Engraved by Dust

Above you see the ruins of the 'upper studio'  at the old Freedonia headquarters...more precisely and less pretentiously, my mother's backyard (the lower studio you have seen elsewhere in this blog). This one however had the added (dys)advantage of being a treehouse which, however cleverly designed style wise, was not up to the rigors of Mother Nature's various assaults coupled with my own in-ability.

I now quite fancy this view however, thinking that it looks somewhat like a steampunk version of a crashed Klingon starship. Of course it will continue to disintegrate, at some point in the future becoming a formless mass covered by leaves, encroaching vines, and sprouting seeds leaving only some vague archaeological evidence of its former luminous presence (it had a translucent roof making it seem like a hovering bit of ectoplasm in the darkening forest edge). I'm also reminded(at least in my imagination if not in the form of the collapsed studio) of the numerous science fiction novels where the massive enigmatic alien ruins lay in wait to be explored and never-quite deciphered by the intrepid explorers. The shiver of infinite curiosity and possibility always greeted me as I read those novels. Modernism, perhaps a ruin in the making, prefers more the Kafkaesque ruins of a Piranesi sketch - a sense of time compressed rather than time expanded.

There seems to be something inherently fascinating about ruins, especially in a garden setting. The nineteenth century gentried English gardener went to quite a bit of trouble to have ruins, often imitating Greek or Roman styles. It gave the garden the imprimateur of a vast deposit of fathomless and murky ruined time, almost as a palpable substance, a sublime presence all within the gardener's immediate horizon, as if an infinite fold in the finiteness of the garden.

(My friend Sean Q. Beeching has written a bit on the Southern ruin, from an article to be issued as a part of the perforations series:

We are proud of many of our ruins, as we are of our defeats. Scull Shoals was ruined by flood and accidental fire but many other mills we Southerners have maintained just as the Yankees left them. This is only partly because we white Southerners are a backwards looking people whose golden age lies in the past. The more mechanical reason that these ruins survive is that they are down by the rivers, and with coal and the railroad we moved upland away from the old water-powered mill sites. Nothing, for instance, is left of upland Civil War Atlanta. In suburbanized Georgia the past is awakened only when an excavation inadvertently brings to daylight a horseshoe, a pipe stem, or a bullet. Cotton mills were not part of the moonlight-and-magnolia South of legend, the one we revisualize out of our ruined Taras and Gone with the Wind. But because we revel in the agony of the destruction of the South, we are happy to include Yankee atrocities in that vanished and invisible empire of the imagination. The same sort of self-pity is at work, for the South, at Gettysburg, for Texans at the ruins of the Alamo, and for all Americans at Pearl Harbor and in lower Manhattan. In each that invisible but still present moment just before the destruction is what we have come to see.)

Of course, the garden holds both possibilities it seems to me. A garden is nothing if not the firm placement of feet on soil, preparing for the mundane act of digging, or tugging or hauling, or some such prosaic gesture.  The work of Empire, the digs of the Ozimandias's of the world, shrink to a mote in the realm of the garden. But still...the need for some sort of vastness (though not necessarily of the despair revolving around the decayed Cyclopean works) is perhaps retained in an encapsulated, encrypted form in the very nature of the seed itself, no flotsam and jetsam of demented emperors (well, that is until the advent of Monsanto) but a bit of matter with a mission invisibly stretched and folded within itself...perhaps one of the closest glimpses a jaded modern human can get to anything resembling a teleology these days.

When the desire is for everything shiny and new and electronic (actually, the very essence of time ruined and compressed), the ruin seems particularly Lovecraftian to a modern age, biological horrors with a stench of a grave which is the only opening to infinity...too much like a garden in some respects maybe. and maybe too Biblical: 'from dust we come to dust we go'.

The Uncanny Garden

"Depopulated, the landscape estranges, it renders uncanny: there is no more community no more civic life, but it is not simply 'nature.' It is the land of those who have no land, who are uncanny and estranged, who are not a people, who are at once those who have lost their way and those who contemplate the infinite -- perhaps their infinite estrangement."

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Uncanny Landscape

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At any rate, it's hard to 'get back to the garden,' as both that pop song and popular sentiment had it, in the Sixties.

