we have
to call
on Bacchus.
Excess. Madness.
The End
of the World. Mass Carnage. Falling Empires. 45
Questions of scale, process, and temporality are expanded to the cos-
mic dimension, imperceptible
to the
human
sensory apparatus, and
nearly unfathomable to the imagination. Smithson's perspective,
transforming time, space, and objects, resulted in such previously
unthinkable works
of "landscape
Monuments of Passaic
series, in
devastated landscapes of
New Jersey
and drainage systems
pipelines,
which
The
last
monument was
—with
—were
cally represented, as veritable sites a sand
architecture"
ly
forgetfulness.
This
his
1967
their oil derricks,
perceived,
and
huge
and photographi-
of landscape architecture.
box or a model
of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a
and
as
industrially transformed
monument of minute
desert.
map
of
Under the dead
light
infinite disintegration
particles blazed
under a bleak-
glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the
drying up of oceans tains
—
all
—no
longer were there green forests and high
moun-
that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones
IN PRAISE
and stones pulverized into
OF ANACHRONISM
was a dead metaphor and
dust. Every grain of sand
equaled timelessness, and to decipher such metaphors would take one
through the
open grave
false
—
mirror of eternity. This sand box
somehow doubled
a grave that children cheerfiilly play in.
as
an
4^
This passage, worthy of the best science-fiction, also makes a theoretic
proposition typical of the epoch, foregrounding the
common
denominator of the materiality of the
grains of sand.
maker Paul
Compare
Sharits,
signifier,
least-
here the
the theorization of the experimental film-
who
stressed the simultaneous difference
identity of "film as object"
and "projected performance
and
as process."
His studies, both cinematic and theoretic, of the micro-morphology of film led to an extreme epistemological axiom, transforming cine-
matography into semiotics: "even those such
as
'concepts.'
""^7
able,
'things'
'emulsion grains,' can be
shown
which
are observ-
to be essentially
In an epoch characterized by wide experimentation with the material substructure of the art object, one might
the
arts,
wonder why, of all
landscape architecture should hardly have benefited from
such contemporary structural-material analyses. Smithson, nearly alone
among
those concerned with the landscape, explicitly brought
these issues into the context of "Western metaphysics. In order to shatter the limitations of previous speculation
on the landscape, he
revealed the phenomenological limits of perception
graphic limits of the imagination.
stood
why
"He was
Thus
and the icono-
in terms of scale,
he under-
Pascal could never accept Descartes's mechanistic system:
always troubled by those actual scale problems, and then
the whole idea of probability springs out of that. "4^ Pascal's theological disquietude
and God,
demanded an
entailing a
ontological rupture between world
new metaphysics and mathematics;
aesthetic disquietude
resulted in
chance and process into
art,
a
new
Smithson's
assimilation of natural
an experimentation transposed to the
realm of landscape. Smithson's Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969) his investigations
is
typical of
of the aesthetic morphology of the landscape. The
work, consisting of a
trip
through the Yucatan peninsula with nine
—
mirrors set in the landscape, photographi-
"mirror displacements"
—
145
—
Robert Smithson, Sixth Yucatan Mirror Displacement (ipdp)
1 1
ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE OF
documented, then removed
cally
—
complicates
specifically
the
problem of the horiiwn:
How
could one advance on the horizon,
A horizon
wheels?
openness,
it
is
something
is
places
The
Crucial
destinations.
away.
far
Time
—
and mythologically
is
car kept going
the site-specificity of the
is
if it
was already present under the
other than a horizon;
an enchanted region where down
is
approached, but time all
else
stressed
is
it is
up.
devoid of objects
closedness in
Space can be
when one
dis-
on the same horizon. ^^^
work
—
by Smithson
physically, historically,
in his
manner of narrat-
ing the voyage in the context of Aztec theology, notably concerning
He
the god Quetzalcoatl.
refers to the
the god, resting near a great realizing that
moment
myth
he had become aged,
cast several
nearby stones into the this
contemporary purposes by postulating that
for
By
traveling with Quetzalcoatl
—The
time
of rock in
one
tree limbs.)
But
if
one becomes aware of primordial time or
memo for a possible "earthwork"
Tree of Rocks. (A
one wishes
to be ingenious
—
enough
final
balance slabs to erase time
requires mirrors, not rocks.5°
vastness of geological epochs parallels mythic timelessness;
opposed to nature and myth beyond the tion,
of the myth where
gazed into an obsidian mirror, and,
where they remained embedded. Smithson reformulates
tree,
The
tree,
Smithson
also stresses
threshold of
human
dedicated to
flies,
limits of
human
percep-
forms of animal perception beneath the
perception. Proclaiming that in fact trees are
he
asks, "
Why shouldflies
be without art?"^^
Depending on the angle of vision, mirrors can
reflect
images,
or light, or nothing. In gardens, reflecting pools and mirrors often fiinction in
They can
baroque splendor, to multiply and glorify their subjects.
and
serve as frames
icons, as at Versailles,
where the mon-
umental Grand Canal and the Hall of Mirrors capture and both the vanishing point
at infinity
and the
reflect
setting sun, Apollonian
apotheosis of all symbols. For Smithson, to the contrary, the mirror fractures perception as a
polymorphic
and
site,
displaces horizons, unfolding the landscape
with infinite bifurcations in both space and
time. Being has multiple entrances:
it is
ed, chiasmatic, reversible, diacritical,
no longer icon but
anti-icon,
overdetermined, sediment-
and equivocal. The mirror
is
decomposing rather than composing.
w Robert Smithson,
A
Non-Site, Franklin,
New Jersey
(ip(i8)
IN PRAISE
OF ANACHRONISM
establishing an aesthetic entropy that
beyond ments
narcissism
all
— through
and
to a creativity
Yucatan Mirror Displace-
the visual fragmentation, physical displacement,
and temporal transformation ralize
tantamount
is
The
nostalgia.
effected
by
—denatu-
aesthetic artifice
and dematerialize the landscape. These nine
subversive,
different mirror displacements served as a sort
postmodern "Claude
glass,"
of
while the resulting photo-
graphic documentation transformed the mirrors from reflective tools into stable icons. Writing
of the
flight over the jungle
towards
the site of the sixth mirror displacement, he offered a description that
is
not only emblematic of the Yucatan project and of his entire
oeuvre, but also of the aesthetics of post-baroque gardens:
and swamps one could
in the lagoons
dimensional icnA homogeneous space sinking out of
reminds us If
you
"Down
see infinite, isotropic, threesite. "5^
Smithson
that. visit
the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but
traces, for the
memory
mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were
photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in has been erased.
Remembrances
are but
New York. The
reflected light
numbers on a map, vacant memories
constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities.
It is
the dimension
of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen. is
An
The
fictive voices
of the totems have exhausted their arguments. Yucatan
elsewhere. 55
indoor version of these mirror works also
relations
exists,
inverting the
between landscape and gallery and thereby further denatu-
Dead
ralizing the landscape:
placed to
fill
Tree,
consisting of an uprooted tree
a gallery space, with mirrors set in the branches. 54 In
this piece, blind mirrors reflect a frozen disaster, creating
accidents, not essences.
What Smithson
placements pertains, mutatis mutandis, to friction
between the mirrors and the
between language and memory. absence of absences."^' Such well as of
all
is
Dead
tree;
now
Tree:
signifier,
art
of
dis-
"There was a
there
is
a friction
A memory of reflections becomes an the condition of writing on
metaphysical speculation; the mirror
metaphoric or mythic
an
wrote of the mirror
but
it
is
art, as
not only a
also creates specific duplicat-
ing and fragmenting effects, both perceptually and cognitively.
