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):