WATER & THE WORLDSOUL - DRAFT 01/15/04

LARGO DESOLATO

"Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."(1) --Arundhati Roy

"For Aquinas, the intellect cannot know sensible particulars, and it is only after the abstraction, in the reflexio ad phantasmata, that it comes to know sense objects. The human intellect is discursive. So also is the aesthetic visio; it is a composite act, a complex apprehension of the object. Sensible intuition may put us in touch with some feature of a particular object, but the complex of concomitant conditions which determine the object, its position in space and time, its very existence, are not intuited. They demand rather the discursive process of the act of judgment. For Aquinas, aesthetic knowledge has the same kind of complexity as intellectual knowledge, because it has the same object, namely, the substantial reality of something informed by an entelechy."(2) --Umberto Eco

THE PRETERNATURAL SUBLIME

To Jean-Marie Morel, 18th-century French landscape aesthetician, water was the soul of the landscape and the garden. No wonder, then, that Le Notre's favourite commission was Chantilly, with its specular-spectacular pools and fountains and a severe optical-geometric parti ruling the makeover of the storied chateau north of Paris. Morel's intimation that water is the great sentient element of the landscape garden derived not so much from the English Garden (the Romantic-Classical aesthetic successfully transplanted to France by the so-called 'enlightened' aristocracy in the run-up to the Revolution) but from the archaic, pan-European pagan presentiment which held that all bodies of fresh water, no matter how small, were connected below ground by a vast system of rivers, yawning chasms, and reservoirs, the surface components of this mythic system representing the eyes of the 'being' that is the Earth.

This great, late expression of the classical concept of entelechy -- all parts informed by an unseen whole -- runs throughout aesthetic, philosophical, and linguistic theory from Aristotle to the Middle Ages to modern high-structuralist investigations of linguistic form, coming to rest (momentarily) in the idea of the sign, or, as others have called it, the tyranny of the sign and the prison-house of language.

This protean idea of water as Worldsoul, a poetic vestige of a sublime concept that pushes rational thought to its own implicit limits (and to a confrontation with nothingness or the Infinite), was all but lost with the advent of the Baroque machine and the divestiture of Mercury and philology. This ancient 'sign' -- the sign of the eyes of the Worldsoul -- resides 'elsewhere', in exile, in the poetic and cryptic interface of moral philosophy and the natural sciences. On the other hand, water as Worldsoul is an exceptionally slippery sign that covers a primordial schism in the construction of the rhetoric of the world (the 'writing' of the world), this schism (rupture) in turn overwritten by an empty signifier otherwise known as the Universal, the Abstract, and /or the Absolute. Water, as the quintessential sign of the Worldsoul remains, then, today, the penultimate tragic sign of the state of the Imaginary.

Water as waste-place has a long, chilling history in and of itself. As a literary and artistic gesture toward 'wildness', the waste-place has pictured the compensatory otherness of Nature, most often writ large and forbidding against the map of the civilised world in Romantic, Post-Romantic, and, now, Post-Cultural times.

What then does water 'sign'? And, what especially, today, does the gurgling, burbling water of tragically disfigured and denatured natural systems portend for that furtive, always futural Worldsoul missing in inaction since Hegel? Arundhati Roy's woeful tales of present-day big water projects in India (in Power Politics, 2001) foretell the onslaught now underway, in the Third World, to harness and tame, market and manage the last vestiges of this ancient watery other world which, if nothing else, signifies -- as it did for Thoreau -- a mythic reserve within culture that preserves the very nature of nature and its preternatural inner-worldliness.(3)

Arguably, the potency of water to signal mystical otherness transcends such attempts to divest it of its elemental eminence. Water persists as a sign of a magical, liquescent interface between the solid and the ether, as a neither/nor condition. And, as such, water embodies sensuality and spirituality, so compellingly manifested in the history of swimming. The practice of swimming reveals the rupture between the secular and sacred facets of water, seen alternately as pragmatically therapeutic and purely sensuous. The Romantic poets embraced water as a sensual and spiritual domain, as epitomised by Swinburne’s autobiographical character, Herbert, in Lesbia Brandon, “the divine touch of it, all his soul saluted it through his senses.”(4)

Water also signs otherness through its presence as a sentient being. Thoreau's observation that "a field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air" evokes at once the ways in which water's reflectivity and transcendental qualities imbue it with consciousness.