— 149 —
Robert Smithsoii,
Map
of Broken Clear Glass
(Atlantis), (1969)
IN PRAISE OF
The
horizon cannot be located or localized, only
fact that the
and
reflected
ANACHRONISM
displaced,
coherent with Smithson's major
fully
is
structural contribution to the history of landscape architecture, his
These
non-sites.
and
are indoor earthworks that simultaneously disrupt
works constituted by
reveal the original site,
of earth
a transfer
or stone from the landscape to a gallery installation, accompanied by
photographic and/or cartographic documentation. This
effects
transformations of scale, disposition, temporality, and containment,
and
and
between prehistory and
establishes a dialectic artifice,
gallery
—
indeed, of
all
history, nature
and representation, landscape and
presentation
the material aspects of the
site
—
a veritable
abstraction, in the root sense of the term, that expands the limits of
landscape. ^^
The
non-sites ultimately permitted the postulation of
of Hypothetical Continents, begun in 1969, including
his series
of Atlantis; The Hypothetical Continent
in Stone,
Cathaysia;
Map The
Hypothetical Continent ofLemuria; Island ofBroken Seashells; Island
ofBroken of Glass
Glass;
Map of Clear Broken
(Atlantis).
Some
Glass Strips (Atlantis);
others were actually completed works, like that in the
and
Map
form of maps and drawings,
exist in the
all
were "anti-expeditions,"
Yucatan, which thrust landscape architecture into the
realm of science-fiction and fantasy.
At the same moment
Smithson was beginning
that
of the landscape, the science-fiction writer
J.
ing internationally famous for an oeuvre that, tions, fantasized the landscape, natural
that influenced an entire literary his apocalyptic short story,
and
and
his interventions
G. Ballard was becom-
among
other innova-
artificial,
in
artistic generation. ^7
manners Typical
"The Illuminated Man," where the
is
trans-
formation of the world into a crystalline realm proffers a terrifying
and morbid beauty. This with the same By day
tale
both opens, epigraphically, and closes
text:
fantastic birds flew
through the petrified
glittered like heraldic salamanders
night the illuminated
man
raced
on
forest,
and jeweled alHgators
the banks of the crystalline rivers.
among
'^ wheels, his head like a spectral crown.
By
the trees, his arms like golden cart-
UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Such
the disquieting strangeness of a world in the process of cat-
is
aclysmic transformation
—
"in this forest everything
and illuminated, joined together space"59
—
jeweled
trellises,
a
is
world containing objects resembling glace
frozen in time,
glistening
wedding
transfigured
marriage of time and
in the last
fruit, brilliant
cakes, Faberge gems, fountains
and opalescent candy,
all
evincing a consummate,
kaleidoscopic imagination of the limits of landscape, as the narrator recounts: Again the
forest
was a place of rainbows, the deep carmine
the jeweled grottos.
I
great white house standing like a classical pavilion
the forest. Transformed
by the
crystal frost,
ment of Versailles or Fontainebleau,
It is
no
its
it
glowing from
on
a rise in the centre of
appeared to be an intact frag-
ornate pilasters and sculptured friezes
from the wide roof which overtopped the
spilling
light
walked along a narrow road which wound towards a
surprise that Ballard, the author
who
forest.
^°
transformed the erotic
landscape vis-a-vis automobile technology in his notorious novel Crash (1973), valorizes above nearly
all
else
in
modernism the
"impossible or symbolic worlds" of surrealist art°' (most notably the "hallucinatory naturalism" of Salvador Dali's paintings), and the
"sombre half-worlds one glimpses ics."^^
What
is
in the paintings
at stake for Ballard
is
of schizophren-
a certain ideal
of the
literary
imagination:
The
dream worlds invented by the
writer of fantasy are external equivalents
of the inner world of the psyche, and because these symbols take their impetus
from the most formative and confused periods of our
lives
they are often
time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity.^'
This confluence of landscape and dream was always evident in the post-Renaissance history of landscape architecture, as evidenced in
Colonna's Hypnerotomachia PoUphili and Scudery's La Carte de Tendre, in Pascal's terror before the infinite expanses of the universe
and Nerval s
erotic hallucinations of the landscape, in Smithson's
Yucatan Mirror Displacements and the rampant contemporary virtual
reconstitutions of the landscape.
It is this
thought that probably
motivated Ballard, in the rhetorical tour-de-force of a recent onepage catalog postulating
essay, to
transform Smithson's work into his
own by
what might be the most famous works of land
—
152
—
art,
IN PRAISE OF
ANACHRONISM
Smithson's SpiralJetty and Amarillo Ramp, as the technological products of a cargo cuit!^'^
Smithson foresaw that "At any
rate,
the 'pastoral,'
it
seems,
is
out-
moded."^^ At the end of the twentieth century, a certain type of gar-
den would seem
to be in constant revolt against
both the
restrictions
of mathesis (universal or otherwise) and those of mimesis; a garden that
is
not "natural," yet one that permits the apparition of nature;
a marginal garden, corresponding to what Gilles Deleuze wrote of as
"minor" works, with their attendant subversive
effects;
whose forms transcend the imagination without, however, ily
a garden necessar-
evoking the sublime. Perhaps such "time-sculptures of terrifying
ambiguity" are indeed destined to guarantee an apocalyptic trans-
formation of the landscape. In a denatured nature that discloses pro-
foundly unnatural horizons, "The gardens of history are being replaced by
sites
of time.""^*^
153
—
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, English translations of French texts are by Allen
Syncretism 1
2
(i860;
New York:
Harper
Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins
secrets
de
(Paris:
G. C.
Bechet, 1816), 99; cited in
la Renaissance
desprodiges (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 48. This
from the medieval
Italy, vol. 2, trans. S.
& Row, 1975), 294.
Francesco Petrarch, Lettres familihes et secrkes
secret garden,
Weiss.
and Style
Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Middlemore
S.
book
hortiis conclusus
is
:
Des
des simples, et
astres,
an excellent study of the
through the
Italian
Renaissance
giardino segreto to the jardin hermetique. 3
Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins
secrets, 11.
4 Francesco Petrarch, "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux," temporary Civilization in the U^if 5
n.t., in
(New York: Columbia
Introduction to Con-
University Press, 1965), 557.
Ibid., 560.
6 Cited in
ibid., 562.
7 Petrarch, "Ascent," 562. 8
Two
classic texts
Baltru^aitis, Paris:
on the
Flammarion,
Symbols (London: 9
trading, inmixing,
and syncretism of symbols
Le moyen dge fantastique: Antiquites 1981);
et exotismes
dans
and Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and
Thames and Hudson,
I'art
are: Jurgis
gothique (1955;
the Migration
of
1977).
Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans.
Mario Domandi
(1927; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 52.
10 Ibid., 143. 11
As
this
is
probably the most analyzed topic in
would here be both inadequate and
art history, a
superfluous.
long
list
As an introductory
of references note, consider
John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: 1957); Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu: L'ordre visuel du
several classic texts:
Faber
& Faber,
Quattrocento {?2ins: Gallimard, 1967); Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
NOTES Rediscovery of Linear Perspective
12
(New
L'origine de la perspective {Vaus:
The most
recent translation
is
Leon
&
York: Harper
Damisch,
Row,
1975);
and Hubert
Flammarion, 1987).
On the Art of Building in Ten Tavernow (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Battista AJberti,
Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Press, 1996). 13
For example, the Villa Lante (Bagnaia), the Villa d'Este (Tivoli), the Boboli
Gardens of the Palazzo
Pitti (Florence),
and
Castello, Poggio, Pratolino,
and the various Medici
Fiesole),
Villas
(Rome,
only to name some of the most typical
and famous. 14
The
on the
literature
Italian
Renaissance garden
is
vast.