I suppose the first time I saw or knew anything of Hieronymous Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (a title given to it, not by Bosch but by later commentators; no one is sure of the original title) was as a poster then. It's seeming thematic of Dionysian revel seemed particularly apropo for the time when it seemed as if every bond of reality was loosening and all hell was breaking out. And of course at that time many people were all about getting back to the land. 

But at the same time, the poster always made me somewhat queasy, to the point that while I was fascinated, I never actually owned it. And also it seemed, at least THEN, that it was TOO much of its time and, really, just too much generally.

And then many years went by when I didn't think about it at all. Nowadays, for some reason, it seems to strike a more or less constant note in the murmur of my background thought gloop and pops up at odd times. Like now. In fact I just came across a lecture by Joseph Leo Koerner, a fantastic art historian, and here I go again. (I am including a link to this lengthy video lecture even though it might seem fairly heavy going for some; my only excuse for doing so is his discussion of the 'self-seeding' of humanity, pods and seeds imagery, etc.; and the idea that there are no human artifacts in the triptych, even the structures seemed to have been grown, like some science fiction tale when biology has become the uber-science and has displaced the functions of the machine).

Below I have picked a few of the structures, hard to do because the whole canvas is alive and every single figure seems to be narrating his own as well as a group story. As Koerner points out, the whole scene has  quality of simultaneity of past, present, and future" the future meets the past while the past is inthe future while the whole thing is ongoing now, in whatever time period you are in, especially since the scene is not marked by (or perhaps I should say coded) and for the machine and in fact the only thing that resembles a built human artifact takes place in what we could surmise as hell/future (which perhaps is also now).  A timeless quality hence ensues, much like those autumn  evenings which could go on forever, thin smell of leaves burning in the background, a time extracted from all other times, a state of exception.

 The garden always retains the possibility of that intrusion that Nancy speaks of in the quote above: an uncanny dispossession of ownership (uncanny coming from the German unhemlich, literally unhomed but also alluding to a secret) by that green fuse that shoots through everything, us, the human, included, and an opening to the sempiternal forces of 'time,' a force which, in the guise of history and prehistory and posthistory, becomes more problematic, the more it is examined. Which is why 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' refuses to go away, existing both in and out of time, a marker like the garden of Eden. Like all great mysteries, as hidden as they most often are, under the baleful gaze of the banal, the garden (and its uncanny other, the landscape) both solicits and refuses but it never goes away. If it were to disappear you would know that the Time of the Human is over.

(and what is this? contemporary architect Greg Lynn:

Some of the (built? grown?) structures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (it could just as well be called The Garden of Unearthly Delights. Avery large high res pic can be found here):

Filling the Surreal Gap

 

 Successful gardens rely on  a bit of tension between the wild and the civilized (or as the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it as the the title of a book, between the 'raw and the cooked'). Too much order and the garden seems too artificial, too little and it seems like the abandoned yard next door.

Of course, that dividing line is a pretty artificial one. Look though any glossy garden design mag and you'll see plenty of very modern stuff which look like it came straight from a drafting table, with very rectilinear components and modern materials. Sometimes these designs work but only for those owners  who have no wish to 'be outside in the garden.' These are gardens to be walked though at the most. The idea of fiddling with placement or doing any digging is not really possible, just as you wouldn't think of altering a painting once it is done and handed off to you.

If I had an aesthetic tendency in the garden it would be toward a sort of surreal naturalism. (In a previous house I had, I had the occasion to be involved in an interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard, a famous French philosopher known for his 'post-modern' works. As he was coming up my driveway with his entourage, he made a disparaging remark about surrealism (This incident obviously left a mark on me since I belately realize that I mentioned this earlier in june of 2009 on this blog). Which I thought was surreal in and of itself...in fact now that I'm thinking of it, similar to a comment which Alan Sondheim, one-time director of the old Nexus art center made as he walked around the house, something to the effect of 'Gee, look at all this outmoded surrealism!! I began thinking about those two stores as I worked on a bit of writing for the Burnaway.org page on reflections on the new Salvador Dali exhibit at the High Museum.)