Perhaps the most powerful evocation of the sentience of water is in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris (1972), based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem. The consciousness of water is expressed as a responsive planetary ocean -- a true Worldsoul -- which challenges conventional notions of alien otherness. Water signs memory and consciousness, with Solaris operating as a mythic reserve, a tragic otherworld. And in the journey of discovery it is also symbolic of the innerworld. Throughout Tarkovsky's films water persists as locus of memory, although he denies this is a symbolic or metaphoric device: “Rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving ground wind – all are part of the material setting in which we dwell; I would even say the truth of our lives.”(5) 

GHOSTLY (GHASTLY) LANDSCAPES

Modern landscape architecture has not been kind to the idea of water as the eyes of the soul of the Earth. Based as it is on abstract, formalistic games, the modernist landscape with few exceptions came to an absurd denouement in the 1980s, from which it has barely recovered, with the high-formalist corporate and civic landscapes that, in turn, morphed into the instrumentalised, soul-less landscapes of the 1990s. The emergence of landscape urbanism (/LU/) in the 1990s, with its attendant machinic aesthetic (where everything 'does' something), attempted to re-claim the dominant force in modernist rhetoric (science and rationalism) vacating all other premises in the process. The pseudo-scientific rationalisations for landscape urbanism trivialised both ecology and sociology while indulging an extreme form of morphological hubris. The product was the instrumentalised landscape writ large, ugly and in-between, valorised as terrain vague by some, while pilloried as nothing of any use whatsoever by others. Landscape as infrastructure gave to late-modern cities the sterile plaza (with chlorinated fountains, ice curtains, and misting boulder fields), the dysfunctional park (with trees as green light bulbs screwed into the urban 'electrical' grid), the edge state of urban esplanades over water (with art as spectacle along the way), and new architectural promenades (going mostly nowhere). In cities blessed with flowing water in the form of rivers or canals, the instrumentalised landscape re-formalised the near dead condition of these formerly vital resources. In structuralist terms, shifting, mesmeric, scintillating urban forces were stylised, streamlined, and fixed in time and place as an amenity to be generally observed versus actually experienced. Actually-existing water within the city, and in the terrain vague surrounding cities, became the average, everyday stormwater problem or yet another commuter transportation corridor. In those cities fortunate to have fairly clean water resources, the edge of the river or lake became de luxe real estate and / or de luxe theme park. In a word, landscape as infrastructure demands that landscape always 'do' something. If it does 'nothing', it must be brought to heel.

As Deleuze has reminded, "Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity". This might be taken as a signal device for registering the anomie embedded in most structural systems and the lie that they perpetrate in the name of rationality. Even rationality relies on the vast substrate of the Imaginary. A storm of reference might put flesh on this claim, but suffice to mention Miguel de Unamuno's immortal words on Diego Velázquez's immortal painting "Crucifixion" (1632) to set the tone and mood of the present-day challenge. "A wind that blows from the abyss above us/ among our brethren who one time existed/ ripples and shakes the surface of our spirits,/ and, reflected upon this trembling mirror,/ the world, too, trembles." Unamuno penned these words while sitting in a train staring out the window at trees reflected in the black puddles of stormy, pre-Civil War Spain in the early 1920s. Things were already falling apart ... It is the vertiginous black of the Velázquez masterpiece that most captivated Unamuno. This blackest black signified for him the Cloud of Unknowing, or obscurity itself.(6)