For a fine introduction, see
Catherine Laroze, Une
histoire sensuelle des jardins (Paris: Olivier
323—32; Terry Comito,
"The Humanist Garden,"
in
Teyssot, eds. The Architecture of Western Gardens (Cambridge, 1991), 37-45;
Orban, 1990),
Monique Mosser and Georges
MA: MIT
Press,
and John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), especially 42-58 ("Ovid in the Garden") and 59-72
Among the many A Tour ofItalian
("Garden and Theatre"). usefiil
Judith Chatfield,
is
fine illustrated
Gardens
(New
books and guides, very York: Rizzoli, 1988).
15
Cited in Lionello Puppi, "Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian
16
This section on Cusanus
Garden," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, is
53.
based on Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos.
On the great New York:
chain of being, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being {\9i6;
& Row,
Harper 17
i960).
Karl Jaspers, Anselm
and Nicholas ofCusa,
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966),
35.
trans.
Ralph Mannheim (New York:
Needless to
say,
the present essay presents
—
only the broadest schematization of these complex philosophical issues
enough, Italian 18
it is
Renaissance garden, and thus to inspire the reader to further investigations.
and
Cassirer, Individual
Cosmos,
51.
On
the extension of these issues as they relate
to aesthetics in the seventeenth-century debates Pascalians, see Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors
17th-century Metaphysics 19
Cited in
Raymond
(New York:
between the Cartesians and the
of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 53-77-
Marcel, Marsile Ficin
(Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1958), 273.
20 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 190-1; see also 69-141.
Oskar
^just
hoped, to situate their interest in relation to the development of the
Kristeller, Renaissance
On
Ficino, see also Paul
Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 89-110, 163-227. 21
Erwin Panofsky, "The Neoplatonic Movement in Iconology (1939;
New York:
Harper
& Row,
in Florence
and North
Italy," Studies
1972), 141.
22 See Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 129-69. 23
Cassirer, Individual
and Cosmos,
24 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 25
Cassirer, Individual
and
132.
134.
Cosmos,
135.
Panofsky rightly notes that the vast influence
of the notion of Neoplatonic love was effected
much
in the
manner
ernism in the
arts,
that psychoanalysis
even
when
was
in
inadequately understood. This idea
sidering the relations between theoretical systems partial readings "affinities."
both direct and indirect manners,
influential for the history
and misreadings
in
and
artistic
no way obviate the
is
of mod-
useful in con-
production, where
efficacy
of "influence" or
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence {Oxford: Oxford University
156
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
NOTES Press, 1973)
remains the most subtle analysis of the role of misprision in
ation. In relation to the experience
Garden and Grove {242,
of the
n.3), astutely
Italian garden,
makes
"Iconographical studies usually consider, as does
Hunt's book
is
how
that
this,
accomplishes both
by
in the Villa Lante:
only meanings inscribed in
such meanings were read by later
it
in
a parallel claim, referring to a study
Claudia Lazzaro-Bruno of an allegory of art and nature
artworks, rarely
artistic cre-
John Dixon Hunt,
visitors."
The
great value of
feats.
26 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, i65n. 27 Ibid., 160. 28 Cited in Arnold Hauser, The Social History ofArt, vol. (1951;
New York:
Vintage Books,
2,
trans. Stanley
Goodman
n.d.), 129.
29 See Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 83-7, 115-9 and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University
Press,
1964), 54-71.
30 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity ofMan (1486), trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John
Herman
Randall,
of Chicago 31
Jr., eds..
Juan Luis Vives, Tabula de homine
(c. 1518),
John Hale, The
32 Juan Luis Vives, cited in
(New York: Athenaeum,
1994), 510.
Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins
secrets,
and botanic knowledge,
classes,
trans.
and Randall, Renaissance Phibsophy,
Kristeller,
33
The Renaissance Philosophy ofMan (Chicago: University
Press, 1948), 224-5.
94.
On
Nancy
Lenkeith, in Cassirer,
389.
Civilization
of Europe in the Renaissance
the transformations of epistemology, natural
see 79—121
of this work. The
locus classicus
subject remains Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, n.t. (1966;
of the
New York:
Vintage, 1973).
34 Cited in Edgar
Wind, Pagan
New York:
Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958;
Norton,
1968), 2l8. 35
Wind, Pagan
36
Ibid., 99.
Mysteries, 218.
Perhaps the most familiar contemporary example of this dictum
Mohammed Alls 37
The
is
"float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
erotic poetics
of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili speddcaWy
justifies
the use of
this adjective.
38
Wind, Pagan
39
Cited in Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos,
40 Wind, Pagan 41
Mysteries, 104. 158.
Mysteries, 21.
Ibid., 25.
42 Maurice Le Roux, cited
in
Maurice Roche, Monteverdi
(Paris:
Le Seuil/Solftges,
i960), 70-1. 43 Although the identity of the author of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili certain,
Friar
the
it is
now
of the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. There
book was written by
affinities
lished,
is
not absolutely
almost always attributed to Francesco Colonna, a Dominican
Alberti, which, whatever
its
is
one theory that
veracity, reveals the
profound
perceived between the two thinkers. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was pub-
with
illustrations, in a
Aldus Manutius
in 1499.
An
mixture of
Italian, Latin,
and Greek,
in
Venice by
abbreviated French translation by Jean Martin
appeared in Paris in 1546, published by Kerver under the
157
title
Discours
du songe de
SYNCRETISM AND STYLE
NOTES
Strife
ofLove in a Dreame, appeared
Italian edition
of Hypnerotomachia Polophili
Poliphilr, the English translation, entitled
in
London
in 1592; the
contemporary
The
was edited by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi (Padua, 1964). Translations the current study are by the author, from the recent French edition (based
in
on the
1546 Jean Martin translation), Le Songe de PoliphiU (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 1994), edited, prefaced, Polizzi.
On
and
transliterated into
book
the influence of this
modern French by
Anthony
in France, see
Hypnerotomachia Pobphili in lyth-Century France," Journal of the Warburg 1
(1937): 117-37; this
is
Gilles
"The
Blunt,
Institute
an important early study flawed, however, by a less-than-
rudimentary comprehension of Renaissance philosophies. The importance of the engravings in the Hypnerotomachia Polophili for considerations of the landscape are briefly discussed in a
book
that
is,
in
its
breadth and depth, a model of scholarship
on gardens and landscape, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf
ing, see Alberto
MA: MIT
1995), 268-79. For
Perez-Gomez,
We
Ibid., 125.
46
Ibid., 128.
47
Ibid., 276.
48 Ibid.,
allegorical read-
The Dark Forest Revisited (Cambridge,
Press, 1992).
44 Colonna, Songe de 45
an idiosyncratic and su^estive
Poliphilo, or
Poliphile, 120.
find here the origins of Astroturf
325.
49 Lamarche-Vadel, Jardiru
secrets, 31.
50 Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, 325. 51
On
the epistemological problem of
lists,
see Allen S. Weiss,
"The Errant Text,"
The Aesthetics of Excess (Albany: State University of New York
Such usage evokes the sensual and
critical aspects
Press, 1989),
in
77-87.
of Rabelais (who was directly
influenced by Hypnerotomachia), the phantasmic and nonutilitarian inventions of
Raymond 52
Roussel,
and the simulacral metaphysics of Jorge Luis Borges.
Gilles Polizzi, "Presentation," in
Dematerialization
Colonna, Songe de
Poliphile, xvii.
and Iconoclasm
Blaise Pascal, Pensies (Edition de Port-Royal, 1670; Paris:
References to Pensees will cite the Port-Royal section
Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique 157.
Le
Seuil, 1962),
number
44
(44).
in parentheses.
{1^1^; Paris: Minuit, 1975),
For a more detailed analysis of this problem, see Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity,
52-77, to which this chapter might serve as a supplement.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966;
Museum
of Modern Art, 1977),
Alberto P^rez-Gomez, Architectural Representation
(Cambridge,
MA: MIT
also ibid.,
in
and the
Perspective
Hinge
Press, 1997), 307-8.