 

(photos taken by Sandrine Arons)

Certainly the old southern yard was a kitschy affair with its everted truck tires painted white, bottle trees and general bric-a-brac, all going be the way side as modernisms antisepticism made its way. But maybe this southern kitsch was ahead of its time, the time of objects, of stuff, things, the banal pushed into the forefront of consciousness and laden over a fecund patch of the garden to grow later into PKDick's 'kipple'...glorious piles of stuff proliferating everywhere, capitalist materialism's cornucopia pushed to its suffocating limit.....and then all that stuff beginning to mate with and hybridize it's 'stuffness'...and now that I think about it, much like nature's fecundity transferred to the machine, Perhaps THAT is our new hybridized surreal, the machine becoming the plant-like ooze of almost-automatic production. 

I seem to be getting out of hand (and head) here so herewith a couple of new pot designs, combination of cement and hypertufa, susceptible to being painted if so desired. These are a couple of special orders for H. and C.  Thanks guys!!

Pot Party

Here we are in the throes of summer with not much relief in sight. With temperatures regularly in the nineties here in Atlanta, I tend to look wistfully at even overcast skies. Occasionally even a little bit of rain comes. It certainly gives more meaning to the food term 'fired green tomatoes' because I'm beginning to wonder if our tomato plants in numerous pots are going to make.

And speaking of pots : we are having a Pot Party at the ol' home base here in Grant Park, in Hotlanta. I've become interested in hypertufa and its sculptural possibilities so Ive started this series of pots I call The Tectonic Series since they look like the results of natural earth activity...well, some more than others and others less so. I have to say that I like them and I like making them. They seem to have acquired a zen-like quality wherein the process gets a slight shove from the conscious/unconscious pot-maker and the we are off and running, much like the throwing of more traditional ceramic or clay pots I'm supposing. There is alos a pleasing discordance between  the almost-formless (or form coming into being) pots and and the, at first glance, rather severe rigidity of the background structure. (I say, 'at first glance' because form is not always what it seems...as of course is true of 'formlessness' also.

The background structure came into existence in a likewise manner (even though it smacks of the Dwell mag design ethos): someone donated a large amount of heterogeneous material -- planks, plywood, etc -- and they 'naturally' fell into an order as I was rummaging around in them and they sort of fell together. It feels like a sketch for a studio shed rather than the real thing, maybe because it has no roof yet. Instead of a 'Potempkin Village' it's more like a Potempkin Shed: all frontage an no insides.  (what some have said of modernity in general--but that's for another blog).

another view:

The stainless steel rods I have from a previous incarnation...can't quite say why but the form didn't work right until the rods...as well as the rock held in suspension.

Ar any rate you are invited to the popt party and hopefully you will feel an unconscious urge to purchase one. I say also that you can always add a chin strop to them and use them to ward off a terrorist attack.

From Here To Eternity

Eternity has gotten a lot of bad rap of late. All of our intelligencia are all about imminence, the things that are right in front of us. (Perhaps a better title would be 'From Eternity to Here'! Anyway, it would have messed up one heck of a movie, theone with Burt Lancaster, Montgoery Clift and Deborah Kerr from 1941.) I guess lots of folks are tired/fed up/ frightened of things having to do with the 'Beyond' (but damn, I do love that old series 'One Step Beyond') ....I guess all the screwed up killings in religion's name(s) have pretty much put the kibosh on transcendence.

Well, maybe, maybe not. It may turn out to be a concept we can't do without. It's not too big artistically maybe but I hereby resurrect it for this new project for Ms. Alembik.  It's a firepit/patio on the top of a hill which I think of somewhat as a 'stargate', a portal to an outdoor nighttime experience (based in very archaic ritual) of fire and stars. Some would say that we are now beyond the archaic and now live only in the age of stars or the space age. I would disagree, nodding to William Faulkner who said something to the effect that the past is not dead it's not even past. We carry within the seeds of a cast of billions over periods of millions of years. True, we can only see the fruit of that Right Now but that hardly means anything in the vast scheme of things, the scheme of things in which fire, stars and that 'vast vegetative wave' I keep writing about, exists and has an existence outside the human kingdom.