The 1990s was also the decade that landscape architecture re-discovered the post-industrial wasteland, the same wastelands that inspired Robert Smithson's dark, entropic vision (in the 1960s), and the Bechers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Bechers, in turn, have inspired a new school of landscape photography (Struth, Ruff, and Gursky) that epitomises in many ways late-modern alienation offset by a trivial aesthetic frisson.(7) This is the post-Magnum landscape. No longer do we see the vast open spaces of marginalised landscapes and the ravaged people that inhabit them, but instead we see the pointless maelstrom of the urban condition, with its economic-deterministic anti-aura, and the great empty void of urban experience inside and outside the architecture that has framed and sealed its fate.

The rediscovery of the post-industrial landscape led to both the fetishisation and the so-called mitigation of totally ravaged rural, urban, and sub-urban brownfields, mining sites, and decrepit industrial and marine facilities. The two cities which put this genre of landscape urbanism on the map in the 1980s were Paris and Barcelona. When the Iron Curtain finally fell in 1989, vast areas of Eastern and Central Europe were immediately paraded before the Western eye as prime candidates for landscape architecture's repertoire of post-industrial bricolage. The Black Triangle -- in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland -- stands out as the most extraordinary example, though the Lake Baikal, Aral Sea, or Caspian Sea basins might top even this once Russia and remnants of its former Near Abroad comes on board.(8)

In all of these cases, and many closer to home (the West), the image of toxic landscape, stagnant putrid water, and rank adventitious vegetation strewn with rubble and rusting industrial rubbish comes rushing into view as the wholly absurd mise-en-scène associated with the highly suspect industrial sublime celebrated since the Industrial Revolution as a sign of progress (see Turner). Indeed, it has progressed to such an advanced degree that all attempts at mitigation, reclamation, and redemption for such sites defy conventional imagination. Such instrumentalisations on top of instrumentalisations produce only more dysfunctional landscapes. The chief concern of anyone with even the vaguest presentiment (memory) of anything else at all (any other desire whatsoever) might be simply to erase the worst of the nightmare and turn such sites of horror over to the weeping gods as yet another place to hide as the world races toward closing in upon itself, extinguishing the last vestige of anything 'useless'. The alternative is to address these sites with a pre-industrial strength formalism, of the high-pointless type, the kind that might redeem the radical rigour of formalism from the faux formalisms of the last several decades. Such forms of formalism would in essence indulge immense erasures, re-writing through negation the worst ravages of the twentieth century. One such strategy is simply to flood the sites (as Michael Sorkin proposed for the Black Triangle), creating massive, horrendous lagoons and lakes which might slowly fill with micro-organisms, reconstituting in some bizarre manner the origins of the world.

Edward O. Wilson's description of vital ecosystems is apt: "The more species that inhabit an ecosystem, such as a forest or lake, the more productive and stable is the ecosystem [...] When we scan a lake our macroscopic eye sees only relatively big organisms [...]"(9) This, in turn, in Wilson's The Future of Life (2002), leads to a rhapsodic description of the warp and weft of life typified by the microscopic life forms that produce and sustain life. Wilson reiterates Leibniz's vision of the second, teeming chaotic infinity below seemingly singular things, matched (if not trumped) by the first infinity, the path of thought leading to galaxies swimming through empty space. This is the same great schism celebrated by Pascal in his famous description of being personally suspended between two infinities. Water, as sign, signifies the glass of the mirror stretched between 'here' and 'there', while the mirror signifies the unresolvable conundrum of representations as the locus of mental and phenomenal experience; i.e., the place of thought itself.