H^lfene Verin, "Technology in the Park: Engineers
Century France,"
New York:
16.
and Gardeners
in
Seventeenth-
Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens,
135.
See
266-79.
Philippe Comar,
La perspective en jeu:
Les dessous de I'image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992),
59; see also 53-63.
158
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
NOTES 7
The anguish behind this phantasm of spaceless space is made clear by Edmund Husserl, whose own phenomenological meditations, in this regard, were particularly Cartesian: "Depth is a symptom of chaos that true science must order into a cosmos, into a simple order, completely
and exposed. True science
clear
La perspective enjeu,
depth." Cited in Comar,
6v, see also
.
.
.
ignores
all
Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity,
33-46.
du
8 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Lafi)lie
voir:
De
I'esthetique
baroque
(Paris: Galilee,
1986). 77-
9
Ibid., 86.
This notion
is
borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
10 Ibid., 75. 11
Pascal, Pensees, 184 (427).
12
Ibid., 161 (378).
Lorsque I'an
13
En
cette
se renouvelle,
aimable saison
Oil Flore
amine avec elk
Les Zephyrs sur I'horizon,
Une nuit que
le silence
Charmait tout par sa presence, Je conjurai
le
Sommeil
De suspendre mon
reveil
Bien loin par dela
I'aurore.
Jean de La Fontaine, Le songe de Vaux (1671), in Oeuvres Completes Gallimard/Pleiade, 1958),
La, dans des chars dares,
14
le
Va gouter lafraicheur sur L'un et I'autre Etale
On
Soleil,
aux regardants
Phebus ne
brille
a
(Paris:
81.
I'envi
Prince avec sa Cour
le
declin
dujour
unique en son sa
pompe
espece,
et sa richesse.
du monarche firangois
sait bien souvent
;
a qui donner sa voix
:
Tous deux sont pleins d'eclat et rayonnants de gloire.
Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amour de Psyche
Computes 15
(Paris:
et
de Cupidon (1669), in Oeuvres
Gallimard/Pleiade, 1958), 185.
Gaston Bachelard, L'Air
et les songes: Essai sur I'imagination
du mouvement (Paris:
Jose Corti, 1943), 188. See also Hubert Damisch, Theorie de nuage (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972).
16
Ibid., 195.
17
Ibid., 194.
18
Ibid., 17.
19
Pascal, Pensees, 103 (199).
20 The following might be cited
as
some of the
epoch: Bernini's L'Inondazione (Rome, 1638), ballet created in Florence to celebrate the
principal fetes II
and
spectacles of the
mondo festeggiante
wedding of Cosimo
(an equestrian
in, 1661), Fete
de
Vaux-le-Vicomte (this celebrated and ill-fated fete given by Fouquet for Louis xiv described in a letter from La Fontaine to after the event
and dated 22 August
M. de Maucroix,
is
written immediately
1661), Carrousel (Paris, 1662), Les Plaisirs de Pile
enchantee (Versailles, 1664), Le Ballet de Flore (Versailles, 1668), and Bernini's Allestimento di una Girandola (fireworks in
Rome,
[59
1659).
DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM
NOTES 21
See John D. Lyons, "Unseen Space and Theatrical Narrative: Cinna,'
Yale French Studies
"
80
(1991):
left
and
coti cour to
It is
The
'Rdcit
de
interesting to note that already
French theater used the terms cotejardin to prompt
in the seventeenth century the
stage
70-90.
prompt
stage right.
22 Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Puns: Le Seuil, 1963), 67. 23
These indications
966, and 1277 of Ph^dre. Note
refer respectively to lines 384, 656,
on the representation of forbidden or impossible
that this theatrical restriction
scenes was overcome in the eighteenth century, especially in regard to the representation of eroticism in the private libertine theater.
24 Pascal, 25
Pensies, 254 (545).
Lyons, "Unseen Space,"
85.
New
26 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things,
n.t.
27 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple,
and the Gods
1969),
28
(1966;
York: Vintage, 1973), 318-22.
(1962;
New
York: Praeger,
3.
Pascal, Pensees, 103 (199). this passage,
Note
that
Cusanus had offered
what
Pascal gives as a definition of nature in
as a definition
of God.
29 La Fontaine, Songe de Vaux, 82. Pensees,
30 Pascal, 31
no
(201).
Ibid., 171 (400).
32 Ibid., 304 (764). 33
Note
that in Phedre, Theseus responds to Hippolytus's
ishing
him from
would
still
the state, saying that even
be too near
were situated
limits
presumed treachery by ban-
he were beyond Alcides's
(lines 1141-2). Alcides's Pillars,
Western
at the
if
pillars,
he
or the Pillars of Hercules,
of the Mediterranean Sea, symbolizing an
extremely distant place.
Le
34
Soleil, las
de voir ce spectacle barbare, passant sous
eaux,
Precipite sa course
; et,
Va porter
chez des peuples nouveaux
la clarte
les
:
L'horreur de ces diserts s'accroit par son absence.
La Nuit LI
vient sur
am^ne avec
La Fontaine, Les Amours, 35
Pierre
un char conduit par
le
Silence
lui la crainte en iUnivers. 141.
Saint-Amand, "Morale du jardin," Critique 546
36 Pascal, Pensees, Pensies,
no
"La nature
(206). est
(1992): 909.
significant that the chapter
It is
corrompue," was the
title
heading (xv
bis)
of the
of a dossier that was never written.
37 Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia (1855; Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 268. 38
Pierre Fontanier, Les figures also
du
discours (1821-30; Paris:
Buci-Glucksmann, Folic du
Emmanuel
voir,
50-2.
The
role
Flammarion, 1977), 390;
of the hypotyposis in
Kant's Critique ofJudgment should be noted.
39
Nerval, Aurelia, 268.
40
Ibid., 268.
160
see
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
NOTES
The Libidinal Sublime 1
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, "Last Will and Testament," The
Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Phibsophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writing, trans.
2
(New York: Grove
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse
MA: MIT
Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, section of
my chapter
3
Etlin, Architecture
4
Ibid., 210.
5
Ibid., 215.
6 Cited in
is
This
Press, 1987), 207.
indebted to Edin's study.
ofDeath, 207.
ibid., 303.
7 Carmontelle (Louis Carrogis), Jardin de Monceau 1779), 4, cited in
Bernd H.
Dams and Andrew
oftheAncien Regime
in the Gardens 8
Press, 1981), 157.
Cited in Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the
Jean Starobinski, L'invention de
(Paris
and
prh de Paris
New York:
la liherte (1964;
(Paris: Delafosse,
Zega, Pleasure Pavilions
Flammarion,
and Follies 1995), 136.
Geneva: Skira, 1987), 180.
9 Cited in ibid. 10 Maurice Lever, Donatien Alphonse Frangois, marquis de Sade (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 655. 11
D. A.
F.
Sade, letter of 17 February 1779, Lettres ecrites de Vincennes et de la Bastille,
in Oeuvres completes, vol. 29, part 12
such 13
i
(Paris: Pauvert, 1966), 92-3.
Several artists of the eighteenth century were noted for their paintings of volcanoes, as Sir
D. A.
F.
William Hamilton, Pierre-Jacques Volaire, and Charles Grenier de
la
Croix.
Sade, Voyage d'ltalie (1776-9), ed. Maurice Lever (Paris: Fayard, 1995),
55.
14 Ibid., 274. 15
The
eighteenth-century experience of the sublime
(as
expressed by
Anthony Ashley
Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, whose thought was influenced by the
was commonly related to the sea and to mountains,
Cambridge
Platonists)
ly the Alps.