The very fact of something existing outside human control is an incredible irritant to human sensibility to which the whole of the development of modernity attests.Rather than using techniques that work with the embedded nature of life in the universe, the developed sensibility of worldwide modernity seems to be one of a conquering army, of severing sensibility from its roots and transferring it wholesale into a machine form of existence, best exemplified by the Fordist means of production via the assembly line, even extended to life itself. And so it makes perfect sense that our design and architecture reflects that right-angled existence you might say, one devoted first and foremost to ease of mass factory production.

I see many pretty designs based on a modernist 'cleaning up' of the unruliness of the garden. All you have to do is check any contemporary landscape mag or many of the garden mags and you'll seee designs predicated on machine modernism. It's easy to see why: they good in sketches and CAD blueprints and they fit in with the machine esthetic of the 'Dwell' (as in the design mag) look.

Many people adore the work of Antonio Gaudi and the organoform shapes he developed but truth to tell its very difficult to achieve anything like that anymore at least on the scale at which Gaudi worked. The economics seem to prohibit it; the bottom line quarterly profit report of corporations prohibit such large scale craftsmanly (and hecne lets face it, idiosyncratic) handwork, Afterall, the Sagrada Familia is still unfinished and the finishing architect has subtly but distinctively turned the finishing into a sort of modernist streamlining (albeit with Gothic overtones) and virtually eliminating the vegetative flourishes (which aren't actually flourishes but at the heart of Gaudi's work; see here for a recent overview of this controversy).

(Here you see the added front of the Sagrada Familia)

Well, I could go on but there is plenty of material elsewhere on Gaudi and his way of working, one totally at odds with modernity by and large. The advent of the computer has changed, paradoxically at first glance, this situation somewhat if you look at the work of Greg Lynne and Frank Gehry who inhabit a terrain of intuitive 'sculpturization' of forms that only the computer can make possible. Needless to say, these forms are still firmly within a modernist esthetic of production. If one is looking for a more seamless integration of form and labor that favors a human scale, these are not the places to look perhaps.

And so we are led back to the garden again, a place where architects go to create their 'follies' as such structures are called, somewhat deprecatingly. One could just as well call many of the modern forms of architecture follies but somehow the connection with the garden betrays a subtle devaluing of worth.

On the other end of the scale, we have the film Avatar where the metaphysics of the garden reaches surreal heights (again, we might add, by courtesy of the computer). This perhaps puts us at the heart of the problem, not removing us (except in the way that all art removes us to a different place. Hopefully.)

 It may be that the tomatoes in pots outside our back door offer just as much food for thought.

Garden Tour!

Well, we've been sorta slack about working on the blog...but got some projects underway!
Come out to the tour and we can talk about them.
see you on Sunday!
google map:
3366 woodview drive
smyrna ga 30082

Dance the Plant Fantastic: Plants I NEED to grow

For many, there is nothing more pleasurable than the anticipation of spring.  For some it only means easier access to the mall, less snow, more touch football, or using the grill or getting ready to veg out (interesting term there since vegetables are always on the move--however slowly!) or other ways to escape from job. family, or whatever. For these folks gardening is nothing but more toil, another job. We're not addressing those folks and in fact they probably aren't even reading this blog.

No, we're thinking of those people who pour over gardening catalogs all winter, fantasizing about the next step in their garden, looking with wonder at what plants are available. (I can remember not too many years ago when perennials were just not that available in the Atlanta market, were considered exotics almost, or something that a relative passed along; I can even remember when Hastings, then located over off of Cheshire Bridge, has a couple of small tables of perennials and had mostly annuals [this was the same Hastings' Seed and Feed that my grandfather -- see the previous post -- would order from for his farm some sixty or more years ago.])

I have to say -- as you may have gathered by now -- that I am one of those maniacs who adores plants with great 'will power,' that is, the bigger the better especially if it can grow 12 feet in one season, or if it can take over a whole corner of the garden, or best of all, it is both huge AND odd looking. Some would say this is a character flaw, even a form of escapism from the invisibility (and some tedium let's admit) of nativistic plant life. But as one who admits of an artistic temperament, I have to say that this admiration of plants with outsized ambition and forceful revelation of its 'inner self' does reveal something of my artistic Leo temperament. Luckily there is no law against that yet. (By the way, without going into the whole thing, I found an interesting PDF of a book called Invasion Biology which I am going to pass along to you here. Be warned though that it is a 10 meg download which will commence when you click on the link. The question of exotics and 'invasions' is a very fraught question which scientists are examining -- this is an academic sort of book by the way -- questions which have ideological components as well no doubt. I only go into this now because many of the plants I am so fascinated with tend not to be 'from around here'; I suppose if one were ruthless enough one could enlist the psycho-analytic crowd to parse the apple but I think I'd rather just eat it.)

