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!!