Water, as mirror as representation, problematises the nature of focus. Like the Escher image of a watery underworld juxtaposed with an apparent surface of floating leaves, the challenge is to simultaneously perceive depth and surface. Or to, at once, see both sides of the mirror. But the designed landscapes of the last two decades suffer from myopia, focussing solely on the surface. Not surface as shimmer, but surface as sham. A critique of these landscapes begs us to plunge beyond the surface, and begin a deep sea dive. In architecture, Leon van Schaik's Poetics of Architecture (with contributing authors) attempted to swim against the surge of fashion, and ask if it is possible to find a "universal or spiritual" dimension to architecture -- the depth of experience as complement to the surface of appearance perhaps. Elsewhere, van Schaik calls for a poetics to add new insights to old, and declares that "as the new physics slowly ousts the pessimistic formulations on which existentialism were founded, architectural approaches that deal with the active imagining of our current inhabitation of the globe do help." The search for the "universal or spiritual" is overdue in landscape architecture, or more urgently, in that realm which is landscape + architecture.(10)

The challenge is thus to focus on surface and depth in a discursive engagement. This could be compared to the two types of vision that the eye uses: foveal and peripheral. The first is direct, and picks up detail but not shadows. Peripheral vision complements this, and ensures that low spatial frequencies are appreciated. This complementary process is glimpsed in the Mona Lisa's smile, which is paradoxically only revealed when you do not look at it, with peripheral vision able to discern the subtle, shadowy smile. (11) To see the smile remains an elusive goal for the designed landscape, to be foveal and peripheral, to see surface and depth, flesh and bones ... "Drawn on paper, the garden is an x-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing."(12)

INTO THE PH-PHONEMIC S-S-SOUP

So, what is the sound of water seeping, cycling, sluicing through the dyspeptic landscapes of the early-21st century? To 'sound' such landscapes requires venturing 'below', into the underside of this grisly picture, beyond the surface. To do so, it might be best to steal a page from Chomsky's minimalist agenda in linguistics, a page from Kurt 'Merz' Schwitters' seminal Ur Sonata (1922-32), plus sketch a few cursory operational details from Parc Downsview Park (Toronto) and Fresh Kills (New York), two very, very big park projects obsessed over at the recent (April 2003) "Large Parks" conference at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

In the case of Downsview, the flat, sonorous nothingness of the ex-urban, former (forlorn) air field suggests a low sizzling sound -- a sleep-inducing z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z. Foreign Office Architects' plan would have modified this, through modest morpho-genetic site alterations, to a skipping, modulated zr rp zr rp rp rp. In the case of Fresh Kills, the overtly, overly-ripe riparian largesse of the site suggests a lively encounter with repressed consonants and regressed phonemes -- a deep sea dive to the elemental ground of things, perhaps. Certainly, such a tragically disfigured landscape would issue forth a steady spectral hisssssssssssing with unpredictable outbursts of blblblblbl or grgrgrgrg spspspsltltltltltlt tt tt tt punctuated by crcrcrcrkkkk crk crk crk psssshshshsh -- that is, monosyllabic stutterings, sputterings, and shudderings characteristic of a completely deranged hydrology. As Field Operations labours mightily to tame and re-colonise the 2000+-acre rubbish pile strewn with post-'sanitary' landfill facilities and post-9/11 debris, various and variable, voluble and volatile, urgent and unctuous murmurs, meows, and howls will no doubt emerge to mar the progress of conversion to a stately park for Staten Island, New York City, the Tri-State Area, and the World. The mewling landscape will hardly be able to help itself. These 'eruptions' (irruptions) will no doubt alter the course of any and all operational-programmatical gestures of the master plan and collide / collude to produce a bizarre new park of a totally unpredictable, perhaps mutational nature.

Benzene, tetrachloroethene (PCE), trichloroethene (TCE), vinyl chloride, ammonia, phosphorus, organo chlorine compounds, phenol, cyclic aromatic compounds, cyanides, chlorobenzene, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene, xylenes, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulphide, disiloxane, thorium, arsenic, zinc, lead, mercury, heptachlor, lindane, chlordane, aldrin.

