PHILOSOPHY / ART / ARCHITECTURE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
The work of Gavin Keeney, through Landscape Agency New York, presumes that landscape architecture derives from architecture, which derives from art, which derives from philosophy. This may appear heedlessly Hegelian, however, the premise of such an assumption is developed in the face of the nihilistic and 'autistic' nature of much contemporary form-making. Also, although this may seem to contradict the maxims of modernism (especially the heroic activities of Adolf Loos) and reposition architecture within the milieu of art, to stop (break) this chain reaction at any point prior to the integration of the arts and so-called applied arts with/through philosophy is to negate the intention of the figurative operation entirely. Landscape + Architecture must not be simply resurrected as an artform. In fact, tectonics must be reconnected to the superstructure of ideation itself (i.e., "philosophy") for architecture to become truly "ethical" and "socially responsible".MORBID SYMPTOMS
This 'golden chain' is established as a prospective corrective to the 'tragic' situation of Late Modernism. Modernism is acknowledged as an extraordinary cultural, perhaps epochal event but has devolved to a near state of emptiness by denial of semantic content in favor of strenuous syntactical operations. The positions of post-structuralism and various post-formalist endeavors notwithstanding, and ignoring post-theory, this current 'malaise' is the result of the classic repression of heterogeneous factors. The so-called return of the repressed (a phrase coined by André Breton and/or Sigmund Freud) is prefigured in numerous avant-garde movements that paralleled the emergence of modern art, architecture and landscape architecture. See Appropriations. It is in contemporary philosophy, in the form of cultural history, that these seminal movements have been partially recovered as therapeutic measures toward the recovery of semantic depth in cultural systems. Surrealism and Situationism are but two exemplary, perhaps synchronic systems worthy of re-appropriation, toward restoring symbolic depth to the post-cultural condition. This has occurred in conceptual and process art but not so much in the built world of architecture and landscape architecture.
RHETORIC & POETICS
Landscape Agency New York has developed a provisional program (an agenda) for "calling forth" Landscape + Architecture, through both design and criticism aimed directly at the loss of presence in landscape architectural form-making. See Projects and Publications. Projects have included design of public and private space, critiques of current architectural and landscape architectural exhibitions and design, and (critically) the creation of the LANY Archive-Grotto, including Serious Real - The Anti-Journal. In On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2000), Gavin Keeney published a survey of landscape architectural expression in the 1990s, as a means of securing a type of depth psychology of landscape that might condition both the current and future states of practice. See Prolegomena to Every Future Landscape-Architecture.Gavin Keeney is currently at work on a series of essays, "Dreaming Prague Gardens", that explores the timeless significance of recently restored baroque gardens in Prague, the Czech Republic. These essays are explicitly not an historical study but the psychoanalysis of a specific garden -- i.e., Vrtbovska Garden, built in 1720 and restored in the 1990s. See Epilogue. This study is an analysis of the cultural cipher of the baroque garden, in the 1990s, and delineates recurrent ahistorical themes of symbolization and the production of indeterminate forms in architectural expression. It also is an attempt at what Walter Benjamin considered the prime justification for studying history -- viz., to re-discover the lost (absent) opportunities of the past by divining the secret of a ruined or derelict present.
In design projects, Landscape Agency New York has explored issues of ambience and mise en scène. These principles are expressed in proposing culturally significant places where landscape serves as a venue to capture or harness larger cultural activities. In the proposal for Pheasants Field, at Prague Castle, LANY's proposal included the conversion of a baroque riding school to a contemporary 'writing' school. The gardens were designed, in part, to serve as a venue for the projection of the hypertexts of the proposed institute utilizing 'hypertext' pavilions. The formal language of the project was influenced by a close study of the works of Josip Plecnik, in Prague, in the 1920s and 1930s. Plecnik's extraordinary gardens at Prague Castle, as his architectural works in general, are situated at the critical transition from neoclassicist to modernist architecture and resist categorization. Plecnik's gardens at Prague Castle have an implicit 'universal' spirit that transcends specific time and place. This critique is offered in full recognition of the fact that Plecnik was perceived as "the enemy" by avant-garde activists, such as Karel Teige, in Prague, in the 1920s.
SUBLIME POTENTIAL
It is this spirit of transcendence (the pursuit of the Absolute) that marks the significance of landscape architecture as an ultimately philosophical endeavor -- and the significance of modern landscape architecture's pursuit of abstraction and timelessness. Since the Renaissance, landscape architecture has served as the quintessential terrain vague, an indeterminate locus of overlapping representational systems -- the anti-thesis of presentday "junk space". Landscape is both an index and a text encapsulating complex cultural endeavors. See History/Theory Syllabus (University of Pennsylvania). Modernity, typically considered to have emerged from the Renaissance humanist worldview, has, for reasons specific to its own identity, progressively identified itself with the 'timeless' and the 'abstract'. For this reason the restoration of radical contingency plus semantic presence is a paradoxical, yet necessary endeavor. Perhaps it was Robert Smithson, and the land artists, that most clearly understood this necessity, given the writing zero degree associated with minimalist and post-minimalist projects.Landscape Agency New York is an idealist project. It seeks to restore to landscape architecture the absent subject of landscape architecture -- in linguistic terms "the signified" -- but through radical contingency (immanence) versus/plus abstraction. The current fascination with materialist operations -- e.g., the fashionable appropriation of systems theory (re Parc Downsview Park) is but a new form of avoiding the issue of acknowledging the repressed field of symbolization and linguistic content common to all artistic endeavors. To restore philosophical content to landscape architecture is a quixotic quest at best. Such an agenda can only be applied in the extreme scenarios of conceptual and intellectual sites -- at the margins and in-between the landmarks of practice.
In the interstices of modernist systems is this repressed semantic field. In epistemological terms this is the 'underworld' of objective notational orders. The work of Fernand Hallyn or Emmanuel Levinas, for example, has shown that science itself -- the empirical system par excellence -- has beneath or within it a contingent system of metaphor and inference (an 'outside' and an 'inside'). For Landscape + Architecture, this inner life -- see Sublime Potential -- is not a matter of conjecture but an unacknowledged, and all-but-unavoidable condition.
Gavin Keeney (New York, 2002)
“Soma” = “An intoxicating drink symbolizing in Vedic and Hindu ritual the divine life force. There are close affinities with the symbolism of ambrosia, sap, semen and wine. Soma was personified by a Vedic god, identified in later Hindu tradition with the moon, from whose cup the gods drank soma (replenished each month from solar sources).” Jack Tresidor (ed.), The Complete Dictionary of Symbolism (Duncan Baird, 2004), p. 446 / LANY invokes /S/O(MA) as the necessary antidote to various ‘architectures of our own demise’ (viz., self-inflicted versus self-inflected architectures), and as a syntactical maneuver (thus-wise the signifier /S/, apparently signifying merely itself, and the provisionally bracketed (MA), recalling, perhaps, the Japanese concept of pure space), otherwise dodging -- as best one might, in turn, and out of necessity -- the onrushing ‘taxicabs of [so-called] Absolute Reality’ ... (03/09/05)