See Alain Roger, Court
16
Philippe Roger, Sade:
17
D. A.
F.
traite
La philosophic dans
du paysage
pressoir (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 158.
le
Sade, Juliette (1797), trans. Austryn
1968), 1017.
Though Sade
visited Vesuvius,
especial-
Gallimard, 1997), 101-5.
(Paris:
Wainhouse (New York, Grove
which
is
cited in his novels,
it
Press,
was
his
experience of Pietramala that was transmogrified in his novels. 18
Ibid.
19
Roger, Sade, 163.
20 D. A.
F.
Sade, Justine, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn
York: Grove Press, 1965), 520-1.
The
relations
Wainhouse
(1791;
New
between materialism and transgres-
sion in Sade are at the center of most of the classic studies, such as those of Georges Bataille, Pierre
David
Klossowski, and Michel Foucault.
The Divine Sade, an also
One
Allison, "Sade's Itinerary of Transgression," in
David B.
issue
Allison,
concise recent analysis
of the Warwick Journal of Philosophy
Mark
S.
is
Deepak Narang Sawhney, {i^^i\): 132-58.
Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss, eds., Sade
ed.,
See
and the
Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 21
D. A. Seaver
22 See
F.
Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), trans. Austryn
(New York: Grove
Anthony
Vidler,
"Asylums of Libertinage," The Writing of the Walls (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 103-24. ly illustrated catalog,
Wainhouse and Richard
Press, 1966), 235.
Annie Le Brun,
On
Sade and
theater, see the excellent-
ed., Petits et grands theatres
161
du Marquis de Sade
THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME
NOTES
Art Center, 1989) and Chantal Thomas, Sade
(Paris: Paris
23
Chantal Thomas, Sade, I'oeilde
Antonin Artaud, Le
(Paris:
Le
Seuil, 1994).
la lettre (Paris: Payot, 1978), 54; this
passage cites
thi&tre et son double, in Oeuvres completes (1938; Paris:
Gallimard, 1964), 28.
24 Sade, 25
Juliette, 241.
Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris (1926; plicit relations
Paris:
Gallimard/Folio, 1953), 174.
The
ex-
between landscape and libido have taken many forms, from Octave
Mirbeau's Lejardin des supplices (1899) to Situationist anti-aesthetic projects of psy-
cho-geography. tradition
is
One charming example
the Jardin
d'Omementzt
of the stylization and allegorization of this
Villandry, designed in the early years of the
twentieth century, which contains a box parterre consisting of four compartments
symbolizing I'amour tendre (hearts, flames, masks), I'amour volage
(butterflies, fans),
I'amour folie (labyrinth), and I'amour tragique (swords, daggers). See chapter
26 See Rene Godenne, "Presentation" to Mile, de Scudery, La Promenade de
5 infra.
Versailles
(1669; Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), i-xiv.
27 See Nicole Aronson, Mile, de Scudery, ou 1986)
le
and Chantal Morlot-Chantalat, La
lepopee a la gazette
Un
:
voyage au Pays de Tendre (Paris: Fayard,
Clelie
de Mademoiselle de Scudery
discours fiminin de la gloire (Paris:
:
De
Honore Champion £di-
teur, 1994).
28 Jean-Frangois de Bastide,
La petite maison
(1758), reprinted as
The
Little
House:
Architectural Seduction, trans.
Rodolphe el-Khoury (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1995), 70.
A masterful analysis of these
issues appears in
Rodolphe el-Khoury, "In Visible Environments: Architecture and the Senses Eighteenth-Century France" (Ph.D.
diss.,
in
Princeton University, 1996). See also
Rodolphe el-Khoury, "Taste and Spectacle,"
(New
An
in Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste, Nostalgia
York: Lusitania Press, 1997), 48-62.
29 Bastide, Little House, 75-6.
30 Ibid., 92. 31
Vidler, "Preface," in ibid.,
32
Roland Barthes, Sade, Loyola,
Wang, 33
To
15.
Richard Miller
Fourier, trans.
York: Hill and
forget the essential role of the imagination in eroticism, with both to
ponend
the worst. This
the error of those
terrifying aspects,
is
Sade's writings, as
most recently exemplified by the
retically naive, politically reactionary,
Shanuck, "Rehabilitating a Monster," p. 31. es.
(New
1976), 30.
Such policing of desire
To do
so
is
is
article
York Times Book Review,
limits eroticism to specific sexual
to repress the imagination, to seriously
to fuel the worst essentialisms
joyful
and
historically tendentious, theo-
and covertly homophobic
New
its
who abominate
31
by Roger
March
1996,
and symbolic choic-
misunderstand
literature,
and
and fundamentalisms.
34 Denis Diderot, "Libertinage," an entry from Encyclopedie (1751-76) in Oeuvres completes, vol. 15, ed.
Assezat and Tourneux (Paris: 1875-1879), 510; cited in Vidler,
Writing ofWalb, 103. 35
Barthes, Sade, Loyola, Fourier, 37.
36 Ibid. 37 Georges Bataille, letter of
15
September 1939,
trans.
36 (1986): 103. 38
Ibid.
39
Ibid., 104.
— 162 —
Annette Michelson,
in October
NO MANS GARDEN
NOTES
No Man's 1
Garden
Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston and
New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1916), 78. 2
Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
(1862), in
Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks
Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 602-3. 3
Ibid., 605.
4
Ibid., 609.
5
La Fontaine, Les Amours,
141.
6 Thoreau, "Walking," 612. 7 Ibid., 619. 8
Thoreau, "Walden," Walden, 105-7.
9
Leo Marx, The Machine in
the Garden: Technology
and the
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 27. This work
"The American Ideology of Space," eds.,
Denatured
Museum 10 Cited in
in Stuart
is
Pastoral Ideal in America
updated in Leo Marx,
Wrede and William Howard Adams,
Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century
Visions:
(New York:
of Modern Art, 1991), 62-78.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
and Space
in the 19th Century (1977; Berkeley, University
11
Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 56-7.
12
Cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 55-6.
13
Cited in
Industrialization
of California
of Time
Press, 1986), 52.
ibid., 60.
14 Cited in ibid., 61. 15
Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 64.
Le paysage dans
16
le
cadre des portieres
Court Jurieusement,
Avec de
et des plaines entihes
I'eau, des hies, des arbres et
Vont s'engouffrant parmi Oit tombent
Dont
les Jib
les
le
poteaux minces du telegraphe
ont
I'allure etrange
Une odeur de charbon qui Tout
le
du del
tourbillon cruel
bruit quiferaient
d'un paraphe.
brule et d'eau qui bout.
milk chaines au bout
Desquelles hurleraient mille giants qu'onfouette
Et tout a coup des
—Que me
cris
prolonges de chouette.
fait tout cela, puisquej'ai dans lesyeux
La blanche
vision qui fait
man
coeur joyeux,
Puisque
la
douce voix pour moi murmure encore,
Puisque
le
Nom si
beau,
si
noble et
si
sonore,
Se mele, pur pivot de tout ce tournoiement,
Au
rythme du wagon brutal, suavement.
Paul Verlaine, "Untided" 17
Architecture (Cambridge, 18
[7],
La Bonne Chanson
John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the
Thoreau,
"
Walking"
MA: MIT
613. In Saint
(1870; Paris: Gallimard, 1979). 3^-3-
Picturesque: Studies in the History
ofLandscape
Press, 1992), 178-9-
Louis in 1848, John
Adams Hudson
presented an
extremely popular panorama representing a voyage of four days and three nights up the
Hudson
River.
From
1846-8, John Banvard traveled from the Midwest to the
163
NO MANS GARDEN
NOTES East Coast and then to
London with
Adam
19
Cited in tors
trans.
Orleans;
it
Mississippi
consisted of over
Comment, Le XIX^
siicle des
400
panoramas
and Stephen Oettermann, The Panorama: History ofa
Biro, 1993), 35
Mass Medium,
New
to
meters of depicted scenes. See Bernard (Paris:
panorama of a voyage on the
his
mouth of the Missouri
River from the
Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books,
Comment, XIX' Steele,
77.
of photography, Louis Jacques
interesting to note that
It is
Mand^
1997).
one of the inven-
Daguerre, began his career as a construc-
tor of dioramas.
20 Comment, XIX^ 21
sihle, 77.
Horse-Power Applied To Railways At Higher Rates of Speed than by Ordinary Draught
(London, 1844); cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 22 John Ruskin, The Complete Works, vol.
Railway Journey, 23
Matthew
(New
E.
54.
(n.p., n.d.), 370; cited in
5
Ward, English hems;
or,
Microcosmic Views of England and Englishmen
York, 1853), 72; cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 60.
24 The standardization of time in the industrial countries was
due
Schivelbusch,
58.
to the
need to coordinate railway
While the
travel.
in great part established
trains in
Great Britain
could run on Greenwich time and the trains in France on Paris time, the vastness
of the United States made
Washington or
New York
impossible for the railroads to function solely on
it
Thus
time.
in 1884 the
world was divided into twenty-
four unified time zones, and in 1889 the U.S. was divided into four zones. 25
Advances in
steel
and
glass construction
were essential to both the railway and to
architecture, both of which transformed the aesthetic relation to nature
the observer
oflf
by cutting
from the panoramic scene. See Schivelbusch, Railway Journey,
45-51. For an illustrated history of interest in relation to botanic collection
exhibition, see
May Woods and
Greenhouses, Orangeries
and
Arete Swartz Warren, Glass Houses:
Conservatories
{Htw York:
26 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; 1931).
and
A History of
Rizzoli, 1988).
New
York:
Modern
Library,
379-90.
27 In this context, see Paul Virilio, Esthitique de Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinema
Cinema,
1991);
Polizotti
(New
and Paul
I.
Virilio
la disparition (Paris: Balland, 1980);
du Mark
Logistique de la perception (Paris: Cahiers
and Sylvere
Lotringer, Pure War, trans.
York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
28 Thoreau, "Walking," 608.
29 Ibid., 613. This has
a catchphrase for the contemporary conservation
become
move-
ment; the tide of a best-selling volume produced by the Sierra Club, containing text
by Thoreau and photographs by Eliot
and nature photographers,
is
In Wildness
30 Cited in Thoreau, "Walking," 31
Is
paysans, paysages," Court traite
considered in
of the World (1961).
la
Loztre (Paris: PO.L., 1996), 239. In "Pays,
du paysage (24-30), Alain Roger explains
most peasants the concept of the beautiful is
one of America's premier bird
the Preservation
611.
Renaud Camus, Le D^partement de
since the land
Porter,
is
that for
rarely applicable to the landscape,
strictly practical
and instrumental terms,
a fact
already recognized by Kant. 32 Marx, 33
Ibid.,
Machine
in Garden, 42.
45-6.
34 Robert Beverly, History
and Present State of Virginia
— 164
(1705), reprint edited
by Louis
NO MANS GARDEN
NOTES B.
35
Wright (Chapel
Hill,
NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1947), cited in
Marx, Machine in Garden,
84.
Marx, Machine in Garden,
85.
The breadth of this
36 Ibid., 128.
issue
is
beyond the scope of the present
essay; see
Marx's analysis, 116-44. 37 John Muir,
A
Thousand Mile Walk
to the
Gulf{Boston and
New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1916). 38
Cited in Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation
Movement (Boston: 39 Such
is
Little,
Brown,
the myth; the reality
is
1981), 83.
otherwise.
of their picturesque and sublime
The National
qualities, or
Parks
—
areas saved because
because of their attraction as scenic
—
were, by dint of their very exposition and preservation,
curiosities
ecration by the sightseers
who began
to flock to them.
The
visitors,
doomed those
to des-
who
guar-
antee the political necessity and existence of the National Parks, are often precisely those
who
them through number
despoil
alone, even if not always in deed. Indeed,
there were already complaints of crowdedness in Yosemite in 1885, in visitors
were limited to three thousand; each advance
in travel
which year
(completion of a
nearby railway in 1908, and of a year-round highway in 1927) increased
number
so that by 1954 the
40 Cited
41
in
accessibility,
surpassed one million.
Edward Buscombe, "Inventing Monument
Fugitive Images:
From Photography
Press, 1995), 87;
emphasis added.
to
Buscombe, "Inventing Monument
Valley," in Patrice Petro, ed.,
Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Valley," 97.
On
the complex relations between
the aesthetics of early photography and landscape painting, see the suggestive catalog edited by Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting
Photography
(New
York:
Museum
of Modern Art,
how, contrary to received opinion, pictorial
it
1981),
and the
Invention of
which attempts
to
show
was landscape painting that influenced the
composition of early photography before the implied "realism" of photog-
raphy caused any revolution in landscape painting. The photographic revolution did not, as rather,
it
common
opinion claimed, "liberate" painting from representation;
expanded the
stylistic possibilities
of representation and transformed forms
of perception. 42 Cited in In Wildness
Is
the Preservation
of the World (New York:
Sierra
Club/Ballantine Books, 1962), 36. 43
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Domain of Arnheim, or the Landscape Garden" The Complete
Tales
and Poems ofEdgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern
(1846), in
Library, 1938),
609.
44 For the most detailed epistemology to date from this perspective, see David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
(New York: Pantheon, 45 Cited in Michael
1996).
R Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
46 Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph"
Beaumont Newhall,
Modern
Wilderness
Press, 1984), 87.
ed., Photography: Essays
Art, 1980), 60.
[65
(1859), cited in
& Images (New York: Museum of
NOTES
IN PRAISE OF
ANACHRONISM
In Praise ofAnachronism 1
Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1976), in The Originality of the
MA: MIT
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (CdjnhnA^t,
276-90. This
text offers the categorization
of a disparate
Hamish
Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Christo,
Naumann, Robert
Press, 1985),
of works, notably by
Fulton, Michael Heizer,
Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Walter de Maria, John
Morris, Bruce
set
Nancy
Holt,
Mason, Mary Miss, Robert
Irwin, Richard Serra, Charles Simonds, Robert
Smithson, and George Trakis. 2 Ibid., 284. 3
Ibid.
4 See Daniel Charles, "Closes sur
le
Ryoan-ji," Closes sur John Cage (Paris:
Union
G^n^rale d'fiditions, 1978), 269-88. 5
One
philosophical
ground
is
work appropriate
to the heterogeneity of landscape as aesthetic
Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Baudelaire's notion of "correspondences,"
Wagner's operatic creations
—
in
and
—
in fragile
^written in
sympathy with
harmony with Richard
which the symbolization and celebration of the
earth implies not the revelation of the metaphysical base of existence, but rather that of an
open
field
of life-enhancing
power"), encompassing
all
possibilities
(what he termed "the
will to
ontological differences without dialectizing, synthesizing,
or totalizing them. If expanded to the theorization of landscape, such a revision of this
problem might well
exist as
establish a discursive context within
which gardens could
both object and support, figure and ground, sign and context, artwork and
frame, ground and Urgrund
6 Cited
in
Edward Lippman,
A
History of Western Musical Aesthetic (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 250.
7 Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge,
MA:
Harvard University
Press, 1976), 424.
8
Andrd
Felibien, Relation de la fete de Versailles
Versailles (Paris:
du 18 juillet 1668
(1668) in Les fetes de
Editions Dedale, Maisonneuve et Laroze, 1994.)
of 17 August 1661
at
Vaux-le-Vicomte, given
in the
The infamous
fete
honor of Louis xrv and marking
the downfall of Fouquet, was the prototype for the considerably
more
elaborate
fetes at Versailles.