A quick summary of the 'official' chemicals (as above) surging, wandering, and languishing through, in, and without the leachate collection and filtration system at Fresh Kills provides a first clue (the same 'unofficial' chemicals striding boldly into the surrounding estuaries and tidal rivers provide a second) ... The venting, torching, and eventual harnessing (harvesting) of the voluminous unnatural gases percolating within the undulating landscape (the sealed / capped mounds) suggest an explosive / compulsive / propulsive aspect that will assuredly tax the most subtle and serene manipulations and interventions proposed for this vast new amenity park. The sound of the soup that seeps throughout the site may, then, become the mostly low, sultry voice of the new Fresh Kills, the piercing cries of the long-legged picturesque birds hovering above or perched astride the shoals of the Isle of Meadows, the clash and crack of extreme sports, and the high-frequency whirring of high-speed windmills not withstanding. The various layers of ecologically-correct management will, in turn, suffer endless setbacks, blowbacks, meltdowns, brownouts, inversions, implosions, and plentiful surprises! on the way to settling in for the long haul and slow crawl to the next millennium, or as far as the blind eye cannot see.

SWEET VIOLENCE: THE BOATMAN'S CALL

"There will always be suffering/ It flows through life like water/ I put my hand over hers/ Down in the lime-tree arbour".(13) 'Home', then, to the idea of the tragic ... Terry Eagleton's recent, magisterial summary of the aesthetisation of the tragic in literary and artistic terms (and its projection, today, into the past, plus its trivialisation in the present), registers several, multivalent cultural themes all at once vis-à-vis (horror upon horror) the horrific,, ddenatured, disfigured face of the modern landscape; a landscape that registers in the lowest registers of the imagination as a slowly creeping nightmare, and in the highest registers of winged thought as a provocative, unearthly total work of art.(14)

Finally, in Millais' "Ophelia" (1851-52) are the paradoxes and poignancy of the water world. Her father murdered by her lover, Hamlet, Shakespeare's Ophelia is implied to have died by slowly drowning after falling into a stream. The surface and depth of the water in Millais' jewel-like representation, in the hyper-real ether-real manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, is a liminal zone between horror and beauty. Smell the roses, meadowsweet, violets, crowflowers, purple loosestrife, poppies, fritillary, smell the mud. Sweetness and sludge. There is even some eerie echo of the list of flowers in Fresh Kills' toxins inventory, with the strangely beautiful incantation of chemicals including Phosphorous (the Morning Star), and Mercury (the messenger-god). Et in arcadia ego. Et in mors ego. Listen! The stream rushes and weeps as it engulfs the crazed, suicidal Ophelia. Listen again! Ophelia sings as she sinks into this sensual stream. Here water is at once, at last, beautiful and tragic.

"Queen Gertrude: There is a willow grows askant the brook,/ That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream./ Therewith fantastic garlands did she make/ Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples/ That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,/ But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them/. There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds/ Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,/ When down her weedy trophies and herself/ Fell in the weeping brook./ Her clothes spread wide,/ And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;/ Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,/ As one incapable of her own distress,/ Or like a creature native and indued/ Unto that element./ But long it could not be/ Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,/ Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/ To muddy death."(15)

GKNY / JBNZ (Easter 2003)

