RECONNAISSANCE / HARVESTING THE 20TH CENTURY
SIGNS OF SOME-THING ELSE
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS' ADVISORY: The theme for this edition of HARVESTING THE 20TH CENTURY is "Night-time". You may need to adjust your night-vision goggles to properly view the following matériel. This always-already deferred anti-conference, HARVESTING THE 20TH CENTURY, is scheduled to take place inside your head, if you wish, and, at your leisure.
PRECIS:"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."
--Miguel de Unamuno (1920)
UNAMUNO reputedly wrote the above passage, from his poem "The Christ of Velázquez", while staring out the window of a train at the reflection of trees in black puddles of rainwater ... The intense black background of Velázquez's painting of a crucified and very dead (and therefore very 'alive') Christ (1632) merged in his mind with the blackening political landscape of Spain. His poem, composed of "2,538 lines in free hendecasyllables, divided into eighty nine sections", took seven years to complete.
Image (left) - "El Cristo Crucificado", Velázquez (c.1632)
It is axiomatic that in these post-cultural times truth is relative ... Relative to what? Rumors persist that Einstein might have got it wrong, that light does not always travel at the same speed ... That there are many times and spaces is obvious to anyone, anywhere, today ... The time of cinema ... The time of photography ... The time of architecture ...
Of these, architecture is the chief 'suspect terrain'. It is riddled with the structural games that condition everyday time and space (experience) ... It has NOT always been so. And, it is NEVER actually absolutely or completely so. There are endless examples (moments) that rise against the hegemonic noon-tide of architectures past and present. In theory, it is in theory that architecture remains supple and non-monolithic. It is in theory, as well, that the majority of other architectures rise up against Architecture ... It is for this reason that everyday architectures complain everyday about theory, sowing endless discontent. On the one hand, it is this incessant warfare between theory and practice (versus a concord between theory and praxis) that has brought theory low. On the other hand, it is the excesses of theory that have allowed the critics of theory to get the upper hand. On the other hand, it is, in part, out of complete weariness with high-handed theory that the materialistic, hubristic, and nihilistic (operational) games of post-theory have all but displaced critical discourse, today. On yet another hand, other hands remain, yet, to be played ...
There are works and movements within art and architecture that defy everyday nothingness ... Burle Marx, Noguchi, Smithson, Hejduk, Cucchi, and others seem -- today -- to be 'from the future'. This future is simply a sign of a true Universal some-thing moving within every-thing, versus the faux-universal nothingness enshrined in most received forms of Modernism and almost all forms of neo-modernism (re-tooled modernisms). This futural thing -- another time -- is the inward mark of Some-thing Else. This Some-thing Else looks very, very much like the synthesis of disciplines otherwise known as the gesamtkunstwerk. This irrepressible idea persists despite its late modern-day nemesis total flow. Strangely, the gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) looks very, very much like Landscape + Architecture (+ This + That).
The last best treatment of this idea of landscape as the great, unacknowledged "total work of art" occurred in Allen S. Weiss' Unnatural Horizons: Paradox & Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (1998). Noting Rosalind Krauss' seminal 1978 essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (republished in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths), Weiss points out the unusual instance of the dog that didn't bark; that is, that landscape is the background upon which all of the various operations within this famous mapping operation occur. As such, landscape is the quintessential "as such", or the foundation (disputed ground) of all aesthetic and critical activities.
"This garden that I built for you / That you sit in now and yearn / I will never leave it, dear / I could not bear to return / And find it all untended / With the trees all bended low / This garden is our home, dear / And I got nowhere else to go"
--Nick Cave, "Bring it On", Nocturama (Mute Song, 2002) / Sonic Therapy (Passim) ...MILIEU(X) & ANTI-MILIEU(X) - "It is possible to give a good and rational explanation of the triumph of the Cross without recourse to psychological hypotheses. The triumph of the Cross reflects and corresponds to a tangible reality that can be rationally apprehended. The Cross has indeed transformed the world, and we can interpret its power in a way that does not have to appeal to religious faith. We can give the triumph of the Cross a plausible meaning in a completely rational frame of reference. When they reflect on the Cross, most people see only the brutality of the event. The terrible death of Jesus takes place, it seems, in a manner that gives the lie to 'triumphalism' in the most decisive fashion. However, beside the event in all its brutality, which works to the advantage of the principalities and powers since it rids them of Jesus, there is another history that goes unrecognized by most historians and yet is just as objective as the stuff we find in textbooks. This is the history, not of the events themselves, but of their representation." --René Girard, "The Triumph of the Cross" [pp. 137-153], I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), p. 141 / Milieu(x) & Anti-Milieu(x) (Anti-Journal) ... / More René Girard (Yellow Pages) ...
*The soundtrack for this edition of HARVESTING THE 20TH CENTURY is Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Nocturama (Mute Records, 2002).
The Editors
THE WAY OUT? - LEVINAS, MARION, CHRETIEN (SAMIZDAT)