9 See Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le roi-machine
A7y (Paris: 10 11
Andr^
Spectacle et politique
au temps de Louis
Felibien, Les Divertissements de Versailles (1674) in Les Fetes de Versailles, 150-1.
See Jurgis Baltruiaitis, "Jardins
Ugende des formes 12
:
Minuit, 1981), 93-113.
Frederick
{Pds'is:
et
pays d'illusion," in Aberrations
Flammarion,
Law Olmsted, The
Spoils
:
Essai sur la
1983), 114-53.
of the Park
(n.p., n.d.), cited in
Jack Flam,
ed.,
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 157.
Edouard Francois Andr^, author of LArt
des jardins
:
Traiti ginirale de la
composition des pares et jardins (1879), actually codified and expanded
on the work
of Alphand and Barillet-Deschamps. 13
Aragon, Le paysan de
Paris, 178.
14 Joachim Carvallo, preface, Jardins de France (Editions P^an, 1924), in Robert Carvallo, ed., Joachim Carvallo et Villandry privately published
by the chateau, 1990),
:
Merits et thnoignages
29.
166
(Jou^-L^-Tours:
NOTES 15
Cited in
16
Cited
17
"Villandry:
IN PRAISE OF
ANACHRONISM
ibid., 46.
in Carvallo,
Joachim Carvallo
et Villandry, 99.
The Ultimate Kitchen Garden
—The Most Elaborate and Unusual of
Formal Gardens," Garden: Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society cited in Carvallo, 18
Joachim Carvallo
all
{]2siu2iTy 1976),
et Villandry, 99.
Francois Carvallo, "Les jardins," La Gazette Illustree des Amateurs de Jardins (1956), cited in Carvallo, Joachim Carvallo et Villandry, 51-2.
19
See
Monique Mosser, "The Impossible Quest
ration of Gardens," in
20
A useful
introductory text
Contemporary
for the Past:
Stephen Bann, "The Garden and the Visual Arts
is
and Land
Period: Arcadians, Post-classicists,
theatrical manifestations
Artists," in
in the
Mosser and
A text that begins to oudine
Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 495-506.
contemporary
Thoughts on the Resto-
Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 525-9.
of gardens
is
these
by Elinor Fuchs, The Death of
Modernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
Character: Perspectives on Theater Afer
University Press, 1996), specifically the chapter, "Another Version of Pastoral,"
92-107.
A perspective from within
the history of landscape architecture that deals
thoughtfully and provocatively with these issues Beautiful Lies 21
& Landscape Architecture"
is
(Master
Gavin Keeney, "Noble Truths, diss.,
Cornell University, 1993).
See Fernando Aliata, "The Pictorial Technique of 'Ecological Painting,'
and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 22 See Catherine Royer, "Art
Deco Gardens
" in
Mosser
519-21.
Mosser and Teyssot,
in France," in
Architecture of Western Gardens, 460-5. 23
From among
the
many books on
George R. Collins,
the topic, see Michael Schuyt, Joost
eds.. Fantastic Architecture: Personal
and Eccentric
York: Abrams, 1980); the major journal devoted to outsider
by John Maizels, continually features
articles
art,
Raw
in various essays in
and
(New
Vision, edited
on such environments.
24 This traditionally modernist approach to the aesthetics of gardens
mented
Elflfers,
Visions
Wrede and Adams, Denatured
Visions.
is
well docu-
Typical of such
endeavors are most of the gardens displayed annually at the Festival International des Jardins at the Chateau de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France. 25
See Stephen Bann, "The Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 522-4.
26 See Annette Michelson, "About Snow," October % (1979): 111-25. 27 See 28
Guy Tortosa, Un jardin
divers (Paris:
See Jon Carroll, "(D)Riven,"
29 Antonin Careme, LArt de
30 Philippe Ciller, Le gout
Fondation Carrier, 1995).
WiW (September 1997):
la cuisine Jrangaise
et les
mots
:
au
120-81.
xixf sihle (Paris: 1833-5).
Litterature et gastronomic (xii/-xxf siecles) (Paris:
Payor, 1987), 104. 31
Cited in
32
Antonin Careme, Le PMssier pittoresque
33
Cited in Jean-Claude Bonnet, "Careme, or the Last Sparks of Decorative Cuisine," trans.
ibid., 53.
Sophie Hawkes, in Weiss,
34 Salvador Dali, style,"
"De
la
Minotaure^-4
Taste, Nostalgia,
beaute terrifiante (1933):
(Paris: 1815).
et
176-7.
comestible de I'architecture
modern
69-76; reprinted in Salvador Dali, 0«/vol. 2
(Paris:
Denoel/Gonthier, 1971), 26. 35
Ibid.,
27-28.
36 Ibid., 29.
On
the theoretical underpinnings of the disquieting aspects of such
167
NOTES Anthony
"architecture," see
Unhomely {Czmht'xA^e,
OF ANACHRONISM
IN PRAISE
The Architectural Uncanny: Essays
Vidler,
MA: MIT
in the
37 Michel Bras, Le livre de Michel Bras (Rodez: Editions de Rouergue, 1991).
nating to observe the process whereby a chef becomes a myth, as
happening to Michel
Bras. In
and Massimo Montanari, contemporary chefs
founders of the nouvelle Troisgros,
is
It is fasci-
progressively
one recent monumental work, Jean-Louis Flandrin
in the book's over
cuisine, Paul
900
few
pages: three of the
Bocuse, Michel Guerard, and Jean and Pierre
and the much younger Michel
oblique manner,
is
Histoire de I'alimentation (Paris: Fayard, 1996), very
mentioned
are
Modem
Press, 1992).
more
Bras. Perhaps even
indicative, in
that in the recent publication, Elisabeth Barille
an
and Catherine
Laroze, The Book of Perfume (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), only two chefs are
men-
tioned in regard to the use of aromatics in cooking: Maurice Maurin of the Paris restaurant Macis et Muscade,
Bras and
Marc Veyrat
at the
and
Bras. Furthermore, the cuisine
Auberge de I'Eridan
of such chefs
Annecy (Haute-Savoie)
in
as
are
often mentioned in an ecological context, due to both their intimate and erudite relation to the
environment and
their
work
in restituting
m^y lost or unknown
plants into French cuisine. See Jean Maisonneuve, "La cuisine des champs," Gault-
Millau (May 1991): 47-52. For an intimate appreciation of the relations between food, the seasons,
and the
1986);
on the geographic
Gastronomic franqaise
:
Honey From a Weed: Fasting and
earth, see Patience Gray,
and Apulia (New
Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades specificity
York: Harper
of French cuisine, see Jean-Robert
& Row,
Pitte,
Histoire et geographic d'une passion (Paris: Fayard, 1991); for
the relation between cuisine and the
arts, see
Allen
S.
Weiss,
Flamme
etfestin
Une
:
poetique de la cuisine (Paris: Editions Java, 1994). 38 Jean-Fran^oise Revel,
La
Editions Suger, 1985),
21.
39
The
sensibilite
gastronomique de TAntiquite a nos jours
original plan for the restaurant
had the dining room
set in
(Paris:
an interior garden,
with the tables interspersed between the stones, but structural and practical exigencies prevailed.
40 Norman Bryson, Looking at Press, 1990), 71. It
the Overlooked
might seem curious that
landscape, so too does his
(Cambridge,
MA:
Harvard University
just as Brass restaurant hides the outer
book dissimulate the
restaurant.
While
its
splendid pho-
tographs depict his dishes and techniques, as well as the natural beauties of the
Aubrac, neither exterior architecture, nor interior design, nor even the restaurant
garden appear anywhere in the book, except for the nearly abstract line drawings that adorn the endpapers. Yet this too
might be understood
in terms
of a gastro-
nomic-aesthetic logic, which at each point aims at foregrounding and symbolizing the dishes themselves. 41
Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the
Jar,"
The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage,
1990), 76.