Ar any rate, herewith a few of these plants which I have lived with in my imagination for many years. Perhaps at some point they will make it into the ground.

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The marvelous plant at the top of the page is Puya chilensis, a native of Peru. I just came across this bodacious version recently by way of the wonderful Annie's Annuals in California. A member of the Bromeliad family, it's flower stalks grow 7-12 feet tall and a basal rosette up to FIFTEEN FEET ! across! The catch is, it takes 10 to 15 years to bloom. I'll call you over when it happens. Maybe I'll try to grow the Blue Puya as well! (yes indeed, sort of a metallic, teal blue!)

And while I'm over at Annie's there are a couple of other plants that I've dreamed about, namely a couple of Echiums:

 

This one is a California native, E. Fastuosum but there is another more spectacular one:

  

Jeez, it's like sci-fi ville....or Fantasia. These like sorta dry conditions and would parobably need to coddled a lot that is, taken in and out of a warm area. Hmmm, an 8 ft tall flower stalk -- COULD be a problem there -- although I can't say that's ever held me back. These versions hail from the Canary Islands.

I've lusted after Gunnera Manicata ever since I first saw it in English gardening magazines. The sheer size of it is mind-boggling...makes me feel like a character in a Leprechaun. movie Unfortunately these plants seem to need much cooler temps than we can provide in our southern summers. I know because I killed it twice...figure I've got one last chance.

 

 And just one more for now. I'm a sucker for all vines but Lapageria Rosea, the state flower of Peru apparently has s sort of mystical allure for me, along with some other vines which I'll discuss in the next post.I'm sure this one requires special care too, can't just plant it in the ground and run off; probably a lot of hauling back and forth. I found this one at the Potato Rock Nursery in California (incredible catalog of OTHER plants also):

 

to be continued.....

Returns

I love the picture above for several reasons. The first, but glancing reason is that it reminds me of that old photograph/poster that I've seen several times, I believe called 'Dream' (I've tried to find a pic on the net but unsuccessfully), a black and white photo of an old car beside the road; I believe the road sign had 'Dream' on it).

The second and most pertinent reason is that it's the gate of my grandparent Taylor's old seventy acre farmstead in Mississippi. For the entire time I was growing up in the small town, the road you see was a county maintained gravel road. Through the fence (which was put up after the farmhouse had basically collapsed and the road was used for dumping trash) was a small one lane dirt road, proceeding down a hill and over a small creek, a trickle most of the time but during rainy seasons all-but impassable -- and often we had to leave the family car up on the road. Finally, heading slightly back up out of the hollow,  and about a half mile in, it would wind up to the small unpainted country farmhouse.

It was a hard life they lived, at least as it seems from our perspective now: a cistern beside the house with a windy series of culverts from the roof directing water to it (I remember leaning over the stone parapet, which I could barely reach, and gazing into the dark, seemingly fathomless well) and a hand pump in the kitchen; the outdoor toilet, always an olfactory adventure; and the single line of electricity powering the mournful  radio up in the corner, and a couple of light bulbs, bare, here and there, but mostly using kerosene lanterns.  To live in  such a way was not all that unusual but now, even in recounting it, seems like another world --which it was in a way. They were almost entirely self-sufficient, cobbling together whatever needed to be repaired (no ipods, islates, pcs!) in the blacksmith shop out back. It wasn't Snuffy Smith but for kids now it would be I suppose: raggedy, a little ramshackle, it's own distinct odor of earth, chickens, sweat, and all the other emanations that comes from hard work, sunup to sundown. But you have to say that it was an environment that was all-of-a-piece, very little room for what they would perhaps have seen as a self indulgent alienation.  But the vegetables were fresh, most likely picked that day, as were the eggs and the chicken Sunday dinner, often inviting the minister (or rather: preacher). It was quite something to see my grandmother grab a chicken with a long pole with a hok onthe end, drag it in like a weird beached fishchicken and at the end of the drag, wring it's neck, have it on  the chopping block with its head off in just a few sesconds.