ENDNOTES
1 - Arundhati Roy, "Come September", War Talk (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2003), p. 45
2 - Umberto Eco, Art & Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 72-73
3 - Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2002). "The international dam industry alone is worth thirty-two to forty-six billion U.S. dollars a year. In the First World, dams are being decommissioned, blown up [...]", from the essay "Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin", p. 62. Trained as an architect, Arundhati Roy is, thereby, well suited to a critique of the role architecture plays in the construction of structural hegemony world-wide. Anyone questioning the complex role infrastructure plays in the late-modern world -- i.e., enslaving while liberating through being both 'indispensable' and 'dispensable' -- need only consult the annals of recent wars to find extraordinary evidence that the hand that giveth also taketh away. In New York, New York, New York (i.e., Manhattan) infrastructure passes every day for everydayness. Indeed, the city is one massive inter-connected construction of stuff with the last vestiges of the Real huddled around the edges and fast disappearing. Even the East River, Hudson River, and New York Harbour are barely real, as they are constantly dredged, permanently bulk-headed, irremediably polluted, and perceived by planners as transportation corridors versus vital natural resources. For a vision of things to come, consult the 2012 Olympic Bid. For the slow demolition of New York City's original prospects, see Paul Cohen / Robert Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps 1527-1995 (New York: Rizzoli, 1997). This survey of historical maps of the city includes the section "Growth Within the Grid", which, in turn, includes: "Real-Estate Interests Drive Cartography" (1851) with its compelling extension of the grid up to what is today Harlem; plus "Dripps II" (1850) and "Watery Foundations to Growth" (1865) with the last signs of rivulets, tidal streams, marshes, and actually-existing topography peeking out from the proposed extension of the city grid to the Harlem River. For a review of this book plus articles on the state of architecture in New York c.1998, see "New York Stories", Architecture New York 22 (1998) …
4 - Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lesbia Brandon, in Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (editors), The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), p. ??
5 - Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 212
6 - Miguel de Unamuno, The Christ of Velázquez: A Poem, trans. Jaime R. Vidal (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1999), p. ??
7 - Andreas Gursky's work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in Spring 2001, and then travelled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The catalogue for the New York exhibition, Andreas Gursky (New York: MoMA/Abrams, 2001), includes an essay by Peter Galassi ("Gursky's World", pp. 9-43) describing in detail the evolution of 'documentary' photography in Europe from August Sander and Otto Steinert to Bernd and Hilla Becher and their time at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. Gursky and Struth are a product of this fertile period and have moved from simple 'objective' photography to producing out-sized, edited images of contemporary life and mass culture. Bernd and Hilla Becher's images of "industrial archaeology" came to the attention of the art world with an exhibition in New York, in 1972, and was, concurrently, the subject of an "admiring article" in the pages of Artforum by American artist Carl Andre. See also the catalogue for the Paris exhibition, Andreas Gursky (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2002)
8 - For projects addressing the extreme environmental degradation associated with Soviet-era coal mining within the Black Triangle, see "Le Triangle Noir", L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 317 (June 1988), pp. 67-95. For devastating photographic reconnaissance circa 1990-96, see Josef Koudelka's Cerny trojuhelnik - Podkrusnohori: Fotografie 1990-1994 / Le Triangle Noir (Prague: Vesmir, 1994). For Michael Sorkin's project see Gavin Keeney, On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001). For additional post-industrial wreckage, see Michael Kenna's The Rouge (Santa Monica, CA: RAM, 1995). In the introduction to the project-based spread in L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui the following statement summarises the spectacle of the post-industrial thing: "The Black Triangle is an extreme case in Europe, a paroxism. The region it covers is as big as a country, straddling three borders. It was dealt the death stroke by intensive mining that is itself moribund today, and has fallen brutally into the post-industrial era." (p. 67) Sic transit five year plans ... In the accompanying essay "Quel Paysages? (Which Landscapes?)", contemporary landscape aesthetician Gilles Tiberghien lays out the historical coordinates for 'looking' at landscape as a manifestation of the vast pictorial tradition in Western art: "The view we take of landscape today is largely due to a pictorial tradition that has its own history and that has led us to consider the artistic quality of natural scenery. Considered