42 Thoreau, "Walking," 602-3. 43 "Passeur" means either a frontier runner or a ferryman,
i.e.,
one
who
transports
something or someone across a border or a boundary. 44
On
Bauduin, see Daniel Charles,
D^sordre et demesure
(Pzris:
Meurice, Deposition Bauduin sel,"
"Du
silence, et
de
la
de-mesure," Bauduin:
Galerie Michel Broomhead, 1985); (Paris:
AAA,
Marc Froment-
1988); Daniel Charles, "Sur la route
Revue de Testhetique 16 (1989): 19-33; Daniel Charles, "Le passeur de
168
du
pierres,"
NOTES
IN PRAISE OF
ANACHRONISM
Bauduin (Bois-Colombes: Galerie Charlemagne, pour
daire
Lieux 45
ou
traverser le paysage,
1992); Allen S. Weiss,
"Un
abec^-
processus de Bauduin, passeur de pierres,"
le
Editions Lahumiere, 1998).
et liens (Paris:
Robert Smithson, "Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson" (1970), Flam, Robert Smithson,
251.
American landscape architecture and the
own
Smithson's sense of his
indicated in his essay, "Frederick
is
in
place in the tradition of
Law Olmsted
Dialectical Landscape" (1973), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 157-71.
46 Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,
New Jersey"
(1967), in
Flam, Robert Smithson, 74.
47 Paul
Sharits, "Postscript as Preface" (1973),
Film Culture 6^-66 (1978):
See Sharits's
4.
cinematic investigation of this problem in his film, Axiomatic Granularity (1973). 48
Robert Smithson, "Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert
Smithson" (1969-70), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 207.
49 Robert Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (1969), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 119. This article contains a photographic documentation of the work. See also Robert A. Sobieszek,
Los Angeles County 50
ed.,
Ibid., 129.
52
Ibid., 127.
53
Ibid., 133.
Dead
Treev/zs
New York tion, Joe
2000
first
Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Los Angeles:
of Art, 1993), 129-33.
Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel,"
51
54
Museum
131.
installed in Diisseldorf in
1969 and destroyed;
in 1997. See the exhibition catalogue
Amrhein and Brian Conley,
Robert Smithson
eds.,
it
was recreated
on the occasion of this
(New York:
in
reconstrucPierogi
Gallery, 1989).
55
Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel," 129.
56
See Robert Smithson, "A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites" (1968), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 364.
57 Smithson was a reader of Ballard, as attested to Ballard's Terminal
Beach
as the
epigraph to his
by
his placing a citation
article,
"The
from
Artist as Site-Seer; or, a
Dintorphic Essay," (1966-67) in Flam, Robert Smithson, 340. 58
J.
G. Ballard, "The Illuminated Man," The Terminal Beach (1964;
Carroll 59
60 61
Ibid., 104. Ibid., 90. J.
G. Ballard, "The Innocent
New York: 62
New York:
& Graf, 1987), 75.
J.
G.
A
as Paranoid,"
User's
Guide
to the
Millennium (1969;
Picador/St. Martins Press: 1997), 93-
Ballard,
"Which Way
to Inner Space?" (1962),
topic, see the excellently illustrated catalogue, eds., Parallel Visions:
Modern
Artists
County Museum of Art,
1992).
of madness and alternate
reality
of the
systems
is
(\t\\2iC3i,
Memory and
User's Guide, 198.
and Outsider Art (Los
One
Draftsman, Writer, Poet, Composer
A
On
Maurice Tuchman and Carol
finest
this Eliel,
Angeles: Los Angeles
monographic studies on the topic
Elka Spoerri,
ed.,
Adolf Wolfli:
NY: Cornell University
Inner Space" (1963),
A
Press, 1997)-
User's Guide, 200.
63
J.
G. Ballard, "Time,
64
J.
G. Ballard, "Robert Smithson
65
Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of die Mind" (1968), in Flam, Robert Smithson,
66
as
Cargo
Cultist," in Flam, Robert Smithson, 31.
Ibid.
[69
105.
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Acknowledgments
For their sundry insights and support,
I
would Uke
to thank the following people:
Bauduin, Brian Conley, Henri Olivier, Steven Kruger, Chantal Thomas, and especially Clare Jacobson,
whose
editorial acuity, sensitivity,
Earlier versions of certain parts of this
publications:
New
Herve Chandes,
ed., v4z«r (Paris:
York 19/20 (1997); and Sulfur
-^^
and thoughtfiilness
book have appeared
2:
Page
154: Ice
Fondation Carrier, 1993); Architecture
Wind
Villandry
Page 176:
Storm,
New York
Mont Ventoux
Photo
credits
Allen
S.
J.
exemplary.
(1996).
Cover: Anonymous, hand-colored 18th-century engraving, The West
Page
is
in the following
Weiss:
2, 12,
46, 72, 116, 118, 120, 134, 154, 176.
C. Shepherd and G. A.
Jellicoe, Italian
Gardens of the Renaissance (1925;
New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), plate 6: 16.
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, translated and reprinted as Le Songe
de Poliphile
(Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 1994):
30, 36, 38.
Patrick Berry, photographer, from Christian Zapatka, The American Landscape
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 105: 102.
Courtesy Galerie des Archives, Courtesy Art
Paris: I24t.
in General: 124b.
Antonin Careme, Le PMssier pittoresque {Puis: Courtesy Henri Olivier, Courtesy Bauduin,
1815): 130.
138.
142.
Courtesy John Weber Gallery: 1461,
148, 150.
Courtesy Joe Amrhein and Pierogi 2000 Gallery: 146b.
(New
Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the landscape architecture,
at the intersection
and technology, philosophy and
last five cerff
of poetics and science, rhetoric
politics. It investigates
the relations between
garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing further the issues raised by author Allen
S.
Weiss's highly acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity.
PRAISE FOR Unnatural Horizons "This its
is
a brilliant, almost hallucinatory, revelation of landscape architecture
profoundly metaphysical origins,
infinitizing future.
The very term
ceived by Weiss that
it
its
and
transfixing history,
'garden' has
become so
its virtually
dramatically recon-
—
seizes the agency of transitivity itself
all
the classical
elements have been so meticulously elaborated and so theoretically energized here as to bring an entirely reflections
on landscape
baroque, to the
modem
new dimension to our aesthetic experience.
architecture,
from the
classical period,
In his
through the
and beyond, Weiss has raised our understanding of
the garden to an exponentially higher level."
— Professor David
B. Allison, State University
of New York
mined by our
a thrilling account of how natural beauty has
arts since the
Renaissance. Each of the chapters
ed by a wealth of philosophical and play
and shown in
tory in a firesh
its
—
and imaginative (and even subtly
language, sounds very
its
original iconography
much
like a
As
ever,
perverse!)
and the
Gesamtkunstwerk in
been
is
artistic material, astutely
multifold interrelationships
Unnatural Horizons, with its
Stony Brook
which imfolds,
"Allen S. Weiss has written a beautifiil, pioneering work,
among other things,
at
deter-
document-
brought into
Weiss uses
marmer
delightful itself It
his-
so that
music of
is,
indeed,
a masterwork."
— Professor Daniel Charles, University of Nice/Sophia Antipolis PRAISE FOR Mirrors of Infinity "The freshness and unsettling boldness of [Weiss's] approach interest
among those well
is
sure to arouse
versed in the French baroque garden."
— Professor Pierre Saint-Amand, Architecture New York "The research style
is
impeccable; the writing strong and clear
—
It is
accessible in
and revolutionary in thought."
— Professor Lawrence
R. Schehr,
North Caroima State University
ISBN lSb6'=16-131-2
90000
PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS 781568"981390'
