IF THIS, THEN THAT
"But what I deplore is not simply that one cannot see the wood of the theory for the trees of the technical process, but rather that it takes so little to believe that one is in the forest [...]" --Jacques Lacan, "The Freudian Thing" (1955)If Jeff Koons can make topiary puppies, and Julian Schnabel can direct a film, then landscape architects can do anything they want. Artistic vision seems infinitely malleable, even in these post-cultural times.
Image (right) - Jeff Koons, Puppy (Bilbao Guggenheim)
In this spirit, it is time to appropriate and synthesize the artistic endeavors of two exemplary 'im-modern' artists -- Antonin Artaud and Kurt Schwitters -- the former the iconoclast of theater and the latter of painting and sculpture. Schwitters' Merz would have blasted abstract expressionism out of the water, if only he had not been stranded in Britain, and if only his influential friends Alfred H. Barr Jr. (MoMA) and Walter Gropius (Harvard GSD), to name but two, had tried a bit harder to sponsor Schwitters' desired emigration to America in the 1930s. Only today, after Artaud's descent into madness (following over thirty electro-shock treatments) and Schwitters' untimely demise in Ambleside (the English Lake District), do we have a clear idea of Schwitters' an-archic purge of artistic form or Artaud's catastrophic assault on classical theatrical forms, both a rediscovery of mise-en-scène (in Artaud's case by way of Balinese dance theater and in Schwitters' by way of Dada). Artaud's The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958) contains extraordinary acts of goodwill in the form of a demolition project.Image (above) - Kurt Schwitters, Construction (1924)
MISE EN SCENE
Mise-en-scène is central to landscape -- as too to the work of these two avatars of artistic expression -- given its relationship to primal artistic jouissance (to the free plays of drives beyond all authorized codes of conduct). It is also what makes the films and installations of Peter Greenaway both so annoying and fascinating.And, voila!, Merzbau has arrived! - now the subject of numerous studies. It was/is an architectural ensemble built up out of grammatical fragments or ur-forms in Schwitters' imagination and, over time, in his Hannover studio (subsequently blown to bits in WW2). MoMA later paid Schwitters to build a second, never-completed Merzbau (Merz-barn) in Britain. And there are rumours of a garden ... This woeful tale is retold in Schwitters: I is Style (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2000), a book that occasioned the retrospective at the Museum der Bildenden Kunst, Leipzig (February 3 through March 26, 2000), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (April 16 thorugh July 16, 2000).
Image (above) - Peter Greenaway, Stairs (Geneva)
Landscape needs Schwitters and Artaud. Landscape Architecture needs to destroy the formal languages that hold it in thrall, that have destroyed the im-mediate and im-manent nature of landscape itself ('the Real').
Mise-en-scène, in landscape terms, equals topology (not typology, nor topography), hence architecture's current fascination with systems theory and manipulated ground plane (the 'field' versus the object). However, MGP is not quite the same radical force as topology. Topology is the intellectual articulation of form -- the secret meaning of 'architectonic' -- and the secret mathesis universalis behind all cultural systems (including those deemed 'natural'). Built form carries both inherent, albeit unstable ideological content and pure, unadulterated content -- poststructuralism's denials of transcendence notwithstanding. The latter resides in the interstices of semantic structures.Image (above) - Still from Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974)
The key is -- alas -- language. And, as with Artaud's critique of theater, the problem is the over-reliance on speech (semantics) itself. In Landscape Architecture the problem is, ironically, the derelict state of design syntax -- form without semantic value. The empty formalism of Landscape Architecture is a curse. The cause of this curse is the empty vessel of landscape practice. Once smashed, this vessel -- which is not unlike a barren tree -- will liberate vast repressed potential. "Here the big clogs move forward to cover the dove's feet, on which, as we know, the truth is borne, and on occasion to swallow up the bird as well [...]" (Jacques Lacan, "The Freudian Thing"). The 'timeless', contemporary-critical work of Giorgio Agamben takes this search for language (below formal systems of discourse) to new heights. He speaks/writes of excavating the 'ur-faktum' (the metaphysical-existential kernel) of existence in Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993) while premiating the fragment in Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Thus the Universal returns in the gaps in-between the Reduction and its Other (the World).
This repressed potential (potentiality) is a type of mythic reserve -- 'the sap stored in the roots of the tree' so to speak. (Find out why such is repressed and/or slaughtered more or less everywhere every day and so-called 'the code is broken'.) The barren tree is not unlike the naked emperor of the well-known fairy tale. We all know it is barren (naked) but prefer to preserve the consensus that it is not. Instead, there may be greater value (in the immortal words of William Butler Yeats) in quite simply, knowingly 'walking naked'.
A propos of this chiasmus, Landscape Formalism, Anyone?
GK (January 2001)
"The trade route of truth no longer passes through thought: strange to say, it now seems to pass through things [...]" --Jacques Lacan, "The Freudian Thing" (1955)
Kurt Schwitters' Merzbarn (Hatton Gallery, Newcastle)
RELATED EFFECTS
Artaud: Landscape and Its Double
Schwitters: Selected Bibliography
Richter: Et tu, Arcady!
Bare-Naked Landscape/Architecture
The Philosophy of the (Ir)Real