With the ideals of modernity -- basically a product of and reflection of the city -- everyone couldn't wait to move away, break the perennial cycle which land plus weather plus a shovel and plow give you...satisfying in many ways -- there's nothing like sitting on the porch at sundown on a late spring or summer day, hearing nothing but the faint tinkle of a cow's bell and then Bobwhites and Whipporwhills as the evening chill would come on and the fireflies came out.

Most  folks now prefer the exciting tension of waiting in traffic, or the nightly homicide reports, or perhasp the mind numbing sameness and push of an image-intensive culture, apparently trying to remake us into something that doesn't exist. (And let's face it, county life can be intensely conservative and stultifying to many who have gone through the image training of modernism -- which is basically everyone now).

How pitiful that small remnant that's left for us, the 'garden'.....necessary perhaps but  certainly not sufficient, a mere vestige, a ghostly revenant of that vast, slow vegetative wave from which we emerged and make every attempt to eradicate even as we suffer the by-now predictable occasional bouts of food poisoning from a highly mechanized and centralized food producing machine.
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Well, I fear I've nattered on too long about all this but it is a somewhat depressing and scary time in America right now. After seeing FOOD INC. it is apparent that the woeful state of the 'Garden', in its most gneralized form is at the heart of much of the disorder which surrounds us.

A recent passage from blogger James Kuntsler puts the fork in the road ahead (how far? Can things possibly go on as they've been?) thusly in his most recent blog:

"We can't maintain our way of life at its current scale and we have to severely rearrange and rebuild the infrastructure of it if we expect to continue being civilized. We have to get the hell out of suburbia, shrink our hypertrophic metroplexes, re-activate our small towns and small cities, reorganize the way we grow our food, phase out the big box retail (and phase in the rehabilitated Main Streets), start making some of our own household goods, and hook up the far-flung reaches of this continental nation with a public transit system probably in the form of railroads."

I don't know. To try to proceed on as we always have is almost always -- except under periods of extreme crisis and threatened deprivation of many kinds both civic and physical needs -- what we most fervently wish to happen. We seem to love the purgatory that cities have held for many people and the breath of 'breathing the air of freedom' and opportunity that the city has always promised. But maybe some compromise with the contryside and technology is possible now, given the nature of theelectronic soup we now live in.

But one thing is for sure: in some form the garden, writ large or small, would be at the heart of it all -- at least until they day they can devise a gene that will allow us to photosynthesize food from our skin.

But don't hold your breath...apparently, 'the economy' has the potential of trumping everything, even common sense. Which is turning out not to be as common as we once thought I suppose.

A Winter's Garden

Here is a post I started a while ago and never finished; however, given today's below freezing temps and Southern ground clad with snow any garden planning feels like time wasted... naw, just kiddin' folks.

-Atlanta's gardeners are particularly fortunate for the winter holiday season provides a time to not only deck the halls in the home and prepare family recipes, casseroles made from the past garden season's bounty, but also here in the deep South, Autumn and Winter are seasons filled tasks to enjoy in the garden.  There's just enough decay for one to see the garden with a clean slate; however, our mild climate, soft ground, unfrozen with merely a thin Jack Frost veil upon the green, and with the neighbor's Rooster I wake, pull back the drape and admire Mother Nature's son's crystals that shimmer in the Atlanta sunrise only to melt away in time for a day's digging, rearranging and late bulb planting (fingers crossed).  An Atlantan may still plant cut-burlap into (spent weekend) dug hole or shrub to block off the an undesirable view; even the perennials left over from the remnants of the nursery sales can be 'stuck' in the ground last minute (again, fingers crossed). Perhaps the best part of Winter for gardeners everywhere is the time it provides for perusing the seed and plant catalogs; the colder months leave time for mental drifting in to a day's dream, sketching Spring gardens in one's mind. I do this last bit quite a lot. I think it's left over from memories of childrens books with illustrations of peach, rose and lavender colored botanical. Another childhood memory exists of making a snow angel in the Atlanta's pitiful dusting and after you make the angel, I stand up only to see bright green grass angel in stead of the white icy ones the children up North see.