beautiful when it corresponded to a certain classical ideal, landscape became picturesque in the early 19th century, when it was portrayed as subject to the sublime, frightening forces of nature. In certain contemporary photographs, those of Koudelka and Baltz for example, we see landscape caught in industrial transformation." (p. 92) While this synopsis is fair, it is also perhaps a bit reductive, since the picturesque pushes further into the past (and into the interior, synchronic, metaphysical realm of thinking itself, or 'thinking about thinking'). It is also useful to recall that certain artists (such as Roland Savery) outside the acknowledged historical continuum (or at the margins of so-called art history) pre-figured the tragic and / or chaotic nature of nature valorised today as a sign of resistance to the commodification (structuralisation) of everything, quite often in terms of a rapport with those very forces within nature that are purely chaotic and violent as they are re-written (re-inscribed) within the machinery of cultural production (classical or otherwise). One case alone will suffice to 'picture' the extraordinary otherness of nature -- that is, the Mannerist response to Renaissance classicism. The Mannerist fascination with bizarre natural and cultural objects and formulations explicitly foreshadowed the emergence of Romanticism two hundred years later. The Mannerist imagination, which is truly 'synchronic', was notably obsessed with the sigilistic nature of things -- images and collected and / or manufactured things -- drawn from as far afield as possible, but usually re-fashioned in the workshops of artists and jewellers. Rudolf II, in Prague, in the late-16th century, had perhaps the foremost collection of such works of the imagination, in the form of sculpture, paintings, and a cabinet of natural wonders (the wunderkammer). These manufactured and found 'things' (including the marvellous paintings of Bartholomaus Spranger) acted as psychic mechanisms, or triggers ('switches'), a touchstone for the Emperor's fascination with the recondite, the fabulous, and the arcane. It was this same reputation for the sur-real which made Rudolf the patron saint for Czech Surrealists and Poetists in the 1920s and 1930s. Needless to say, such concerns 'picture' a different sensibility altogether than that of order and reason. Tiberghien rightly calls upon artists (architects and landscape architects?) to treat the post-industrial wreckage of the world as "time corridors" (juste-milieux?), versus attempting to restore them, conferring on such sites the status of magical signifiers, pointing into the future, if you will, charged with the irrepressible, insuperable agency of Nietzschean "critical history".
9 - Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage, 2002), pp. 108-109
10 - Leon van Schaik, "Poetics in Architecture", Architectural Design 72/2 (2002); and Leon van Schaik, "Between Abstraction and Cultural Reference: House at Morley Road by Mok Wei Wei, William Lim and Associates", Singapore Architect 201 (1999), passim
11 - The Guardian ????
12 - Rubio i Tuduri, quoted in Eduard Bru, "Lapena & Torres en sus jardines", Tres en el lugar / Three on the site (Barcelona: Actar, 1997), p. 25. In the essay "Barcelona", included in the same text, Eduard Bru describes the conversion of Barcelona and other Catalan cities and towns through the agency of neo-modernisation, in the 1980s and 1990s, as a form of rampant memorialisation coupled with rote commercialisation: "Thus contemporary urban spaces populated by hyper-designed objects have become a spectacle seen time after time in Catalan architecture of the last decade. And this is not just a phenomenon restricted to capitals. Innumerable small and medium-sized towns and cities have felt obliged to incorporate public spaces representative of their updatedness, filling disproportionate squares and promenades with landmarks and monuments 'by the kilo', all presided over by the rampant modernity of design in an episode of destruction which, coupled with the predatory effect of so many rows of terraced housing, is comparable to (though less remarked upon) the disasters of sixties desarrollism ('developmentalism')." (pp. 36-37) "Free space in today's city is generally residual space. It is not free space in the strict sense of the term, but rather space among things. It is the result of the existence of unresolved tensions that have made its occupation impossible." (p. 45) Furthermore, in a short series of pithy aphorisms entitled "Against Picturesqueness", Bru qualifies these remarks by noting that: "It is picturesque to use fragments of other architectures as fetishes." And, "It is picturesque to consider technics as a vehicle for the idea and not as forming part of the essence of the idea." (p. 60) This dual calamity has effectively reduced the contemporary city to a stage set for the exercise of dubious design strategies that have little authenticity, providing short-term gain (excuses) for some and long-term disenfranchisement and / or alienation for all who question the total objectification of the city as real estate.
13 - Nick Cave, "Lime-tree Arbour", The Boatman's Call (Longitude Music Co., 1996)
14 - Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002)
15 - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII