Thinking the Sculpture Garden: Art, Plant, Landscape [1 ed.] 0367190230, 9780367190231

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THINKING THE SCULPTURE GARDEN

This innovative book poses two, deceptively simple, questions: what is a sculp­ ture garden, and what happens when you give equal weight to the main elem­ ents of landscape, planting and artwork? Its wide-ranging frame of reference, including the USA, Europe and Japan, is brought into focus through Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, with which the book begins and ends. Effectively less than 15 years old, and largely the work of one man, Tremenheere affords an opportunity to examine as work-in-progress the creation of a new kind of sculpture garden. Including a historical overview, the book traverses multiple ways of seeing and experiencing sculpture gardens, culmin­ ating in an exploration of their relevance as ‘cultural ecology’ in the context of glo­ balisation, urbanisation and climate change. The thinking here is non-dualist and is broadly aligned with New Materialisms and Material Feminisms to explore our place as humans in the non-human world on which we depend. Eminent contribu­ tors, including John Dixon Hunt, Georges Descombes, Bernard Lassus and David Leatherbarrow, approach these issues through practices and theories of landscape architecture; garden and art making; history and writing; and philosophy. Richly illustrated with over 100 images, including a colour plate section, the book will primarily appeal to those engaged in professional or academic research, along with sculpture garden visitors, who will find new and surprising ways of experiencing plants and art in natural and urban settings. Penny Florence is Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK. Previous appointments include Chair of Humanities and Design Sciences, Art Center, Pasadena, USA; Head of Research Programmes at The Slade; Professor of Contemporary Arts and Director of Research at Falmouth University and Co-Director of Women’s Studies, University of Exeter, UK. She

continues to exhibit art works and films and she is a published poet. She has also given public performances/exhibitions of digital poetry at Tate Modern, Tate Britain and internationally. Her international publications include a number of books and many articles on issues related to art, poetry and feminist philosophy/ theory, including especially sculpture and word-image (sculpture, poetry and painting). She has published on the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Liz Larner among others, and contributed to the two-volume book Sculpture in 20th-century Britain (Henry Moore Institute). The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé in relation to painting is another sustained interest, as are feminism, innovation, experimen­ talism and the general shifting of boundaries.

THINKING THE SCULPTURE GARDEN Art, Plant, Landscape

Edited by Penny Florence

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Penny Florence; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Penny Florence to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-19023-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-19024-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19988-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

Contributors’ biographies Acknowledgments

vii x

Note on method: Diffracting the sculpture garden

1

Introduction: The ground

8

PART I

Tremenheere sculpture garden 1 Tremenheere: Place of the long stones Penny Florence 2 The seed in the stone: Peter Randall-Page’s exploration of energetic structure Penny Florence 3 Mono-ha: Paying attention: Japanese art in/of the garden Gay Watson

17 19

45

60

PART II

Placing history in/of the garden 4 Sculpture gardens and sculpture in gardens John Dixon Hunt

71 73

vi

Contents

5 The garden: Art object Bernard Lassus

92

6 From pedestal to place David Leatherbarrow

101

7 Little Sparta: The neo-classical re-arming of the sculpture garden Patrick Eyres 8 How to make a path: The Swiss Way project, 1991 Georges Descombes

125

140

PART III

Return to Tremenheere 9 Landscape, art, plant, event Penny Florence

157 159

10 Conclusion: The art of the plant; the art of the earth (far other worlds) Penny Florence

179

Appendix: Tremenheere plant list and map Bibliography Index

197 212 215

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Penny Florence (Editor) is Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Previous appointments include Chair of Humanities and Design Sciences, Art Center, Pasadena; Head of Research Programmes at The Slade; Co-Director of Women’s Studies at Exeter University; Pro­ fessor of Contemporary Arts & Director of Research at Falmouth University. She continues to exhibit art works and films and she is a published poet. She has given public performances/exhibitions of digital poetry at Tate Modern, Tate Britain and internationally. Her international publications include a number of books and many articles on issues related to art, poetry and feminist philosophy/theory, including especially sculpture and word-image (sculpture, poetry and painting). She has pub­ lished on the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Liz Larner among others, and con­ tributed to the two-volume book Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain (Henry Moore Institute). The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé in relation to painting is another sustained interest, as are innovation, experimentalism and transdisciplinarity. John Dixon Hunt is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Land­ scape, University of Pennsylvania, and editor of the journal Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and the series editor of Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, where over 40 titles have so far appeared. Professor Hunt is Cheva­ lier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, (French Ministry of Culture) and received an honorary D.Litt from Bristol University. He has taught at Harvard, Leiden, York and London Universities among others, and served as Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks (Trustees for Harvard University), Washington, DC. Among his many publications dedicated to the study and ana­ lysis of garden landscapes and their histories, are A World of Gardens (2012) and The Making of Place: Modern and Contemporary Gardens (2015), both from Reaktion Books, and The Venetian City Garden: Place, Typology, & Perception (Birkhäuser,

viii

Contributors’ biographies

2009). With Michael Leslie, he is editor of the six-volume book, A Cultural History of Gardens (Bloomsbury, 2013). Georges Descombes is one of the most original practitioners of landscape architecture of recent times. Descombes has a subtle design approach that reflects three guiding (aesthetic/ethical) principles: minimal insertion (consulting and respecting the existing, and then doing the most with the fewest resources); identifiable interventions (what has been added should be apparent) and revers­ ibility (what has been done may be modified as conditions change). Descombes’ landscapes are characterized by an intensive investigation of the qualities and his­ tory of the site, deriving their vocabularies from the existing characteristics of the place. His best-known works are the Bijlmer Memorial in Amsterdam, the Parc de Lancy in Geneva and the Swiss Path around Lake Uri in Switzerland. Other recent projects include the Parc de la Cour du Maroc in Paris, a riverfront park in Architect and Landscape in Lyon, and the transformation of the River Aire outside Geneva. Descombes has taught at several universities including UC Berkeley, Harvard, Penn and the University of Geneva, where he was Professor of Architecture and one of the founders of the graduate program in landscape architecture. Patrick Eyres is Director of the New Arcadian Press and the driving force behind the 53 New Arcadian Journals and the 70 accompanying New Arcadian Broadsheets (1981–2016). He has devised, edited, designed and published each edition, including typesetting, pagination and the preparation of artwork for print. He is an author who has published in numerous books and other journals, and lectured across the UK as well as in the USA and mainland Europe. He is also co-editor, with Fiona Russell, and contributor to Sculpture and the Garden (Ashgate, 2006), editor and contributor to Wentworth Castle and Georgian Political Gardening (WCHT, 2012); co-editor, with James Lomax, and contributor to Dip­ lomats, Goldsmiths and Baroque Court Culture (WCHT, 2014). His latest book, with Karen Lynch, is The Yorkshire Red Books of Humphry Repton, Landscape Gardener (NAP, 2018). Finally, having had the good fortune to know Ian Hamilton Finlay for almost 30 years, he is a conservation adviser to the Little Sparta Trust. Bernard Lassus is a distinguished French landscape architect. He cites four orienta­ tions that underpin his work: art, research, teaching and his practice as colourist and architect-landscapist. Early years studying in various ateliers in Paris (including with Fernand Léger) led to an enviable record of international exhibitions and Biennales (Centre Pompidou, Sao Paolo, Milan, London) and commissions for numerous fac­ tories/workplaces, cultural centres etc., bringing new materials to the creation of many moods: matter/light/colour. His research, culminating in the original concept of ‘Habitants-Paysagistes’, was published in his 1977 book Jardins Imaginaires, Habit­ ants-Paysagistes and was described by Claude Levi-Strauss as a new field of study. Pres­ tigious commissions include projects for cruise ships, French Ministerial bodies,

Contributors’ biographies

ix

motorway companies and rest areas, the Corderie Royale park in Rochefort as well as the Garden of Hypotheses, Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire. David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1984. He received his B.Arch. from the University of Kentucky and holds a PhD in Art from the University of Essex. He has also taught at Cambridge and Westminster Universities in the UK. His publications include, On Weather­ ing: The Life of Buildings in Time, with Mohsen Mostafavi (MIT, 1993); Uncom­ mon Ground: Architecture, Topography, and Technology, (MIT, 2000); Architecture Oriented Otherwise (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Three Cultural Ecologies (Routledge, 2017). Gay Watson has a PhD in Religious Studies from SOAS, University of London and is also trained as a psychotherapist. Her nuanced and subtle approach brings together mind sciences, art and gender. Her publications include A Philosophy of Emptiness (Reaktion 2014), Beyond Happiness (2007) and Attention, Beyond Mindfulness (Reak­ tion 2017). They evince her sustained concern with the dialogue between Buddhist thought, psychotherapy and the Mind Sciences, all of which inform how she views art and the garden. Attention is an exploration of its titular concept through many dis­ ciplines and ways of life. It contains interviews with many scientists and artists skilled in practices of attention. Her most recent book is Buddhism AND (Mud Pie Books, 2019), which is a short exploration of ancient ideas of interdependence and emptiness in contemporary settings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due above all to Dr Neil Armstrong and Dr Jane Martin. Without their ready collaboration, and that of their team at Tremenheere, this book would have remained a conversational idea at a convivial event at the Sculpture Garden. Someone said there ought to be a serious book about Tremenheere, and someone else said I should write it. I’m grateful to these two fleeting acquaintances for their persuasiveness and their insistence that not being a garden specialist was no barrier to tackling the subject of a sculp­ ture garden. I am also greatly indebted to Professor John Dixon Hunt, whose interdiscip­ linary scholarship at the University of York was one of my formative influences in the days when we were both (supposedly) focused on the study of English and Related Literature. He is, of course, not responsible for any of my views or mis­ takes; but he is responsible for bringing all but one of the distinguished contributors to the project and for the initial editing of those essays. Thank you, all of you, for sticking with it, and especially thank you, John. I continue to learn so much. Artists Penny Saunders and Peter Randall-Page, and contributor Gay Watson, walked round Tremenheere with me, sharing their thoughts and impressions. They have greatly enriched the book and the experience of writing. A special thank you is due to Peter Randall-Page for many invaluable con­ versations over time, and for the wonderful Dartmoor Arts programme he and Charlotte organised, together with Jackie Abey, Mandy Barber and Robin Dutt­ son (in the early years). Together with Neil in particular, the architect Petra Elkan shared contacts and memories of the early days of the garden when her husband, Barrie Briscoe, architect of Tremenheere café, was still with us. Thank you for your generosity and enthusiasm.

Acknowledgments

xi

Finally, my thanks are due to my friends and family, to Sarha Moore for her friendship and insights over the years; to Senior Iyengar teacher Lucy Aldridge for the special qualities of our shared readings of the Yoga Sutras; and above all, to my life partner, Elly Rose, who knows more about art that she lets on, and a great deal about the natural world.

NOTE ON METHOD Diffracting the sculpture garden

In this book you will find ideas that draw on a number of disciplines. The aim is not to merge them, but rather to gain insight by reading through them, attending as much to how they differ, to what else each has to say, as to where they come together. The following three quotations afford a sense of how this works. The poetry of Clarice Lispector’s thought takes us straight to fundamentals: Being alive is inhuman; the deepest meditation is so empty that a smile exhales as from matter. (Lispector 1964 171) But how do we get to a place where we can, on the one hand, access such insights more readily in relation to regular experience, and on the other, use them to enhance our understanding? As W.J.T. Mitchell asks, ‘How is it that people are able to maintain a “double consciousness” towards […] representa­ tions in a variety of media, vacillating between magical beliefs and skeptical doubts, naive animism and hard-headed materialism, mystical and critical atti­ tudes?’ (W.J.T. Mitchell 2005 7). My third quotation takes us towards, if not an answer to this critical conundrum, then a potentially fruitful approach to the questions: […] think of a garden as sculpture. Not sculpture in the ordinary sense of an object to be viewed. But sculpture that is large enough and perforated enough to walk through. And open enough to guide the experience which is essentially a communion with the sky. (Rose 1958 22)1

2

Note on method

In light of these three very different writers, the question I seek to address is fundamentally straightforward: what happens if you take landscape, art and plant­ ing as equals in the Sculpture Garden? What does it mean to do this; how does it impact on the experience of place? The institutional ‘Sculpture Park’ has to function within a number of constraints and frameworks that effectively mean it cannot treat art, landscape and plants equally. It is therefore not my concern, either as attached to arts or educational insti­ tutions, or, as in the UK, as run by, or reliant upon, any of the national or civic bodies with responsibility to the arts. The same applies to commercial sculpture gar­ dens that operate effectively as outdoor galleries. To risk a sweeping generalisation, my impression is that none of these pays as much attention to plants and landscape as they do to sculptures. One, or occasionally two, of these three elements is privil­ eged; usually – and perfectly reasonably in their terms – the art comes first. Even if some care is taken over landscape alongside the art, the former is subordinate, while only minimal attention is given to planting as a determinant, if any at all. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of contemporary gardens open to the public, including those that incorporate sculpture into their plan, neither conceive of, nor treat, art as equal to the idea of a garden. There is, however, one Sculpture Garden that aims to work equally with all three elements of plants, landscape and art, and it is the inspiration for this book. Tremenheere Sculpture Garden in West Cornwall is the creation of one man who thinks quite simply that ‘any sculpture park could have those [three elements] as the touchstones, if you like’.2 Practicing GP Dr Neil Armstrong began work on his newly acquired land as recently as 1999. Since then, it has developed rapidly into a major cultural presence in the region. It deserves to go further. Tremenheere is therefore the reference point for this book. But I think that the issues it implicitly or explicitly raises go beyond any one place. For this reason, there is a section in the middle of the book written by distinguished writers and practi­ tioners in the expanded field of the sculpture garden and the landscape. They were invited for their expertise, of course, but also for the breadth of approach and richness of cultural context they bring to a project that must necessarily draw across disciplines. I understand this as a process that recognises that a relation of difference is still a relation, and a powerful and productive one at that. By mapping ‘where the effects of difference appear’,3 specialist insights can be brought to bear on new problemat­ ics. Donna Haraway deploys the term ‘diffraction’ for what is in effect an active mapping ‘that makes visible (the personal) interference patterns, that understandings from different schools of thought and disciplines’, deriving from embodied positions and material practices ‘can induce together’ (Haraway 2004/1992 63ff). We need to attend to those words ‘embodied’, ‘material’ and ‘practices.’ It is not only at question of disciplines; it extends to materiality, to matter itself, as in the work of Karen Barad in creating ‘a theoretical framework that helps to theorize and account for the active role that matter (in her case electrons) plays both in worldbuilding event as well as in the forming of thoughts and discourse’ (Prins 2018 113). This is why ‘thinking’ the sculpture garden is my title and not ‘thinking about’. Putting it this way calls attention to process; of the garden, in art, and of

Note on method

3

thought. So the actuality of being in a landscape, in a garden and in the presence of works of art is foregrounded, keeping the idea of the sculpture garden in play. Perhaps it is also to recognise that the plants, as living matter, are also, in senses we can as yet only dimly perceive, thinking. That is to say, the sculpture garden is not only the object of thought. It is also the means and shape of it. The sculpture garden is a dynamic art. It changes through time moment by moment, weather system by weather system, season by season, year by year. The plants grow, mature and die. Eventually, so do what we normally consider as works of art, but on a different time scale – if the works are not made from plants, that is. The aim is to set out and explore the territory and frameworks within which we can at least ask whether we can move beyond ways of thinking and seeing that not only separate human consciousness from that of all other life forms, but also justify keeping ‘us’ in a position of privilege and dominion over ‘them’. To do this is not exactly to ‘rethink’, nor is it to claim to overturn current understandings. It is to align with those writers and practitioners of the arts of sculpture, landscape architec­ ture and the cultivation of plants whose work makes it possible to think and see ways to reconfigure a system that is clearly broken environmentally. How we should interact with and treat life forms that we no longer consider to be on the same level as human is becoming an urgent question. We have dismissed and forgotten ways of living that understood such ways of living and being. Climate change is forcing us to see that it is not enough to dismiss them because they are not ‘like us’. They might indeed be unlike us, but that does not necessarily mean they are entirely different from us, or of less significance than us in the greater scheme of things. In elaborating what this means, we may well need to revise what we thought we knew, perhaps to confabulate (Berger 2016),4 in the sense of ‘making stories with’. It is one way of redirecting the unethical script that assumes, or accepts, that power is always power over someone or something else, and that it can do what it likes with them largely because it can. Up to a point. It is possible that the potential for a different kind of power of the sculpture garden, and its current popularity, derives in part from the combination of art with our intuitive sense of plant life, not just the aesthetics of looking. Perhaps also it is also connected with the ways in which a garden almost always holds the potential for beauty; arguably, if it does not, it is due to the human element and/or neglect. Contemporary art in general is not primarily focused on the beautiful (which is not necessarily meant as a simple criticism, at least not of art); as a category, it is yet fully to shake off its aesthetic taint as the not-quite sublime, the feminine as the lesser.5 To experience various life-forms as having even the potential to equality with us is to change our sense of who we are, and, crucially, what art is. As Eduardo Kohn puts it, ‘In that realm beyond the human, processes, such as representation, that once seemed so familiar, suddenly begin to appear strange’ (Kohn 2013 2). This is not the same in the garden as in a gallery or in the urban setting, and although arguably more of the above may apply than at first appears, for example in

4

Note on method

that works will eventually decay, or that light may change, these factors are only contingent, exceptional or specific. In the garden, they are fundamental. It is in order to begin to understand what these processes might mean in prac­ tice, then, that this book sometimes explicitly, and overall implicitly, asks its deceptively simple question (and I repeat): what happens if we assume that land­ scape, art and planting are equal in the sculpture garden? I repeat it because I want to pause on it. Its simplicity is the tip of a very great iceberg. Art is equal to landscape. Planting is equal to art. Landscape is equal to planting. None takes precedence. An assumption of equality between all the elements of the sculpture garden draws attention to the synergy between them rather than to the appreciation of any one of them as primary. Again, we are brought to how we think it. Not only do we need to be adaptable in the ways we explore a garden; we need to be open to changing how we see ourselves as interacting with it. To make a simplified ana­ logy, an 18th century English garden directs the visitor along defined routes and towards often elevated viewing points, with specific areas of greater or lesser infor­ mality, but generally less formal than the French style that preceded it. There is still the detachment of perspective and an assumption of the superiority of an ordered nature over wilderness. We know, in general, what to expect: a lake, a temple, the odd ruin, perhaps; above all, a great house.6 We are supposed to know this; it is a large factor in the quality of our enjoyment of how well it is all ‘done’. We admire what we can do with nature; we are impressed with a grotto and wonder at it as the habitation of an imported hermit. While landscape, art and planting are all part of this, they are not equal. This approach sets us apart from the garden; even as we are in it, we are not of it. Even works of art ‘hidden’ in it are not generally placed in ways that suggest they are inseparable from the landscape or in locations where its effects might evolve over time in a manner that goes beyond ‘weathering’. Working with landscape and planting implies change, instability, impermanence. It is a collaboration with forces greater than the human psyche and an inquiry into them. Thinking about art in this way is potentially revelatory. If we see ourselves as part of the same life forces as the garden and the landscape, a number of new possibilities open up.7 We are, after all, art, plants, landscape, humans, at the most basic level, matter. Carbon. Genuinely equalising plants, landscape and sculpture, as maker Neil Armstrong aims to do at Tremenheere, is thus more radical than it may at first seem. Even if he may not always seem to succeed on the surface, the intention counts, philosophically as well as in practice, and it enables ways out of prevailing ortho­ doxies. For example, climate change may mean that species indigenous to one part of the world need to move to another to survive. This runs counter to privileging native species. Some parts of the world, furthermore, may only maintain their ecologies through the introduction of new species; the ‘anthropo­ cene’ has already interfered with natural selection on many levels. Armstrong is quietly and ambivalently pleased with ‘tiny contributions’ such as his thriving specimens of Aesculus wangii (Vietnamese Horse Chestnut, indigenous to

Note on method

5

North Vietnam and Yunnan Province, South China), collected some years ago. The ‘fruit is like a conker the size of your hand’. The practice is now illegal, but measures designed to safeguard against major corporate exploitation may well be too blunt. Since Armstrong and his plant hunting colleagues obtained their specimens, they have become seriously threatened with extinction in the wild, because their rare habitat has now been clear felled. It leaves only one site in the wild, and that is also vulnerable. But it’s now growing well in various sites in the UK and Ireland. Armstrong says that there is [...] a Kew expert who reckons if you want to plant a tree here in the UK, don’t choose native species. They’re all doomed in various ways, so we have to look to locations where trees haven’t succumbed to diseases. The reason is, overwhelmingly, monocultures. Diversity is essential. The flora of UK incredibly poor and sparse, all wiped out by the Ice Age. So even without climate change, ‘the remaining small populations are prone to dying out’. It is, he finds, bittersweet, experimenting with half-hardy and tender plants.

FIGURE I.1

Dr Neil Armstrong (seated) at the summit of Mt Fanssipan, N. Vietnam.

6

Note on method

Armstrong’s plant research trips are geared towards furthering knowledge of what is surviving and even thriving, for example his recent trip to Arunachal Pradesh, East of Nepal, below Tibet and East of Bhutan. The same sustainability concerns will apply to South Brazil and Chile next winter, and to a separate trip to Ecuador. While the current focus is on South America, Armstrong is keen to return to North Vietnam, where the ‘Yunnam-Vietnam interface is very inter­ esting. Scheffleras are in particular are found in these altitudes’, and the group discovered eight new species in one morning’s work. They are now being named. This was on a ‘new’ mountain, just ‘discovered’ last year ‘by trekkers uninterested in plants. It’s a very savage climb. No track. Now that the collec­ tion has matured enough to plant out, it is being quietly introduced’. They also found ‘lots of rhododendrons and evergreens, polyspora, new to Europe, hydrangeas and viburnums of new types’. Bearing in mind that ‘in the UK, we have only 600 native species of flora compared with the tiny Western Cape (6,000) – not to mention Yunnan (17,000) and Mexico (22,000) – this is an issue with urgent implications’, as recent calam­ itous fires in Australia demonstrate (Colour Plate 16). Cultural ecologies have also changed, arguably even faster over recent years, so that even or especially in what we assume to be home turf, we may not be perceiv­ ing all we urgently need to act upon. We require new ways of opening to the intensities of a visceral experience of art conjoined with what was the natural world.

Notes 1 P. 22, cited (Visilia 1996, 56). 2 Since looking at a number in Europe, he thinks that ‘the main thing was seeing how badly they were done, really. Yorkshire’s pretty good [The Yorkshire Sculp­ ture Park at Bretton Hall, near Wakefield], they seem to make a lot of effort to site things appropriately, and of course they’ve got 500 acres to play with. But in a lot of places it seems they’re shipped in where it’s most convenient for the lorry to park, really (laughs). I don’t know what the criteria are’. Louisiana, as men­ tioned in the Introduction, and the subject of Leatherbarrow’s essay in this volume, is an exception to this. 3 This and the following paragraph draw on Haraway and Barad as cited by Lisa Prins in her highly relevant article for Antennae (Prins 2018). 4 In his book Confabulations, John Berger most effectively reclaims the word from pathology. 5 This is too large a topic to enter into here. 6 This is clearly only intended as an indicative summary. See Hunt, Chapter 4 in this volume. 7 I generally avoid the term ‘posthuman’ because it can sometimes tend to mask our continuing dominance.

References Berger, John (2016). Confabulations. Penguin. Kohn, Eduardo (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Univer­ sity of California Press.

Note on method

7

Haraway, Donna (2004/1992). “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In The Haraway Reader, 63–124. Routledge. Lispector, Clarice (1964). (trans. Novey, Idra) The Passion According to G.H. Penguin Modern Classics. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005). What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago University Press. Prins, Lisa (2018). (On) Diffracting Materiality. Antennae, v 46, Winter, 113–125. Rose, James (1958). Creative Gardens, Reinhold Publishing Corporation. New York. Visilia, Anna-Marie (1996). Sculpting in Space and Time: Gardens by James C. Rose, PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania.

INTRODUCTION The ground

More of a ramble than a straight walk along a clear path, what follows is an exploration in the company of experienced travellers. Some of them know each other and their routes well, so their conversation shares reference points. But the homes from which they set out are diverse and none of them has approached this particular terrain via the same entrance or chosen the same vantage points from which to point out salient features. They are theorists and historians, practicing Landscape Architects, makers and artists – and one physician-turned-garden-maker. To borrow a phrase from a book by one of them, David Leatherbarrow, ‘the topographical stories’1 we tell are aiming neither to merge into a wide thor­ oughfare nor to emerge to reveal a single commanding overview. By aiming to open on to a variety of ways to experience the terrain, not to encapsulate it, all the contributors, more or less explicitly, invite you to consider the potential of the Sculpture Garden as a completely new hybrid work of art (to avoid ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and its baggage). Japan plays a significant part in this in James Rose’s sense; it is a frame of mind, a touchstone, a setting. Once smitten, you never get over Japan. I am not speaking of tawdry little imitations of pebbles and rocks pretending to be Japanese gardens on the front lawns of suburbia. I am not speaking of the landscape at all, good or bad. I am speaking of a frame of mind out of which even gardens can grow. James C. Rose (1987)2 There are other elements that make up this framework. For me, Ancient Rome, 1960s Britain, USA and Europe, especially France are also interwoven into my own shifting intellectual and artistic conjunctions. And feminism; fundamentally, indelibly, not as dogma, but as experience and philosophical influence.

Introduction

9

Yet there is common factor. Encountering place as a transition or a becoming between art, the environment (both built and ‘natural’), and living plants is a thoroughly contemporary experience. It points away from landscape as languidly timeless towards space as temporal and mutable. What could be more contemporary than that? So Thinking the Sculpture Garden grows out of one era of change and into another, the mid-late 20th century and the present. It crystallised when I first visited what was then the very new Cornish garden at Tremenheere, barely half a mile along the ridge from where I live. I was standing in a disused underground water tank, perhaps the most improbably perfect art installation anywhere, when I suddenly saw how the synergy between landscape architecture, plants, and sculpture can work for the present, with its urban obsessions set against variations on the rural as idyll or threat; how this is truly con­ temporary and relevant. The setting being a post-industrial relic is of the essence. To get to the tank, you go down a sloping path towards a stream. There’s a palpable shift in humidity as you step from one of Cornwall’s characteristic microclimates, all brightness and charm, into another, uncanny and dark. On your left, you see a rough door in a stone wall. Holding a wooden rail, you enter darkness. The rail is a lifeline. You can almost play with primitive fear. Then you just wait in bewildered silence. The door closed, your eyes feel the thickening of the light until it’s impene­ trable. You wait. You blink, experimentally. Time changes, you don’t know how long you wait, you feel you can’t look at your watch or your phone; the natural underground claims you. Almost imperceptibly, you seem to begin to see something, wraith-like and grey. A mottling hangs perhaps in the air. You watch it intently, and it clarifies. Eventually, you realize that it’s the image of the canopy above, passed by natural science and not by magic through a pinhole into the empty water tank below - not onto a screen or any apparent surface, but into the air. It’s the most subtle work I’ve seen by James Turrell (see Figure II.i below),3 the American artist best known for spectacular works with light, an example of which you can see at the top of Tremenheere garden in his ‘Skyspace’ Tewlwo­ low Kernow; by contrast, this tank is a kind of earth space. It’s basically a camera obscura, but that’s a bit like saying a painting is fabric stretched over wood. What Turrell has done is to introduce duration into the idea and the experi­ ence of the camera obscura, so that the work is both time-based and embodied. You have to wait for the image to present itself, and its emergence makes you aware of your senses, especially of vision and proprioception, your senses of your body in space. In that underground moment, I felt my inner landscape shift and re-form as if the earth were as mutable as light. It shuffled and re-shuffled time and place with utter disregard, and four intense moments across my artistic life came vividly to mind: a Japanese temple whose gift to me was Zen gardens,

10

Introduction

Aqua Obscura (Winter). James Turrell. 2013. Disused underground water tank. Tremenheere Sculpture Garden.

FIGURE II.1

Photo: Neil Armstrong

but enveloped in the total darkness of its undercroft; a chance visit to Hadrian’s villa that exploded my sense of the ancient world; another sculpture garden, the Kröller-Müller outdoor museum in the Netherlands, where Hepworth’s work interacting with the Rietveld Pavilion showed me a way into Modernism for the first time.4 On this new stage of my journey, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens serves as a kind of virtual map rather than a diagram. It is, as we shall see, an ideal place in relation to which to consider what a sculpture garden is, or might be, and how both its actuality and is potential have changed. It acts in this exploration more as a reference-point than a landmark, kind of mobile trig point, perhaps, that offers for a moment the view from a certain intersection in a semantic force-field before moving to another at a different level, time and/or place. What is the lasting effect, for example, of the resurgence of ecology movements as well as the upheavals of the 20th century in art and in most people’s experience of nature? Urbanisation, the movement of peoples, either voluntary or forced, con­ sequent on the destruction and displacement of wars and their aftermath, has engen­ dered a proliferation of movements in art. As art fragmented and internationalised, its relation to place arguably changed irrevocably. In synergy with this it became clear that what we think of as nature can no longer be assumed. The impact of the revolutionary art and philosophies of the 20th century, and perhaps especially of the heady days of the mid-late period are still being

Introduction

11

worked through. The spread of innovative ideas and practices appears to be as great as during the European Renaissance, but the pattern and direction of exchange is quite different. The process of assimilation is also less obvious than the drama of oppositional rhetoric and paradigm shift that prevailed as the ferment came to a mid-century head. The sculpture garden is no exception, especially as it grows out of the most traditional of origins. Yet it has changed, and more profoundly than it appears on the surface. Among the most interesting and significant recent elements in this too brief sketch is the fairly recent rise of the individual garden maker (Langen 2015), generally working without reference to an inherited house or the freight that historic buildings bring. A sculpture garden that is one person’s vision grows out of a different relationship between artwork and place from that which obtains either in the aristocratic tradition or in an institutional context such as statesupported art or the aegis of major national museums, with their inevitable need to represent or exemplify a culture. It becomes more like a hybrid artwork in itself, especially in its development over time, and in its implicit understanding of time. We are in an exciting moment when the balance is beginning to shift between what has seemed the impossibly fixed orthodoxies of recent years and the ways of thinking they have tried to marginalise. They concern power over, overwhelmingly in the form of the economics of late capital. ‘Monetisation’ has seeped into such areas that it hasn’t aggressively colonised to the extent that even the frameworks of more flexible approaches have become difficult to convey. I raise the thought very briefly in order to point out its relevance to what is not included in this book. It does not focus on gardens of English stately homes (except in a historical context); it examines no institutional gardens, such as those attached to major museums, or those in which public entities such as the British Arts Council, or cities or regions have an interest.5 Nor is it about the growth of those sculpture parks in which the super rich have invested, interesting though this phenomenon is (Langen 2015, 2016). Tremenheere, the garden that is the reference-point – and to an extent, the touchstone – of this book at first looks like a very Cornish garden. But it is fundamentally thought of by its creator both in terms of the British and of the Japanese modernist movements of the 1960s, specifically, Mono-ha. This is an artistic context of interest to few of the thousands of visitors, but important in relation to the three factors of plants, landscape and sculpture as the tripartite foundation of sculpture garden design and the ideas it manifests or articulates. Interestingly, it is Japanese art that is the influence, as much as the design of Japanese gardens, though it’s an artificial distinction, given their common phil­ osophy; furthermore, and with a similar caveat, it is to conceptual Modernist Japanese sculpture that we should turn, rather than the traditional painting that most readily springs to non-Japanese minds. Perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson’s

12

Introduction

thought, to the effect that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, would be equally or more appropriately expressed in the Tao version that abolishes any idea of destination: the journey is the reward. It is through such cross-currents that the explorations in this book implicitly and explicitly address what are now global movements in sculpture and in ecological and sustainable planting (Rainer & West 2015). It culminates in a complex, differ­ ential sense of movement in stillness, memory in presence and art in tension with the natural – and even, in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms – as of the animal. (Grosz 2008). It is very different from the old binaries of wilderness-cultivation, art-nature or artwork-context. It also is some distance from how especially in the UK we experience sculpture and gardens as a combination of history and leisure, or at best as embodying a traditional philosophy of the garden as essentially in relation to a house, be it grand, a cottage or in ruins. Few of us experience them as articulating a further reaching philosophy that helps us to think about what it is to be human. So the idea is to approach the sculpture garden as a way of thinking in the contemporary context of complex international understandings of place, growing out of and beyond the kind of internationalism that has informed art and horti­ culture since the colonial era and the age of Darwin. It is also to bring both landscape and plants to bear on installed works in ways that are rarely considered when the art is foregrounded at the expense of every­ thing else. It is an approach that rewards the reader with new ways of looking at art in general, revealing the unstable becomings of today’s interconnected, yet alienated, world. And finally, it opens on to a number of ways that bring human thought and being not only into closer relation with the earth, but into a ‘becoming’ that is essentially of it. In light of the above discussion, the variety of approaches in the essays that follow shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are a mindfully heterogeneous selection from outstanding writers and practitioners. Contributors are all engaged in some way with art in the landscape, or perhaps in/and/with ‘nature’, as constituting a creative piece in and of itself. The artists and movements discussed similarly engage with the natural world in ways that explore human relationships with it, raising questions that go well beyond trying to assess what limits or defines the garden. It should, I hope, be clear by now that this is not an attempt to outline positions or set forth a single argument, let alone define a field. Rather, it is a combination of interwoven trajectories that grow out of varied skills relating to place and to time in the long and the short term. The poten­ tial of the Sculpture Garden as a form is more fully accessible if we approach it as always in process. These contributions are presented together as the middle section, with a historical introduction by the pre-eminent garden historian John Dixon Hunt. Chapters drawing on Tremenheere have been placed either side of this section, with the intention that they should inform readers’ approaches with at least a wider indication of how the overall argument may be productively understood

Introduction

13

in relation to a number of practices and fields. Most of these were written by me, drawing on conversations with artists and makers; one is by Gay Watson on the philosophy of Japan. Chapter 1, ‘Tremenheere: Place of the long stones’, looks at the evolution of Tremenheere Sculpture Garden over its short history, and relates Land Art to Cornwall and its ancient past. It draws freely on conversations with the maker of Tremenheere, Dr Neil Armstrong, who aims for equality between the landscape, the planting and the sculpture. While the Sculpture Garden in general is widely recognised as relating in some way to Land Art, plants rarely feature prominently at all in discussions of either of them, with the result that the over­ all implications of broadly new materialist thinking is not considered. Artists discussed include James Turrell, Richard Long, Bernar Venet, Kishio Suga (all represented at Tremenheere), plus Jannis Kounellis, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. The relation with plants is taken further in Chapter 2, ‘The seed in the stone: Peter Randall-Page’s exploration of energetic structure’. As with the previous chapter, it draws on conversations with the maker under discussion. RandallPage is interested in the ways ‘pattern and surface imply interior dynamics’. It goes right down to the molecular level, crossing between science, mathematics, architecture and art. With reference to the Eden Project as well as to Tremen­ heere and other installations with a deep concern for plants and conservation, including the urban, Randall-Page’s synergy with the landscape and with pattern formation in the plants themselves is discussed. In Chapter 3, ‘Mono-ha: Paying attention: Japanese arts in/of the garden’, Gay Watson examines the connection mentioned above between Tremenheere and the ancient philosophies of the ‘Far East’. She explores the distinctions between European and Chinese and Japanese approaches to thought, aesthetics and attention and how this influences their attitudes to sculpture in/of the garden. She places Tre­ menheere as a synthesis of European and ‘Far Eastern’, traditional and contemporary ideas and aesthetics, and as a place of participation rather than presentation. Part II of the book moves out towards the view beyond Tremenheere. It opens with John Dixon Hunt’s informative and wide-ranging historical essay, ‘Sculpture gardens and sculpture in gardens’ (Chapter 4). Hunt situates the con­ tributors to this part of the book in contemporary and historical milieux ranging from the early Renaissance, through the 18th century to the city parks of the 19th and 20th centuries. He demonstrates how the ‘escape’ of the sculpture garden in recent years has enabled a more nuanced dialogue between sculpture and context and sets out how the following chapters require us to adjust how we now think of sculpture gardens. They also, taken together, interrogate what can be understood as ‘sculpture’. He also introduces the contributors to this section, which includes, alongside writers David Leatherbarrow and Patrick Eyres, two distinguished practicing landscape architects: Georges Descombes and Bernard Lassus.6

14

Introduction

With the third section of the book, I return to some further examples of sculptures at Tremenheere sculpture garden through which to consider the notion of ‘event’. In Chapter 9, ‘Landscape, art, plant, event’ the explorations of the book overall form the base from which to open on to an understanding of the sculpture garden as a hybrid and fluid form that nevertheless is recognizable through the relatedness of it elements. Artists discussed include Penny Saunders,7 Mat Chivers, Tim Shaw, Caroline Winn and David Nash. In the concluding Chapter 10, ‘Conclusion: The art of the plant; the art of the earth (far other worlds)’, I work outwards from the work of two very different approaches by contemporary artists who are not sculptors – since the arguments underpinning this book are not defined by genre, style, medium or form. Kate Wal­ ters’ paintings draw on a ‘co-emergence in difference’8 that moves seamlessly between binaries such as plant and animal to connect all living beings. Tracy Hill’s ethereal drawings appropriate scientific techniques designed for landscape surveyors, not only to reclaim ‘waste,’ post-industrial wetlands, but, in effect, to alter the gaze. New tech­ nology, site-specificity and Sci-art are all referenced as the arguments of the book are brought together as an articulation of a profound and consistent non-dualism. There are no other books that explore the equality of art, planting and land­ scape in either the making or experiencing of the sculpture garden, though this one draws on many excellent works that focus on one or more of its elements. There are no studies that attempt to bring together the disciplines required in order to understand the sculpture garden in contemporary terms as a dynamic force field between all matter, all life forms, as ‘territory’.9 There is, as yet, no other sculpture garden quite like Tremenheere.

Notes 1 In Topographical Stories, the author takes a broad and poetic approach to the shared cul­ tural frameworks of landscape and architecture in a manner entirely sympathetic to those of this book. Armstrong also knows and greatly admires Louisiana, the garden that Leatherbarrow explores in Chapter 5. 2 Cited in Vissilia 1996 p.45.

3 See p. 29 ff for further discussion, and Figure 1.8.

4 The proximity of Hepworth’s studio and garden in St Ives to Tremenheere – just

seven miles away – seems to invite comparison. It is not without relevance. Although Hepworth’s Modernist philosophy can’t readily be assimilated into what is emergent in this book, it could be considered a precursor. The sculptures and the planting work in harmonious balance in the tiny garden, as do her home, studio, greenhouse and summer house. 5 For an examination of these issues, see W.J.T Mitchell 1992, though Mitchell’s refer­ ence is to the USA. 6 See Chapter 4. 7 As with Armstrong and Randall-Page, the discussion of Saunders draws on conversa­ tion with the artist/maker. 8 The phrase is Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s in speaking of the Matrixial. 9 In Elizabeth Grosz’s sense – see Chapters 9 and 10.

Introduction

15

References Grosz, Elizabeth. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press. Langen, Sylvia. (2015) Outdoor Art. Prestel. Leatherbarrow, David. (2004) Topographical Stories. Studies in Landscape and Architecture. Univer­ sity of Pennsylvania Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) (1990/2). Art & the Public Sphere. Chicago University Press. Rainer, Thomas, West, Claudia. (2015). Planting in a Post-Wild World. Designing Plant Commu­ nities for a Resilient Landscape. Timber Press. Rose, James. (1987). The Heavenly Environment: A Landscape Drama in Three Acts with a Backstage Interlude. New City Cultural Service Ltd., Hong Kong. Vissilia, Anna-Maria. (1996) Sculpting in Space and Time: Gardens by James C. Rose, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.

PART I

Tremenheere sculpture garden

1 TREMENHEERE Place of the long stones Penny Florence

FIGURE 1.1

View from top of Tremenheere to St Michael’s Mount.

Photo: Dave Peake 2017

‘Tremenheere’ means ‘place of the long stones’ in Cornish, and the valley where it lies is at the gateway to the tiny Penwith Peninsula, 10 miles or so wide and across to Lands End; ‘Pennwydh’, in turn, is Cornish for ‘at the end’ (‘wydh’) ‘of the ‘headland’ (‘penn’). ‘By Tre, Pol and Pen [ … ].’1 Weighing about 8 and 10 tons respectively, the two menhirs from which the name derives are the first thing you see as you drive through the outer gates, the only entrance apart from the inconspicuous pre-existing local footpath through the trees by the stream. The

20

Penny Florence

twin stones are even larger than they appear, since stability required that a large proportion of the narrow, upright stones should remain underground. For such a small area, Penwith is crammed with ancient sites and ‘menheere’ (menhirs), although not in the spectacular way of Carnac just across the Channel in Brittany; Penwith almost forms one single ancient site, and you have to seek out its scattered monuments in defiance of intermittent signage that is sometimes (they say) turned around to confuse outsiders. It is a wild and beautiful place that would doubtless have been ruined by now were it not for its remoteness and its precipitate fall on three sides into the Atlantic Ocean; it doesn’t ‘go any­ where’; next stop the USA, via the Scilly Isles. This location is critical. Warmed by the Gulf Stream and famous among artists for its extraordinary light, Penwith is a microclimate made up of microclimates. (See, e.g., Colour Plates 17 and 20.) Sub-tropical plants abound alongside hawthorn and gorse, and in the many narrow valleys with their rocky streams there is shelter from the prevailing Westerlies that regularly blast the frequent rain and winter storms with gale force. But they also, on the whole, keep the frost at bay. It is com­ paratively rare for sub-zero temperatures to last beyond the occasional day.2 The importation into Europe of species of floral and arboreal exotica that began at least in the 1540s if not before3 is essential to its biodiversity, especially in the UK, whose native species are far fewer than most inhabitants think. It has suited Cornwall even more than the rest of these islands, as showcased by the group of 12 ‘Great Gardens of Cornwall’4 stretching right across the county – or country, depending on your political persuasions. From Cotehele in the east, just this side of the Tamar river that divides Devon (and the rest of England) from Cornwall, to Tresco Abbey Gardens on Scilly in the west, many of them are in the sheltered valley homes of their wealthy plant-hunting landowners. Tremenheere is one of the two newest members and, like many of the Great Gardens of Cornwall, it occupies almost the whole of a valley.5 Unlike them there is no great house and no history of gardening. This is a significant point, and one to which I shall return. Tremenheere Sculpture Garden is a private passion that has rapidly developed into a valuable regional asset. Begun in 1999 (and officially opened in September 2012) by gardener, art-lover, plant collector and practicing physician, Dr Neil Armstrong, and wholly owned by him and his wife, Dr Jane Martin, it was bought when disused agri­ cultural land was very cheap in the 1990s. Only two fields have been under cultiva­ tion, as the rest was either too wet or impenetrable. NHS doctors, however well paid they may seem to be in the UK of ‘austerity’ politics, are not in the league of the super rich or even the wealthy. Tremenheere has to pay its way. It is run as self-financing in about 20 acres of what was a neglected valley – of Grade 1 agricultural land – and woods. In the words of its maker Armstrong, ‘The first five years was just hacking and burning.’6 He has received very little indeed in the way of outside capital finance or grant aid,7 and no ongoing sup­ port at all. The UK thus far does not allow tax benefits comparable to those of the USA to charity or arts benefactors. ‘I suppose I’m lucky, this kind of thing is normally the preserve of the filthy rich, not necessarily aristocratic, but serious industrialists who have [maybe comparable] resources.’8

Tremenheere

21

One such highly successful industrialist is the owner of a private garden near Copenhagen, on 120 acres of landscaped grazing land. It has a substantial art collec­ tion, and Armstrong finds quite a lot of similarities to Tremenheere, although that garden is not open to the public. Armstrong continues, ‘The next artist he [the Danish industrialist] would very much like [to have in his collection is] Richard Long. He is able to afford that from his own resources.’ Visitors pay a modest entry fee; there is an Art Gallery (opened January 2017) across an open, sloping meadow from the very popular café area from which there is a shady rural path typical of the locality that leads to the garden proper. While the comparatively new Gallery is commercial in that it sells art, it does not sell sculpture from the gardens, and it does much to promote the varied and excellent contemporary art of West Cornwall. It is run as a complementary add­ ition, and like the gardens overall, is socially aware and thoroughly engaged with the community and the cultural life of the region.9 The Gallery was originally planned as part of the restaurant building, so it would have been there at the beginning.10 It forms part of Armstrong’s ‘long standing ambition to grow Tremenheere as an arts destination. If this ambition is serious, then it makes sense to ensure the quality’ that will bring it about. The Gallery is ‘strictly contemporary in the same way as the garden, showing new work by living artists and retrospectives of relevant prominent local artists such as Jeremy Le Grice.’11 The inaugural exhibition was ‘Rose Hilton and Friends: Fifty Years in Cornwall,’ opening on January 28th 2017.12 Armstrong feels the gallery is still trying to find its voice and expression, its style: ‘It is pretty flexible, now having three spaces including a small room for prints, books, small objects d’art.’ Inevitably, the need to remain financially self-sufficient will affect the Sculp­ ture Gardens long-term, and will be interesting to see whether its aims can be upheld. This is especially so, given that its organizational structure is dependant on one individual, despite the fact that it operates highly collaboratively in practice.13 Armstrong views the process of carrying out all the permanent instal­ lations and long-term loans as an enjoyable and friendly ‘arm-wrestle’ with the artists ‘to try to find something that works, that doesn’t dominate or take away from what’s there. So I’m not in the position of the artist as such, but I’m trying to work productively and collaboratively with the artist.’ The following is a long quotation about the history of the place and the inception of the gardens in Armstrong’s own words, lightly edited: The garden differs in many ways from the wonderful long established gar­ dens of Cornwall. There is no big house, no emphasis on spring planting,14 no existing garden and a new factor is to add contemporary art to the mix. The land was owned by the monks on St Michaels Mount until a tenant farmer Michael de Tremenheere bought the land in June 1294. The owner of the land carried the Tremenheere name forward for 600 years. […] Sey­ mour Tremenheere was the last owner carrying this name (1830–1894). He was a prominent national figure, leading barrister and social reformer

22

Penny Florence

involved in improving conditions for mine workers and in schools. He also had the woodland planting carried out which is now an important feature of the gardens. The ‘crossroads’ where paths meet at the top of the gardens was the turning circle for his striking yellow carriage. The garden now occupies 22 acres. Like many Cornish gardens the core is a south facing valley running towards the sea. A happy set of natural fea­ tures: shelter, good soil, fast flowing stream, mature woodland, benign micro-climate and wonderful views all provided a promising starting point. [We] set about clearing overgrown woodland, which had been neglected for decades. Brambles and bracken dominated the land over several acres and wild rhododendrons were well established in non-cultivated areas. The land used for cropping had reverted to luxuriant layers of weeds. Over the subsequent 15 years an embryonic garden emerged and then flour­ ished. The planting scheme is designed to respond to varying aspects, soil and exposure to create a large scale naturalistic, subtropical effect taking full advan­ tage of the near frost free conditions. An early surprise development was the arrival of the hugely respected (and generally inaccessible in person) American artist James Turrell. He was looking for a site from which he could interact with the 1999 total solar eclipse, for which West Cornwall was predicted to be the ideal viewing place.15 Turrell clearly recognised me as not being a Russian oligarch, who really have a different set of rules, I’m sure. So he was happy to support the overall ideas and concepts, which he did hugely by not demanding his usual fees. The work itself was paid for by Turrell’s then agent. [The involvement of Turrell] was extremely helpful, and released interest from other big name artists who came along in various ways. They’ve all arrived from different angles, with different [assumptions] I think. Things have evolved organically, starting off from a position of quality. This is liter­ ally true organically, since plants mature fast in West Cornwall and the out­ line planting and landscape were by this time already legible, so that new artists had something to go on, to respond to. As Armstrong puts it, ‘[…] I’m sat here, right on the central line [of the eclipse], when his team turns up and asked if I’d be interested in hosting a work, no cost, nothing, just like that!’ Turrell’s Gallery remained very distant, and in the end, Armstrong project-managed the whole installation of what was to become Elliptic Ecliptic, a wooden Skyspace.16 At dinner on the eve of the eclipse, ‘Turrell said that he liked the valley, and, further, it is an out of the way place, and you have to make an effort to get here. He asked if he could do something permanent.’ It was as extraordinary and as simple as that.17 The title of this stone skyspace is Tewlwolow Kernow, which means Twilight in Cornwall. There is, however, a further twist to this tale: Elliptic Ecliptic was always a temporary installation, constructed as such with a temporary three month planning

Tremenheere

FIGURE 1.2

23

James and Kyung Turrell at the opening of Tewlwolow Kernow, 2015.

Photo: CJ Everard

permission, as part of a wider festival to celebrate the eclipse. This meant it had to be dismantled within a certain time limit. It was too difficult to take it apart in the allocated time, so they ended up having to burn it down. Some time later, however, the French sculptor Bernar Venet bought the plans, so it has risen again, suitably phoenix like. This incarnation is in a Mediterranean sculpture garden, at the Fonda­ tion Venet in the South of France.18 So began a dialogue that continues to this day with the arrival of two per­ manent large-scale installations by James Turrell. This also spurred the concept of contemporary art in the landscape with involvement of several other inter­ nationally respected artists – Richard Long, David Nash, Peter Randall-Page, Kishio Suga, Tim Shaw and others.19 Temporary installations or ephemeral events come and go as opportunities present. The concept remains that of the landscape, planting and artwork all being in harmony with each other; maintaining this balance represents the chal­ lenge as the garden develops further. The hope is that Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens provides a restful Arcadian space where visitors may encounter moments of wonder or inspiration. Information boards are kept to a minimum, and interested visitors are directed to a very basic plan and to the website. There is no ‘spoon-feeding’ of visitors, since telling them what things mean, or how to approach them works against directly

24

Penny Florence

FIGURE 1.3

Plan by Barrie Briscoe. 2006 of James Turrell Tewlwolow Kernow.

Reproduced by permission, Tremenheere

experiencing your own journey, working against the way that the combination of features aims to create new experience, or a ‘series of unfolding experiences.’ ‘You will have to have your cortisol levels reduced by the de-stressing power of the stream and the tall trees,’ he quips before citing a Japanese study that showed a 40% reduction in cortisol levels after woodland walk.

FIGURE 1.4 James Turrell Tewlwolow Kernow under construction, 2008. Completed 2012, opened officially 2015.

Photo: Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens

FIGURE 1.5

James Turrell Tewlwolow Kernow (ext.) 2019, 15×10m approx.

Photo: Penny Florence

26

Penny Florence

FIGURE 1.6

James Turrell, Tewlwolow Kernow (int.).

Photo: Bent Szameitat

‘There is an underlying theme,’ he continues, whose unifying balance, we hope, carries you along. Spelling it out would detract from what is a process, a journey; you have to experience it; not know­ ing how it’s done, as with Turrell, is part of it. It isn’t cerebral. There are quiet spaces (not always respected or understood), but they should be there. There’s the Skyspace, and it’s part of the Quaker Trail around the country, the Quiet Garden Movement,20 if you like. It’s about offering the opportunity rather than making it prescriptive. But he is very clear about his vision. It is: [...] the holy trinity of landscape, planting and artwork, that’s how it’s evolved and that’s how it’s going forward. None can be dominant. Being consistent to

Tremenheere

27

that is the guiding principle […] The idea of having an ornamental garden is one thing and the idea of having it as a collection of artwork is another thing. For Tremenheere the challenge has been to justify each individual existence, and then justify how they come together in this landscape. They are inter­ dependent in that this is a new garden without a focus – because traditional gar­ dens would always have a big house as a focus and that would dictate the formal drives and the layout thereafter. Without that, you can avoid straight lines, which is immensely liberating because you don’t need a heavy hand on the landscape. The lack of the big house gives the freedom to introduce other fea­ tures, which are diverse and scattered. Being blessed with a very sensuous land­ scape, a very dramatic landscape, it’s important not to mess it up. A big house would certainly have done, what with a drive, parterre and all that carry on. Note that Armstrong here clearly starts from the landscape; and his interest is in art­ istic diversity. If you begin with the landscape and the plants, there is a changing rationale and set of criteria for selection and siting of work, while the idea of the ‘sitespecific’ need not apply in the usual terms; the work belongs to the place without having been made for it. Diversity can work coherently in one location. It allows a kind of eclecticism that is generally much harder to pull off in a gallery, because of the relative permanence of gallery spaces; this applies, relatively speaking, even where walls can be moved. But in the Sculpture Garden, with its cycles of growth and decay, new work can be incorporated in the radically different and mutable areas throughout the seasons and years without major alteration to the overall balance For example, at the time of writing, new planting and features are under way in the east corner field, recently acquired on loan from St Michael’s Mount. Co-ordinated sculptures and planting are going in at the same time. The newer area is completely different in character, movement & big skies […] a fantastic bit of land from a landscaping point of view, a high plateau going down to a bowl, the central strip to be heavily planted with grasses. The structural stones [from Halsetown just over the hill] are there already, and the high grasses will ripple up and down the hill above the smooth grass. The wooded area is a kind of primeval araucaria family gathering – araucaria angustifolia and wool­ lemi nobilis (after David Noble, the ranger who found it in a ravine) a pine, unchanged for 150 million years, only found west of Sydney 20 years ago. There were just 200 specimens in what was a major botanical discovery, now slowly being distributed around the world. It will form a trunk and a high sculptural top – long after we’re dead! In 5 years it will start to have a shape.

Photo: Penny Florence

FIGURE 1.7 East Field Tremenheere, Panoramic view with wind sculptures by Michael Chaikin, Holiday Home by Richard Woods, and meander­ ing stream leading to sediment pond (see above note 7).

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The relation between this and the access points from the original garden, Armstrong explains, is an example of a compression (for comparison see note 25). When the idea was suggested that the absence of any dominant feature also afforded an opportunity for creating multiple perspectives in thought as well as topographical direction, he responded ‘Absolutely, many of the artworks provide a directional pull, to draw you from A to B around the garden in a way that’s kind of unconscious but also natural … it makes the artwork perform different functions.’ He finds this affords great freedom as you can follow the camber [and other features] of a largely unaltered land­ scape. This works as a guide through. The ambience varies around each sculp­ ture [due to the landscape and the planting]. It’s different from the 18th century garden, quite apart from the scale. There’s an intimacy, a closeness to works. Armstrong thus thought of the sculpture in interaction with the landscape from the outset, in effect creating a new kind of focal point. Sculpture was always part of the plan, and the arrival of Turrell was the first of quite a few serendipitous events (of which more in due course).21 Then there’s the role of abstraction. It was an early choice not to have figurative sculpture,22 since abstraction is more appropriate to landscape. The one exception is Tim Shaw’s Minotaur, although even that is not straightforwardly representative, its front view contrasting strongly with the view from the side or from three-quarters behind, when its abrupt change in mode becomes apparent. It ‘is a brooding pres­ ence […] all the works have their story, what they’re there for.’23 The idea for Aqua Obscura,24 the second Turrell work at Tremenheere, was born at the same time as Tewlwolow Kernow. The story goes that Armstrong mentioned there was a huge empty water tank, a relic of the days when Tre­ menheere was a significant source of water for the area. Turrell’s response was to lean over the table and say, ‘I know. I’ve been in your tank!’ He had evi­ dently been waiting for some building materials when he saw a small manhole cover in the undergrowth, lifted it, saw metal steps and went down. Armstrong had never ever been in, while Jane Martin said it was full of rubbish, absolutely awful. I rather think it speaks well of Turrell that he did this, alone in a remote place on an obviously old iron structure. The initial plan was very different from what was eventually realised. The model was not much different from Turrell’s Arcus series, with a rectangle of light introduced into a dark space.25 The light would be bounced off shallow water in the bottom of the tank. But the angles were too steep; a much shallower angle was necessary to create the desired effect. Turrell returned several times, spent time in pitch darkness (he apparently likes dark spaces), experimented with various lenses and after consider­ able time still didn’t know what to do. Eventually, the pinhole light idea emerged (the effect of which is described in the Introduction: The Ground). The whole process in the tank was very interesting creatively, according to Arm­ strong. Billy Wynter, whose camera obscura is also at Tremenheere, was instrumental

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FIGURE 1.8 James Turrell, Aqua Obscura. Opened June 2015. 10×10m approx. Winter and summer.

Photos: Neil Armstrong

in it. They collaborated on various experiments with sheds and lenses, to find where to have the opening so that the image would be in focus. Armstrong and Wynter finally worked out the technical aspects.26

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It remains Turrell’s only camera obscura work, and as such, it occupies a particular place in his oeuvre. There is also a fundamental similarity-in-difference between Aqua Obscura and Tewlwolow Kernow. It concerns the movement between the presence and absence of light and/or colour – in other words, the manifestation of light in all its forms. As Armstrong points out, the rising corridor of the entrance to Tewlwolow Kernow is sculptural, […] It’s a compression of sorts, so you’re surprised then to find a 10m wide interior space. People feel the need to lie on the benches or on the ground or do other strange things. It gives permission to act differently, not just tick a box and say I’ve seen that, but they want to live with it for a while. This same rhythm of compression-release27 occurs at several moments in the garden, especially at the entrance along a shady path that opens out into a wide, sloping meadow. The timing depends on which path you take. It is very under­ stated and it is left to the visitor to choose their route.28 Both Turrells are absolutely in tune with the ambition to change the visitor for the better through an unfolding experience; ‘you certainly arrive in the tank with expect­ ation (or dread for some!) and as the journey unfolds, a much more restorative calm breaks out and you return blinking to the world as a slightly different person.’ This is a hint of what Turrell is fundamentally about and counters the occa­ sional accusation among his critics of mere visual trickery. As with Anish Kapoor’s use of illusion, Turrell’s often baffling colour and spatial effects concern ancient knowledge and beliefs in the plenitude of the void and the ultimate stage of uni­ fied consciousness of the seer (‘samadhi’ in Kapoor’s Indian tradition). The experience of Aqua Obscura is of this exalted nature, and in this it could stand as a condensed version of what Tremenheere is about. Indeed, Armstrong has said that he ‘would like more of those experiences in the garden.’ What kind of experience this might be is by definition not easy to convey in words; it is ineffable, without referent and therefore requires oblique and complex means. The same applies, perhaps even more so, to another serendipitous arrival at Tre­ menheere, that of Kishio Suga in 2001, although this did not come out of the blue, but rather through social and family connections with Kettles Yard, Cambridge. Simon Groom, who was then curator at Kettles Yard – he is now Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – reunited a group of the founder members of the important 1960s Mono-ha movement (or School of Things) from Japan to the UK, and took them on tour.29 (See Figure 1.9 below, Plate 21 in the colour section and Figure 3.1.) Groom knew of Armstrong’s plans – ‘that I was up to something’, as Armstrong said. The Newlyn Art Gallery was one of the locations for the touring exhibition during which Groom brought them to Tremenheere. Suga let it be known he’d like two of the works to come here as donations at the end of tour. Both initial works were in soft wood for gallery installations, and they have now been replaced (in collaboration with the artist) with hard wood for outdoors; natural,

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FIGURE 1.9 Kishio Suga, Untitled, 2001, installed Tremenheere 2002, pine & scaffold­ ing poles, reconstructed 2008, bamboo & scaffolding poles. Scaffold 2×2×3m, bamboo poles 10cms dia. Ht 4m.

Photo: Penny Florence

waste or disposable materials are as fundamental to Mono-ha as they are to Arte Povera (as the name implies). The only other piece by Suga in a UK permanent collection is in Tate Modern, London.30 Mono-ha was highly influential on the European Arte Povera movement, and both movements also shared ideas with – or influenced- British land artists such as Richard Long and David Nash. Armstrong traces his interest in this thread at Tremenheere back to here. But there is also a direct connection, which I point out to demonstrate an aesthetic and ideological consistency in these apparently chance events. Jannis Kounellis, who died in February 2017, was one of the most prominent expo­ nents in recent years of Arte Povera (sometimes exhibiting alongside Giuseppe Penone, the youngest of the Arte Povera artists, described by Armstrong as ‘fantastic’31). He was a friend32 of Barrie Briscoe, the architect who designed the café at Tremenheere. Briscoe also designed the conversion of some of Kounel­ lis’s buildings in Italy on the border between Umbria and Tuscany into what was planned as a Foundation for the study of his work.33

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Kounellis had planned to hold an event to honour Briscoe at Tremenheere, where the latter is buried,34 but he was unable to travel at the time. Kounellis’s early work brought live birds and animals into the gallery, with the aim not only of breaking out of the norms of artistic means – materials and expression – but also of creating a bridge between the human and the animal. ‘The viewers became part of the scene of these living natural sources of energy within the gallery space.’35 The underpinning at Tremenheere represented by Suga and Kounellis is pos­ sibly the least noticed by visitors, especially given Armstrong’s light touch in terms of information and giving any kind of steer to their experience of the garden. It is in many ways to be applauded, and, again, it is consistent.36 But it is indeed diffi­ cult to access the meaning of the work with no context other than its location in a garden. This applies to one of the Tremenheere pieces. Composed of metal scaf­ folding and bamboo poles, Suga said at the time of installation that it represented a lost generation of one million Japanese young men (hikikomori), who won’t come out of their bedrooms in the city. He asks why society is so stiff and unforgiving. This is perfectly articulated in the materials.37 The iron scaffolding contains the natural energy of the bamboo. The bamboo is also about art, furthermore, and the traditional skill of ordinary people. Bamboo scaffolding was once widespread all over Asia. It is a highly skilled trade that has much in common with sculpture. It requires a long apprenticeship, the need to understand form and structure and the qualities of the material. Builders have to judge the strength and suitability of each of the poles, which must generally be at least three-years old, and they do this by eye. Such an art38 practiced outside the ‘art world’ with everyday materials is fully consistent with the Mono-ha aesthetic. Its disappearance could hardly be more appropriately expressed than by iron scaffolding around bamboo. In an aside almost as easy to miss as (seemingly) the Sugas themselves, Armstrong diffidently observed in passing that Black Mound, an extremely popular David Nash work at Tremenheere, was acquired as part of a thread he was developing. That’s all he said. Pressed, he added that he looked for simple materials presented in a different way, a sparse, reduced type of visual art, where less is more, and where the choice of materials is essential to the power of composition. It has as much to do with materiality as aesthetics.39 Nash’s work is more fully discussed later in this book;40 suffice it to say here that it is further evidence of the under­ standing of the materiality of art that underpins the thinking of a naturally reticent sculpture garden designer, who is more at home with plants.41 The same goes for Armstrong’s involvement with Richard Long,42 and what begins to emerge is just how deeply rooted – possibly left-field – and bold the whole enterprise is, the leap of faith it must have required at the beginning. It would be hard to think of a less likely artistic lineage for a self-financing cultural attraction in the far west of England, despite the proximity of Tate St Ives; it takes as long to get to Penzance from London by almost any means as it does to fly to New York.43 By rail, it’s terminus to terminus, a fair amount of it single track along a slow 19th-century route; very beautiful, but vulnerable to closure due to the elements. And then you have to get to Tremenheere.

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Richard Long RA, Tremenheere Line, 2013, Grasses; South African resto grass, Boloskion Tetraphyllum. 40m (L).

FIGURE 1.10

Photo: Penny Florence

It is not a journey to give pause to Long, who has a long association with Cornwall and the West Country, explicit in works such as Cornish Slate Ellipse (2009) or Cornwall Summer Circle (2011). Born in Bristol, he studied there before progressing to London at St Martin’s School of Art (as it then was), and Bristol continues to be his base.

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Tremenheere Line, harks back to Long’s famous A Line Made by Walking (1967)44 and the many other lines in landscapes he has created in the field, in text and in photographs, including White Water Line for which he won the Turner Prize in 1989. Most of Long’s works are in the landscape, not in galleries or gardens. It therefore carries a particular charge here. Consisting of a row of tall grasses on a mown meadow at the top of the valley occu­ pied by the garden, Tremenheere Line points due south; and although there is nothing to ‘say’ that this is the direction, everything about the location indicates it. The view to the north is restricted by a tall hedge and by the rise of the land; while to the south is a wide vista to Mounts Bay, to the headland past Mousehole and the open ocean. You are looking west of the end of the Channel and Lizard Point, the southernmost part of Cornwall and therefore of Britain. It is clearly about the beyond. For Tremenheere Line, Long and Armstrong ‘chose point A and point B, and dug this trench 40m long and I (Armstrong) thought that’s actually fine by itself, do we need to say any more? Perhaps use small stones? He said no, no, I’ve loads of those.’ Long’s initial idea, as Armstrong tells it, having decided where he wanted to position something, was a strip of wildflowers,45 one of his minimalist insertions, in this case something he felt might be appropriate to the garden. However the rabbits wouldn’t have gone along with this, and neither would the gale force winds we get in the winter. I don’t think he’s a gardener in any way. So we had to make a suggestion to him. He was happy to have a look at the particular plant I chose, Baloskion tetraphyllum, and he felt it might work. The deal with Long is to keep the sur­ rounding grass in order [that is, short]. He doesn’t mind if [the tall grasses of the installation itself are] higgledy. The seedheads create a soft, fuzzy top, while it’s reedy at the base. That’s how I sold it to him. It’s Long’s only work with living material.46 Following on this question of selecting plants for specific locations, and bear­ ing flowering in mind, Armstrong observes, I think that to have wild exotics cheek by jowl with mature native woodland would look silly. So there has to be a buffer to allow that easy settling in the wider landscape, you’re drawn in […] there’s a practical issue, the woodland provides dense canopy shade, which kind of precludes more flamboyant exotic stuff. To some extent any colour will do as long as it’s green along the woodland. It’s not as restrictive as it sounds. Schefflera, for example, are very classy aristocratic plants from China and Vietnam, but they sit easily within that landscape and they’ve become a sort of signature plant for the woodland. I’ve spent quite a lot of time collecting individual scheffleras in various ways, growing them on and settling them in the wider landscape.47 They don’t really flower, well, they do in a restrained way, but they’re really grown for architectural qualities. As line and foliage, they certainly work

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very well. Within the aegis of the woodland there are rhododendrons, magno­ lias and camellias, which do obviously flower and they’ve become traditional Cornish plants. […] The landscape doesn’t change dramatically and if there were [sometimes] a riot of colour after which drabness would arrive, it wouldn’t offer up the balanced easy harmony which is what the whole thing’s about. Baloskion tetraphyllum (in Tremenheere Line) happens to be a rather restrained, quiet plant, but one that is very adaptable to that particular setting, and perform the function that he [Long] wanted; to have a clear line in the middle of close cut grass. Again, how it’s presented and its position in the wider setting is most important, and obviously to a large extent the actual plant material itself. It’s a much more conceptual work, a line due South from the top of the gardens inviting you to take in the wider view. In this, it is balanced by the more recent spiral installation in the trees at the lower end of the garden.48 Both direct the visitor’s attention to the garden itself, to the land­ scape immediately surrounding it, and also across Mounts Bay to St Michael’s Mount and West towards Mousehole. Both encompass views of other works: the lower van­ tage point affording a long view up the valley past the Chivers and the Randall-Page; the upper stretching down it past the Turrell and the Billy Wynter Camera Obscura.49 The gale force winds referred to above by Armstrong have taken their toll on the grasses at the front, creating the curve so characteristic of trees and shrubs on the exposed coast. It brings the plantsman into conflict with his idea of the precision of the work: While that’s natural and how it is, I think it would be stronger if the front wasn’t quite so [I made a face in disagreement] you’re keen for it to remain! I’m thinking of putting up a wind hurdle at the front when we’re closed to allow the front to become more established, it looks a little bit puny. And also maybe the Phormiums beyond take away from it looking down at it from the top. The site was chosen because it’s a slightly receding plateau and then a quick drop. If it were an infinity line going to nothing it might be stronger than mer­ ging into the planting below it. But that’s something for next winter maybe. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he is more immediately forthcoming about plants than about art. The collaboration with Long overall exemplifies Armstrong’s take on the planting and sculpture as working in equal conjunction as well as incorporating a fundamental relation to landscape. The planting scheme overall ‘is not driven by ideology, but by the soil, the aspect, the cultural requirements of the plants, what will do best in a certain location. It has to have a quality like the art works, and they also have to bring a certain level of quality or class.’ Armstrong has observed in relation to Kishio Suga (see below) that the Japanese are more in tune with gardens that are meant to

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relate directly to an idea of landscape, as ‘stylised symbols of natural landscape,’50 which he contrasted scathingly with over reliance on herbaceous borders. So the attraction of Long for Armstrong is not hard to understand in terms of landscape, but the walking element, for which Long is also known, is also sig­ nificant. Armstrong once spent time at Dartington Hall, Devon learning how to walk as monks do. The headspace one gets into with measured contemplative walking contrib­ utes to the overall experience. The gradual changes in stimuli enable the walker to experience the ambience in a quiet way, it gives you time. Again it gives you permission to stop and look and think or not think […] it’s just as appropriate to think of nothing, just be aware of trees, plants. Any kind of inquiry into artworks or planting remains incidental to overall experience. It is something a sculpture garden can give you that perhaps exhibitions can’t. Armstrong mischievously then said, ‘A garden by itself can be deeply boring!’ Going on to explain by way of anecdote, he tells how he invited the Cornish gardener Edward Needham to visit gardens with him. Needham replied politely by card to say ‘I’d rather not.’ ‘On reflection,’ Armstrong goes on, this is quite understandable. Needham was a prolific traveller and plant explorer. The comparison is with chancing upon plants in wilderness loca­ tions rather than in a manicured and artificial setting. The wild location carries the hope of a quietly thrilling discovery – rather comparable to chancing upon a Peter Randall-Page in an unannounced fashion.51 Needham ‘created his own criteria’ in modelling a valley where he lived for over 35 years (see Browse 2004).52 As a result, he would rather walk the coast path than visit gardens. Armstrong has also observed ‘that there are layers to creating a restful oasis from modern life at Tremenheere. Alongside the planting and artwork and everything else, the atmosphere and ambience allows a transport of experience, providing a venue for creative thought, really.’ It is more ‘evolved’ than simple leisure, and he sees the art of the whole (sculptures, planting, landscape) as engaging deeper levels. Each art, as is natural, has a distinct mode and form of duende, but their roots unite at the point from which flow […] the ultimate matter, and uncontrollable mutual depth and extremity of wood, sound, canvas, word. (Frederico Garcia Lorca, Juego y teoría del duende, 1933)53 [ … ] he [Robert Smithson] did have a rather bifurcating mind, which, like the gnarled oaks, was rooted in the ground and the rocks – like his being expressed in nature. (Nancy Holt, 2012)54

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The senses in which plants and landscape are art are radical in implication, and they are essential to the concept of ‘event’ the sense elaborated in this book.55 The fact that Long’s installation has already changed considerably since planting; that both Suga’s pieces are in their second iterations signifies much more than a complication in the practice of dating works of art. The works become openended; they are a ‘becoming.’ Rosi Braidotti describes ‘a bioegalitarian turn’ in contemporary thought that encourages ‘us to relate to animals as animals ourselves’ (Braidotti, 2009). The implications of this turn, as in Donna Haraway’s work, is to ‘bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, […] nature and culture, in unexpected ways’ (Haraway, 2003). While the focus of these thinkers is primarily on animal life, they recognise the implicit opening on to plant life that bioegalitarian thinking represents, not least because of the changed relationship with any kind of ‘other.’ Taking the life of plants seriously is no longer to be seen as marginal, or even weird. It may well be vital. It is only recently that work in philosophy has begun to look closely at plants. This move is highly relevant to the garden, of course, but also in many other areas including plant science56 and environmental ethics. Hannah Stark, writing on plant ontology, refers to the way that cultural work on plants is part of ‘the intensification of ecophilosophy and ecocriticism’ (Stark, 2015 181). Feminist writing and philosophy has been in the forefront of this move, for example in the seminars and writing since the 1970s of Hélène Cixous on the Brazilian novelist and short-story writer, Clarice Lispector, and in the approaches of philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Vicki Kirby. The feminism I refer to (and there are many ‘feminisms’) is inherently and profoundly egalitarian, since it is founded on respect for ‘the other’ to the extent that even the concept of the other is challenged. It requires a paradigm shift. Kirby’s work approaches the issues through a fascinating interdisciplinarity, including semiology of the body, deconstruction, language and epistemology, which has been described as redefin­ ing ‘the ways in which we think about life, the human and the posthuman.’57 This has in effect mounted an assault on what used to be an ‘almost hegemonic’ idea of ‘culture’s comprehensive ability to make a world in its own interpretive terms’ (Neimanis, 2017). It is a challenge to how we understand the role of art in culture, indeed ‘what art is,’ that puts the sculpture garden in a unique position to explore issues of much wider concern. We are, in some respects, once again in a position similar to that which Rosalind Krauss describes in her indispensable work, a situation in which ‘the category has now been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing. And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is’ (Krauss, 1979 33).58 Similarly, but not the same, she could assert that we did know what sculpture is, setting it in her well-known expanded field of oppositions. The territory and frameworks have evolved. We can at least now ask whether we remain in a place where the terms of the negative condition she outlines – not­ landscape and not-architecture – remain optimum; ‘logical operations’ on a ‘set of cultural terms,’ ‘[…] organised through the universe of terms that are felt to be in

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opposition within a cultural situation’ (loc.cit. 43). The difference in the situation we are in now is in the greater fluidity of the terms, where ‘is’ and ‘is not’ cease to be fixed, and therefore potentially disappear, and in the equalizing of terms such as nature and culture, landscape, art, plants. It is a subtle one; this is, after all, a challenging of oppositional thinking, not an ‘othering’ of intellectual precedent. It is encapsulated in the following observation, ‘Territory is not the background or context for sensory qualities […] but rather it is […] sensations, qualities, that enable territory to appear’ (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). Following Cixous and Lispector, Michael Marder puts it this way: ‘the spatio­ temporal movement of plants, non-synchronous with human time, is directed toward and by the other (light, the changing seasons, etc.) and therefore, unfolding as a hetero-temporality, is governed by the time of the other.’59 He goes further: The living tending of plants toward their other, the tending expressed in growth, the acquisition of nutrients, and procreation, amounts to the nonconscious intentionality of vegetal life, the cornerstone of its ‘sagacity.’ In keeping with vegetal ontology, plant-thinking practices an embodied, finite, and material expression; is wholly oriented to the other […] and stands for the impersonal, non-individuated it thinks underlying and sub­ verting the ever-present synthesis of I think. (Marder, 2013, 12) Marder’s language can be knotty, but the implications of what he has to say are far-reaching and clear: taking plant life into serious consideration impacts on how we experience what it is to be human, and how we treat life forms that we do not consider to be human. It is not enough to dismiss them because they are not ‘like us.’ It is therefore unethical to assume we can do what we like with them. It is possible that the power (and current popularity) of the sculpture garden derives in part from the combination of art with our intuitive sense of plant life, not just the aesthetics of looking. Perhaps also it is because a garden is almost always beautiful; arguably, if it is not, it is due to the human element and/or neglect. Contemporary art in general is not primarily focused on the beautiful (which is not meant as a criticism, at least not of art). To experience various life-forms as having even the potential to equality with us is to change our sense of who we are, and, crucially, what art is. As Eduardo Kohn puts it, ‘In that realm beyond the human, processes, such as representa­ tion, that once seemed so familiar, suddenly begin to appear strange’.60 This is not the same as in a gallery or in the urban setting, and although argu­ ably more of the above may apply than at first appears, for example in that works will eventually decay, or that light may change, these factors are only contingent. In the garden, they are fundamental. An assumption of equality between all the elements of the sculpture garden draws attention to the synergy between them rather than to the appreciation of any one of them as primary. Again, we are brought to how we think it. It impacts on not only the need to be adaptable in the ways we explore a garden; we need to be open to

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changing how we see ourselves as interacting with it. To make a simplified analogy, an 18th century English garden directs the visitor along defined routes and towards often elevated viewing points, with specific areas of greater or lesser informality, but generally less formal than the French style that preceded it. There is the detachment of perspective and an assumption of the superiority of an ordered Nature over wilder­ ness. We know, in general, what to expect: a lake, a temple, the odd ruin, perhaps; above all, a great house.61 We admire what we can do with nature. While landscape, art and planting are all part of this, they are not equal. A work of art is not generally placed in ways that suggest it is inseparable from the landscape and where its effects might evolve over time. Working with landscape and planting implies change, instability, impermanence. It is a collaboration and an inquiry. An approach that sets us apart – from the garden, the earth, each other – will no longer serve. To postulate seeing ourselves as part of the same life forces as all matter is the general implication of the deceptively simple question put by what follows: what happens if we assume that landscape, art and planting are equal in the sculpture garden?

Notes 1 ‘By Tre, Pol and Pen shall ye know Cornishmen’, according to the rhyme noted down by Richard Carew in his 1602 Survey of Cornwall. 2 British readers old enough to remember the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1963 will know that Cornwall did not escape the coldest winter since 1740. It lasted from December 1962 to March 1963. 3 According to the 2012 exhibition at The Garden Museum in London and reported in the FT https://ft.com/content/c4c0a9b2-f8d3-11e1-b4ba-00144feabdc0, accessed 20.05.2019. 4 https://greatgardensofcornwall.co.uk Most if not all of these gardens were begun in the 19th century, to accommodate and display the exotic species brought back, either by estate owners, or by the plant hunters they sponsored. All 12 gardens in the group are open to the public and provide full visitor facilities. 5 Tregehan, owned by Tom Hudson, which occupies the south facing half a valley. is the other. There are no plans add any more members to the Great Gardens. 6 This and the remaining remarks attributed to Armstrong in the book are either exact tran­ scriptions or close paraphrases of a number of conversations I recorded with him, either in the gardens or the café, and approved by him. There is one exception to this, which is the long quotation below, which was supplied in writing. See also Armstrong, 2006. 7 The process for obtaining grant aid for the fine café designed by Barrie Briscoe, who was a local resident, ‘very nearly killed us all’, says Armstrong, since it ruined momentum, much as they needed the funds. This substantial investment in the fledgling project shows considerable forward vision, and it was planned for expansion. A tiny grant came from the Henry Moore Institute (‘bless them’) for the David Nash installation. ‘That’s pretty much it. The Forestry Commission contributed to the boardwalk, to improve access, and English Nature grant aided the top field as it performs the function of holding water and stopping it going on to the road, and especially preventing the pollution of Marazion Marsh Nature Reserve with fertilisers. Sediment ponds hold water up, then they are managed to go down hill. This is now a landscape feature’ (see Figure 1.6). Filtration and water manage­ ment are possibly one reason why most Cornish valley gardens have a series of descending ponds. Tremenheere used to provide the water supply for the locality, getting around 46” of rain per annum, concentrated in small area; the origin of the water tank so admirably repurposed by Turrell for Aqua Obscura.

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8 Armstrong cites the example of David Walsh, who has invested huge amounts in a centre in Hobart, Tasmania, transforming the country. [The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and Moorilla Estate]. He’s a maverick, made a fortune from a gambling system that wins vast amounts. He can’t now gamble directly. He’s spent 10–20 million on new gallery Kapoor, Turrells […] . 9 An early example was the ‘cut stack and burn event 18 years ago.’ This consisted of a circular wall of gorse, which was set alight at the Spring equinox. ‘It went off like a rocket, due to the internal thermals, leaving a pink necklace of cinder on the hillside. It was made by Bruce Davis, an environmental artist commissioned by National Trust to do various works. It took about three months to create the installation. The fire service said they’d need to stand 25 meters back, which they grumbled about as absurd, but it turned out to be ‘absolutely appropriate! Gorse was an early fuel, and some of the huge inglenook fireplaces one sees around Cornwall and elsewhere were to accommodate these bundles of gorse. It was an eco event to stimulate thinking about alternative fuels. All the rage now, but less so back then.’ A forthcoming example is the Force Majeure festival, culminating at the Summer Solstice – like the Equinoxes, solar events remain a vital part of the Celtic cal­ endar and are actively celebrated in Cornwall (Beltain in Summer, Samhain to usher in the winter). The website listing says ‘Held in aid of Freedom from Torture, the [Solstice] event features soundscapes, films, paintings, ceramics, talks, poetry readings, performance and sitespecific artworks from over 60 artists and performers that will take you on a thrilling, multisensory tour through the gardens on the most auspicious night of the summer.’ 10 That Armstrong had to wait to add the gallery later was part of the planning and grant debacle referred to in the previous note. There is a rich programme of events that are genuinely locally embedded and local artists benefit greatly from having a focal point of this active kind. 11 Le Grice died in 2012. The retrospective was held September 30, 2017 – November 12, 2017. 12 Rose Hilton died on March 20, 2019. 13 Which one reason is why ‘no dead artists’ at the time of acquisition. All the installa­ tions entail extensive discussion. 14 Many Cornish gardens are traditionally closed at the end of May. ‘The important fact that the artwork is non-changing means that the planting doesn’t have the same sea­ sonal characteristics as most Cornish gardens, a lot of Cornish gardens close at the end of May because it’s all over, there’s just dense green walls all over. Caerhayes, Tregrehan, Trewithen, That wouldn’t be any good for me, having landscape and sculpture as the other parts of the trilogy.’ 15 The nearby (and historic) Newlyn Art Gallery was already showing one of Turrell’s Arcus installations: essentially, blacked out spaces that lead to a second space seen through a window. 16 Armstrong remarked that ‘the artwork evolves as a collaborative thing, even with Turrell, he wanted a wooden bench, which might have looked heavy. 2.2m high dark wood could be very oppressive [working against] the white roof. And the design of the floor was something we decided to do ourselves as a simple arrange­ ment rather than two overlapping circles as he suggested which would look incred­ ibly busy and take your eye away from the main event. An ellipse is basically two overlapping circles that merge, but setting [the circles] out individually in stones would be a distraction. When he came back, he was perfectly pleased with the result. ‘That’s another one I’ve lost’, he said. He didn’t seem to mind in the end.’ 17 There is a shared Quaker understanding that is likely to have contributed to it. Tur­ rell was brought up a Quaker, and Jane Martin, the GP to whom Armstrong is mar­ ried – they work in the same NHS practice – is a Quaker. Armstrong is very familiar with their gatherings and rituals, and sympathetic to them. 18 See Chapter 9 for a brief discussion of Venet at Tremenheere. 19 Also discussed later in this volume, mainly Chapters. 2, 3 and 9.

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34

35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42

Penny Florence

See for example https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-13470363 See below on Kishio Suga’s arrival. Alongside the decision only to include artists living at the time of acquisition. For a discussion of the Minotaur, and other works at Tremenheere, see Chapter 9. Discussed in the Introduction. See Chapter 9. Turrell commissioned a number of photographs, from which a series of prints was planned. As in the entrances to American Modernist houses, similarly derived from the Japanese. Frank Lloyd-Wright’s rightly famous Falling Water (1936–7) is an appropriate example, since its organic concept as a living entity goes beyond harmony with the landscape; it is conceived as continuous with it, as are the elements at Tremenheere. Cf. note 15 above. Some do get lost, which is interesting, since anyone used to walking in the landscape would immediately be able to reorientate themselves. It’s simply a choice of paths round a single valley. See Groom’s informative lecture at https://youtube.com/watch?v=S3ZWjHKzrtk (accessed 07.01 2019). Armstrong introduced the work to Blain Southern, the London Gallery, who didn’t know of Suga, and were immediately interested – and grateful. They organised a show, which aroused considerable European interest. But anything further was stopped by Blum & Poe, the US gallery who asserted their rights. Suga had to accept this. Armstrong and Jane Martin, his wife and co-owner of Tremenheere, greatly admired his 2017 show at Château La Coste, Provence, in the brilliant pavilion designed by Renzo Piano. The property brings together vineyards, hospitality and large-scale contemporary art. Briscoe was lent a house in Tuscany where his sister-in-law lived. There he met Kounellis, and they became good friends. Armstrong puts Kounellis with Beuys, Gabo and Moore high in an off-the cuff list of favourites. My thanks for this information are due to the architect Petra Elkan, who is Briscoe’s widow. It is published here with her permission. A major retrospective in Venice at the Fondazione Prada from 11.05. – 24.11.2019 is, at the time of writing, the latest of Kounelliss’s many exhibitions worldwide. We haven’t been able to ascertain whether the former farm still functions as a Foundation now. Olive trees and a boulder chosen by Petra mark the spot, knowing that was what he wanted. The loss of the Kounellis memorial event is only one of several major events and installations that have fallen through, often due to the commercial interests of galleries. All of them would have been world class additions, including one Arte Povera example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jannis_Kounellis accessed 25.05.2019. The text on artworks in the printed and online material is deliberately brief, in keeping with the ‘holy trinity’ of art, plants and landscape. His recent compromise – yielding to pressure – of putting small, discrete labels with the artist’s name and the title near the works can sometimes jar. But such habits and visitor expectations are hard to break. Anecdotally, I have seen many visitors walk straight past the Sugas without a glance, as has Armstrong. The original work was made for gallery exhibition and used soft wood. The change to bamboo constitutes an evolution in the work appropriate to an outdoor setting for reasons greater than durability. During a recent visit to Berlin reported in the South China Daily, a group of skilled scaf­ folders were apparently treated as artists https://scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/ 1186476/why-hong-kong-last-frontier-bamboo-scaffolders. Giotto was prominent among his choice of painters (with de Stael & Bacon); cf. how Giotto, having brought back drawing from life after 2 centuries, uses landscape to define and focus action. The other two seem to bring together abstraction, landscape and, perhaps, the interests of a physician. See also Chapters 3 and 6 (Watson and Descombes). Armstrong’s mother was also a garden designer. See also p. 33 ff.

Tremenheere

43

43 This was true even of flying when I looked into it, by the time you factor in the connec­ tions and security delays. It may be better now. A little. Sometimes. Weather permitting. 44 A simple straight line in a field, it was followed by many other documented and photographed walks responding to landscape, and often modifying them as a result. Time is a factor in this work, which Long also records. See especially the essay by Georges Descombes in this volume ‘How to Make a Path.’ 45 ‘The planting has to have a life beyond the season, has to have year round appeal. That kind of dictates structural architectural planting and the comparatively minor role of flowers, [I’m not] disregarding flowers, but it’s about having the emphasis on the plant first and the flower second.’ Wild flowers, especially the spectacular blue­ bells, are a valued presence in the woods. 46 The artist is pleased enough with the result to have requested that postcards be made of it. Armstrong lightheartedly expressed satisfaction that Sir Nicholas Serota also likes it. (Serota was the director of Tate from 1988–2017 and oversaw the creation of Tate Modern (opened 2000) and now chairs Arts Council, England. Serota has a house in West Cornwall.) 47 See also the end of the Preface for further details. 48 The installation of this viewing platform (‘massive sculpture going in, spiral thing in trees to the east’) coincided with one of our conversations, and gives further insight into how closely involved and hands-on he is with everything. In a revealing aside, he said ‘today if my back holds up, we’ll manage another of the footings.’ It’s fairly typical; he will pull up the odd weed and make asides about plants and sculptures as you walk round. The platform was made by local (originally Australian) metal fabricator Tim Stockings-Baker. 49 See garden plan in the Appendix. 50 Arguably, the ideas governing the tradition of Britain’s great landscape gardens are very different from this, not least because of their reference and vantage points. Perhaps Randall-Page, whose work is discussed in the next chapter, can illuminate this: you can as readily imagine most of his work in a Japanese garden as you can in the wild settings where you can come across them. (Armstrong mentioned doing so at the edge of a lake in Scotland). But they would be much harder to accommodate in a Capability Brown design without altering its meanings quite fundamentally. Randall-Page seeks to under­ stand natural landscape, not to alter it in conformity with an idea of beauty. 51 See previous note and Chapter 2. 52 Armstrong regards Needham as a mentor. The Browse book, Gardening on the Edge: Drawing on the Cornwall Experience, was published by Alison Hodge, in association with Armstrong. 53 Translated by A.S. Kline as Theory and Play of the Duende, https://poetryintranslation. com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.php, accessed 30.04.2019. 54 Tate Etc. issue 25: Summer 2012. 55 See especially Chapter 10. The term is developed out of Grosz, 2008. 56 See the next chapter on Peter Randall-Page. 57 Claire Colbrook, Penn State University, on Kirby’s profile page at UNSW, Sydney https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/people/vicki-kirby/accessed 27.4.2019. 58 Krauss has in mind Perimeters, Pavilions, Decoys, 1978, by Mary Miss, which is perhaps more precisely an earthwork than what was then thought of as sculpture. Nobuo Sekine’s Phase: Mother Earth (1968) is also relevant, as is Kapoor’s Descent into Limbo (1992), in the news in 2018 when man fell into it. As with other pieces of Kapoor’s, the depth is impossible to tell by eye, such is the intensity of the pigment. 59 Marder, 2013 12. 60 Kohn (2013) 2. 61 This is clearly only intended as an indicative summary. See Hunt’s essay in this volume, Chapter 4.

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References Browse, Philip and McMillan (2004). Gardening on the Edge: Drawing on the Cornwall Experience. Alison Hodge. Grosz, Elizabeth (2008). Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press. Kirby, Vicki (1997). Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. Routledge. Kohn, Eduardo (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. University of California Press. Krauss, Rosalind (1979). ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8, Spring. pp. 30–44. ––– (2011). Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Duke University Press. Lispector, Clarice (1964). (trans. by Novey, Idra) The Passion according to G.H. Penguin Modern Classics. Marder, Michael (2013). Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press. Stark, H. (2015). ‘Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies’. In Roffe, J., Stark, H. (eds), Deleuze and the Non/Human. Palgrave Macmillan.

2 THE SEED IN THE STONE Peter Randall-Page’s exploration of energetic structure Penny Florence

Peter Randall-Page RA. Slip of the Lip. 2016, Hassan Granite, 89 × 160cm and 115 × 200cm. Installed May 2016.

FIGURE 2.1A

Photo by permission

FIGURE 2.1B

Slip of the Lip (Detail).

Photo: Penny Florence

46

Penny Florence

Peter Randall-Page RA is a sculptor whose work, while deriving from natural forms and processes, is never Romantic. It is never descriptive, nor is it either precisely abstract or simply representational. This balancing act is deftly achieved by treating massive stone boulders as sources of potential energy. The effect can be almost as powerful as if several tons of granite were hanging over your head, though far more complex and subtle than this implies. The point concerns potential energy; the work is underpinned by a scientific rationalism. This is in syn­ ergy with Armstrong’s understanding of the interrelation between landscape, plants and sculpture in the garden. Broadly speaking, both are thoroughly in tune with emergent ecological moves in the arts overall. Such moves necessarily raise the pos­ ition of landscape and plants in relation to art from ‘setting’ to equal element. At Tremenheere, the siting of Randall-Page’s Slip of the Lip refers to the garden not only in its siting and forms, but also in its processes. It is set, as several works elsewhere by Randall-Page are, in a space carved out of the ground, or a recessed space that connotes at the same time both a womb or a seed pod;1 animate and inani­ mate. In Marina Warner’s words, ‘His sculptures characteristically delve and burrow into the rock as if it were a living thing, poking it like the sun itself into unfold­ ing […] lighting up the cockles in its dormant heart’ (Warner 1999, 26). Or in the artist’s own words, which evince his interest in an embodied onto­ logical inquiry: It was literally like getting blood out of a stone […] The whole enterprise is not to feel like a disembodied consciousness […] I know that we are all deeply connected […] a physical knowledge, connecting us as part of everything, with the trees, with Douglas (his dog) and with the stories of the past and the future. (Randall-Page 1999, 25) Slip of the Lip thus conjures a sense of living stone, perhaps deriving in part from its origins in the artist’s drawings of seed pods,2 but it is immediately apparent that it is not descriptive of the seeds, even though it is strongly evocative of them. Specifically in this case, they are Eucalyptus seeds, and there are a few specimens of these trees to be found around the garden. This is what RandallPage recently said about the work: This two part work is the latest in a series of sculptures exploring the idea of positive form and negative space. These pods break apart revealing the exquisite precision of how the parts marry together. The sculpture is not the copy of a seed pod but rather an exploration of convex and concave forms relating to how things fit together and break apart. The “male” and “female” forms are ambiguous and somewhat hermaphrodite. The impli­ cation is that the two stones have separated, revealing their complex internal conjunction. The title Slip of the Lip is a playful reference to the physical form of the sculpture and its sexual ambiguity.

The seed in the stone

47

The description contains mathematical, anatomical and botanical terms, bringing together the animate and the inanimate: the work concerns ‘positive form and negative space’; ‘an exploration of convex and concave forms’ relating to how things fit together and break apart, while at the same time possibly alluding to sexual congress. There is undoubtedly a more marked charge than usual in the artist’s work, but, like the Hindu Lingam (with which Randall-Page is acquainted) it has more to do with energetic tension than overt eroticism. It concerns natural cycles of regeneration and destruction.3 Slip of the Lip embodies continuity and difference: Randall-Page’s stone sculpture and graphic art clearly point us towards energetic pattern, the tension between figure and ground, contour and detail, outside and in, plant and stone. He finds pattern to be fundamental, reflective as it is of ‘universal tendencies’. The growing habit of plants is pattern, which activates the second meaning of the word: ‘model’, as in, perhaps, an underlying design (‘Template’, would be too static). Pattern, he points out, can be seen from ‘atomic, crystalline structures, right up to galaxies’ while at the same time there is ‘an equally strong tendency to random variation. The tension between these is behind all driving forces, includ­ ing evolution’. When asked what a random element might be, the artist gave the example of a naturally eroded boulder, formed by innumerable chance events over time. Stone is subject to scientific laws; events may intervene and modify their unfolding. So the ‘random’ element here is not exactly the same as ‘chance’; the difference

FIGURE 2.2

Peter Randall-Page RA. Stones for Evening Light.

Reproduced by permission

48

Penny Florence

though subtle, and largely in connotative meaning, is significant. In general, when we say ‘chance’ we mean related generally either to the accidental, or providential, to do with luck or fate. ‘Random’ largely means without conscious decision, unknown.4 But it is subject to laws. It is neither arbitrary nor predestined. Another aspect of this philosophical approach can be seen in Randall-Page’s installation at the Chelsea Flower Show, London of Stones for Evening Light, a highly successful collaboration with Luciano Giubbilei and renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma for the Laurent Perrier garden on the theme of ‘Nature and Human Intervention’. Giubbilei thinks of himself primarily as an artist whose materials are plants and landscape, and his planting takes a subtle line for a walk between the wild and the cultivated, as his success at The Chelsea Flower Show attests; Chelsea is not known for rewarding wildness. Yet this garden was one of his several gold medal winners, and he achieved best in show in 2014. His Tuscan origins take us straight to the long tradition of Italian gardens, but his influences are far more eclectic than this, drawing, for example, on international Modernism, Japanese simplicity and a use of water that recalls Islamic design. Randall-Page was aware that there would be a predominance of muted pinks in the planting, and the title, Stones for Evening Light, makes understated reference to the warm tones of sunset. This is further reflected in his choice of stone: all three boulders are differing shades of pink granite. The lines carved into their surfaces bring to mind at the same time the natural contours of landscape, the lines of ploughed fields and the raked gravel of a Zen Garden. This last is invoked by Kuma’s bamboo pavilion that stands behind, focusing and containing the allusion. Natural forces are also present in the movement of this pavilion, whose curved uprights are set in motion by each breath of wind. The overall effect is contemplative and as philosophical as it is visual. The interrelation between landscape, art and plants is seamlessly invoked. In this way, Randall-Page’s approach to installation could be called ‘environ­ mental’ in the sense that how he makes and situates work is generally inseparable from its location; Harmonic Solids (2013) at Karlsruhe University does the same, for example, though it reads very differently from almost any of his works in rural locations. To begin with, its five constituents5 are shaped out of Carrara marble, a material more associated with urban civilization than his more usual granite. Then they are spaced out along a line following that of the clean open square for which they were commissioned, which includes a new avenue of 24 trees and a formal lawn. Their interaction is more overtly abstract or conceptual than usual, and they relate as much to the location – which, when the trees mature, they will have substantially changed – as they do to each other. Here, too, the artist goes straight to plants when asked to describe how these par­ ticular forms came about. The underlying strong forms evolved from putting spheres together, but his interest was ‘not in symmetry, but rather in taking layers off like un­ peeling an onion.6 If they were perfect, they would be cold; what is interesting is the space between geometry and biology’.7 Geometric form, then, is always approached through organic process, incorporating the random, and therefore approximated.

The seed in the stone

49

Peter Randall-Page RA, Harmonic Solids, 2013. Carrara Marble. Spheres 120 × 120 × 120 cm, Dodecahedron 120 × 130 × 120 cm, Tetrahedron 120 × 130 × 120 cm. Cube 120 × 122 × 120 cm. Commissioned for Karlsruhe University Germany.

FIGURE 2.3

Photo: Gerold Jaggle

There is, as the title suggests, another factor. The work alludes to Pythagoras on natural harmony and number, reproduced through an 1844 device invented by one Professor Blackburn and called The Harmonograph. Put simply, it is a device that employs two oscillating pendulums; one controlling a stylus, the other a drawing surface. The length of the pendulums can be altered to have specific mathematical relationships. The combination of these two frequencies produces drawings, which are visual equivalent to harmonies in music.8 When working with boulders, generally Randall-Page begins by drawing on the surface; but with these Platonic solids, he began by working incrementally, including stacking ping-pong balls, then waxing over them. This simple method keeps to fundamentals because it depends on how a number of spheres can be made to balance, how they fit together. The perfection of the sphere, two of which bracket the linear installation, is both structurally integral to, but different from, the energetic spaces between. It is an incremental method that recalls one of the ways Henry Moore devel­ oped natural forms into sculpture, but working with animate rather than plant life, which I was privileged to witness on a visit to his studio in Much Hadham, UK.9 The artist showed us how he would often begin with a bone and add wax, following its contours at first, while steadily evolving it, then combining, or placing it in tension with, others.

50

Penny Florence

In this, the wax is far from irrelevant. Despite the fact that wax does not dir­ ectly figure in the completed work, its flows, subject to the laws of thermoplas­ ticity and its own composition as a hydrocarbon, are significant in determining the form to which the artist will work. This is not a rigid process; there are many contributing factors to the ‘rules and the random’, in addition to the com­ position of the marble and the freehand touch of the sculptor. The two states of the wax from solid to liquid and back evoke the turbulent origins of metamorphic rock, formed over millennia in intense heat and pressure on the protolith, or original rock, radically altering, or even destroying its structure in liquefaction. The result of these violent forces is a recrystallization of the material at the deepest level, manifesting on the surface of white marble as its characteristic glow, the result of its low refractive index, meaning that light actually penetrates right into it before being bounced out again. These living processes are re­ activated in the completed work, whose surfaces work with each other subtly to create subliminal effects that vary from moment to moment. It is an astounding process, so easy to take for granted; Randall-Page does not. So surface texture is never simply decorative, but rather points us towards deep structure; deep structure, in turn is expressed on two dimensional surfaces, and so on. And this, in turn, leads to a third significant element that interestingly bridges Randall-Page’s sculpture and printmaking: his distinguished architectural commissions. If we take three of these, Dulwich College, the University of Birmingham and The Eden Project, we shall find that they are all consistent with his work that is explicitly set in conversation with the natural, but, importantly, they bring the issues into seats of learning. Given the epistemological – yet never didactic – drive of all his work, and how close this is to Tremenheere in funda­ mentals, it is important to consider them as an integral part of what a sculpture garden might be. The first, his designs for the exterior of the Laboratory at Dulwich College, clearly exemplifies just how close the relation is between all his work is: it derives from biological principles; it concerns pattern and structure in the natural world; while at the same time, it relates to language (at the levels referred to in the introduction)10and story, not to mention music and mathematics. For the façade of the new building at Dulwich, he based his designs on the Lindenmayer algorithmic system (L-system), which has been widely applied in computing, although it was originally designed as a way of describing and mod­ elling plant development. It very quickly opens onto mathematics, fractals and formal grammars of all kinds.11 We are back again with pattern, and it is worth bearing in mind that surface ‘decoration’ is something of a taboo especially when it comes to Modernist architecture and sculpture.12

The seed in the stone

51

Peter Randall-Page RA. Laboratory, Dulwich College, London. 2016 Terracotta panels and Decomo precast Concrete.

FIGURE 2.4

Photo: Daniel Shearing

The idea of pattern is often misconstrued as a decorative add-on to things, like something superficial, and in fact, for me, the opposite is absolutely the case. Pattern is fundamental to the way everything fits together. The universe we’re in has an absolute propensity to spontaneous patternformation in all sorts of ways. Pattern may even be the wrong word […] but certainly kind of tendencies […] in our last talk, we were talking about ‘habits’, of plants, you know, habits of things, the way things tend to be.13 The sense of energetic potential in his work derives from the tension between these forces of regularity or order, and variation. This is so close to plant growth in its relational yet specific generation as to give us great insight into the ways his artistic process go far beyond the formal strictures that often determine them, or serve as their starting point. What he really aims for is to investigate the living energies of matter, regardless of distinctions such as ‘animate’ or ‘inani­ mate’. As the artist said when speaking of medieval sculpture, ‘The foliage

52

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carving (usually seen as decorative and therefore of less importance than the stat­ uary) seemed to me an attempt by the Medieval carvers to embody the essence of growth’ (Randall-Page 2003).14 The patterning of the Laboratory façade at Dulwich College, is similarly rela­ tional, yet specific. It is based on what is known as the dragon curve, which may be defined as ‘any member of a family of self-similar fractal curves, which can be approximated by recursive methods such as Lindenmayer systems.15 For me, it is not chance that this invokes myth (in its reference to the dragon); by connecting directly with stories that echo and modulate throughout the world and across time, it touches on the commonalities or even universal laws that apply to all grammars. This is Randall-Page talking about art, while referencing Universal Grammar: […] it would be pretty remarkable if certain forms didn’t have a resonance since we share an evolutionary history. Noam Chomsky pointed out that while babies born in different cultures learn different languages, we all share an innate propensity for language, and the same basic grammatical structures seem to be hardwired into all of us. Perhaps the same argument could be applied to our appreciation of visual art.16 While some commentators see Chomsky as having now rejected the Universal Grammar he first evolved in about the 1950s, others do not, and the controversy may well be part of a way of thinking similar to that which misunderstands pattern in art and natural forms. Ultimately, its tendency is away from the universal because it cannot reconcile the universal with muta­ tion or with the particular.17 The second architectural commission I want to look at is Theme and Variation (2014), the frieze at the University of Birmingham Bramall Concert Hall. While all of Randall-Page’s works develop out the unification of the sciences of physics and biology into a musical whole, this is made explicit at the Bramall. The design is all about dynamics, evidenced in a talk about the work, where Randall-Page’s vocabulary is full of activity, such as spiralling, becoming, moving, separating, the whole giving a sense of metamorphosis: The original Anning Bell18 frieze images comprise of a grid of 6” square tiles and I decided to use this same tiling system as the base of my design for the Bramall Frieze. These structures will be based on diagonals and I have used rotational symmetry in the centre of the image where the two colours spiral together. Moving away to left and right the pattern becomes a series of zigzag alignments before separating to become terracotta islands at one end and cream islands at the other. I thought of one colour being like sound and the other like silence.

The seed in the stone

53

When the resulting drawing is translated into a two-colour image there is a near perfect balance between the terracotta and cream so the image can be read as terracotta and cream or vice versa, rather like the famous Rubin’s Vase phenomenon, where the negative space becomes two profiles. The overall effect should be a sense of metamorphosis from individual isolated shapes at each end to highly ordered spiralling rotational symmetry in the centre.19 It is another remarkable and syncretic view of living structure, starting from a simple square and shifting to tessellation, to invoke both infinity and congru­ ence as the mention of diagonals turns the inner eye from the vertical and towards rotation. It is music, it is human visual perception and it is mathematics, the vertex as index and as the top of the head, a bringing together of the bio­ logical and physical as in the excited state of quanta. We are in the same territory as the work of Randall-Page’s that I want to end with, the extraordinary Seed, whose 1,800 spiralling surface nodes form what we now call a Fibonacci sequence, but which has long been a fundamental in Arabic mathematics,20 a reminder of the embodiment in the physical world of universal laws if we can think flexibly enough. This sequence, as is well known, occurs throughout animate and inanimate nature from the phyllotaxis of leaf formation to shells to spiral galaxies to human and animal bodies, and in art as the golden ratio. In the artist’s words, he is interested in, ‘[…] the underlying principles that determine the seemingly infinite variety of form we see in the natural world’.21 At The Eden Project, Cornwall, UK,22 Seed was designed together with the building, into which it fits as tightly as if into a pod, ‘The Core’ (it had to be craned into its purpose designed chamber through the roof).23 It is a unique col­ laboration between architect and artist for a futuristic kind of garden that is rarely referred to as such; words like ‘project’, ‘biome’, ‘zone’ are generally used. But it is a garden. And art is a significant component in it, far beyond, though arguably including, the iconic structures that house its temperate, tropical and desert plants. Both the roof through which Seed was lowered and the sculpture below are structured in a Fibonacci spiral. They work together seamlessly with the result that the superlatives invoked by the work’s construction recede in its presence; it is very much as the artist describes, ‘an object of contemplation and medita­ tion, a still, quiet hub; both fossil and seed’.24 Indeed, Randall-Page is equally syncretic in how he views matter and energy. When he talks about his work, he will shift imperceptibly from the language of pattern and geometry to that of energy. It’s as if he works at the moment the one becomes the other, at the release of energy or the germination of the seed. Ultimately, he works with energetic structures. So pattern and surface imply interior dynamics, to the extent that looking at his work leads to seeing the world differently.

Peter Randall-Page RA, Seed, 2007. De Lank Granite. 417.6 × 315 ×

315 cm. Eden Project, Cornwall.

FIGURE 2.5

Photo: Ben Foster

Jolyon Brewis of Grimshaw Architects & Peter Randall-Page. Roof Model of The Core Building. Eden Project, Cornwall.

FIGURE 2.6

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Why this matters can be seen if we consider the recently discovered phenom­ enon that bees can tell which flowers to visit because of their electrostatic charge. It has been known since the 1960s that bees acquire a negative charge in flight by bumping into microscopic positive charged particles. But nobody con­ nected this with how the bees might experience and use this when approaching flowers: […] the bees can do more than just tell if an electric field is there or not. They can also discriminate between fields of different shapes, which in turn depend on the shape of a flower’s petals and how easily they conduct electricity. Clarke and Whitney visualised these patterns by spraying flowers with positively charged and brightly coloured particles.25 Seeing the world differently is about much more than the ‘ah!’ factor; it’s about the ability to grasp more deeply the kinds of dynamic that remain imperceptible or incomprehensible according to current assumptions and states of knowledge. This is often where art and science meet. Barbara Hepworth was another artist whose mathematically accurate art altered the boundaries between fields of understanding. Both she and RandallPage find an interior life in stone, a sense of its interiority, partly by cutting through the relation between surface and inside in such a way as to merge them; Hepworth by piercing the stone, Randall-Page by incising or splitting or both. I don’t think he ever actually pierces stone, however, and this alerts us to a fundamental difference from Hepworth, even though we could follow avenues of similarity. It is that Hepworth’s mathematics emerged through the process of carving. Randall-Page’s is worked out in advance. This is not to say that it is either external or imposed. When he works with boulders, the fact that their surfaces are formed over geological time becomes, in turn, formative of the work. By definition, the shape of a found stone of any size is the result of the action of natural forces, of the wind and weather and the ways these in turn constantly form, and are formed by, the landscape. The completed work will remain continuous with these processes, since they determine the overall outline. There is no intervention in this, other than in the selection and siting of the boulder, since the artist does not change the overall shape, but rather responds to it through surface patterning. Sometimes, for example, the surface carving is planned by stretching elasticated net over the found boulder, distorting the reticular pattern of the net according to its wea­ thered form. The strictly regular mathematics of the square yield to the temporal erosion of natural forces, of water on igneous rock. You might imagine that incising and splitting would be very different, and in one sense, they clearly are. But looking past these differences, both can be approached as indissolubly linked to the surface of the natural stone.

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FIGURE 2.7 Peter Randall-Page RA. Granite Song. 1991. Dartmoor Granite. 70 × 84 ×

40 cm. 70 × 84 × 40 cm.

Photo: Chris Chapman

In the case of Granite Song, a found boulder of the local Dartmoor Granite has been precisely cut in two parts as equal they can be in a natural boulder, and the interior carved deeply enough to be visible from a distance. The carving suggests both a leaf, and, in its apparent stone casing, the interior of a seed. The effect is enhanced greatly by an awareness of all three of the elements of the Tremenheere philosophy equalising landscape, plants and art. The mottled texture of the granite is a reminder of geological time and land­ scape formation as well as effectively contributing to the textures of the location, such a light on water and mixed vegetation, while its colour is native. The moss and lichen on its outside surfaces are continuous with its surroundings. The effect is produced by all the elements of landscape, plants and art, working seamlessly. Granite Song is situated along an ancient path.26 What we regard as untouched landscape is very often the result of human habitation over time, as advances in archaeology and its associated technologies is revealing.27 Sites such as Stonehenge may well have been far more heavily populated than previously assumed. Byways, drover’s roads and footpaths are in themselves linkages or marks of passage, their fascination deriving at least in part from a sense of long history and time. By the side of this old route, still regularly used, Granite Song sits on an island in the middle of a stream. It would be comparatively easy for the inattentive passer-by to miss it, as nothing calls attention to its presence. It is placed directly on the ground, with no plinth, no adjustments to the surroundings at all.

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Brancusi’s famous incorporation of the plinth or support of his work into the work itself is here taken almost to vanishing-point; but the absence of what we recognise as a plinth does not make the idea of a plinth irrelevant. Far from it. How any work of sculpture relates to the ground carries meaning; how any framed painting relates to its surroundings does the same, as Eva Hesse’s HangUp of 1966 wittily showed (not illustrated).28 The work consists of a picture frame with a steel cord attached top and bottom that touches the floor. Made of acrylic, cloth, cord and steel tube, its materials speak to its modernism, and its form interrogates our preconceptions of what painting and sculpture are. The title was cool 1960s slang for uncool inhibitions, including insisting on classify­ ing art as painting or sculpture. The implication is clearly to ask where an art­ work begins and ends, or indeed whether it does at all.

Notes 1 The Fullness of Time, for example 2002. Clipsham Stone and associated landscaping. 88×117×91 cm.74 × 104 × 76 cm. 68.5 × 99.5 × 71 cm. Private collection; and others along paths, in recesses. 2 The original concept, as the artist points out, was developed out of the drawings of Eucalyptus seed pods he made during a residency at the Botanic Gardens in Australia two decades ago. (Tremenheere information sheet, March 2016). 3 Western interpretations of these sculptures, associated with Siva, and translations from the Sanskrit as ‘phallus’ are disputed. The god Siva is, with Brahma and Vishnu one of the triumvirate of the Hindu gods of destruction, creation and preservation respectively. On another tack, the detail image above makes an interating comparison with the photo of Richard Long’s 1988 Sahara Circle on the Tate website’s entry on Land Art. https://tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/l/land-art, accessed 15.06.2019. 4 Clearly there is an overlap between the terms, and this is a selective way of contrasting the terms in order to bring out a point. 5 Spheres120×120×120cm, Dodecahedron 120×130×120cm, Tetrahedron 120×130× 120cm, Cube 120×122×120cm. 6 This and following remarks are quoted from a conversation between Peter and myself recorded at Tremenheere, August 2018. 7 These forms are not unrelated to the small prehistoric ‘petrospheres’ that have been found in Scotland, the best known of which is the so-called ‘Towie Ball’, dated from c. 2500 BC and about 7cm in diameter. Examples have been exhibited in major UK museums, includ­ ing the The Museum of Scotland, the British Museum and the Ashmolean. Their context or purpose, if any, remain unknown. 8 From the artist’s proposal to the University. 9 This was on the occasion of a visit organised by the then fledgling (formed 1974) Association of Art Historians in the 1970s. It made a profound impression on me, and I remember the meeting vividly; but I’m not certain the material was wax. Moore, born in 1898, died in 1986. 10 See Vicki Kirby 1997 & 2011, respectively exploring the meanings and semiological cap­ acities of the body; and taking deconstruction into reflections on nature, the material and science. Problematising the nature-culture division is fundamental to Kirby’s research. 11 As can be seen in any number of fascinating online articles deriving from the work first set out in 1968 by the biologist Aristid Lindenmeyer, and subsequently devel­ oped widely. The building was winner of the RIBA London Award and RIBA National Award 2017.

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12 Cf Adolf Loos’s notorious essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), which not only attacks decoration, but also natural form, in that it was written in reaction against Art Nouveau/Viennna Secession. It is but a short step to misogynist associations with irrelevant femininity, which he does not hesitate to take. Presumably he would have seen as weakness Hepworth’s departure from this Modernist orthodoxy in her restrained, and very beautiful, use of flat colour in her work in wood (she did not paint on stone or metal). 13 Conversation recorded while walking in Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, 3.8. 2018. 14 https://sculpture.org/accessed 10.4.2019. 15 See Wikipedia entries Dragon Curve and L-System (accessed 10.4.2019). 16 Conversation recorded at Tremenheere 03.03.2018. 17 The idea of a more complex understanding of the ‘universal’ has gained credence since I wrote ‘Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art’ in 2003 – not that I would claim any credit for this. It’s about much, much bigger forces and developments. But it remains somewhat controversial. 18 Robert Anning Bell, artist and architect (1862–1933), the maker of the 1905–1909 frieze of the building adjacent to the new Bramall Hall under discussion, was prominent in the Arts & Crafts movement. It is in colour and technique that the designs relate, not style. The Anning Bell references the Italian Renaissance and is figurative. Randall-Page’s design, for me, brings medieval church floor tiles and Islamic design to mind. 19 Peter Randall-Page, The Making of the Bramall Frieze, http://thebramallfrieze.com/ post/51551507964/theproposal, accessed 20.04.2019. 20 Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1180–c. 1250) was known for using the Hindu-Arabic numeric system in the West. The sequence that bears his name was known to Arabic mathematicians far earlier, perhaps in the 6th century. 21 Vimeo.com. Grimshaw, The Laboratory at Dulwich College, 2016, accessed 9.4.2019. 22 Conservation and sustainability through research are fundamental to the Eden Pro­ ject. The site is an abandoned china clay quarry about 10 miles North of The Lost Gardens of Heligan, creator Tim Smit’s cannily named first garden open to the public, in the case of Heligan, a restored Victorian estate. The story generally goes that Smit stumbled on both sites, Heligan when he downsized to Cornwall, and Eden after its completion. This may or may not be accurate. 23 The Eden Project site calls Seed, which weighs over 70 tonnes, ‘one of the biggest sculp­ tures in history made from a single piece of rock’. Carved out of a 167 tonne piece of granite from the nearby De Lank Quarry, the largest crane in Europe was required to lower it into what is known as the Core (the centre of the education building). https:// edenproject.com/visit/whats-here/seed-sculpture, accessed 15.04.2019. 24 loc.cit. 25 Clarke, Whitney, Sutton & Robert. Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees. Science http:/dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1230883, acknowledging work by Liz Neely. Reported in Bees Can Sense the Electric Fields of Flowers, Ed Yong, in National Geographic, https://nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/ 2013/02/21/bees-can-sense-the-electric-fields-of-flowers/accessed 2.02.2019. 26 The ‘Two Moors Way’ footpath between Drewsteignton and Chagford, Devon. See also Chapter 10. Tremenheere is also on an ancient path, St Michael’s Way (Fordh Sen Mighal in Cornish), which is believed to be part of a pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostella. It runs from the North coast of West Cornwall to St Michael’s Mount on the South coast. See also Chapter 8, How to Make a Path, especialy where Descombes discusses Figure 8.9, the work of Carmen Perrin. Here, geological time is revealed through the removal of biological process, such as mosses. 27 For example https://archaeology.org/issues/161-1501/features/2782-england-stone henge-neolithic-ceremonial-landscape. 28 (Art Institute of Chicago). See Bryony Fer, On Abstract Art, Yale University Press, 1997.

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References Fer, Bryony (1997). On Abstract Art. Yale University Press.

Kirby, Vicki (1997) Telling Flesh: The substance of the corporeal. Routledge.

Kirby, Vicki (2011) Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Duke University Press.

Loos, Adolf. (1910/1913) Ornement et Crime, Les Cahiers,d’aujourd’hui.

Randall-Page, Peter and Chapman, Chris. (1999). Granite Song. Devon Books.

Randall-Page, Peter, McAvera, Brian. (2003). Sculpture. July/August 2003, Vol. 22 No. 6.

Warner, Marina (1999) ‘Desire Paths’ in Randall-Page, Peter and Chapman, Chris, Granite

Song. Devon Books 20–28.

3 MONO-HA Paying attention: Japanese art in/of the garden Gay Watson

Concepts of impermanence, emptiness and interdependence underlie traditional painting, poetry and the art of the Japanese garden. They also underlie much of contemporary art. As British Asian sculptor Anish Kapoor says: ‘Art, like the garden, hovers in immanence, the non-declaration of meaning and the possibility of the meaningful […] Contradictory as it seems, the non-declaration of meaning is the very means by which the viewer becomes implicated as an active participant in “an act of making meaning” […] It is an active performative process’. (Walker 2017, 197)

Whilst the Japanese School of Mono-ha artists arose in the 1960s, a time of much upheaval in Japan, it also unmistakably betrays the influence of traditions of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy that have long underpinned Chinese and Jap­ anese aesthetics. At Tremenheere in Cornwall, works by Kishio Suga, a leading member of the Mono-ha school sit comfortably beside those of contemporary Western artists and present the visitor with a hybrid yet strangely congruent experience in a landscape and plantscape that references several biomes. The French philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien presents three biases of European landscape thought in his fascinating book Living Off Landscape (Jullien 2018). Firstly, it is conceived in the shadow of the relationship between part and whole; landscape is the part of the land captured by the observer’s eye. Secondly, it is ascribed to the primacy of visual perception and thus, thirdly, it is necessarily a part of a subject/object divide that will always presume the exteriority of the spectator. European sculpture, from the Greeks to Rodin, has also traditionally followed the same trajectory. A representation of the object is presented to the eyes of the viewer. Very largely, sculpture in the landscape until recent times, has been

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presented as a place marker, an emphasis extraneous to the land itself, a pause in the walk through the landscape, a treat for the viewer. It is strangely distant and dissociated from any understanding or inhabitation of the land itself. Chinese philosophy, in particular Taoism, which closely informs and under­ pins its artistic practices, and which deeply influenced Japanese philosophy and aesthetics, in particular that which we now know as Zen, offers a very different framework. Whereas Western gardens, like Western art, are anthropocentric, East Asian art and gardens are not created from the perspective of the human viewer.1 They aspire to transcend representation by embodying and conveying the dynamic resonance that animates reality. The elements speak for themselves, the human being just one amongst them, not dominant, merely another factor involved in the incessant and ever-changing play of energies. In Taoist philoso­ phy, which deeply influenced later Chinese Buddhist Ch’an (Japanese Zen), everything is considered to emerge from this generative process of energies through which all things arise and pass away as, in the words of David Hinton, poet and translator, ‘Absence burgeons forth into the great spontaneous trans­ formation of Presence’ (Hinton 2018, xiv). Presence is the empirical universe called by Chinese ancients ‘the ten thousand things’. Absence is the generative emptiness or void from which this impermanent and ever-changing Presence perpetually arises. This dynamic opposition of absence and presence, emptiness and fullness, is central to Chinese aesthetics. In a manner profoundly distinctive from European understanding, cosmology and consciousness are seen to be of a single fabric, and the human an organic part of the cosmological process. Wisdom then entails understanding how they are inex­ tricably interwoven, which then enables the insight to dwell as an integrated part of Tao’s organic process. As Hinton describes, ‘The cultivation of this dwelling took many forms, all of which involved a deep engagement with landscape, which was seen as the open door to realization, because it is where Tao’s process of transform­ ation was most majestically and immediately visible’ (Hinton 2018, xv). Indeed in Chinese (and Japanese) the word for landscape is mountains and waters. Another paired term attached to the concept of landscape in Chinese, established in parallel with mountains and waters, is wind/light. These reflect the pairing, the interplay of energetic factors, the most fundamental of which are yin and yang, which underlie all creation. Empty and full, high and low, dense and spacious, moving and silent, everything is the relational result of such pairings. What is vis­ ible also implicates the invisible: what is primary is relation. These are not pairings of contradiction but of complementarity. As François Jullien describes it, What we call landscape draws its consistency from the correlation of mountains and waters. The mountain, it is said, deploys the course of the water, and the water animates the mass of the mountain […] It is from the coupling of the two – from the stable rooting of one and the fluid flow of the other – that the world deploys. (Jullien 2018, 32–3)

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Fundamental Buddhist philosophic concepts of emptiness and interdependence enable a logic of complementarity and correlation, in sharp distinction to the European logic of either/or and contradiction. Jullien has suggested that Chinese thought is structured around ‘a logic of respiration’ as opposed to the Greek ‘logic of perception’. Such a distinction defines what is then considered to constitute reality. A logic of res­ piration based on the rhythms of inspiration and expiration rests in continuous process through its alternation of the in-breath and the out-breath. (Jullien 2009, xxi, 11, 135). Thus rather than taking a position of either absence or presence, it is able to express the regulating rotation of emptiness and fullness from which the process of the world flows. The Greek logic of perception, on the other hand, leads to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge that entails an initial separation of subject and object, and a consequent cascade of dualities; presence/absence, inner/outer, reality/ experience. Thus, a Japanese garden does not ‘represent’ a landscape but enacts the vitality, the play of creative energies of all landscapes. Instead of ‘looking at’ a painting or a garden as spectators, ‘we undergo the experience of immersing ourselves, and even of losing ourselves in the tensions between mountains and waters’ (Jullien 2009, 39). The work is not reduced to the perceptual, but is, says Jullien, a ‘locus of exchange’. In an illustration of this, the leading Mono-ha artist Lee Ufan has written: ‘The artworks I create are all tapestries of intimate breathing between me and the world. Therefore, seeing is not the confirmation of an object but a quiet concert of breathing between the work, the world and the viewer’ (Ufan 2018, 283). We are invited to consider land­ scape as a process, a process of exchange. Thus it becomes not an aesthetic pleasure but rather a ‘gratification of living’ in which the perceptual and the affectual are merged (ibid.). Jullien goes so far as to say that according to this view of landscape, not only is the boundary between the perceptual and the affectual erased, but also the split between the physical and the spiritual is sealed. What, he suggests, promotes land to landscape, is that ‘it hoists us up – lifts us – to that transition and makes the transition apparent. Landscape elevates us into the spiritual, but does so within nature, within the world and our perception of it’ (Ufan 2018, 56). Such distinctly different foundations for thinking about gardens, perhaps explains why, when Renaissance sculptors were shaping stone in the likeness of human form, which were occasionally placed in the landscape for the pleasure of the viewer, Japanese garden-makers were setting stone in its natural forms. Such Japanese gardens were intended to have an effect on the mind, the percep­ tion and senses of those that participated in them: they are an attempt to promote awareness, to change one’s consciousness. This is also one of the core intentions of the creator of Tremenheere Garden. Richard Serra on his first visit to Japan in the 1970s appreciated this distinction. He noted that in a Japanese garden, ‘the act of seeing and the concentration of seeing, takes an effort. The gardens impose that effort on you if you want to see them. It’s another way of ordering your vision, and it slows down your vision’.

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He felt that these gardens presented a ‘shift of spatial paradigm’. Unlike the proto­ cols of Western spatial systems which impose order and control from a static van­ tage point to frame an image, the layout of Japanese gardens is based on the ‘perceptual principles of time, meditation and motion – a peripatetic vision’, which ‘affords an expanded, extended understanding of the garden as a whole lived experience’ (Walker 2017, 35). Commenting on a Japanese karesansui or dry landscape garden, Serra observed, the articulation of discrete elements within the field and the sense of the field as a whole (would) emerge only by constant looking […] One had to analyse the abstract placement of the stone as well as grasp the syncretistic complexity of the whole (Walker 2017, 183). Contemporary Japanese sculptor Tatsuo Miyajima writes of mitate, a term that originally signified ‘looking with one’s own eyes to make choices’ but in the arts came to mean likening one thing to another or ‘alluding to something with some­ thing else entirely’. (Walker 2017, 117). He suggests it signifies an act of changing consciousness, the ability to see one thing as something different – a trait that runs from the dry landscape gardens to today’s contemporary sculptors. Mitate belongs to both senses and intellect: layers of meaning are placed on top of one another, creating simultaneous yet distinct effects. All of these comments emphasise that the intention of the Japanese garden is some­ what far from the ‘pleasure garden’, or even the botanical garden aspect of European garden design. As Sophie Walker points out in her admirable study of The Japanese Garden, they aspire to a state beyond design, in which ‘the search for meaning, for truth, is active, engaged, fully fledged’ (Walker 2017, 10). The architecture of the garden is symbolic rather than decorative. The deeper beauty of the garden resides not in its surface ornament but in its profound embodiment of the original state of nature, which entails the same energies as embody us. After the Japanese defeat at the end of World War II, the ancient traditions of art and landscape were challenged by contemporary Japanese artists, in reaction both to the defeat of entrenched ideas and to wholesale encouragement and adoption of Western artistic ideals. In the 1950s and 1960s indigenous schools of artists arose with manifestos of change. One of the first was the School of Gu Tai, noted for rejecting tradition in favour of performance and immediacy. Later came the Mono-ha (Object School), which arose in the late 1960s and early 70s, a time of deep questioning of the past and much cultural and political tur­ moil in Japan. These artists questioned the very act of creating ‘works’, whilst also rejecting the subjective expressionism and conceptualization of contempor­ ary European and American art. A fairly loose grouping of artist centred around the Tama Art University in Tokyo, Mono-ha came into existence following the exhibition of a work that has become its most famous exemplar, Nobuo Sekine’s Phase – Mother Earth. In this work, a large core of earth is displayed on the sur­ face of the ground adjacent to a hole created by its extraction. The first presen­ tation of this sculpture occurred at the first outdoor sculpture display in Japan, a temporary exhibition in a park in Kobe in l968. Interestingly outdoor

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sculpture parks in Japan also started in these years, with some precedent in this form of outdoor temporary exhibitions The following year saw the inauguration of the permanent Isamu Noguchi studio/park. Following the Kobe display of Mother Earth, Nobuo Sekine met with the Korean artist Lee Ufan, who was studying philosophy, both Japanese and European, in Tokyo and the school of Mono-ha (School of Object or Thing) came into existence. Thus the name of the school came from their intention to celebrate mono or the elementary thing by making its essence visible. Mono-ha, rejected Western notions of representation, and focused on the relationships between materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention. In the words of one of its leaders, Korean Lee Ufan, ‘The highest level of expression is not to create some­ thing from nothing, but rather to nudge something that already exists so that the world shows up more vividly’.2 Whilst the school, as a grouping, was only active until the 1970s, its influence and the works of individual artists associated with it has grown in recent years, with an important exhibition, Requiem for the Sun, The Art of Mono-ha in Los Angeles in 2012, and many recent exhibitions of the work of Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan and Kishio Suga around the world. Mono-ha has often been compared to the European school of Arte Povera, and a recent exhibition of works from both schools displayed together took place at the Dogana Gallery in Venice.3 Yet Kishio Suga, one of the important Mono-ha artists sees an important distinction. To him, Arte Povera deals only with the reality of thought. It thus displays those biases of European landscape thinking presented by François Jullien and referred to earlier in this essay; being detached from the material substance of things it functions as an expression of the human psyche and ultimately relativises object with respect to human per­ ception. Mono-ha artists aspire to let things speak for themselves through their relationships – with site, space, time and perception. As Lee Ufan has written: ‘the key characteristic of Mono-ha is that it is more about a space than an object. Also it is more about a temporary state and gives a feeling of openness that connects the viewer with the outside’ (Ufan 2018, 22). Whilst Lee Ufan states that Mono-ha ‘has nothing to do with Japanism or Orientalism’, this emphasis on the encounter of self with otherness and an aesthetic of relationship is, without doubt, more easily understandable against the background of Chinese and Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed maybe the enduring and increas­ ing contemporary popularity of these Mono-ha artists is that today they are seen to incorporate some of the finest trends both of Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary attitudes. The artists understand that the essence of an object cannot be singular, and attempt to pay homage to all the aspects of the object, as much to what is invisible as to what is visible. As Nobuo Sekine stated: ‘We may no longer be able to “create” but what we can do is wipe the dust off the surface of things and let the world it is part of appear’. A similar example is a piece Relatum – Stage, which as I write, is on display outside the Serpentine Gallery in London by, Lee Ufan. The work is part of a series titled Relatum, all consisting of two rocks and two sheets of metal (See

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Colour Plate 21), and presents a large rock placed in front of sheets of stainless steel, which provide a backdrop to the stone. It brings together the materiality of the objects, natural rock and man-made metal and implicates the perceiver, whose image is inevitably reflected in the shiny steel as they move towards the piece. The image that is seen is utterly changed if approaching from different directions or angles, and another smaller rock is almost hidden behind the steel, visible only from certain positions. This, perhaps is a reference to that most famous of karasansui gardens Ryoanji in Kyoto where all 15 rocks are never vis­ ible at one time from any location. Relatum, the title given to Ufan’s public sculptures, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. This radical approach to the artwork, not as an object but as a network of relationships, shifts the artis­ tic experience to an encounter or occasion that unfolds around the viewer in a particular time and space. Kishio Suga visited Cornwall for an exhibition at Newlyn in 2001 and was very impressed by a visit to the ancient stones around the area such as Lanyan Quoit and Chûn Quoit, and expressed an interest in having his work exhibited in the locality. Two of the only three pieces of his work in the UK are now to be found at Tremenheere, as a result of his meeting with Dr. Armstrong who was then in the process of creating the garden. As with the other Mono-ha artists, Suga’s work aspires to let things speak for themselves through an enhanced attention to their relationships. By constantly questioning what objects really are he attempts to touch their fundamental nature. The deep background of East Asian philosophy and aesthetics and its understand­ ing of the nature of reality and consciousness, so distinct from the European, obviously plays an important part in this attempt. The importance of relationships and process, of the invisible aspects of things, and of the interconnection of form and emptiness profoundly inform the work. He attempts to reveal the presence of mono in a new fashion, and in so doing to renew the perception of the viewer and the artist. He speaks of his efforts to remove the conventional concepts of recognition associated with an object that he is using, and of changing those estab­ lished perceptions and associations, thereby altering meanings in accordance with new awareness. This involves the elimination of all preconceptions, and he writes of placing the object in a state of ‘namelessness’ so that it can acquire a new reality and arouse a sense of presence responding to the invisible aspects of its being. He explains how in creating works: ‘I look at the materials and then I look for a space of “nothingness” in which to ground them. This allows me to sense a kind of order that is inherent to those materials and the space’.4 This order, he says, embraces the essence and history of the materials, which will include their interactions with nature and people. An artwork is then a product of abandoning preconceptions and organizing a new order. He says: In this manner I make artworks so that people can see and learn about things, so they can perceive an existing space differently and thereby experience a new

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kind of order. It they can apply their experience with art into their daily lives, the new order may find settlement there. There would be no turning back. I want to induce new ways of responding to situations in all viewers.5 What is important to him is the act of transforming the nature of work, and the essence of his art lies within the act of producing a shift in consciousness; Suga uses the term ‘activation of existence’. The actual work arises from this deep well of attention and practice. He describes how morning, noon and night, he spends his waking hours thinking about the nature of mono, site and space. From another person’s point of view, it might look like I’m just absent­ mindedly walking down country lanes, but in fact my consciousness and perception are in a heightened, sharpened state. I’m inspired by all kinds of things – trees, stones, rocks, grasslands, wastelands, the sky or the movement of the wind. When I look at them I think about the interconnected spaces between them, their conditions and the nature of their existence.6 In so doing, he attunes himself to the invisible aspects of the object as well as conventional visible perceptions and conceptions. For example, he suggests that knowing whether a stone was formed by the erosive effect of a river’s current or by gradual change in the ground, leads one to experience the time of the stone, its space and its permutations. This makes it possible for him to introduce into his consciousness the interiority of mono. He explains: By knowing the interiority of mono’, he writes, ‘I became aware of realms (strata, heterogeneity, concatenation) that I was ignorant about. Such internal realms are hidden within the scope of everyday life. They are not, however, fic­ tional. I attempted to elicit such latent realms as much as possible to tease out the reality of mono that are otherwise invisible.7 It is absolutely fitting that works by Kishio Suga appear at Tremenheere, and they are indeed some of the favourite pieces of its founder Dr. Neil Armstrong, though he expresses fears that their quiet presence is often overlooked by visitors. The first piece Untitled, a row of wooden logs or groynes with a line inscribed on the top of each log, is indeed so quiet that it could be easily overlooked (Figure 3.1). But pay a little attention, and it becomes a marker, a breakwater, a barrier, reflecting its relation with place, with the growing plants around it, with your journey through the garden, even perhaps your journey through life. The longer and deeper the attention, the wider the interconnections. Tellingly, this sculpture also articulates impermanence and change, the cycle of life and decay. It has already had to be replaced due to natural decomposition and has been reconstructed as it says in the garden leaflet ‘with kind permission of the artist after the original work melted back into the landscape’. Another message. The second work by Suga (see Figure 1.9), again without title, is a large scaf­ folding cage enclosing lengths of bamboo, and is said in the Tremenheere litera­ ture to refer to the hikikimori, or social withdrawers, that strange phenomenon

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FIGURE 3.1 Kishio Suga, Untitled, 2001, installed Tremenheere 2002. Pine. Recon­ structed 2017 with larch logs, wooden frame and slate mulch. Installation 3.9m (L), individual logs 89cms (H), diameter 24cms.

Photo: John Champion, Tremenheere

of Japanese life, wherein many young people, predominantly male, maybe find­ ing contemporary life too daunting, remain house-, or even bedroom-, bound, never venturing outside. The repressed energy of the bamboos in their stiff

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scaffolding cage resonates with this modern day phenomenon of Japanese society.8 Here we see the pairing of materials, the metal cage and the natural bamboo, reaching out again to the growing plants, also reminiscent to me, of the struts used to shape and prop up ancient trees in traditional gardens. This work too has changed its form in relation to its surroundings and time. Origin­ ally created out of softwood for interior display, it was recreated for Tremen­ heere with more robust bamboo. Soon after opening the garden, Dr. Armstrong explained that his intention had been to create a place of tranquillity and inspiration – ‘a spiritual place with meditative and restorative qualities’. He also has said that he wants to alter the visitors’ headspace. Here, as Penny Florence has noted, although the Japanese elements are far from the time-honoured rocks and lanterns, Dr. Armstrong’s intention reflects that of the Zen ideal behind the traditional Japanese garden, the creation of place that re-makes experience, so that you leave with a changed state of mind. The underlying foundation being based on complementarity rather than contrast opens the space for everything present within it to breathe freely; plants, art and the participating visitors. Tremenheere is not solely a botanic garden, nor a sculpture park nor a pleasure garden, though it is per­ haps all of these, a microbiome and a multicultural gallery. Most importantly it is an experience. Its Turrell works, the dark tank and sky-watching space ques­ tion our ordinary perception and Suga’s quintessentially Japanese works embody the aims of Dr. Armstrong, making visible to those who are prepared to see, the significance of the quiet presences that are the two examples of Mono-ha. It is a place of process, of pilgrimage and above all of participation, where while we absorb pleasure we are also led to question our own perceptions and feelings. If we allow ourselves to acknowledge our involvement, these works can challenge the dissociation, the exteriority of the viewer mentioned earlier. David Nash’s dark huddled pilgrim figures in the woods, the expansive maritime views over St. Michael’s Mount, the contemporary Japanese works of Kishio Suga, Billy Wynter’s camera obscura and James Turrell’s Aqua Obscura and Tewlwolow Kernow skyspace all upset our ordinary perception and – if we will allow and participate – have the power to alter our minds. Another of the art works, Tremenheere Line by the British artist Richard Long again links the Cornish garden and Japan. It perhaps demonstrates that the East Asian and European artistic elements in this hybrid contemporary sculpture garden unite like the plants from all continents. On a high terrace of the garden, stretching out towards St. Michael’s Mount, a line of growing grasses make a positive impres­ sion of Long’s famous negative space, Line Made by Walking. Years earlier Long had written a piece titled Mind Garden around a walk in Japan in the winter of 1992. Bearing a rock in mind An eleven-day walk in the mountains north of Kyoto Beginning and ending Looking at the same rock at Ryoanji9

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Notes 1 I am using the not-always-academically acceptable terms ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ here, as ‘Western’ can cover both European and North American artistic and landscape movements, and ‘Eastern’ can encompass Chinese, Japanese and Korean approaches, which all share philosophic foundations and similarities that are distinct from ‘Western’. 2 Lee Ufan, www.serpentinegalleries.org (access 31.3.2018) 3 Prima Materia was shown from May 5th, 2013 – June 1st, 2015 at the Dogana Gallery in Venice. 4 www.kishiosuga.com ‘Between Presence and Nothingness’. (access 12.2.2018) 5 Ibid. 6 www.artasiapacific.com Kishio Suga ‘Reflections from Almanac 2016.’ (access 2.1.2018) 7 www.kishiosuga.com ‘Latent Infinity 2015’ (access 7.1.2018) 8 www.tremenheere.com 9 www.richardlong.org (access 20.12.2018). Also cited in Walker, Japanese Garden, p.184.

References Hinton, David. (2018) No-Gate Gateway. Shambhala: Boulder CO. Jullien, François (2018). (trans P. Rodriguez). Living Off Landscape. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ––– (2009). (trans Jane M. Todd) The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject Through Painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ufan, Lee. (2018). (trans. Stanley N. Anderson). The Art of Encounter. London: Lisson Gallery, Serpentine Gallery. Walker, Sophie. (2017). The Japanese Garden. London: Phaidon.

PART II

Placing history in/of the garden

4 SCULPTURE GARDENS AND SCULPTURE IN GARDENS John Dixon Hunt

There have always been gardens, and some of these might have displayed sculp­ tural artefacts. Often sculptures have been placed in gardens, or the garden has found reason to display them. On occasions, the garden might be so filled with them that it could deserve the title of sculpture garden; but that entitlement seems really to have occurred only when in the early modern period there were both enough old sculpture to display and the sense that a tradition of sculpture – at that time, Greek, Hellenistic and Roman – was acknowledged, deemed worth collect­ ing, and displayed as an ensemble. Today, when the amount of sculpture produced has increased prodigiously, there seems a florescence of sculpture gardens, specially designed to entwine both garden and sculpture, as the phenomenon in the United States makes clear.1 New Jersey boasts one such site that is called “The Grounds for Sculpture”. It actually took over the site (hence “grounds”) of the former New Jersey State Trade and Agricultural Show, where sculpture was now to be “shown”. But I always assumed that the title implied there were grounds (i.e. reasons) for having sculp­ ture there as opposed to anything else, like agricultural equipment. Sculpture gar­ dens have also solicited some relationship with land art, where the land forms itself can be sculpture.2 Recent re-inventions of how sculpture might be con­ ceived in gardens, garden museums and the larger landscape have asked fresh questions about the context, meaning and indeed material of the sculptures.

Some early history In the early Renaissance, when ancient statues were unearthed and rediscovered in Italy, gardens or garden courtyards were specially realized to accommodate them. The Belvedere Court at the Vatican led the way, established by Pope Julius II in the early 16th century, and featured such marvelous works as the Laocoön,

FIGURE 4.1

Henrick van Cleef III, “Cardinal Cesi’s Antique Sculpture Garden”, 1584. The National Gallery, Prague

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or the statue of Ariadne. That collection stimulated many others throughout Italy and elsewhere to emulate its displays. A painting of the nearby Cesi estate (now in the National Gallery, Prague) depicts excavations, sculptures carried off to display in other villas, and some already positioned in the Cesi grounds [Figure 4.1].3 Such Italian examples were clearly the inspiration for visitors from the north: Lord Arundel’s sculpture garden beside the Thames in the mid-1610s and 1620s was a major example, for he brought home from Italy “the finest ancient statues in marble, of Greek and Roman workmanship”.4 The profusion of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman sculpture meant that there were plenty to decorate Renaissance villas or palaces; they may have been authentic, but many would later be sophisticated copies. Often these were chosen with specific iconographical relevance. Copies of a Roman river god were apt insertions in the basin of the Villa Lante during the 16th century, where the catena d’aqua released its waters, gathered in the hills above, through the lower terraces; so the river gods were the symbolic presentations of the mythic deities of rivers. The Sacro Bosco of Bor­ marzo, created in the mid-16th century, has sculptures that may allude to contem­ porary poetry, but equally provide today a weird and stimulating world of monsters and mythic forms [Figure 4.2].5 Later at Versailles in the 17th century, studded with sculptures, is an Apollo playing a harp in the Petit Parc, which was apt on two counts: Apollo traditionally led a procession of the Muses, whose resources underlined the whole creation of this royal garden: but Louis XIV, as Le Roi Soleil, also acknowledged the sun-god as his model. Yet neither Versailles, nor Bomarzo nor Lante saw themselves as gardens for sculpture, though they used

FIGURE 4.2

1550s.

The figure of a reclining giant in the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo, Italy,

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them, at Versailles and Bomarzo especially, as occasion to insert apt and sym­ bolic insertions into the complex intellectual repertoire.6 But just as readily, and increasingly, sculptures and statues figured in gardens simply as embellishments, though they might well have had some significance locally for their owners – the statue of the Dying Gladiator on the top of the Prae­ neste Terrace at Rousham in Oxfordshire during the 1730s might have stood for the ailing General Dormer who lived there [Figure 4.3]. But just as readily, along with other sculptures at Rousham – Venus, Pan, a Lion Attacking a Horse, Apollo (if that is who is represented) – they were an elegant enhancement of that garden; the Lion and Horse recalled for some visitors a similar sculpture at the Villa D’Este and may well have signaled that this English garden wished to acknowledge an Italianate model and its new context. At the least, they lent a color romanus to an English site that deliberately chose to mark its Englishness by its allusions to early precedents.7 Sculptural presences also became an inevitable feature of city parks in the 19th century, placed there to record the worthy figures who had contributed to local amenities or figures that the community wished to honour. The Mall at Central Park is lined with exemplary worthies, a modern and civic version of 18th­ century private gardens, like the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe which cele­ brated a significant political moment of 18th century enlightenment politics with

A copy of the Roman “Dying Gladiator” on the terrace of the Praeneste Terrace, Rousham, Oxfordshire, late 1730s.

FIGURE 4.3

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busts of eminent persons, or the Nordmandsdal (Valley of the Northmen) in Den­ mark that, in the late 18th century, paid homage to the local craftsmen and women whose sculptured figures by J.Wiedewelt decorate its amphitheatre (see Colour Plate 1). From at least the early Renaissance, there was also room for sculpture, among many other objects, in cabinets of curiosities, which could be often associated with an adjacent garden: the sculpture presenting the artifice, while other objects cele­ brated the found items of the natural world.8 Such cabinets eventually spawned a series of different types of collections, as materials accumulated and specialization saw different materials focused in botanical gardens, arboreta, menageries, zoos, as well as galleries for paintings and sculpture. And the museum, as we now know it, played a major role in sculptural collection and display – but by the late 17th cen­ tury without any garden context. These musea also offered some refuge from the weather for precious classical examples (to be replaced often in situ by copies). Yet by the 20th century the advent of some massive sculptural works that would not fit into museum spaces could be gathered in an adjoining sculpture park or garden. Immense steel formulations, wooden and stone constructions might also gain a new patina from their exterior display. Among the final stages in the development of the sculpture garden was its escape – first into sculpture gardens like that at the National Gallery in Wash­ ington, or the much extended Minneapolis sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center, and then into vast parklands unrelated to museum buildings.9 Storm King in New York State or the sculptures inserted into the Forests of Dean or Grize­ dale or the Sculpture Garden on the North Yorkshire Moors in England – all these offered to accommodate work in different situations, inviting a far more nuanced dialogue between the sculpture and the contexts that was found for it (often selected by the artist him or herself).10 The Gori Collection in the decayed picturesque parkland of Celle near Pistoia in Italy has an adjacent museum building, but the landscape display of modern sculpture is by far the more exciting. Ian Hamil­ ton Finlay’s own garden at Little Sparta in Lowland Scotland, or his public, so-called Sculpture Park at Luton were striking modern “takes” on the traditions of sculptures and gardens associated with them, and are examined below by Patrick Eyres.11 The emancipation, therefore, of sculpture from museums and even from gardens per se, allowed a new role for them in even bigger landscapes, where their presence was less clustered, more subtle, yet perhaps more effectively invoked to alert visit­ ors to the genius loci. These moves are taken up here in part by Georges Descombes and Bernard Lassus whose pursuit of sculptural insertions takes them on alpine hill­ sides, Swedish autoroutes, corporate HQs and onto the balcony of the Pompidou Centre in Paris (an intriguing return to a museum location for sculpture). Yet there is another “development” of sculpture gardens or parks, created now in some dialectical relationship with elitist sites. Not only the use of urban spaces to exhibit, usually temporarily, sculpture, but vernacular gatherings of abandoned materials, derelict or defunct machinery, assemblages of disparate objects or building materials. These, like that of Noah Pomfrey,12 have been put together with little

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desire to rival conventional sculpture parks, but more as contemporary protests against waste, inadequate living or commemorating events and civil destruction, like that of the Watts Uprising. Sam Rodia’s Watts Towers that arose in Los Angeles during the second quarter of the 20th century shares with a host of other works – the Rock Garden at Chandigarh, Bottle Village in California, Maison Picassiette in Chartres, or the various gardens explored by Bernard Lassus in a mining village in northern France – a range of imaginative creations that celebrate “idiosyncratic genius, ten­ acious faith, and unalienated labor”.13 They are all the work of highly motivated people with faith in a world beyond secular materialism and unusual skills; not indebted to contemporary art, indeed often folk who would not see themselves as artists, they seek their materials in found materials, the left-overs and detritus of the modern world: the vision that Tessa Prisbrey explains as – “it takes more than money to make something out of nothing”. These gardens are indeed sculpture gardens that confound the works that are otherwise explored here.

New conventions and materials The following four essays and their illustrations approach sculpture gardens in new ways and on sites that need some adjustments to how we should now think of sculp­ ture gardens. If a garden like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta is a sculpture garden – a term he would not have appreciated – it returns to a world where inscriptions inflect the sculptures, though these too are not anything like those that are found in even such an unusual institution as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Beyond gardens, as those certainly are, lie the larger landscapes where sculp­ tural objects mark places that solicit ideas of genius loci: these can be objects that are clearly, if wonderfully unusual, markers of place – the Nordic features that Bernard Lassus placed along a highway in Sweden, or they can be subtle revela­ tions of items already in a topography – boulders cleaned, pathways subtly marked, and benches or belvederes that one may expect in landscape sites, which Descombes explores in his design for a section of the Swiss Way around Lake Uri between 1987 and 1991. Yet another approach is more radical: the “representation” of natural objects and such usual landscapes features as grottoes in forms that are neither conven­ tional, not evidently representational nor even immediately registered as sculptures. When Lassus took his departure from Pierre Francastel’s La sculpture de Versailles, it was to identify a new rapport between the two elements that configure a garden and bracket its potential: on the one hand, some building, whether chateau, col­ lege or city monuments, and on the other the unmediated landscape of either an immediate forest or its distant and imagined recollection. These sculptures – abstract images, often in perforated steel panels – pertain only distantly to natural worlds; they are sui generis, though they need a specific landscape to seize their significance. Thus Lassus extends Leatherbarow’s concern with the role of context, by finding new ways for sculpture to go “swimming in the open air”.

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From my brief survey of the tradition of sculpture parks, given above, and the essays by colleagues on their own work or commentary, emerges a cluster of themes that allows a more nuanced view of how context and materials contrib­ ute to their success today. These topics relate to time and movement, to the meanings of objects and their relation to sites, and thereby to how sculpture, sometimes mimicking natural forms, prompt or trigger visitors’ ideas and associ­ ations. In all cases – and this is a vital aspect of these four approaches – the “sculptures” contribute new ideas of genius loci, the meaning or spirit of place.

Time and movement Though gardens and sculptures are arts that are essentially different, they curiously share one element: walking. A garden is seen in and through motion. A free-standing sculpture is to be seen (at least ideally) from all directions, so we need to walk around it, as we do in even a smallish garden. And walking takes time, and time, as noted by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Lord Burlington, is part of nature, and thus makes cul­ tural landscapes like Stowe “grow”.14 There is the time it takes a garden to be explored (even a window box deserves exploration by the eyes), time for its planting to develop (and even perhaps decay), time for us to understand it (to learn how it was made, how it has been used – especially for long-established ones) and how different eras have sought to shape them to their own cultural ideas. Sculpture’s time has its own cultural life, the duration of its making (different from that of gardens), while the time it takes to be understood depends upon our patience and willingness to see it (literally) from all directions, and of course the location where it is seen. Those times in garden and around sculpture, though they may converge and even coalesce, pro­ pose different ways of looking, different ways of responding to materials. One of the differences between sculpture gardens and the experience of them in a museum, or the placement of them in gardens like Versailles or Villa Lante, is that, in the absence of a map of the sculpture garden (which many may provide), the visitor moves randomly through their sites. In forests especially, this promotes an exciting series of unexpected encounters: simply finding your way from “sculpture” to “sculp­ ture” – finding the various trees within the Forest of Dean where Finlay’s plaques announce words for SILENCE [Figure 4.4] in different languages – is not easy, even when there is a useful map. Yet silence in these woods is what we expect to find.

Triggers and prompts Knowing what a sculpture is and how we are to look at it can be directed by an item having a label. This is not exactly what Ariosto’s lovers did, carving their names on trees;15 but it shares a similar love of why we might want to know the name of a beloved with the “meaning” of a sculpture or our discovery of what a place means (like silence). Yet naming in the latter is not the same, since the object did not have a name until its sculptor gave it one. There is a painting in Bath’s Holbourne Museum, attributed to Roelandt Savery, of Adam Naming the Animals, who skip

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FIGURE 4.4 Ian Hamilton Finlay, with Nicholas Sloan, one tree plaque among several in in other languages – Schweigen – in the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, Gloucestershire, 1988.

around the landscape as if unwilling to accept their names of horse or bull, or who, contrariwise, are happy to escape the need to think of names for themselves. The problem I personally often have in sculpture parks is that the artists often attach names on a scale that ranges from banal description, through ones that agreeably tempt one to examine the sculpture more carefully, to ones that defeat even the most dedicated solver of crossword puzzles. An art historical colleague once told me of an American modern abstract painter (I have long since forgotten his or her name) who always entitled a finished painting with the name of the horse that won the 3 p.m. on the local race track. I take it that this was merely to make fun of anyone who wants a name for the painting rather than trying to see it for itself. But why on earth do we impose names on sculptures – especially abstract ones? Would it even have mattered if Adam named the bull a horse or a parrot a crow, as long as we now know them that way? Both Ernst Gombrich and Stephen Bann have explored that conundrum; yet while their essays provide much ingenious scope for reflection, they do not in the end help to answer it.16 Why should we trust, ask Alexander Nagel and Christoper S.Wood,17

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“what an artwork says”? Yet their emphasis on “saying” always seems to imply that we must use words for things. If we are to be left on our own, there seem three ways in which a useful “mean­ ing” (whether or not couched in a title) can help. We can devise one for ourselves – indeed on the Grounds for Sculpture, the labels with title, artist’s name and date are now so worn or invisible that this is precisely what we have, or need, to do. This (as Sterne might say) throws the reader of Tristram Shandy back on his own resources, as it now does the viewer of the sculpture. Hanging in the Forest of Dean is a stained glass panel representing trees in a forest, called Cathedral, by Kevin Atherton [Figure 4.5], where the sections of glass in the panel play with the materials around it, catch the ambient light, and imply why forests have so often been likened to cathedrals. Then perhaps we transfer our understanding from glass panel to the forest itself. Nearby, though, is Tim Lee’s The Heart of Stone, where between two upright stone boulders emerges a half wheel of stone lying on the ground and carved at its edges with grooves [Figure 4.6]. The title seems to me variously either banal, pre­ tentious, or asking of a visitor for more than the cluster of stones can provide; when

Kevin Atherton, “Cathedral”, in the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, Gloucestershire, 1986.

FIGURE 4.5

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FIGURE 4.6 Tim Lee, “The Heart of Stone”, with visitor contemplating it. The Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, Gloucestershire, 1988.

I photographed it once, I caught a visitor clearly puzzled by how to link its title to the item. On the other hand, Noguchi’s Momo Taro at Storm King is a cluster of large fragments sliced through to disclose a hiding place (as a stone is found in a peach); once you know that it refers to a traditional Japanese folk tale hero who emerged from a peach, it makes sense – and moreover it is the one sculpture there that children are allowed to climb on. But then you need to know the story. On the meadow at the entrance to the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia are scat­ tered some pleasing black steel cut-outs of sheep. They speak readily both of pastoral felicity, what might have been there earlier in an agricultural realm before the estate was originally established, and of artistic permanence (though I have often wanted to move them around from time to time). They introduce visitors silently at the start of their visit to encounters with other sculptures scattered within the arboretum. Or we can hope or imagine that a sculpture has been given or found a specific site where the natural materials somehow dialogue with it and render it some significance – like the cut-out sheep, or the glass panel of Cathedral in the forest. Or a “headstone” in Little Sparta that Finlay inscribed with “Man A Passer By” [Figure 4.7], thus leaving it

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FIGURE 4.7 Ian Hamilton Finlay, “MAN A Passerby” inscribed on a stone at Little Sparta, Scotland.

up to those who wander by to exercise their own imaginations on this tomb-like item: man’s life is fleeting, art is long, so a sculpture may be there after a person has passed. That one, articulate injunction, encourages passers-by to find their own responses to ones that are not identified. And it alludes, surely, to the Greek term pro­ sopopeia, whereby a poet or orator images something in the landscape that speaks dir­ ectly to a privileged visitor.18 Or – and this is essentially an avoidance of naming or needing names – when seeing a sculpture in relation to others near it, a dialogue then concerns a comparison of forms and materials as much as eliciting its individual meaning [Figure 4.8]. This happens often in the woods of Celle, where pieces sometime sit cheek by jowl, and so demand some sort of exercise to “compare and con­ trast” their forms (shades of the examination hall!). Museums that display

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FIGURE 4.8

In the Parco di Celle, Pistoria.

sculpture will follow museological methods and label items (whether or not a viewer wishes to utilize that information). It is when sculptures are set free in places where there are no labels or they are difficult to find, or whether (as at Storm King) the much vaster spaces tend to marginalize any labels (indeed, I often don’t bother to find them as they’d be too small to have an effect there).

Meanings and sites, and genius loci Now the exact dialogue between sculpture and its garden site is tricky. Is the land­ scape simply a convenient place to situate, especially large, sculpture, with back­ grounds that do not “interfere” with them? Or are sculptures placed so that their forms respond to where they are located? Or is that placement simply fortuitous, and visitors themselves find, perhaps, a suitable relevance for the juxtaposition. And it depends, as for all sculptures, that we look at them from many angles, which com­ plicates the visitors’ appreciation of their siting. Sculpture has to be seen in situ, though that could be anywhere that the artist, the collector or the curator choses for it; while the garden has, essentially, its own situation and ground (though it may itself need to be formed and registered as an art different from surrounding cultural activities like agriculture or local infrastruc­ ture). Sculptures can depend upon where they are, but they may be moveable onto different sites, which often happens in sculpture gardens. That placement may be sheer accident, sometimes happy, sometimes deliberate, ort less than suc­ cessful. Especially when this is in the hands of a curator who can determine how

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it is best to be viewed, sculptures may acquire a richness by virtue of what is around them and also by how we move around and between them. This is interestingly different when the site and space around sculptures change: when they are grouped in fairly limited spaces – say the hillside of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles19– or when they have the benefit of exception­ ally generous landscapes – like the meadows of Storm King (Figure 4.9). The scale of the sculpture in relation to its setting has an imperceptible effect upon how a visitor responds. And when at Celle, for example, visitors begin by moving through the older picturesque woodland, glimpsing the next piece often before they have fully responded to the one before, but then they emerge from the woods onto a hillside of olives trees and open skies, a different context is exploited. Inside that Tuscan woodland, pieces (I found) were often intense, intimidating, not readily opened to quick understanding, while on the adjacent hillside, there was lightness, quiet and more quickened understanding. There, in 1985, Finlay opted for a space that he called “The Virgilian Wood”, deliberately opposed to what he termed the “Forest of the avant-garde”, i.e., the modernist sculpture within the forest; here he inserted bronze baskets of olives, ancient ploughs, along with more labels on trees to signal Roman traditions of agrarian poetry [Figure 4.10]. Also in the same area outside the forest is discovered a trench that descends into the earth; following it into the hillside, we then climb up into a luminous glass box,

FIGURE 4.9

The meadows at Storm King Art Center, New York State.

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FIGURE 4.10

Ian Hamilton Finley, “The Virgilian Grove”, Il Parco di Celle, Pistoria.

Bukichi Inoue’s “My Sky Hole” of 1985–9. Suddenly the box takes dominion over the landscape, like Wallace Steven’s “Jar Upon the Hill”, and the Tuscan landscape of olive groves is suddenly seen afresh through the “lens” of the glass. And trees themselves, especially when old and worn, are venerated as living sculpture; later editions of John Evelyn’s Silva depicted some ancient specimens in that way and they serve, often without being so designated, as sculptures. So even in forests like Dean or Grizedale, there is the temptation to let a tree become a sculpture. But they are just trees. Andy Goldsworthy makes much use of found materials in a site: his Wandering Wall [Figure 4.11], zig-zag-ing down a wooded hillside at Storm King, gathers the scattered stones around it to con­ struct the wall. In Scotland, Goldsworthy likewise organized two sheep enclosures, using the adjacent stones from the surrounding hillsides; it is only registered as something more than sheep folds, when you realize that each enclosure is situated on different sides of wall, forming a kind of open “8” that allows two neighbours to pasture their sheep on each other’s land (“good fences make good neighbours,” in the words of Robert Frost). Conversely, it is also possible to see an item as sculpture when it is something distinctly other: recently, while in the New Jersey Grounds for Sculpture and perhaps indiscriminately photographing both individual items and/or their interesting juxtapositions, I mistakenly photographed what, once I worked through the images later at home, was simply a derelict electricity box hidden at the edge of the trees! If we seek, as Lassus does below, to ask what exactly is a garden and what exactly is a sculpture in a garden or landscape, then an obvious answer is that each is a work of the imagination, to which the necessary and different skills and talents of

Sculpture gardens and sculpture in gardens

FIGURE 4.11

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Andy Goldsworthy, “Wandering Wall”, in the landscape of Storm King

Art Center.

designers have been applied. When the artist is both maker of the garden and of the sculpture, as Lassus is on several occasions, then the same skill is expended and the result is a much more collapsed encounter of what (we generally call) nature and culture. Natural materials – marble, stones, wood, steel (an alloy of iron and other elements, primarily carbon) – are shaped into new forms by somebody familiar with how each may be handled, knowing the particular qualities and capabilities of their material, and seeking to find an artistic expression for it.

Four new approaches The four essays that follow mark fresh approaches, both to the reception of sculpture in gardens and landscapes and even to what might constitute sculpture insertions today. Both Leatherbarrow and Lassus invite concerns with how sculpture is viewed: the former, by focusing on just one sculpture garden where the museum’s posi­ tioning of items clearly determine how a visitor could see and respond to them; the latter, utilizing a perfectly modern medium – steel, explores the affinities and the ambiguities of sculpture with the material in the natural world. Eyres and Descombes move sculpture in two different directions by playing with how sculpture communicates. Finlay’s landscapes – whether his own garden of Little Sparta in Scotland or his “sculpture park” at Luton in England, among other sites – imbue his items with explicit and often verbal inscriptions, items that call for a verbal articulation of what they signify [Figure 4.12]. Descombes’s

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Ian Hamilton Finlay, “VUNA”, Max Planck Institut, Stuttgart, Germany, where the Latin for wave is “misplaced” until corrected three times before arriving at the right spelling; the sculpture points towards a pond to the right.

FIGURE 4.12

architecture (a term he prefers to “landscape architecture”) uses either the very forms in the landscape – rocks, tree roots, topography – or items conventionally invoked in landscape design – belvederes or seats – to draw out features in the landscape without any easily formulated linguistic adjuncts. Sculpture is always both form and content, but its dual impact has not always been appreciated. Apollo with his lyre at Versailles is both elegant and effective in itself, yet also, with the emblematic attribute of the lyre, it asks its contem­ porary viewers to reflect on both a classical meaning and its present relevance. Such imagery, however, began to lose its double impact during the 18th cen­ tury. Thomas Whately distinguished in 1780 between an “emblematic” and an “expressive” meaning (i.e. instead of responding to a widely understood and even conventional attribute, a viewer might discover for him or herself some expressive potential).20 Sculpture seemed to lose any inherent and articulate meaning, or so Whately assumed, though his distinction was neither absolute nor universal. Yet it left sculpture – for example in modern public parks – with the need to label its significance in an inscription (the habitual means of doing so in a museum setting). Finlay’s Little Sparta uses explicit inscriptions or, more usually, those that hint at or hide a meaning in some aphoristic phrase that the passing visitors can or may linger and decipher for themselves. At the very least, curiosity and some sense of what ideas Finlay espouses – a neoclassical perspective and retreat from modern secularism – will guide those who go there. The alternative is what

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Whately’s “expressive” emphasis allows – tot homines quot sententiae (as many ideas as they are people), and that implication assumes, too, that there is an “afterlife” for thinking about sculpture as there is for responding to gardens.21 Personally, both Eyres and I appreciate what Findlay is doing in his land­ scapes, and his sculptural items or effects draw attention to the locality as well as to the larger landscape of his own ideas. But others will wish to absorb a site, perhaps grope towards a sense of its genius loci, by and for themselves. Indeed, sculpture has always the potential of making visitors aware of where they are, especially for those less attentive to or less accustomed to responding to “nat­ ural” places without prompts or triggers. People at Storm King without the large pieces on its open spaces would not know exactly, or at all, how to respond to what is a remarkable scenery. It might for some be just “nature”, like the thickets of Celle without the modern items. Lassus’s Nordic images along the highway in Sweden help to define the geographical and cultural land­ scape where they are encountered, though with no labels or explanations; with­ out them it would be simply a modern highway in Sweden. Whereas his “Jardin Monde” at the Centre Pompidou, again without labels attached to any element (though advanced in a book) are not helped by its location, except for those who register it as an “art object” in a museum. Sculptures without labels or inscriptions are in the first instance simply forms to be seen and appreciated, forms that a label will not necessary provide. Landscape architects are often wary of words; distinct and deliberate prompts are not what they see as apt within a landscape – though that does not prevent them from expressing ideas off site or in the pages of an article. Descombes is of that persuasion. His careful and deliberate insertions of items, the emphatic (but wordless) underlining of elements as he transforms a site, retain the language of landscape itself. They are (we are back again to tot homines quot sententiae) what visitors will notice and find, or perhaps not, responses to for themselves, though the careful assemblage carries its only studied meanings. Lassus, also a landscape architect, but also an artist (trained originally in the atelier of Ferdinard Léger), uses sculpture to make emphatic points about their relation to natural landscapes. Drawn, as his essay explains, by the relationship of sculpture in a garden like Versailles both to the chateau and to its surrounding forest, he seeks his own versions of that rapport, what he calls a delayed contrast, as we observe first a wood, then a building and subsequently how the sculpture mediates between those forms. And to further this contrast, by making his inser­ tions partake neither of nature, yet by imitating its forms with colour or repre­ senting it in perforated steel, nor the immediate built work, we enter a new world of sculpture and its reception. And further, he has advanced his thinking when moving in 1995 from the “gar­ dens” at COLAS, an international office building in the suburbs of Paris, to a prestige and utterly committed modernist venue, the Centre Pompidou, in 2017. At COLAS, there was a dialogue between place and purpose, between some nat­ ural hedges and trees and steel cut outs and life in a corporate HQ; at the

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Pompidou, though there are some small gestures to natural forms, the emphasis is on different representations of trees, forests and a grotto and their location on a balcony above the city of Paris. In this “Jardin Monde”, what visitors are maybe happy to call “sculpture” assumes a wholly new role for the garden, its sculptures and their place in the world. It may, then, seem not so odd that from the Belvedere Courtyard at the Vatican around 1500 to museums five hundred years later in Copenhagen or Paris, that from garden spaces to landscape forms both rural and urban, local and global, and that from articulate wordlessness to sculptures seeking their meanings in the varied languages of today, we still find – beyond the wholly vegetable world – solace and stimulation in these sculptural landscapes.

Notes 1 Francesca Cigola, Art Parks, A Tour of American’s Sculpture Parks and Gardens (New Park, 2013, and Jane McCarthy and Laurily K Epstein, A Guide to the Sculpture Parks of America New York, 1996). For other European examples see notes 5 and 6 below. 2 This is a topic much discussed in books and articles, but is not taken up here, as the focus is upon distinct creations of spaces in gardens and landscapes. That land art shares some features with the sculptures gardens can be seen in such books as Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (Paris: Editions Carre, 1993) or Land and Environmental Art, eds. Jeffrey Kastmer & Briab Wallis, (London: Phaidon, 1988). 3 This, and the Belvedere courtyard and some of its sculptures, are illustrated in my Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600–1750 (London: J.M.Dent, 1986, and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); see also the article on Cardinal Cesi’s garden in The Burlington Magazine, 116 (1974), p. 14ff. See also Alberta Campitelli, The Vatican Gardens (Vatican City & New York, 2009) and, among other studies, Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm, 1970). 4 On Arundel, Mary F.S.Hervey, The Life, Correspondence & Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge, 1921). Some images of this now lost garden are also illustrated in Garden and Grove. 5 This is a much discussed parkland, with a variety of explanations of its sculptures, all carved from the rocks in situ to depict giants, nymphs, giantesses, dragons, harpies and lions; see, among many books, Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigan­ tic in Renaissance Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), or Maurio Calvesi, Gli Incantesimi di Bomarzo. Il sacro bosco tra arte e letteratura (Milan: Edizione Bompiani, 2000), with bibliography and many illustrations of the sculptures. 6 See Claire Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles or Michel Baridon, A History of the Gardens of Versailles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 and 2012 respect­ ively). An intriguing counter view of the natural as opposed to the sculptural resources of Versailles, is Grégory Quenet, Versailles, une histoire naturelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2015). 7 I have discussed Rousham gardens on several occaisons, but see in particular “Land­ scape Architecture”, in William Kent. Designing Georgian Britain, ed. Susan Weber (Yale University Press for Bard Graduate Center, 2013). 8 See The Origins of Museums: The cabinet of curiosities in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, eds. O. Impey & A. MacGregor, OUP 1985. 9 See chapter 10 on sculpture gardens in my The Making of Place: Modern and Contem­ porary Gardens (London: Reaktion Books, 2015).

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10 See H. Peter Stern, The Creation of the Storm King Art Centre. A personal history (New York: Mountainville, 2008); Marco Cei, Il Parco di Celle a Pistoia (Florence: Edifir, 1994); a map by the Sculpture Trust for the Forest of Dean lists and locates nearly two dozen pieces, noting shortcuts between them and the walking gradients to be negotiated – a similar map exists for Storm King; The Grizedale Experience: Sculp­ ture, Arts & Theatre in a Lakeland Forest, eds. Bill Grant & Paul Harris (Edinburgh: Cannongate Press, 1991. Others to consult are Parco di Scultura di Villa Gori, ed. Daniele Fonti (Rome: Edizione de Luca, 2000); Différents NatureS [sic]: Visions de l’art contemporain, ed. Liliana Albertazzi (Lindau, 1993), an A to Z catalogue of artists who work their sculpture into landscapes; The Sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 2007), and sculpture exhibitions have been held from time to time in other Dutch parklands, like Sonnsbeek, in Arnheim (see Art in America, October 2008). 11 His essay has a sufficient bibliography of Finlay’s work, but my own Nature Over Again. The garden art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), though not specifically about his “sculpture gardens” is, in fact, an essay on its modern potentialities. 12 See the article “Lost and Found” by LaToya Ruby Frazier, as told to Jaime Lowe, in the Magazine of the New York Times (30th November, 2016). 13 These are the terms in which John Beardsley defined the scope of his book, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), p.7; he quotes Prisbrey on p,7. For Lassus, Jardins Imaginaires: Les Habitants Paysagistes (Paris: Les Presses de la Connaissance, 1977). 14 I refer specifically to lines 57–70, with the specific insistence on time in line 69, in Pope’s Epistle, where nature is first invoked as the guiding spirit of landscape and then, by implication, the designer assumes a role (another kind of genius) to work with the genius of that place. 15 See Rensselaer W. Lee, Names on Trees. Ariosto into Art (Princeton University Pres, 1977), and Greth M.Spriggs, “Enduring Remembrances of Times Past: Historical tree carvings”, Country Life (19 July 1979). And see also Patrick Eyres’s use of this topos in discussing Finlay. 16 Gombrich, “Image and word in twentieth-century art”, Word & Image 1/3 (1985), pp. 213–41, and Bann “The Mythical Conception in the name: titles and names in modern and post-modern painting”, Word & Image 1/2 (1985), pp. 176–90. 17 See their Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), chapter one but specifically p. 16. 18 A famous Biblical example of prosopopeia is when Moses is told by a voice from heaven to put “thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou stand is holy ground”. 19 See The Fran and Ray Stark Collection of 20th-century Sculpture at the J.Paul Getty Museum, ed. Antonia Bostrom, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2008. 20 Observations on Modern Gardening, pp. 294–317. I have explored this breakdown of meanings in landscape in “Emblem and expressionism in the 18th-century landscape garden”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 1971, reprinted with some modification in a French translation in URBI, 8 (1983). 21 I have explored this in my The Afterlife of Gardens (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

5 THE GARDEN: ART OBJECT Bernard Lassus

Some years ago, when I was teaching visual perception in the Landscape Section of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Horticulture at Versailles, and as an artist was exhibiting at the Salon de La Jeune Sculpture, I confronted the question of the shaped, or topiaried, tree (“arbré taillé”).

FIGURE 5.1

Sculpture at Versailles with Topiary, 17th century.

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In the gardens of the Château de Versailles, many shaped trees intervened in the spaces between the chateau and the forest, actually the wild forest since that was where the French king hunted. Between the shaped tree and the building it was evident that there was a contrast of materials (vegetable/min­ eral) and yet a resemblance in the two kinds of geometry. But between the shaped tree and the forest tree, unshaped, there was an identity of material, since both were vegetable, and yet there was a contrast between the geomet­ rical and free forms. The new element is that the shaped or topiared tree pro­ vides a palpable transition between forest and chateau. It is thus the deferral of one element into the neighbouring adjacencies that creates, by a delayed con­ trast, a new element. That recognition led me, in responding, to commit the required 1 percent art­ istic intervention for academic buildings at the Collège Ambroise Thomas at Gué­ nange (Moselle, Lorraine, 1970), to establish a palpable transition between the College and its neighbouring forest. That necessitated a contemporary solution. The stone chateau now becomes metallic, and suggested, not an imitation of a shaped tree, but an equivalence – a transition certainly, but also a new element: namely, an untrimmed hedge composed of enamelled balls, with their 24 colours arranged in a game of successive coloured curves. A section of this work was exhibited in 1972 at the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture in Paris (see Colour Plate 2). By 1995, I had acquired considerable experience in designing both for the new throughways required by the insertion of many kilometers of autoroutes and for the transformation of their rest areas into stopping places, where travel­ lers would discover something of the places “between” their destination and the place from which they departed. Accordingly, I was asked by the President of the COLAS Group, to design parts of their new international offices at Bou­ logne Billancourt with the architect, Pierre Riboulet; I was asked to design a garden and “green” terraces, to comply with the local municipal requirements and the requests of neighbourhood associations. He wanted both a ground floor garden that could be used for receptions, and designs that required minimal maintenance. The garden would become a symbol for the COLAS Group, which is primarily concerned with autoroute construction. Later on, I designed several entries and gardens for their regional offices at Lyons and Bordeaux, I realized that to devise an architecture tied to industry on the one hand, and a space as a symbolic entry for COLAS garden was a challenge. Faced with these diverse and even contradictory requirements, I was inspired to employ a new and experimental technique at that time: metal­ work cut by lasers, and colour-coated. The trees and the hedges became one-dimensional, and so freed the courtyard between the building and the courtyard, which would be floored in teak as the reception area. The garden consisted of metal trees, coloured according to the sea­ sons from spring to winter. An added attraction was that the metal trees could be interchanged and the seasons reversed, so that there could be snow in summer – hence it was a “Garden of Seasonal Games” (see Colour Plates 3 and 4).

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Terraces on the second and fourth floors, with more actual vegetation, became “The Pine Garden”, in homage to the poet, Francis Ponge; his princi­ pal work, Le Parti pris des choses of 1942 affirmed as part of his refusal of con­ cepts that “L’on ne peut sortir de l’arbre par des moyens d’arbre” (You can’t get out of the trees by the means of the trees), but must needs renew what we consider its usual affectivity. In 1971 Ponge wrote also about the creation of a meadow (“La Fabrique du pré”), which sought – in his famous phrase – to describe things for themselves (“the mimosa tree without me”). On the seventh floor, visitors were welcomed to plantations of threedimensional metal trees close enough to be touched; this was “A Garden As Waiting Room” (see Colour Plate 5). In effect, that meant descending an open air staircase to the sixth floor, the Com­ pany President’s terrace. At its centre, within a metallic vegetation, was the “Green Theatre” (“Théâtre du Verdure” see Colour Plate 6) consisting of two grottoes also in cut steel and painted to signify metal: in red, violet and ocre to contrast with the vegetative colours of green to blue. The first grotto displayed a computer-generated glowing fountain; in the other, further away, a blue neon square. If the glowing fountain was comprehensible (“measurable”), the luminous square symbolized the incomprehensible. Taken together, certainly, this not only constitutes a transition between cities, but also a personalized object, a new presence. This engagement with issues of topiary was taken up again in 2011, but now via a direct and limited consultation for the design competition for the creation of a contemporary garden in a central bosquet at Versailles, the Theatre d’Eau. This project was enabled by citing the work of Pierre Francastel, “La sculpture de Ver­ sailles”, who posed the question exactly – what is the relationship of sculptures to a garden like Versailles. Here three allees converged on the fountain – two glass panels between which, like a theatre, performed its computerized play of water; they juxtaposed the real bosquet or surrounding woodland with lines of real trees and then pyramids of perforated steel, illuminated from inside with lights that changed as the visitor moved towards the fountain1 (see Colour Plate 7). Thomas Erlandson, the senior advisor in the Transport Division of the Swed­ ish Ministry of Enterprise, had noted the book by Michel Conan on my design for the quarries at Crazannes, and he asked me to evoke an ancient road from its earlier origins – that leads from the south to the very north of Sweden. At that time I was thinking of the Villa Lante, where the famous water channel, or catena d’aqua, descends through the garden and then becomes, in succession, a torrent, a river, and then, after passing between two casini, a sea and an imaginary ocean with miniature ships. Here is what Thomas Erlandson wrote in making the request: Imagine that you were following the footsteps of a hunter in the Stone Age, or maybe you are walking in the midst of a procession, surrounded by neoolithic tombs. The imagination cringes at the idea. But excavations undertaken by archaeologists for the reconstruction of E6 showed that people had travelled the length of this same route, through the landscape,

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in the Stone Age. The Swedish Transport Administration wanted to remind today’s users of this route and have them relive its historical, even prehistorical, vision. The Swedish Highways Department (TRAFIKVERKET) in its Scanie province, while undertaking archeological trenches in advance of the E6 construction, had uncovered a very important archaeological site. The archaeologists revealed traces of a five thousand-year old road, edged with pieces of wood, probably related to a religious ritual that led to some dolmens. In other places, road and dolmens were never related, suggesting the sacred meaning for this site. It was a prehistorical combination unique to Sweden. In the past, reindeers and mam­ moths used this road walking further north. How could this old road be evoked when covered by a new one, with the remains of the excavation barely visible and only one or two dolmens to be seen on the new road? In consultation with archaeologists Magnus Andersson and Björn Wellebom and a historian, Hans Aström, and the head of the team for this project, Marie Minör, we decided to take up the following themes: For the ancestry of the route: first reindeer horns [Figures 5.2 and 5.3]; then at some distance, luminous prehistoric arrows [Figure 5.4], designs derived from other discoveries in this part of Sweden; further away still, two wheels -of an old carriage, and an actual truck (or lorry) [Figure 5.5]. The movement of automobiles and the distance between the sculptures allowed a cinematic review, or presentation of time, by these three symbols [Figure 5.6].

FIGURE 5.2 Reindeer horns for Trafikverket for European Motorway E 6, Sweden, steel. 2009–12.

FIGURE 5.3

Illuminated representation of reindeer horns, E 6, Sweden, steel. 2009–12.

FIGURE 5.4 Illuminated representation of prehistoric arrows, E 6, Sweden, steel struc­ ture, internal lighting and drawing printed on plexiglass. 2009–12.

FIGURE 5.5

Two wheels from an old carriage to an actual truck, E 6, Sweden, steel.

2009–12.

FIGURE 5.6 Drawing of Bernard Lassus, for Trafikverket for European Motorway E 6, running South to North in Sweden: Reindeer Horns, Prehistoric Arrows, Wheels from the old carriage to an actual truck.

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Then, in the first part of this road there would be a representation referring to the discovery of the dolmens situated in proximity to the road. But how to do this without having to rely on words, or an implausible imitation? So, three large metallic objects, illuminated inside, and parallel with the autoroute hinted at this discovery [Figure 5.7]. The Centre Pompidou sought to celebrate my work by asking me to create a garden on the terrace of its fifth floor. This was the very first garden to be shown there, and since it was to be part of the museum collections as a work of art, it had to be entirely dismantled given its large size so that it was transportable. Arriving at the end of the central allée of the garden, visitors skirt the Forest, a painted paper 21 square meters, green on a white ground. Then, they emerge onto the terrace to discover a magnificent panoramic view of Paris from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower. Stopping at the basin filled with 2 cm of real water, they see to their right two brise-lumières (see Colour Plate 8) that show, first, a tree as a cluster of leaves that reflect each other, a volume of light coloured by reflection. To demonstrate the properties of colour reflection, painted metal blades are mounted on pivots. They move naturally and their colours reflect on a screen, which is at the back, and they mingle on the screen with the colours reflected by the neighbouring blades. Here, then, is a metaphor in metal, where the different coloured “leaves” turn in the wind. In effect, these mingling and

FIGURE 5.7 Evocation of the dolmens close to the E 6, Sweden, steel and printing on tempered glass. 2009–12.

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reflecting colours are those adopted by the Olympic Games to symbolize the five continents, the cultural world represented by the Centre Pompidou. If the visitors turn, they see again the cathedral of Notre Dame. Near the basin, a black, 2.50 meter Monster guards and opens the view to the city [Figure 5.8].

FIGURE 5.8

Jardin Monde, Monster, Pompidou Centre, steel. 2017.

Then, a metal cut-out hedge becomes a little further on a cluster of natural plants waving in the wind – that clearly distinguishes the rural from the urban – while another mass of artificial flowers composed of spheres of different enamels, the tactility of which conjures up a wineglass, and finally a mass of mixed, natural flowers pre­ sented in vases painted according to Chevreul’s laws. (Michel-Eugène Chevreul, 1786–1889, established a laboratory to perfect colour contrasts when he was director of the Teintures à la Manufacture Royale des Gobelins). The three massifs front a Grotto (see Colour Plate 9), also in perforated metal in layers of colours from yellow to red at the base, and from yellow to violet at the top. At its highest, it is 5.10 meters. If visitors approach the black entry of this Grotto and go inside, they discover that it is somber and empty. It is per­ haps a sociable Monster that emerges. That is my question to the visitors […] The Grotto stands in front of two Bosquets and a little further off lies the Forest. These two bosquets have different scales: the far view of rounded peaks, and the nearer view a rhythm of branches through the foliage. If we recall the two Trees isolated at the start of the walk with their trunks covered in bark, some of which only are visible through the foliage. This ensemble reveals the different representations of trees, individual and in groups that constitute them. Some isolated ones are often called Sculptures by visitors although they are part of the garden, le “Jardin Monde”.

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If over the years, many from the countryside have moved into towns, more recent surveys show that, given the new modes of work, many urbanites go to live in the country. These two population movements signal something new that is “between” town and country, a balance between an old rural life and a new invasion of the town. This “new way of life” signals a “new living space” that has to be envisaged afresh, designed anew. But always a new garden […] a garden of sculptures, perhaps? An art object?

Note 1 Francastel’s Essai sur les origins et l’évolution du goût français classique (Paris: Edition Albert Morance, March 1930). For an image of the project and analysis, see John Dixon Hunt’s The Making of Place: Modern and Contempoary Gardens (London: Reaktion Books, 2–15), pp. 244–45.

PLATE 1 The Nordmandsdal, “Valley of the Northmen”, Fredensborg, Denmark; the figures sculpted by J. Wiedewelt, 1760s. Hunt p. 77.

PLATE 2 Bushes at Guénange, Moselle, France. 1970. Coloured enameled balls. Lassus p. 93.

PLATE 3 Hanging Gardens of Colas: The Garden of Seasonal Games. Tree in Summer. Laser cut steel. 2001–2. Lassus p. 93.

PLATE 4 Hanging Gardens of Colas: The Garden of Seasonal Games. Tree in Winter. Laser cut steel. 2001–2. Lassus p. 93.

PLATE 5 Hanging Gardens of Colas: The Garden as Waiting Room. Laser cut steel. 2006–7. Lassus p. 94.

Hanging Gardens of Colas: The Green Theatre. Grotto Laser cut steel. 2006–7. Lassus p. 94.

PLATE 6

PLATE 7 Contemporary garden. Glass panels, digital water, perforated steel, dynamic light, artificial cut trees lit from the inside and natural trees, Lassus p. 94.

PLATE 8

Jardin Monde, Brise-lumière, Pompidou Centre, steel. 2017. Lassus p. 98.

PLATE 9

Jardin Monde, Grotto, Pompidou Centre, steel. 2017. Lassus p. 99.

PLATE 10 Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, Giacometti Room, Louisiana Museum. Leatherbarrow p. 105.

PLATE 11

PLATE 12 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Ron Costley and Kenny Munro), Apollo pursu­ ing Daphne, after Bernini, 1985, painted stainless steel. Eyres p. 126.

PLATE 13

Photo: Patrick Eyres

Richard Serra, Gate in the Gorge, 1983–6, Louisiana Museum. Leatherbarrow p. 123.

Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Alexander Stoddart), Apollon Terroriste, 1987, gilded epoxy resin. Eyres p. 126 and Note 4. www.littlesparta.org.uk/ apollon-terroriste/.

Photo: Patrick Eyres

Swiss Path, 1991 Successive positions of farmers paths, Alain Léveillé, School of architecture, Geneva. Descombes p. 144.

PLATE 14

PLATE 15 Swiss Path, 1991 Drawing for the sound piece, Max Neuhaus, colour pencil, Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva. Descombes p. 153.

PLATE 16 Tremenheere. Telopea speciosissima. Rare. Only grows in the wild 200km around Sydney, NSW. Florence p. 6.

Photo: Neil Armstrong

PLATE 17

Tremenheere Puya berteroniana. Bromeliad. Origin, Chile. Florence p. 20.

Photo: Penny Florence

PLATE 18 Tremenheere, Crozier Cyathea Brownii unfurling. Florence p. 161. In this context, the plant appears sculptural.

Photo: Penny Florence

19 Tremenheere, Ken Gill, Schimza. Florence p. 161. In certain light, the art appears as water.

PLATE

Photo: Debbie A.R. Smith

PLATE 20

Tremenheere at Christmas 2017. Florence p. 20.

Photo: Neil Armstrong

Lee Ufan, Relatum – Stage 2018. Serpentine Galleries, The Royal Park of Kensington Gardens. Stones: 60 × 60 × 60 cm; 145 × 110 × 110 cm. Steel panels: 220 × 160 × 3 cm (each). Concrete base: 450 × 400 cm. Watson p. 65.

PLATE 21

Photo: Gay Watson

James Griffith, Study for Lemon Tree, Tar on Board, 16x12ʺ, 2016. Florence p. 163. PLATE 22

Photo: James Griffith

6 FROM PEDESTAL TO PLACE David Leatherbarrow

What frames are to paintings, pedestals are to sculptures, instruments and emblems of separation. [Figure 6.1, Figure 6.2] From what? From everyday, non-aesthetic concerns, which are by this means converted into background. Thanks to frames and pedestals, works of art stand on their own, free from

FIGURE 6.1

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure No. 5, 1963–4, Louisana Museum.

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FIGURE 6.2

Richard Serra, Gate in the Gorge, 1983–6, Louisiana Museum.

conditions outside the artist’s control, free for individual expression. If the per­ ception of a painting is thought to be a matter of perspective, the picture’s frame is like a window’s, as Alberti said,1 for both present us with worlds that are different from the one we presently occupy. Maybe not. This simple and long-standing distinction between content and container was challenged in modern art, in some cases renounced. Not only were works made to be displayed without frames, when frames were used they often became part of the work itself. Paintings by Rene Magritte are perhaps the most well-known illustrations of framing frames. Likewise, the work’s ostensible background—the museum or gallery wall— became part of its proper subject matter, the fond (in French, the ground, depth, or bottom, also fund or reserve) was discovered to cooperate in the work’s com­ position and reception. Among the many provocative works of this kind, Robert Rauschenberg’s are possibly the most instructive. Similar reversals of fore- and background occurred in modern sculpture. The work’s separation and support, its grounding, became part of its make-up and meaning. Historically, gar­ dens, parks, and landscapes played decisive roles in sculpture’s newly discovered “expanded field.”2 In what follows I will describe a number of the ways that sculpture can occupy its location, ranging from its standing on a pedestal, as a work unto itself, to its different forms of engagement with the terrain that extends beyond it, grounds not necessarily, though sometimes, designed by the sculptor. Perceptual orientation

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toward the work will be one of the key topics, likewise viewing distance, viewing angle, and the scale of the setting. Each of these themes bears upon the more gen­ eral problem of movement toward and around the work, as well as the kinds of time in which that movement unfolds, times that are variously quick or slow, sequen­ tial or cyclical, and known through anticipations, discoveries, or recollections. Although issues as basic as these could be taken up in any number of works, I’ll concentrate on some of those that have found their place at single site, the park, gardens, and architecture of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

A museum without walls3 In 1965 the Sculpture Park at the Louisiana Museum was opened 20 miles north of Copenhagen, in a village called Humlebaek.4 [Figure 6.3] Before there was a museum on the site there were the house, barns, gardener’s lodge, fishing hut, and gazebo of a pre-existing but deserted villa (1855). It was called Louisi­ ana because the estate’s founder had been rather remarkably remarried three times to women with the same name, Louise. The villa’s varied topography included gardens, terraces, an orchard, stream, lake, and the shoreline of the Sound, with a view of Sweden in the distance. A church and cemetery stood on the adjoining property. Also on the site were rare tree species: Japanese Maple, Ginko, Atlas Cedar, Tibetan Fir, Serbian Spruce, and many others. Is wasn’t planned as an arboretum, but had and still has that quality. But the villa had been abandoned and the grounds neglected when it was obtained for the museum in 1955. The architects used the word jungle to describe the landscape. Nevertheless, these pre-conditions played significant roles in the make-up of the new building and landscape, though they themselves were transformed in order to meet the museum’s requirements.

FIGURE 6.3

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1969–70, Louisiana Museum.

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From the very start of the project, Knut Jensen, the owner, and his two archi­ tects, Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, wanted to avoid the introverted, treas­ ury type of museum they thought common at the time. Jensen referred to the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst, 1896) as “a true horror cabinet, very much the 19th century bourgeoisie’s exaggerated view of its own importance (Jensen 1896: 46).” His reaction was rather like Paul Valéry’s polem­ ical comments from four decades earlier: however vast the palace, however suitable and well-arranged, we always feel a little lost, a little desolate in its galleries, all alone against so much art … we cannot stand up to it. So what do we do? We grow superficial. Or else we grow erudite. And erudition, in art, is a kind of dead end (Valéry 1960: 205). The Louisiana alternative [Figure 6.4] involved opening the walls of the insti­ tution to the opportunities of its milieu, literally through the use of window walls, and conceptually in the transformation of what typically would have been a single-block-of-a-building into a number of pavilions connected by gallery corridors that linked together not only the enclosed exhibition rooms but the house and the site’s several prospects, across terraces, gardens, and the lake, towards the old orchard and forest on one side, the lake on another, and the

Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, initial site plan, 1956, Louisiana Museum. (See endnote 5 for key).5

FIGURE 6.4

Courtesy of Editions Blondal

From pedestal to place

FIGURE 6.5

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Ole and Edith Nørgård, plan of garden rooms, 1966, Louisiana Museum.

Courtesy of Editions Blondal

open sea on the third. A simple pattern of walkways allowed for the clear differ­ entiation of rooms, inside and out, [Figure 6.5, Figure 6.6] each with its own character or atmosphere, thanks to their individual dimensions and geometries, of course, but also the site’s varied topographical conditions (of enclosure or expanse, shade or bright light, and views) which they variously absorbed and amplified. For example, a depression near the lake became part of a wonderful two-story gallery for a group of works by Giacometti (see Colour Plate 10), the expanse of the upper terrace extended the prospect and illuminated a pair of walkways, and a shallow pool under ancient trees served as the site for alter­ nately compact and vertical sculptural works. Variations in the exhibition spaces did not prevent the ensemble from expressing coherence as a whole, however, for simple techniques of wall and roof construction [Figure 6.7] were repeated throughout, as were the types of

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FIGURE 6.6

Ole and Edith Nørgård, initial sketch of garden room, 1966, Louisiana

Museum. Courtesy of Editions Blondal

display panels, and a few types of materials: tile, painted brick, and clearvarnished timber. The zig-zag plan also formed the sides of a number of outdoor rooms, [Figure 6.8] again with varying character, though built, like the build­ ings, with a limited palette of materials (horizontal boards covered with ivy in the “garden rooms,” for example), sometimes locating sculptural works, other times providing good spots for sunbathing, picnics, or evening concerts. While these uses transcend what we typically assume to be museum functions, they do allow the institution to ease its way into everyday life, restoring the links between its representational and participatory dimensions.

Landscape configuration Immediately after the architects accepted the commission (1956), the client invited them to stay for several days in the house, to survey and study its grounds. He had obtained the villa one year earlier, but took a while to select

From pedestal to place

FIGURE 6.7

Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, corridor, Louisiana Museum.

FIGURE 6.8

Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, corridor, Louisiana Museum.

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his architects. While there, Bo and Wohlert walked and wandered the site, dis­ covering what they took to be its potentials and deciding what changes would need to be made, what clearings, cuts, terracing, and planting would accommo­ date both the works that Jensen already owned and those he intended to obtain.

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To get a better sense of possible settings for display within the pre-existing con­ ditions, they hung some of the paintings on large trees—improbable though that seems, and risky for the paintings—in order to assess lighting, angles of approach, and distances. There isn’t evidence that sculpture was similarly tested, Jensen’s initial collec­ tion seems to have consisted largely of pictures plus some small sculptures, both ancient and modern. Yet, he did arrange outdoor exhibitions of sculpture, with works borrowed from other collections. In 1964, for instance, he mounted a show called Middelheim Visits Louisiana, with works on loan from the Middel­ heim Museum in Belgium. This experience seems to have taught him the importance of careful placement, for years later he wrote that “in the open air sculptures swim,” not something he recommended.6 Surveying was also required for the second campaign of design and construction, undertaken by the land­ scape architects Ole and Edith Nørgård, in the early 1960s. Their work resulted in another set of walkways and rooms, “garden rooms” they’ve been called, [Figure 6.9] as varied and individually characterized as those inside, thus scaled better to some works than others, linked together by steps, but unroofed. Sadly, these rooms no longer survive, except as remnants alongside newer buildings that took their place. Seen as a whole, the plan composition is basically a double grid. First, there are the elements that run parallel or perpendicular to the streets at the site’s edge, des­ pite the fact that the short entry drive rotates to the angles of the house’s

FIGURE 6.9

Ole and Edith Nørgård, garden room, Louisiana Museum.

Courtesy of Editions Blondal

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forecourt. If one imagines for a moment the house and forecourt were not there on the plan, the geometry of the passages and gallery rooms laid out by Bo and Wohlert could be seen to simply extend the lines of the approach road. The premise seems to have been that paths through the park should extend the lines of approach and arrival. The only exception to this rule is the very first gallery corri­ dor, the plan lines of which conform to those of the house. The next segment of the corridor restores the quasi-urban pattern, alongside an impressive and ancient nine-stemmed beech tree. As the early design development proceeded, subsequent passages were laid out with lengths of string, in and among existing trees, but also in conformity with the initial pattern. The second set of parallels and perpendiculars links the geometry of the house (and the first passage next to the ancient beech) to the terminus of the route, the public rooms and terrace that sit atop the bluff, facing the Sound. The fact that the alignment of the house with the bluff terrace is inexact, not quite parallel, sug­ gests that the view from the latter across the Sound was just as significant as the view back toward the house. But this second geometry had wider consequences. In the same way that the first, quasi-urban grid regulated the geometry of the enclosed exhibition spaces, the lines and angles of the house determined the plan form of external display spaces. The “green rooms” designed by the Nørgårds extended the house geometry, rather like kitchen gardens attached to a country house, though art works were on show, not herbs and vegetables. This geometry is plain on the landscape plan from 1963. Unlike the gallery passages [Figure 6.10]

FIGURE 6.10

Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, corridor, Louisiana Museum.

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that slightly slope downward toward the library and public rooms atop the bluff, these terraces consistently rise toward an observation deck (the former gazebo site), that overlooks the cliff above the shore. All in all, then, there are two grids and two directions of orientation: from the village toward the park, and from the house toward the shore, with glass-walled passages conforming to the first and garden rooms aligned with the second.

Landscape movement Nothing was more important to the client, the architects, and landscape architects than avoiding the boxed-in sense of enclosure that had become typical of late 19th- and early 12th-century museums (temples of art). Thus, interior passages and enclosed rooms were always open to points or places in the landscape. In terms of architectural construction, thin load-bearing columns hidden within window frames plus window walls made this openness possible, though contrast and focus were aided by the careful placement of bulky planes of white-washed brickwork. Nor was the route closed in on itself as a single aesthetic experience. Although a work by Henry Moore (Reclining Figure, 1969) now greets the arriving visitor, entry to the museum properly begins in domestic space, at the door to the pre-existing house, with its modest scale and traces of residential life. The end of the route has all the opposite qualities: the shore-side bluff’s open expanse, the Sound’s wide horizon, a very big sky, and another country in the distance. Medi­ ating these contrasting conditions, the route offered a series of spatial/sculptural events, analogous to a journey Jensen said, though hardly goal oriented, because the destination could be decided at any moment, in any one of the passages, walks, indoor or outdoor rooms. The paths and places were meant to be continu­ ally stimulating and inviting, though not dominating one’s attention. The spaces through which movement passed were governed by the principle of variation. They were to be alternately high or low, narrow or wide, bright or dark, and everything in-between. Variation did not mean insistent individuation, however, for no less important was a sense of rhythm. Recurring intervals regu­ lated the movement between the works/events Jensen called “birds on a wire.” Also modulating passage were repetitive alignments and similarly formed station points. Rigidity, however, was not the result. Rather like the recalibration of skills and habits that is required when one is faced with unique circumstances and materials, the elements that were used repeatedly were slightly adjusted or adapted to local opportunities, giving passage not only measure and cadence but grace. These attunements were prompted by variations in the pre-existing ter­ rain, its different enclosures, openings, elements, and prospects, as well as the physical qualities of the lawns and groves, plus the pools, pond, and sea. Yet the terrain wasn’t always amplified, sometimes variety was achieved by working against the grain: levelling a terrace, for example, where the land had previously fallen to the shore. Nor was the range of spatial types only topographical. Move­ ment from one spot to another meant encountering settings that were alternately

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aesthetic, natural, and practical, the latter including places for concerts, picnics, swimming, and children’s play. Concentration thus gave way to distraction, with spaces for musing in-between.

Putting works in their place: viewing distance, viewing angle, scale Perhaps the first task of design when locating a work of sculpture in either a museum interior or a landscape setting is the determination of viewing distance. When the distance is right, the work gives itself to perception without reserve, completely. When not, when the separation is too great or slight, perception and understanding are blurred or blunted, through deficiency or excess of con­ tent. Putting the matter mathematically, optimal viewing distance is inversely proportional to indeterminacy.7 Remote works slip out of one’s grasp. This doesn’t mean they are nowhere to be seen, only that they are not present fully. If, by contrast, their locations allow them to advance too far forward, when placed tangent to a curve in a path for example, pressing in on us too closely, or we on them, they disintegrate into bits of material and colour, fragmenting, at least for the moment, the whole intended by the artist. When turning into one of Louisiana’s gallery corridors, works at the far end of the passage are sometimes too distant to be appreciated, rather like a person you can’t quite recognize on a train platform. But with a few steps forward, decreasing the distance, accepting the summons for a closer look, the profiles spring into relief, shadows and highlights give shape to legible form, and the work offers its qualities unhesitatingly, without end. A point such as this could be reached near the end of an approach, or as soon as a corner is turned and the view opens onto a new prospect. Targeted views at Louisiana often look out­ wards, with the interval between the vantage point and the work measured by equally spaced paving stones. At these moments, when works simultaneously attract focus and reward concentration, one sometimes has the feeling of submit­ ting to the work’s expectations or requirements, of accepting one’s part in the drama the work itself has scripted. Viewing distance is not, however, a matter of so many meters, precisely deter­ mined; instead, a range is intended, rather like a perceptual norm, within or around which meanings crystalize, neither too far nor too near, as I’ve said, but at the extent of reach that allows one to grasp the work fully. The fact that control over this distance—the length of the gallery/passage or the interval between a corner doorway and the end of a line of paving stones—is never absolute does not mean the conditions in which meaning can be maximized should not be attempted. Admitting defeat so quickly would deprive design of one of its main responsibilities. Approach is not only a matter of distance but also of angle, and there may not be a single slant that seems best, but several together. Determining lines of sight is a second essential task in siting sculpture, indoors and out. Some of the works at the Louisiana were positioned so that they would be

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approached and viewed frontally, squared off, face-to-face. This was the case, for example, on the upper level of the first large gallery room designed by Bo and Wohlert, the Lake Gallery, where a kneeling figure rested on a raised plinth (Astrid Noack’s Kneeling Figure, young man planting a tree, 1942). [Figure 6.11] The approach to both the room and the work is orthogonal, along the lines of the gallery corridor that leads there, but also, and more importantly, those of the ceiling and roof structure, two parallel timber beams. Between them a circular roof-light has been cut through the ceiling, under which the sculpture rested on its plinth, bathed in light, rather like a prince or madonna in classical paintings, though kneeling. The backdrop plays an important part in this set-up, floor-to-ceiling whitewashed brickwork that does its very best to escape atten­ tion, playing the part of barely taking part. The backdrop, lighting, beam struc­ ture, and line of approach all contribute to the presentation format, concentrating the focus and allowing for a “meeting of the eyes.”8 Of course, oblique are views are always possible and often taken, but the configuration privileges the axial line, to which one eventually returns, because it is the view angle that answers the expectations of the work itself. Similarly axial was the approach to Astrid Noack’s Standing Woman, 1937, [Figure 6.12] which stood on an open lawn past a shallow pool of water that aligns with a wide corridor gallery. Both the initial view and the approach demarcate the axis, inviting one to step outside and approach the work. In this case, a line of paving stones between the gallery door and the work bridges the pool and inscribes the route into the soil. As in the previous case, the posture of the work invites a corresponding stance in the viewer, as does the initial view. The door surround, which frames the figure, has corresponding vertical propor­ tions, and the lower plinth encourages a conversational encounter, face-to-face. All of the views that follow the first reinforce those that came before, making experience reiterative, sense cumulative, and time incremental. Turning off axis would mean turning toward another work or some other prospect, beginning the journey anew. Other works at the Louisiana invite many angles of approach and view, giving themselves to experience in distinctly different phases or moments. [Figure 6.13] Because no single vantage is preferred, movement is not frontal but orbital, one circles around the work, inspecting or discovering sides that had been unseen from the preceding angle, sides that perforce conceal still others yet to come. Sense such as this follows a different temporal register, distinct moments or phases that are neither repetitive nor complete, incidents that diverge from one another as much as they precede and follow. At the Louisiana this kind of approach reveals the qualities of works by Henry Moore, Max Bill, and Joan Miró, [Figure 6.14] works that shows themselves in-the-round, above the soil and beneath the sky, but never all at once, nor from any preferred vantage. The third basic task of siting a sculptural work is the definition of the setting’s scale. Sizes are at play in these determinations, but not only that, for scale is essen­ tially a matter of relationships, between the dimensions of the work and those of its

From pedestal to place

FIGURE 6.11

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Astrid Noack’s Kneeling Figure, young man planting a tree, 1942, Louisiana

Museum. Courtesy of Editions Blondal

location: small works or groups of them make sense in comparatively contained set­ tings, against a wall or hedge, for example, or under a cantilever or canopy, while larger works, raised off the ground on a plinth, fit better in the middle of an open lawn, facing the sea perhaps. Broadly speaking, sculptural works sited in gardens and

FIGURE 6.12

Astrid Noack’s Standing Woman, 1937, Louisiana Museum.

Courtesy of Editions Blondal

FIGURE 6.13

Henry Moore, Three Piece Reclining Figure-Draped, 1974–5, Louisiana

Museum.

FIGURE 6.14

Joan Miró, Personnage, 1970, Louisiana Museum.

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FIGURE 6.15

Henry Heerup, Collection, 1967–8, Louisiana Museum.

parks answer to three scales: that of the human body, the specific setting in which work is sited, and the wider territory or geography. At the Louisiana Museum and Park, the architects and landscape architects took great care with elements at the scale of the human body. Everyone who goes there experiences the results of their exacting calibrations. Interior and exterior “rooms,” for example, convey impres­ sions of calm intimacy and warm domesticity, no matter what the weather. Low riser heights slow passage up and down the stairways that modulate the paths, just as waist-high garden walls enclose spaces but allow wider views. An ensemble of stone carvings by Henry Heerup next to a white brick wall, under an overhanding roof, among ivy and ferns, and sheltered by overhanging limbs is an example of this scale of setting. [Figure 6.15] Larger works, such as those by Max Ernst, were, in turn, scaled to their set­ tings through different means; the two sides of the gallery passage, for example, [Figure 6.16] which defined a place that was equally enclosed and open. The building’s floor-to-ceiling glazing played a part in this figure-ground proportion­ ality, as did its ever-so-thin full height columns, which stretch the elevation of the setting vertically, though not lower than the ground plane (to the shore), nor higher than the limbs of the birch trees (to the clouds). Still larger works, such as those by Calder and Shapiro, [Figure 6.17, Figure 6.18] were scaled to much larger places: wide open lawns, raised platforms, the shoreline, and the Sound. So significant is the siting of these works that the lawn on which the Calder sculptures stand is now commonly called the Calder Terrace. In addition to being widely expansive, the platform is far more level than its surroundings and is

FIGURE 6.16

Jorgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert, corridor, Louisiana Museum.

FIGURE 6.17

Alexander Calder, Little Janey-Waney, 1964–76, Louisiana Museum.

FIGURE 6.18

Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1985–86, Louisiana Museum.

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prominent from several vantages and great distances. Distant Sweden comes into the picture too. From the public rooms of the Museum, the terrace’s far edge perfectly aligns with the distant horizon, where the sea meets the sky or the opposite shore. The Shapiro sculpture commands a lower plateau, but one that is no less expansive and is likewise basically level. It obtains prominence thanks to strong contrast with the dense grove of trees nearby. Before the work was installed in 1986 a full-size mock-up was made so that alternative placements could be tested—not too close to the tree line, somewhat hidden from the Calder group on the upper terrace, dominating the landscape at its own level, but also answering views from above.

Pedestals No matter whether they are viewed frontally and statically or obliquely in a series of glances, within a clearly contained enclosure or at the center of an open deck, sculptural works in a museum or park often take their stand on ped­ estals. Furnished thus with feet, or more accurately a foot or footing, the work is less ambulatory than raised up and steady—etymologically pedestal means stable footing. Resting on the ground and under the work, the pedestal is flatter and dryer than the first, but like the second insignificant with respect to the content it supports. Pedestals thus grant works a rather significant measure of autonomy from their location, when one recalls all that has been observed about viewing distance, angle, and scale, to say nothing about lighting and the less tan­ gible but no less important sense of the atmosphere of the setting. Thanks to its pedestal, the work is freed from the surrounding ground level, slightly or signifi­ cantly sloped as it may be. Thus separated, it establishes its own relationships to its surroundings, rather authoritatively, organizing the space for the angles and distances by which it presents itself most fully. An even more important consequence of pedestal siting is its acknowledge­ ment of the work’s own principles of configuration or rules of composition. In works by Henry Moore, for example, the involution of volumes first turns the work in on itself, then outwards, then back again, in an unending sequence, not as an element of or in the landscape, but on or as its own terrain or topography, a sculpted landscape which invites a wandering eye to explore its sloped surfaces, up its hills and down its valleys, towards or through its unlikely hollows. Like Jensen, Moore invoked the idea of journey, not toward the work, but across its surfaces. It is therefore not exactly right to say sculptural works in the Louisiana sculpture park stand on their bases or pedestals, because the reclining position of works by Moore emphatically renounce that eminently stable posture. Why?— for the sake of movement, for movement brings the work to life, as Michelan­ gelo, following Aristotle, famously observed. Furthermore, space is not only structured around the work but within it, the cavities, voids, and hollows sub­ tracted from its bulky mass. Sculptural landscapes (for a peripatetic eye) can be seen in other works at the Louisiana, too. No less internally defined and free­ standing, thanks to their pedestals, are the works by Jean Arp and Max Bill.

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Yet, the relative autonomy granted by a work’s base doesn’t always orient the view to itself, according to its particular rules of composition. Works by Giaco­ metti also stand on pedestals, but are neither autonomous nor inwardly focused. The Walking Man (Homme qui marche, 1960), whose stride sets the measure for one of the Louisiana’s most beautiful galleries, the Lake Gallery mentioned above, dir­ ects its view and ours across the space, from one side to the other. Depending on which way the curators turn him, the line of sight is either out across the water (beyond the floor-to-ceiling glazing), or up the stairway we have just descended. In either case, his focus leads ours elsewhere. The short but stable base allows a well-healed pace, but it is less a stance than a stride. Outwards orientation is also expressed by the other Giacomettis in the Museum. Large Head (Grande tête, 1959–60), for example, rests on a high base, high enough to reply to one’s look with its own. Even if the view/thought is indecipherable, you never doubt its eyes have an interest in yours, thanks in part to a rather stiff neck. An exchange of views is also apparent in the groupings of smaller-sized works. Their large bases and diminutive dimensions keep them distant from the space we occupy—they seem so very far off—but because they stand together at the same level they converse with one another. Communication is inevitable when they share the same base, as in La forêt, but also when carvings that stand separately are exhibited near one another, as in Femmes de Venise, 1956. In each of these cases, the pedestals keep the immediate setting distant, not so that we focus on the works themselves, but on the eccentric interests they suggest we observe. One must be careful, then, not to say these works stand within the Museum or Park, for their pedestals would allow them to placed elsewhere. Indeed, the smaller groups have been located in different rooms at the Louisiana. Yet, the sizes and forms they’ve been given, together with the orientation they express, make us aware of the wider landscape, in both its spatial and social dimensions. Knowledge of the place is the result, even if it is an eccentric or dislocated manner of understanding.

Platforms Like pedestals, raised platforms and levelled lawns provide sculptural works with bases that separate them from the local terrain and wider vicinity. [Figure 6.19] But while no one other than the work occupies a pedestal, sculpture terraces allow and encourage all of us to enjoy the same standing, and not only you and me when we are viewing the work, also others who may not have any interest in the sculpture, kids at play, friends enjoying lunch together, or individual with her back to the work staring at the horizon. The Calder Terrace at the Louisiana accommodates all of this. There are three of his works there (Slender Ribs, 1963; Little Janey-Waney, 1964–76; and Almost Snow Plow, 1964–74); but, there is much more. More land and light are included in the work’s generous domain, as well as the wider horizon. The ground on which the works stand is generally allowed to play the part of background, which is to say an unnoticed substrate. What is more, it possesses qualities missing from the work.

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FIGURE 6.19 Alexander Calder, Almost Snow Plow, 1964/76 and Little Janey-Waney, 1964–76, Louisiana Museum.

Against the land’s ponderous solidity, the mobile whimsically plays with the wind and light, refusing to settle down, happily at odds with all that can be taken for granted, especially the earth base. Platforms in sculpture parks are essentially topographical foils. Once works are sited in this type of place, however, opposing qualities reinforce one another. Rather like the sea at its border, the Calder Terrace couples forms that continually change, mobile geometry and incoming waves or passing clouds, with images of unshakable constancy, the lawn’s edge and the distant horizon. Perhaps the most decisive characteristic of the sculpture platform is the change of level that distinguishes it from nearby slopes. The step up or down is just sufficient to make a place within the wider landscape.9 Within such a room—it is barely that– viewers and works stand together, face-to-face sometimes, but mostly with glancing awareness of one another. This sort of marginal and occasional contact is one of the consequences of “orbital” perception and the separation from the surrounding context granted by the level deck. And though it is like a room, it is scaled more to the sea and sky than the soil. It is from the former that it borrows many of its essential qualities.

Places In a landscape or park, sculpture can also be sited in outdoor rooms or places with distinct and apparent character. [Figure 6.20] Pedestals and platforms are commonly used within them, but the autonomy and openness those two enjoy are replaced

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FIGURE 6.20

Ole and Edith Nørgård, garden room, Louisiana Museum.

Courtesy of Editions Blondal

by adherence to routes and acceptance of boundaries. Given Jensen’s desire to overcome the stuffy pretentiousness of traditional museums, as well as his wish to re-position works in more approachable and relaxed settings, it is not surprising that his landscape architects designed sites that approximated residential or domestic interiors. As with the axial or orbital viewing of works on pedestals and platforms, there is a correspondence between the works and their setting in garden rooms. At Louisiana the Nørgårds designed a remarkably beautiful ensemble of inter­ connected outdoor spaces. As shown on the 1966 plan, the settings included an approach walk from the old house, a forecourt open to the park on one side and walled off against the old orchard on the other, three variously sized and shaped “rooms” that ascend to a final sculpture court, and then a walkway that leads to the observation deck over the cliff that falls toward the shore and sea. Thanks to their greater or narrower widths and varying lengths, the three rooms have different characters and moods, with which sculptural works gracefully coexist. Scale is at issue here, as I’ve said, smaller works in smaller rooms, for example, inviting close inspection and intimate contact. Despite the differenti­ ation, the path that links the rooms together (and to elsewhere in the Park) is hardly a meander, the sequence of steps follows a single line, giving the ensemble unity and clarity, without sacrificing the distinctness of each room. Each of the rooms is squared, levelled, bounded, and trimmed. Moreover, they are defined by repetitive elements: walls, steps and walks. They are not only linked to one another through repetition, but also connected by a single line of passage—steps-paths-steps—that leads to a single destination, the observation

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deck, with wholly contrasting qualities: unbound in its prospects, more like a platform than a room, but ungrounded. Finally, there are the works that have the most intimate contact with the loca­ tion, those that are typically called site-specific. [Figure 6.21] The most interesting case among several at the Louisiana is by Richard Serra, The Gate in the Gorge, 1983–86 (see Colour Plate 11). While common, the term is too general to be of much use for present purposes, for we have seen there are several ways of making a work specific to its site. Non-separation from the physical location is key, for works of this kind entirely lack the portability that characterizes sculptures set on pedestals, or positioned in the middle of platforms. Serra himself argued this point in criticism of works by Calder and others: “sculptures by Noguchi and Calder fail [because] they have nothing to do with the contexts in which they’re placed … they are displaced, homeless …”10 Likewise for works on pedestals. Serra claimed that “the biggest break in the history of sculpture in the 20th century occurred when the pedestal was removed … [for this concept] established a separation of the object from the behavioral space of the viewer.”11 His works, by contrast are inseparable from the locations in which they are built and they draw the viewer into the space that has been defined or restructured by the work. What was brought to the site—the sculptor’s ideas, experiences, techniques, images—was no more important than what was discovered there, in this case the tangle of vegetation than ended a fern-filled cleft running parallel to the shore, but back toward the center of the park. When asked by Jensen to install a work at the Louisiana, Serra wandered the landscape, as did Bo and Wohlert decades before him, looking for a location in which he could imagine himself working—with and against what he saw. In addition to the cut in the land, he discovered a rather dramatic change in elevation, beginning at the site of a bridge and ending on the lower clearing in the forest that overlooked the sea. It was a transitional space in a number of senses, but there was no marker of topographical change, no articulation of the shift of level or re-direction of orientation. Yet, the site wasn’t merely found, it was also constructed, as both a context and outcome of his work. The two steel plates he inserted into the sides of the ravine marked the point of passage with an threshold that gradually opens as ones angle of approach shifts from the sides to the center of the work. And once the gate opens, the shore’s wide horizon comes into full view. Sculpture of this kind is less an object to be seen than a way of seeing, an optic that shows a landscape that had been there but hadn’t be noticed until then, at least not so vividly. Site-specific sculpture, so-called, reverses the roles of figure and ground, the container becomes the content, the park, at least some part of it, presents itself as a sculptural work, and aesthetic pleasure assimilates itself into landscape experience we can either take for granted or choose to wonder about.

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Notes 1 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1972), 55. The relevant passage is as follows: “First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen …” 2 Here, of course, I borrow the felicitous chapter heading from Rosalind Krauss, though not the specifics of her argument. See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985), 276–90. Previously, I addressed this and related topics in: “Gardens and the Larger Landscape,” A Cultural History of Gardens in the Modern Age, vol. 6, ed. John Dixon Hunt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 181–206. 3 This heading is from a classic text: André Malraux, Museum Without Walls (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967). Malraux argued that the distinctive aspect of the museum was the dislocation of its objects, the fact that they had been removed from the spatial, material, and functional environments that had originally contributed to their mean­ ings. Once removed from their native settings they ceased to function in the ways their makers and patrons intended—practically, politically, or religiously. Portraits that were removed from family estates to museums, Malraux said, became pictures. Votive carvings and talismans came to be classed as examples of the minor arts, handicrafts. 4 The basic sources on the museum’s history and holdings are the following texts: Michael Sheridan, Louisiana Architecture and Landscape (Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2107); Helle Crenzien, The Louisiana Sculpture Park (Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2008); John Pardey, Louisiana and Beyond (Hellerup: Blondal, 2007); and Knud W. Jensen, et al, Louisiana The Collection and The Buildings (Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1992). Also interesting, though indirectly, is: Jean Nouvel, Louisi­ ana Manifesto (Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2008). 5 Nyanlaeg (New Layout). 1. Reguleret Skraent. Delv M.Buske (Regulated slope. Bushes). 2. Graesplaene (Lawn). 3. Terrasse i Chaussesten (Cobbled Terrace). 4. Haevet Bed M. Pergola - Rhododendr.Slyngi (Raised bed, pergola, rhododendrons). 5. Haevet Bed Bambus. O Lign (Raised bed, bamboo & similar). 6. Baergpyr M, Overstanderer AF Pin.Silv. (Mountain Pine). 7. Skaerebede (Formal [‘cut’] beds?). 8. Graesgange imemen skaerebedene (grass paths between beds). 9. Bamboo. 10. Bassin. Grønblå bund. (pool, blue-green bottom). 11. Traedesten af granit. Kant af søsten. (Granite stepping stones, pebble surrounds). 12. Yuca (Yucca). 13. Robina opst. (Robina?). 14. Aelanthus (Tree of Heaven). 15. Blomsterbuske: Ribis fiia? (Flowering bushes). 16. Sorbaria (compact shrub, thicket-forming). 17. Iris (Iris). 18. Sandkasse (sand pit). 19. Rundskulptur af Westmann (Circular sculpture by Westmann. 20. Knaelende dreng af Noack (Kneeling Boy by Noack). 21. Ny Skulptur (New sculp­ ture). 22. Legeplads (chaussè). Play area (paved). 23. Baenk. (Bench). 24. Rhododen­ drons. 25. Chaussè - sti i graes. (Paving - grass path). 26. Søstensbelaegning. (Pebbled surface). 27. Kampesten. (Boulder). 6 Knud W. Jensen, Mit Louisiana liv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1993), 128. 7 A number of the points I’ve made here restate and elaborate observations made in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 302. 8 This type of encounter is described very beautifully and helpfully in Ananda Coomaras­ wamy, “The Meeting of Eyes,” in Traditional Art and Symbolism Selected Papers, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 233–40. 9 I have discussed this more fully in David Leatherbarrow, “Building Levels,” Uncommon Ground Architecture, Technology, Topography (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000), 25–70. 10 Richard Serra and Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture,” Richard Serra Writings Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 126. 11 Richard Serra, “Interview with Peter Eisenman,” Richard Serra Writings Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 141.

7 LITTLE SPARTA

The neo-classical re-arming of the sculpture garden Patrick Eyres

It is unusual in Britain to find a garden at 300 metres above sea level, and within the remote liminal space between upland fields and open moorland. Nonetheless, Little Sparta inhabits the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland where gardening is challenged by the omnipotence of weather and the sparse, exposed terrain. Yet between 1966 and 2006, the poetic vision and hard graft of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) transformed the four acres around the small farm­ stead into the well-watered glades of this contemplative sculpture garden. This representation of the place is used with caution. Through a fusion of concrete poetry and neoclassicism, Finlay developed a synthetic approach to art-making that he would characterise as pastoral, and he always preferred to describe the inscribed artworks as poems. Nevertheless, as he would also, rather reluctantly, concede to the term ‘sculpture’, it will be used throughout this discussion which, by surveying the elements and activities of Finlay’s neoclassical rearming, will of necessity address the wider contexts of cultural warfare, commissions and the sculpture park. Originally known as Stonypath, the farmstead was gifted to Sue Finlay by her parents and the family settled there during the autumn of 1966. Finlay had already been exploring ways of using the outdoors as a site for sculpture, and was also familiarising himself with histories of garden design.1 Although the place gradually evolved through the 23-year collaboration between Finlay the poet and Sue Finlay the gardener,2 by the mid-1970s it was clear that the idea of the sculpture garden was undergoing a unique renaissance. Finlay had found common ground in certain avant-garde and traditional practices and was re­ thinking the form and content of his artworks. Even though he would not wish to be associated with either, practices discernible in the discourses of Land Art and Conceptual Art – such as the ready-made, site-specificity, and resistance to autonomous object sculpture – were complemented by appreciation of the

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inscription, sculptural forms and landscape design, which were drawn from his understanding of the European classical garden.3 This process of re-thinking began c.1973 and was defined in 1978 as the Five Year Hellenisation Plan, which led in 1979 to the garden’s renaming as Little Sparta, in a wry antithesis to ‘the Athens of the North’, Edinburgh, 25 miles away – though, by 1983, the sterner terminology of Neoclassical Rearmament was preferred. It must also be noted that, although Finlay created sculpture, he was not a sculptor. His solution was traditional and became a characteristic of his practice. He employed carefully selected collaborators in the fields of design and craft who could realise his ideas to his precise brief, in the appropriate manner and with consummate quality. (See Colour Plates 12 and 13).4 Although an apparent contradiction, the principal sculptural innovation at Little Sparta was the inscription. Finlay had come to appreciate that the terse economy of text favoured by concrete poetry was evident in the elegant simpli­ city of the classical inscription. He also realised that the associative resonances of an inscription could transform a place through the poetics of metaphor. More­ over, exclusive focus on the sculptural object was resisted by use of the inscrip­ tion because it was only one element in a work that was also composed of words and plantings. He had noted in The Monteviot Proposal (1979) that: The sculpture – if one is to call it a sculpture – was characteristic of the ornaments of that landscape, for it drew attention not to itself (though it was pleasing to look at) but to the indigenous features of the woodland – to the pleasure of hearing the breeze in the trees, and to the trees which were both ornamental and useful.5 At Little Sparta the glades and pools, groves and parkland, lochan and pathways were designed as a series of atmospheric spaces that embower a neoclassicised reper­ toire of inscribed sculpture, predominantly in stone, that encompass benches, planters, headstones, sundials, bird-tables and columns, as well as bee-hives, obelisks, bridges, dry-stone walls and even a wheel-barrow (Figure 7.1). While all these forms pre-existed within classical and vernacular traditions, the tree-plaque and tree-column base were unique to Finlay, and had been created in response to com­ missions precisely to articulate his contemplative fusion of sculpture and nature. The presence of the tree-plaque and tree-column base acknowledges an add­ itional sculptural purpose for the garden, which was to rehearse neoclassical installations for export elsewhere. Another form, the monumental inscription, indicates a further sculptural relationship between Little Sparta and the world beyond. Commissioned for London’s Hayward Annual exhibition, which in 1983 specialised in sculpture, the work was subsequently installed at Little Sparta, where the inscription, attributed to the French Revolutionary Saint-Just, invited contemplation of the breadth of countryside that encompasses garden, moors and farmland: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future (Figure 7.2). The sculpture’s repatriation stimulated the idea that it could be perceived as an

Little Sparta

FIGURE 7.1

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Gary Hincks, Overview of Little Sparta, c.2010, drawing.

Courtesy: the artist

FIGURE 7.2 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Nicholas Sloan), The Present Order, 1983, monumental inscription, eleven blocks of Purbeck and Whitsum stone, Little Sparta.

Photo: Patrick Eyres

‘edition’ in which each work would be uniquely inscribed in the native lan­ guage of each commission – thus, in Eindhoven, Dutch (1986); Paris, French (1987); Milan, Italian (1988); Frankfurt, German (1989); Barcelona, Catalan (1999), and Nashville, USA (1990), in Latin!

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The tree-plaque is a good example of the proposition in The Monteviot Pro­ posal that the inscriptions ‘sometimes suggested the fragments of antique poetry, & being fragmentary were for that reason all the more evocative’.6 Fas­ tened to tree trunks they create ‘a sense of depth and solitude, providing a reason for straying a little distance from the main path and making wander­ ing as it were permissible’.7 Some of the proposed tree-plaques would bear the name of the tree, as in the Linnaean Latin classification which is familiar through the labels in arboreta and botanic gardens, as in Abies Alba (Silver Fir). Others that were proposed were later made for Little Sparta (c.1980). Their inscriptions invoke the literary lovers who had famously carved their names into the bark of trees – Oenone Paris (Ovid), Angelico Medoro (Ariosto) and Rosalind Orlando (Shakespeare) – and remind that the garden is also an intimate place for romantic trysts (Figure 7.3). The two types of inscription enabled the tree-plaques to ensure that ‘silvicul­ ture and literary culture were set side by side and each had its due & natural place within a single world’.8 These tree plaques would be exported into the ‘single world’ of the Domaine de Kerghuennec sculpture park in Brittany, France, where the Tree-Plaques (1986) were placed high up on the trunks having been enlarged in scale to accommodate the height and breadth of the mature woodland trees.

FIGURE 7.3 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with David Ballantyne), Angelica Medoro, c.1980,

tree-plaque, ceramic, Little Sparta.

Photo: Patrick Eyres

Little Sparta

129

Through The Monteviot Proposal Finlay defined the pastoral approach to sculp­ ture that he had cultivated by gardening at Little Sparta during the 1970s. Even though it was never realised, the proposal constitutes Finlay’s most extensive dis­ cussion about his sculpture. He also explained that: ‘The work will be both an object (poem? sculpture?) and an invitation to enjoy the sound’. The sound alluded to was the music created by ‘the real wind in the real trees’.9 ‘The sound of the breeze’, he reiterated, could be experienced as ‘a kind of chamber music’.10 The breeze could also invoke the sound of distant sea. One treeplaque, placed high on the trunk, draws the eye upwards to enjoy the sough of wind through leaves and boughs (Figure 7.4). The Latin inscription, Mare Nos­ trum (Our Sea, 1975), transforms windsough into the susurration of Finlay’s own poetic ocean, which is populated by the sculptural presence of sail-powered work-boats and twentieth-century warships.11 While Neoclassical Rearmament described the sculptural programme at Little Sparta, the term can also be seen as a metaphor for Finlay’s campaigning approach to art practice – for his self-appointed role as champion of neoclassicism in contem­ porary art, for the passion with which he strove to update and reinvigorate the clas­ sical tradition, and for his understanding that conflict was integral to and even a stimulus to his art. The garden’s inscriptions articulate his fascinated engagement with the paradoxical presence of violence in culture and nature. Yet, while resonant with philosophical and poetic associations, neoclassical rearming was rife with humour, irony and affection. Take, for example, the Roman Garden and the Homage to the Villa d’Este sculptures (1973–76), which playfully combine earnest homage to the classical garden with a wry, tongue-in-cheek wit (Figure 7.5). Through the potent modern forms of miniature aircraft carriers, Finlay winks, with a twinkle in the eye, at the sculpted triremes of Roman imperial gardens and especially at the warship fountain in the Renaissance garden at the Villa d’Este. At the same time, by transforming the flat tops of the flight decks into bird-tables and a bird-bath, he enables the feathery ‘warplanes’ to peacefully animate the carriers. By way of contrast (Figure 7.6), the inscription on the garden temple (1982) – To Apollo/His Music . His Missiles . His Muses – visually places the death-dealing archer centre-stage (missiles), flanked by the deity’s simultaneous personas of musician (music) and patron of the arts (muses). This characteristic fusion of the lyric and pugnacious befitted the tradition of the poetic garden at odds with the wider world, and Finlay also drew on the cultural politics of the Georgian garden to assert in his celebrated series of Sentences that: A garden, being less a place than a world, is a proper work for an exile.12 Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.13 The painted colonnade and inscription transformed the former cow byre into a garden temple as a challenge to Strathclyde Regional Council. After the build­ ing began to be used to display artworks, the Council had unilaterally redefined

Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Nicholas Sloan), Mare Nostrum, 1978,

tree-plaque, Portland stone, Little Sparta.

FIGURE 7.4

Photo: Patrick Eyres

Little Sparta

131

FIGURE 7.5 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with John Andrew), Homage to the Villa d’Este, air­ craft carrier bird-table, 1975, and (left) birdbath, c.1973, Portland stone, Roman Garden, Little Sparta.

Photo: Patrick Eyres

it as a commercial art gallery for the purpose of levying rates (property tax). Fin­ lay’s counter-attack re-designated the structure (1979), and suspended payment of the increased rates until the Council agreed to discuss a rating definition appropriate to its new use as a religious building. His principled and vigorous prosecution of the long-running Little Spartan War was regarded by many as symptomatic of the way that he appeared to court controversy.14 Fought through correspondence, propagandist artworks and the courts, the war only came to an end in 1996 with the dissolution of Strathclyde Regional Council. In the context of an embattled Little Sparta, the Hellenisation Plan had evolved into the combative notion of his neoclassicism as a ‘rearmament programme’.15 This combative notion extended to commissions, especially for the new type of landscape known as the sculpture park, in which the rationale for siting proved to be incompatible with Finlay’s vision of outdoor installation. Thus the policy was to export his model of the neoclassically rearmed sculpture garden as a lyric interven­ tion to create a self-contained, neoclassical environment within places that he regarded as outdoor galleries dominated by modernist object sculpture. His percep­ tion was that the synthesis of sculpture and nature was absent from these landscapes because the tradition of the European classical garden had become unfashionable. He was dismayed that the natural environment had become relegated as a backdrop

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Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Nicholas Sloan), The Temple of Apollo, 1982, stone building, with façade painted and gilded with four Corinthian columns, two Ionic column window decorations and lettering.

FIGURE 7.6

Photo: Patrick Eyres

to highlight the form and materiality of the stand-alone, autonomous sculptures that colonised these spaces: ‘The contemporary “sculpture park” is not – and is not con­ sidered to be – an art garden, but an art gallery out-of-doors. It is a parody of the classical garden native to the West’ (c.1981).16 Little Sparta was the antithesis, and his proposals and installations became cultural missiles fired from the garden’s rearmed silo.17 The Monteviot Proposal and the Tree Plaques for the Domaine de Kerghuennec exemplify this strategy, and three other commissions provide useful examples of the degree to which the garden became the site of sculptural rehearsal.18 These are the Kröller-Müller sculpture park at Otterlo in Holland (1982), Stockwood Park, Luton (1986–91) and the Glasgow Garden Festival (1988).19 Playing on the wartime term for clandestine subversion, Finlay wryly titled his proposal A Fifth Column for the Kröller-Müller. His response to this commission was not only to create the new form of the tree-column base, but also to use the garden experimentally. The Little Sparta Pantheon is now a mature sculpture on account of the growth of the trees. Yet it originated as the maquette for the Kröller-Müller’s Sacred Grove. Installed in 1980 and nurtured on the then exposed and windswept hillside, the pantheon-maquette comprised six distinct types of classical column base set before the trunks of saplings. Each one is inscribed with the name of a European

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FIGURE 7.7 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Sue Finlay and Nicholas Sloan), Sacred Grove,

1982, Kröller-Müller sculpture park, Otterlo.

Photo: John Tetley

cultural hero so that, together, they conjoin politics, philosophy, history and the visual arts in a manner similar to the ‘worthies’ commemorated in a Georgian garden temple: Robespierre, Michelet, Corot, Rousseau, Cusanus, Freidrich. Three different versions of the Robespierre tree-column base were installed in the process of resolving its appropriate form. The Dutch Sacred Grove (Figure 7.7) hallowed European cultural heroes chosen from those already saluted at Little Sparta: Lycur­ gus, Corot, Robespierre, Michelet and Rousseau.20 Each name is inscribed on one of the five monumental tree-column bases set before the trunks of mature forest trees within a dense screen of rhododendrons. The painter Claude Lorrain is among the presiding genii of Little Sparta. His vistas of water, woodland and classical fragments influenced the Georgian design­ ers of the English garden, whose landscaping was regarded by contemporaries as an aesthetic and economic improvement. By referring to Georgian landscape gar­ dening, the Improvement Garden for Stockwood Park provided an antidote to the unimproved norm for the siting outdoors of autonomous object sculpture, as intimated by the proposal’s lyric imagery ‘after Claude’ and polemic text: ‘Every summer, in Europe’s “sculpture parks”, Art may be seen savaging Nature for the entertainment of tourists’ (1986).21 Whilst most of the works for Stockwood Park derived from Little Sparta’s sculptural repertoire – tree-plaque, tree-column base, buried capital, inscribed stone (Figure 7.8) – the vernacular form of the stile was a rehearsal for A Country Lane with Stiles, which was commissioned for the

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FIGURE 7.8 Chris Broughton, Overview of The Improvement Garden, Stockwood Park,

2007, drawing, from New Arcadian Journal 61/62, 2007.

Courtesy: the artist and New Arcadian Press

temporary sculpture park at the Glasgow Garden Festival.22 This proved to be the most sculpturally ambitious of the five that comprised the short-lived phe­ nomenon of the garden festival (1984–92). The organisers clearly regarded the exhibition as significant, and devised the catalogue to encapsulate the often competing discourses concerning the siting of sculpture outdoors. Isabel Vasseur, who had selected the exhibits, championed the sculpture park by tracing a positive modernist trajectory, which privileged the accessibility of contemporary sculpture through display in outdoor spaces. Originating in the post-war exhibitions in Battersea Park and continuing in metropolitan public parks, the modernist approach had flourished nationwide once the sculpture park had settled in Britain during the late 1970s.23 As a counterbalance, the critic, Walter Grasskamp, acknowledged avant-garde discourses of resistance to the autonomy of object sculpture, and reflected on the potential dangers of the sculpture park. In so doing he contextualised Finlay’s polemic litany, which is exemplified by ‘The contemporary “sculpture park” is an ill-designed indoor museum with the roof left off’ (1998).24 Grasskamp warned that, by exporting into the outdoors an art first conceived in galleries and museums, the symbolic barrenness of the autonomous sculpture would be perpetuated through absence of a legible relationship with the site.25 His fellow critics,

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Richard Cork and Yves Abrioux, applauded Finlay’s pastoral approach as an exemplar of site-specificity, and concurred that it was distinctive because of the fusion between landscape design, sculpture and cultural association.26 It was this pastoral synthesis that Finlay had achieved at Little Sparta through neoclassical rearmament, and which had won the place international renown. By way of conclusion, it is illuminating to consider the first and last work encountered by garden visitors. This is the Monument to the First Battle of Little Sparta (1984). Had the battle not transgressively confronted the authority of local government, it would have been hailed as an epic feat of performance art. Nevertheless, this dramatic coup de theatre rebuffed the attempt by the Sheriff Officer (bailiff) to seize works from the Temple of Apollo, and was reported nationally by television, radio and newspaper media. What is intriguing about the monument is the way that its sculptural form and implicit meaning have been elucidated by photography. Through posing this photograph (Figure 7.9), Finlay literally transforms visitors to Little Sparta into the Arcadian shepherds depicted in the eponymous painting by Nicolas Poussin (c.1638). While Pous­ sin’s Arcadians contemplate the presence of a tomb in such an idyllic place, and digest the provocative yet elegiac inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ (Even in Arcady, I, Death, hold sway), the modern Arcadians discover that the presence

FIGURE 7.9 Andrew Griffiths, Monument to the First Battle of Little Sparta, after Poussin’s ‘Arcadian Shepherds’ (Et in Arcadia ego), c.1638, 1984, from New Arcadian Journal 23, 1986.

Courtesy: the artist and New Arcadian Press

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of Death is articulated by a motif of modern warfare, the light machine gun. Perhaps they are puzzled by the exhortation of the monument’s inscription: Flute, begin with me Arcadian notes

Virgil, Eclogue VIII

February 4, 1983

The commentary that accompanies the medal struck to commemorate the battle qualifies the inscription with a question: The machine-gun is a visual pun (or play!) on Virgil’s flute, with the vents of the barrel-sleeve as the finger-stops. But – Et in Arcadia ego – is the flute to begin, or the gun – or is the duet in fact to be a trio: does the singer (if he is to continue in his pastoral) need both?.27 Although detached from the monument, both the photograph and the commentary have been reproduced elsewhere and so they are accessible at least to the multitude of Finlay aficionados.28 The monument invites reflection on the exhortation urged by ‘me’ (inscrip­ tion), and the question posed by ‘the singer […] in his pastoral’ (commentary). Through these rare projections of the personal, Finlay acknowledges that the flute and the gun are necessarily united as metaphors within his pastoral. The singer’s flute, the weapon, can encompass the pugnacious in order to resist the potential ‘death’ of his embattled Arcady.29 The flute can also, by representing the variety of columns amidst his Arcadian glades, lyrically invoke ‘a reticent music, as if the flutes of the stone were the sound of the old-fashioned shepherds’ flutes somehow made visible to the eye’.30 Culturally animated by the modern Arcadians, the photograph’s pastoral tableau exemplifies the endeavour to contemporise the clas­ sical tradition that is drawn upon as the context for sculptural practice at Little Sparta. However, by focusing attention on the inscription, the photograph trans­ forms battle monument into the tomb of the poet-sculptor,31 thus creating a coincidental memorial to Finlay. Nonetheless the monument stands as an epit­ ome of the neoclassical rearmament, through which he has realised a unique vision of the sculpture garden. Moreover, ruinated by weather and cattle, the monument was rebuilt and re-sited in 2016 to become a catalyst for discussion of the garden’s afterlife.32

Notes 1 See Stephen Bann, ‘The Horizon of Holland: A Poetic Prelude to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardens’, in Stephen Bann (ed.), Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging The Nature-Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscapes (Washington DC: Dum­ barton Oaks Research Library and Collection), pp. 37–49, and Stephen Bann, ‘A Description of Stonypath’, Journal of Garden History, 1:2, 1981, pp. 113–44.

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2 See Sue Finlay, ‘The Planting of a Hillside Garden’, New Arcadian Journal 61/62 (2007): Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selected Landscapes, pp. 19–25. After their separation, Finlay almost doubled the size of the garden and, in association with Pia Maria Simig, new works continued to be created and installed. The garden remains open to the public and is maintained by the Little Sparta Trust; see www.littlesparta.org. See also Patrick Eyres, ‘Planting for Perpetuity’, Historic Gardens Review 16 (2006), pp. 22–7. 3 See Patrick Eyres, ‘Naturalizing Neoclassicism: Little Sparta and the Public Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay’, in Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell (eds.), Sculpture and the Garden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 170–86. 4 Colour Plate 13, Apollon Terroriste, is inscribed in French and catalogued as such by the Little Sparta Trust. See https://www.littlesparta.org.uk/apollon-terroriste/ For the range of Finlay’s oeuvre, see Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 2nd edn. 1992), with Stephen Bann (introductions); Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: A Guide to the Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Edinburgh: Bir­ linn, 2015), with Robin Gillanders (photographs), Stephen Bann (foreword), and Pat­ rick Eyres (introductions and catalogue); John Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). 5 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Nicholas Sloan), The Monteviot Proposal (1979). For full reproduction, see Patrick Eyres (ed.), Mr. Aislabie’s Gardens (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 1981), unpaginated. This unrealised commission was part of a scheme within a Scottish timber estate to transform disused and overgrown woodland into a visitor attraction. Over the years, Finlay acknowledged it as a seminal work. 6 Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p. For the use of antique fragments in gardens, see Robert Williams, ‘The Leasowes, Hagley and Rural Inscriptions’, New Arcadian Journal 53/54 (2002): Arcadian Greens Rural, pp.42–59; see also Harry Gilo­ nis, ‘Emblematical and Expressive: The Gardenist Modes of William Shenstone and Ian Hamilton Finlay’, pp. 86–108. 7 Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p. Finlay’s emphasis.

8 Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p.

9 Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p. Finlay’s emphasis.

10 Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p. 11 See Tom Lubbock, in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Maritime Works, St. Ives: Tate St. Ives, 2002, pp. 5–17, for a discussion of the nautical theme that permeates the garden at Little Sparta. 12 From Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Detached Sentences on Exile’, in New Arcadian Journal 23 (1983): Gardens of Exile, unpaginated. 13 From Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Unconnected Sentences on Gardening’, in Nature Over Again After Poussin (Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1980), reproduced in Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, p. 40, and in Hunt (as note 4), Nature Over Again, p. 39. 14 For a summary of the Little Spartan War, see John Stathatos, ‘Piety and Impiety: The Little Spartan War’, Art & Design 57 (1997); Art and the Garden, reprinted in Joseph Black (ed.), The Garden at War: Deception, Craft and Reason at Stowe (London: Paul Holberton, 2017), pp. 83–93. See also, for example, Yves Abrioux, Jonathan Buck­ ley, Patrick Eyres and Ian Hamilton Finlay in New Arcadian Journal 15 (1984): Liberty, Terror, Virtue: The Third Reich Revisited and The Little Spartan War, unpaginated; Ste­ phen Bann and Patrick Eyres in Cencrastus 22 (1986): Ian Hamilton Finlay: Retrospect­ ive; Patrick Eyres in New Arcadian Journal 23 (1986): Despatches from The Little Spartan War; Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, pp. 168–85. 15 From Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Nicholas Sloan), ‘An Illustrated Dictionary of The Little Spartan War’, MW Magazine Holland, 1983, reproduced in Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, pp. 28–29. 16 From Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘More Detached Sentences on Gardening in the Manner of Shenstone’, c.1981, reproduced in Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, p. 40.

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17 For discussion of Finlay’s proposals, see John Dixon Hunt, ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay and the commonplace – book to garden and back’, and ‘Catalogue’, Word & Image, 21:4 (2005), pp. 294–307, pp. 357–62. 18 Patrick Eyres, ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Cultural Politics of Neoclassical Garden­ ing’, Garden History 28:1 (2000), pp. 152–166. 19 Over the years Little Sparta became the epicentre of Finlay’s pastoral gardening, as he cultivated the place not only as an artwork-in-progress but also as a nursery-of-ideas for export through commissions to seventy-seven sites across mainland Europe, the UK and the USA. See Patrick Eyres, ‘Garden, Park, Cityscape: A Checklist of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Permanent Landscape Installations’, New Arcadian Journal 61/62 (as note 2), pp. 55–82; see also Pia Simig and Zdenek Felix (eds.), Ian Hamilton Finlay: Works in Europe, 1972–1995 (Ostfildern: Editions Cantz, 1995), unpaginated, with Werner Hannappel (photographs), John Dixon Hunt (introduction), and Harry Gilonis (commentaries); Bann in Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, p. 121, 124–27; Hunt (as note 4), Nature Over Again. 20 See Hunt (as note 4), Nature Over Again, pp. 109–19. 21 From Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Detached Sentences on Public Space’, in Finlay (with Gary Hincks), Six Proposals for the Improvement of Stockwood Park, Luton (Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1986). Stockwood Park is Finlay’s most ambitious public com­ mission in Britain. For full reproduction of the proposal, including the unrealised sev­ enth proposal for a pool, and commentary by Patrick Eyres, ‘A Peoples’ Arcadia’, see New Arcadian Journal 33/34 (1992): A Cajun Chapbook, pp. 61–103. See also Hunt (as note 4), Nature Over Again, especially pp. 170–79; Patrick Eyres, pp. 106–15, and Harry Gilonis, pp. 149–58, in New Arcadian Journal 61/62 (as note 2); Pia Simig and Rosemarie Pahlke (eds), Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997 (Ostfildern: Editions Cantz, 1997), pp. 108–09; Simig and Felix (as note 19), Works in Europe, plates 53–9; Stephen Bann, ‘A Luton Arcadia: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s contribution to the English neoclassical tradition’, Journal of Garden History 33:1–2 (1993), pp. 104–12; Lucius Burckhardt (trans. Lesley Lendrum), Sculpture in the Park: The Hamilton Finlay Sculp­ ture Garden, Stockwood park, Luton (Luton: Luton Borough Council, 1991). 22 See the proposal, Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Laurie Clark), A Country Lane with Stiles (Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1988), unpaginated. All the illustrations are reproduced in Eyres (as note 3), ‘Naturalizing Neoclassicism’, pp. 178–79. For photo­ graphs of Finlay’s installation, see Graeme Murray (ed.), Art in the Garden: Installa­ tions: Glasgow Garden Festival (Edinburgh: Graeme Murray, 1988), pp. 46–47. 23 Isabel Vasseur, Preface, in Murray (as note 22), Art in the Garden, pp. 8–9. See also Joy Slee­ man, ‘1977. A Walk Across the Park, Into the Forest and Back to the Garden: The Sculp­ ture Park in Britain’, in Eyres and Russell (as note 3), Sculpture and the Garden, pp. 156–69. 24 From Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Disconnected Sentences on Site Specific Sculpture’, New Arcadian Broadsheet 46 (1998). 25 Walter Grasskamp, ‘Invasion from the Artist’s Studio’, in Murray (as note 22), Art in the Garden, pp. 20–22. 26 Richard Cork, ‘Interview with George Mulvagh’, pp. 10–15, and Yves Abrioux, ‘From Versailles to La Villette’, pp. 17–19, in Murray (as note 22), Art in the Garden. 27 Ian Hamilton Finlay (with Ron Costley), commentary on the medal: First Battle of Little Sparta. 28 Originally photographed for the centrespread of New Arcadian Journal 23 (as note 14), pp. 19–20, the photograph was later reproduced in Patrick Eyres, ‘A people’s Arca­ dia: the public gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay in relation to Little Sparta’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 29:1/2 (January-June 2009), pp.115–32 (p. 126), and in Joy Sleeman, ‘Elegiac Inscriptions: A Discussion of Words in the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Richard Long’, Sculpture Journal 18:2 (2009), pp. 189–203 (p. 191), which is reprinted in Black (as note 14), The Garden at War, pp. 103–123 (p. 107). The commentary was incorporated by Ian Hamilton Finlay into his

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‘Monument at Little Sparta’, in The Third Reich Revisited, which is reproduced in full in New Arcadian Journal 15 (as note 14), n.p. It is also reproduced in Abrioux (as note 4), A Visual Primer, p. 244, and in Patrick Eyres ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay: emblems and iconog­ raphies, medals and monuments’, The Medal 31 (1997), pp. 73–84 (p. 79). It is worth noting that the garden works that address the horror of Arcady, as mediated through the symbols of modern warfare, tend to be specific to Little Sparta. One exception among the permanent landscape installations is The Arcadian Dream Garden at St. Mary Axe, London (2004), see Eyres (as note 19), ‘Garden, Park, Cityscape’, pp. 79–81. Finlay (as note 5), The Monteviot Proposal, n.p. Both the monument and the photograph are discussed by Sleeman (as note 28) in ‘Elegiac Inscriptions’, in the Sculpture Journal and The Garden at War. See Hunt (as note 4), Nature Over Again, p. 15, who simultaneously acknowledges and warns that ‘The afterlife of Finlay’s garden poetry is in our hands; we have opportunities as well as responsibilities’.

8 HOW TO MAKE A PATH The Swiss Way project, 1991 Georges Descombes

In the words of Gilles Deleuze (1997), ‘Every work is a voyage, a journey, but one that travels along this or that eternal path only by virtue of the internal paths and trajectories that compose it, that constitute its landscape or its concert.’ The two kilometers of the Genevan Itinerary of the Swiss Way are part of a series of frag­ ments (designed by each of the 26 Swiss cantons) linked together around the Uri Lake. The whole walk is about 35 kilometers long and was the main event celebrat­ ing the 700 years of the Swiss Confederation, in 1991. In the pocket book ‘De Morschach à Brunnen’ with the project, André Corboz wrote: ‘The Swiss Way loops the loop around an empty center. At least historically empty. Ideologically, on the other hand, it overflows’ – that is say, overflow in the drawing up of a ’national story’, celebrating a mythical, original Swiss Democracy. The ‘Genevan Itinerary’ is an essay reacting to this heavy commemorative trend. It was not so easy to decide to participate in such a project, but, in the early 1990s, two events were decisive for our final agreement to jump in. One was the ‘commemorative’ suffocating atmosphere during the events for the 200th anniver­ sary of the French Revolution. The other, Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Letter to Freddy Buache’ (1982, 11 min), which had been realized at that moment for the 500th anniversary of the City of Lausanne, near Geneva. An outstanding and moving 11ʹ visual poem, Godard celebrates and questions the city landscape, geog­ raphy, foundation and the current situation of its inhabitants. As everything except a ‘commemorative’ work, it elicited harsh controversies; Godard responded to the furious reactions of the (financing) local authorities with a question: ‘Is there any­ thing to celebrate?’ The French event acts as a repulsive device, the film of JeanLuc Godard (with whom I had already worked on a project for a TV studio in Geneva) as an encouragement for a possible, even if risky, engagement.

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FIGURE 8.1

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Swiss Path, 1991 Wooden steps.

Photo: Georges Descombes (GD)

The project ‘Something began which was already there’ (Handke 2000). We first decided not to add anything along the path which was not already there, avoiding a transformation of the walk into a ‘sculpture show’, or a mere exposition of Geneva’s attractiveness, and we transformed the theme of the pro­ ject from a processional celebration of a birthday, into a question: ‘what it signi­ fies today to make a path ?’ – looking for ‘an art of the path opposing to the monumental and to the commemorative’ (Gilles Deleuze 1997). This National Event gave us the opportunity to make an exceptional project, outside Geneva, but that nevertheless deeply concerned this city. A city where planning activities tend towards a purely technical matter, without much consid­ eration for the cultural layering of any territory. Or, in the opposite direction, choosing too often a completely conservative point of view, fearing any trans­ formation. A city where one destroys a lot of ‘small things’, banal left-overs, without giving them any attention in order not to see all the potentialities they hold for the development of a project. In these exceptional circumstances, we had time and money to do it, and the design of the path was given an experi­ mental turn. A kind of open air laboratory installed for a year around the Lake of Uri, right in the heart of the ‘Urschweiz’. We were then familiar with the Italian attitude affirming this ‘Progettare per capire’. To design in order to understand a situation, to elaborate the frame and

FIGURE 8.2

Swiss Path, 1991 Lake Uri, site map, on Swiss topographical map.

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FIGURE 8.3

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Swiss Path, 1991 Path with side stones.

Photo: GD

conditions of a necessary, and possible shift in a given situation. And, as with Jean-Luc Godard’s film on Lausanne, the path itself was to be a long, patient questioning of the territory it would cross. An exploration, an experience to decipher another story. There is always a story in the landscape, associated with the real site. A kind of editing of real and imaginary. The site evokes something else, represents something else than its pure physical reality. Philippe Descola terms this process ‘transfiguration’. This became our task: how to deconstruct this solidified official (his)story and give – through the experience of ‘walking’ the path – the possibility of imagining another one, different and richer for the many forgotten events or people. In particular, in this region in which a sublime landscape had been invented and mastered for the wealthy European elite who squatted on it, the ‘other story’ should include the makers of this landscape, forest people or mountain farmers. They are all usually forgotten by viewers of the traditional cultural experience of the landscape. ‘A restrictive way of seeing that dimin­ ishes alternative modes of experiencing our relation with nature’ (Denis Cosgrove 1998). At the occasion of the opening ceremony of the Swiss Way, Jean Starobinski made a surprising speech, insisting on the vital importance of the construction of roads across the Alps, and on the endless work of the maintenance of these axes. His talk was an address ‘In Praise of the Road Mender’. No one could have more clearly given the whole project its dignity and relevance.

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We started the project in 1987. It has been a long process of conception, and then, a whole year on the site during the realization phase in 1990. We consti­ tuted a team including geographers, historians, botanists, architects. We already knew each others, with a common approach and a shared idea on what was the challenge of this project. Very early on, we called on the collaboration of three artists. And we began, on the site and on the maps as usual. The presence of André Corboz in the team was decisive. Historian of art, architecture and urbanism, Corboz proposed in the late 1970s the concept of ‘The City as a Palimpsest’ (Corboz 2001), which has been a key reference for the project. This idea of a city (or a whole territory) that rebuilds itself continually, on and with the traces of past situations, could not be a better conceptual frame. And, another member of our team, Alain Léveillé, a former student and col­ laborator of Corboz – with his book The Invention of Carouge (1968) – who elab­ orated at a very early stage of the design, a ‘cartographical comparison’. A study showing clearly that the positions of paths along time, far from being fixed, were on the contrary continuously shifting, tracing historical maps as a kind of moving web of different trajectories followed by countrymen (this was for very practical reasons, in particular the paths becoming impossible to use after long periods of rain). See Colour Plate 14. This was our first move to call in question the solidity and univocity of this ‘linear path of history’. A call to face and accept a much more complex evolution. The ‘Swiss Way’ itself was moving. This first jolt opened the field for the general idea of the project: the path would be walked as an experience through the territory, looking for all the ‘dis­ placements’ of the supposedly fixed situations the visitor would come across. The general landscape design therefore intensifies, underlines, transforms the given situation. Nevertheless, when it resorts to historical maps, documents, archives of all sorts, it is not to plunge into an archeology of the site, but just to grasp all the potential ‘becomings’ it contains, this ‘active part of the antiquitas’ valuable for the present, a part reachable only through the continuous process of transformations and modifications (Patrick Boucheron). We had experimented with this thought process in earlier projects: origin of the sites, traces of modifi­ cations, questionable adjunctions or destructions. Interested with topography, rocks, earth, water, flowers, animals – and people- we were in a constant state of ‘site immersion’ in Elizabeth Meyer’s terms. The influence of Bernardo Secchi (then professor in Geneva) was important, with his concept of ‘progetto del suolo’ (ground design), which put the atten­ tion as much on the ground or the site as on the buildings, and helped us to articulate hypotheses with more precision or design. Just as much as these explorations were being made in the field of architec­ ture, at the same time the arts were experimenting with new developments, where the ‘visual’ would not exclusively dominate. This led to ‘a topple over of the vertical towards the horizontal’ (Bois, Krauss 1997) questioning the demarca­ tion of the verticality of the visual and of the space and experience of our body.

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Hole, Claes Oldenburg’s contribution to the exhibition ‘Sculpture in Environ­ ment’ in 1967, and the works of Robert Morris, Sol Le Wit and Carl Andre, all participated to an anti-monumental movement, united by the fact that they all worked with the ground or the underground. At the same time, the influence of the experiences of dancers like Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs had a decisive influence on the sculptors (with whom they were linked and worked on many common experiences). During public events the floor played a key role. A surface where a few minimalists objects accompanied the displacements of the bodies in sublime and moving performances. A minimum of materials, a maximum of life. Robert Smithson, making his celebrated 1967 written piece ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’ (the day after Oldenburg dug his ‘Hole’ on 1st October), remains the main theoretician of what came to be termed ‘Earthworks’. This movement had a strong impact on the architectural field, simultaneously with a new interest by architects for the territory. Smithson’s obsession with entropy, multilayered sites, geological forces, crystalline organizations, his declared lack of interest in the pastoral landscape and his focusing on devastated sites through industrial processes, building developments or deserts were all a very powerful example in the search of a different idea of ‘Landscape’. If these new art experiments were realized mainly in the USA, other trends of experiences occurred in Europe at the same time, such as ‘Arte Povera’, which advocated a complete absence of hierarchy between materials. All of these movements had a strong influence on our way of designing architectural projects, as they prioritized the experience of sites and situations as the most important element to be dealt with. In the same years, Richard Serra`s ‘Shift’ (1970) also had a very strong impact on architecture. It worked as a new ‘Rappel à MM. les Architectes’, the famous Le Corbusier’s plea for action. With this work Serra re-proposed a true ‘promenade architecturale’. Yve-Alain Bois, in his essay ‘Promenade pittoresque autour de Clara Clara (1983) showed the paradoxical use of this term for a sculpture funda­ mentally foreign to any ‘painting’ quality. A sculpture always needs to be experi­ enced, through displacements around or through. Not by chance, Serra was directly associated with the experimental dance scene of these years in USA. Our design first, as a kind of ‘opening declaration’, would then reveal how the path had moved through the ages, by cleaning some former stones on the side of path, or by doing the same to some that were some metres in the grass on the route of the path today; or, when some side stones were lacking, they were replaced by concrete blocks. This switch of material, this burst of industrial products into the pastoral landscape, these ‘shocks’, were a series of attempts to question and renew and wake up visitors’ attention (Figure 8.4). This attitude was certainly in continuity with a series of projects we made earlier with ‘difficult children’. Influenced by the experiences of Fernand Deligny, the outstanding French educator, they associated the children with the construction of ‘adventure playgrounds’, creating situations (‘shock circumstances’ according to

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FIGURE 8.4

Swiss Path, 1991 Path with trees roots and metallic gutter.

Photo: GD

Deligny terms), in which the children could break their psychological confinement in a collective action. The use of ‘maps and wander lines’ in his practice was fun­ damental in his method to open ‘another look’ on customary things. In a similar way, this walk around the Uri Lake could allow the visitors to perceive and imagine, freed from a too heavy message, another ‘song of the world’. The same ‘intriguing’ alterations in the normally expected ‘nature of materials’ were utilized all along the path, each time trying to erase a lazy, ‘kitsch’ use of pseudo vernacular odd assemblages we found on the site, and that we replaced with industrial ones. Sometimes also, some rusty pieces of handrails were restored to their shining appearance, underlining an old inscription on a rock down in the woods. This ‘provocative’ use of steel is particularly sensible in the construction of the viewpoint ‘Chänzeli’, made of a double wall of chainlink, with an opening view directed towards the mythical lawn ‘Rutli’, the supposed founding place of the Swiss Confederation. If Michael Snow’s sculpture ‘Blind’ (1968), in the complexity of its layering of different metal grids, certainly counted for something in the design of ‘Chän­ zeli’, our frequent use of metal in the woods came also from experiencing Rich­ ard Serra’s ‘Spin out, for Robert Smithson’ (1972–73) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, where the brown colour softness of the three corten steel plates and their shining top edges in the dark woods impressed me so much a few years ago. To accentuate these contrasts of materials and light, climbing plants covered the inner wall of the ring of Chänzeli, building an inner space, while the metallic of the outer wall was shining in the dark woods. On the

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FIGURE 8.5

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Swiss Path, 1991 Belvedere ‘Chänzeli’.

Photo: GD

usual and expected viewing table facing the Rütli, nothing was written, leaving every interpretation open. If sometimes we would switch the material (steel instead of wood), or change the appearance of the same material (rusty to shining), we introduced another declension in a long installation of a ‘stair’ linking two diverse segments of the Swiss Way (see Figure 8.1). In that case we employed manufactured boards of wood, the common 2ʹx4ʹ, to oppose these ‘stairs’ to a nearby wooden barn built in the sixteenth century, entirely made then of prefabricated, named and numbered pieces of wood, and situ­ ated originally some 50 kilometers away from its present site, where it was trans­ ported in the 1940’s. This time, our influence was Alvar Aalto’s 1951 wooden steps in Säynätsalo. The installation was built knowing it would be a fragile and temporary device. The state of degradation of Aalto’s work when I visited it convinced me, if necessary, to accept this fragility as an essential part of the emotion it provoked. We proceeded in a similar way with planting. During the winter preceding the opening of the Swiss Way, we cleaned the soil of the woods on the sides of the path as far as one could see. This ‘brushing’ boosted the growth of plants, and in the following spring provoked an explosion of bushes and flowers. At other spots in which we found a few Epiloba montanum we collected seeds and grew thousands of them in the Geneva Botanical Garden (one curator there was a member of our team), and re-introduced them along the path, creating surpris­ ing blast of pink colour. Long rows of cherry trees were also planted along the path when approaching the limits of Morschach, where numerous orchards trad­ itionally infiltrated the village from the surrounding hills.

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The artists involved ‘I guess the lesson I learnt was it’s really in the spirit of my work that a lot of it is has to be temporary, that I can’t go out of my way to make it permanent if it is not appropriate’ (Richard Long).

Richard Long This blend of work on maps and on the very materiality of a ground we found in many works by Richard Long, and as such we asked him to participate to the project. On the occasion of an exhibition of his work in Geneva in 1987, I first met him on the site of a house we had just finished, the conversion of an old barn in the countryside. I guess he found some common ground in the choice and use of materials, the attention given to the complex processes of observation and modification we engaged with on this project. He accepted to participate. His work, contrary to other participants in our project, who intervened exclusively on the Genevan itinerary, concerned the entire ‘Swiss Way’ all around the Uri Lake, to manifest in a clear way the inclusion of Geneva in the Swiss Confederation and to sow in the other projects something of our way to deal with this manifestation. The ‘Swiss Way’ project, a walk, underlines movement as essential in the experience and appreciation of the landscape. An active process, the walk rela­ tivizes the general, usual panoramic views associated with the grasping or con­ templation of landscapes, in its always changing focus towards different depths, levels or on a large variety of possible objects of observation. Going through this incredible landscape surrounded by fantastic mountains on either side and also gorges down at the side of the path, there are two ways, you can stop and look around and see the distant views, or you can look at the ground in front of you. It is nice to have the possibility to make art from just looking at the ground in front of you. There is also the idea that you have a beautiful landscape but you can only see it or appreciate it because of the fact that people have made this incredible difficult footpath that leads you into it. It is like the key of the whole area. If there was no footpath I would not be there. You can see how it is hard engineering, a very hard dangerous thing to build. It is a big social line that completely opens up the area. The footpath is the most important feature. Richard Long Richard Long walked, observed, photographed an eight-hour journey on June 16th, 1990 around the Uri Lake. He made piles of 100 stones seven times (Figure 8.7). The ‘story’ of this walk was transposed in a text-work, a map tracing the con­ tours of the Lake through a series of notations taken by Long, printed in small letters and punctuated seven times by ‘A HUNDRED STONES’ in bold capitals. The text-work map shows the sites of the observations as well as those of the

FIGURE 8.6

Swiss Path, 1991 Richard Long’s ‘Textwork’, lithography.

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FIGURE 8.7 Swiss Path, 1991 ‘SEVEN HUNDRED STONES FOR SEVEN HUN­ DRED YEARS’, lithography.

Text and photo Richard Long

temporary cairns. The mixing of these notations, observations of all kind of facts, events, animals, sounds, people and the punctuation of the seven piles of stones could possibly be interpreted as a kind of affirmation: the history of Switzerland was made as much of the everyday, anonymous, common things as of the ‘great moments’. In fact one of the reasons why I started making textworks is because it gave me another kind of possibility, not using a camera or not necessarily making a sculpture. I can use words and they can give me different possi­ bilities than I would get from using a camera. So, taking photographs does a certain type of job, records one moment, makes an image. And words do a different job. They can usually record the whole idea of a walk, maybe much better, more […] they just have a different function, some­ times a more complete function. Richard Long (1986) Besides this map, one photograph taken by Richard Long showing one of the cairns on the shore of the lake, with a boat just centered above it, was printed with the title he gave to the work ‘SEVEN HUNDRED STONES FOR SEVEN HUN­ DRED YEARS’. The work was perfectly in tune with the general line of the project. It is interesting to note that, as for us or for Godard, these kinds of particular conditions for a project (the commemorative presence) are exceptional. In an

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interview given in 1997, Richard Long answered a question about making art for a particular purpose, with a particular remark: I can see that could be a good function of art. I actually did do something of the kind in Switzerland some years ago. It was the 700th anniversary of their parliament and I made ‘Seven Hundred Stones for Seven Hundred Years’ – seven piles of stones at different places around the lake where the Swiss parlia­ ment first originated. That was an example of a sculpture on a walking route also having a commemorative, historical and social function. But I suppose I only do that kind of work if it suits the way that I work anyway.

Carmen Perrin Ronald Bogue, commenting upon Gilles Deleuze’s last book, Critical and Clinical (1997), notes the relation in Deleuze’s thinking between the real and the imagin­ ary of an individual’s external movements and his/her internal psychological states. The two maps of trajectories and becomings are inseparable, and their mutual penetration undoes the traditional distinction of the real and the imagin­ ary: ‘a becoming is no more imaginary than a voyage is real. It is becoming that makes of the slightest trajectory, or even a fixed immobility, a voyage; and it is the trajectory that makes of the imaginary a becoming’ (Deleuze 1997). Deleuze discusses the work of one of the other artists involved on the project, Carmen Perrin. She chose to work with the massive erratic blocks which were part of one of the richest field of boulders in the country, dispersed in the woods and entirely covered by vegetation, sandblasting them, so that in a manner they were reappearing, just as they have been 20 thousand years ago: white shining granite blocks. Carmen Perrin clears out erratic blocks from the greenery that integrates them into the undergrowth and delivers them to the memory of the glacier that car­ ried them there, not in order to assign an origin to them but to make their displacement something visible. One might object that a walking tour, as an art of paths, is no more satisfactory than the museum as a monumental or com­ memorative art. But there is something that distinguishes cartography-art from a walking tour in an essential way: it is characteristic of this new sculpture to assume a position on external trajectories, but this position depends primarily on paths internal to the work itself; the external path is a creation that does not exist before the work, and depends on its internal relations. (Deleuze 1997) […] ‘A map of virtualities, drawn up by art, is superimposed onto the real map, whose distance (parcours) it transforms.’

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FIGURE 8.8

Swiss Path, 1991 Boulder, Carmen Perrin.

In a letter to the artist, Deleuze writes: ‘I’m glad you sent me the ‘Voie suisse’. It’s the best expression I know of an art which is more about the path than the place. What you say about ‘displacement’, and you’ve done strikes me a lot’. In fact, in Carmen Perrin’s notes on her work, we can read: One could follow the trace of each movement of life, just as we know to find again those of men. To observe all indices of direction changes. […] Every event is a crossing, a virtual point deforming the lines, illuminating, darken­ ing. An imperceptible point of forces’ circulation. […] Agassiz, Altman, Bor­ dier, Favre, Forbes, Grüner, Hooker, de Saussure, Venetz wanted to decipher the footprints of the displacements of the mountain. They guessed that the study of the stones will be long. […] The white stones are the dots of continuous lines, drawn by the passage of the glacier. […] How to clean a rock helps me to understand how it looks at me. […] Let’s invent other kinds of monuments, imagining that the duration of their presence under our eyes. They are never the same men who look at the same things and live with them.’ Carmen Perrin, ‘A Black Stone sinks into the Ice’

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Max Neuhaus In a conversation with Carmen Perrin about the Swiss way project, she sug­ gested that I invite the American artist Max Neuhaus, who just had an exhib­ ition (1989) at the Kunsthalle in Bern. Describing his method, in the catalogue of the Kunsthalle, Max Neuhaus for his ‘Time Piece’ series, wrote: The idea for Time Piece is about forming common moments with silence rather than sounds. The concept is realized by gradually changing the acoustic environment, and then creating a sense of silence by removing these changes. A sound texture is slowly introduced over a period of minutes so that it is not noticed directly, but subtly establishes a different or imaginary sense of place, acoustically. Once established, this place is removed, juxtaposing the imaginary with the real and exposing the real, in a new way, as a moment of quiet. It is important that the sources of sound remain unseen, and that the work becomes a common occurrence – a subtle presence, there and at the same time not there- noticed, forgotten and re-found At the moment where the path of the Swiss Way enters the dark forest, a moment where the predominance of the vision is diminished and the sound becomes primordial, Max Neuhaus made his contribution. A sound installation made of seven loudspeakers aligned around a circle of 150 m diameter. The sounds produced were like light bells, circulating according to a computer driven tempo. All the installation was buried in the soft ground under the trees. (See drawing, Colour Plate 15.) As one enters the work’s wooded grove, one encounters a high bright sound. Like a fine aural mist. It permeates the grove, seeming to come from nowhere. At first the sound seems constant, but if one listens for a few min­ utes an inner detail and motion begin to appear. After a while the sound sometimes seems to disappear, becoming imbedded in the sound of the woods. It is an intense but not unpleasant place to be. Upon leaving the wood the sound becomes distant and things slip back to normal. MN In an essay on the ‘Swiss Way’, Bruno Reichlin underlines the particularity of Neuhaus’ work in the project: The Genevan Itinerary is not a piece of architecture. Architecture there is, one could say, only an interruption that appears in the space and in the tempo and rhythm of the displacement, in the waiting between one event and the succeeding one, following the physical distance.

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The interaction between space and time is in fact the ‘leitmotive’ that we dis­ cover in the most diverse declensions, a sort of succession of ‘mise en abyme’, whose duration is left to the care of people, as in the case of the fragile installa­ tion of the wooden and grass stairs; biological time of the growth of the climb­ ing plants inside the Chänzeli ring: geological time of the erratic blocks that Carmen Perrin has cleaned of the millenarian slags and returned to the light of the day before their great journey. Then as nearly a paradox to underline the particular spatiality of a path – in a way organized as a linear succession of time, like a musical composition- the sound installation of Max Neuhaus intervenes: instead of a time succession of resonant events, this installation produces the effect of a spatial continuum, building a place: isotropic as the dark woods selected to position the seven loud­ speakers around the 150m diameter circle which mix their sounds to those of the site. (See Colour Plate 13.) If in this last paragraph, in which Bruno Reichlin deciphers subtly Neuhaus’s work, the insistence on the ‘non architectural nature’ of the Genevan Itinerary – written in the catalogue of an exhibition on the new architecture in alpine countries – opens a delicate question, on the present separation of the two disciplines, architecture and landscape architecture. If we refer to Robert Irwin’s categorization, we could claim that the works of art realized on the ‘Swiss Path’ are possible examples of ‘sites specific’ pieces, even if at first sight, due to the careful and exhaustive work of investigations of the site, in situ or in archives and other historical documents, one could have thought to consider them as ‘site conditioned/determined’. And if we keep in mind the possibilities of sculpture in ‘the extended field’, we may legitimately hesitate on these strict categorizations or limits of many sorts. From my first dis­ covery of the Italian sites, as a student, I’ve never been able to separate the terri­ tory and the constructions, shocked as I’ve been by their inextricable organisation, beauty and presence. A presence, according to Walter Benjamin, is a ‘collision of space and time’ characteristic of any work of art. Both very present, here, and very far, there. The Swiss Way project is part of an effort in that direction. It is directly linked to a long teaching experiment, in which we promote, at least in the basic courses, a common grounded teaching for designers in Geneva, but also at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam (1990–95), where these topics were interrogated. Among others who taught there, Ken Frampton has been constantly confronting the works of architects with the sites and questioning a separation he finds dam­ aging on both sides. In a letter to André Corboz, in 1992, he wrote: Certainly I would be interested in contributing to the publication celebrat­ ing the work of Alain Léveillé, but I am not sure how to go about this. Two subjects occur to me as possible topics for a very short essay that might be appropriate. One would address itself to the ‘made’ landscape character of Manhattan in all its aspects both physical, factual and otherwise; the other

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would try to address the ‘made’ character of all built work. It would be a polemical text, written against, above all, the absolutely catastrophic separ­ ation of landscape design as a métier from architecture and vice versa. Despite being polemical, the Swiss Way was at first hardly criticized. The main newspaper in Geneva gave this headline: ‘They didn’t do anything’. We anticipated and accepted the fragility of the project, but we largely underesti­ mated the aggression it would trigger. As for Jean-Luc Godard’s film, it was dif­ ficult for many people to be confronted by a work which was silent, open and asking them to collaborate. And today nothing, nearly, remains of what was built then.

References Bogue, Ronald (2003). What Children Say, Deleuze on Literature, Routledge.

Bois, Yve-Alain (1983). Essay Promenade Pittoresque autour de Clara-Clara. In: Richard

Serra catalogue, Centre Pompidou. Bois, Yve-Alain, Krauss, Rosalind E. (1997) Formless: A User’s Guide. NY: Zone Books. Corboz, André (2001) Invention de Carouge 1772–1792, Payot Le Territoire comme palimpseste et autres essais, Les éditions de l’imprimeur, 2001. Cosgrove, Denis (1998). Social formation and Symbolic Landscape. Wisconsin Univ. Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997). Critical and Clinical, University of Minnesota Press. Handke, Peter (2000). Across, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Long, Richard (1986). In Conversation, Holland: MW Press. Neuhaus, Max (1989). Catalogue, Kunsthalle Bern. Perrin, Carmen (1991). De Brunnen à Morschach, l’itinéraire genevois’, Office du livre. Reichlin, Bruno (1992). Voie suisse, in Neues Bauen in den Alpen.

PART III

Return to Tremenheere

9 LANDSCAPE, ART, PLANT, EVENT Penny Florence

One of the first works you see on arrival at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens is Bernar Venet’s large work in steel Nine Unequal Angles (2015 dimensions). Venet and Richard Long in the same garden is suggestive: their approaches are very different, but their exploration of organic matter and line makes for pro­ ductive comparison. Venet’s Tas de Charbon, for example, in which the way a pile of organic material falls becomes the work of art, together with his exploration of ‘indeterminate’ and straight lines, creates an interesting tension with Richard Long’s lines in the landscape. The comparison is entirely consist­ ent with Venet’s dismissal of style. So what follows is not about style or formal qualities. But it is about intensity and the blurring of boundaries between the human and ‘matter’. Take Robert Smithson’s rightly well-known words, for example, in which he cites red as the place where any separation between us and ‘something beyond’ is at its thinnest: On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crim­ son through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the colour of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents, no they were veins and arteries sucking up the obscure sediment. My eyes became combus­ tion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere. (Smithson 1972/1996) Any relationship, for example, between Tremenheere and the Venet Foundation is not to be found in ‘what they look like’. But if we consider the point through Turrell’s two works at both the French and the English gardens, the deeper association begins to emerge. Prana at the Venet Foundation, whose pitch-black

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space into which light bleeds recalls Aqua Obscura at Tremenheere, complement­ ing the Skyspaces in each location. ‘Prana’ in Sanskrit is breath or universal life forces; this and the pairing of light and dark emphasise the meditative and philo­ sophical tenor of Turrell’s work. At Tremenheere, the necessity of siting of the skyspace Tewlwolow Kernow in a clear meadow at the top of the valley and Aqua Obscura in the darkest part of the garden beneath a dense canopy and beside a stream at the bottom can easily mask the vital part that the landscape itself is playing, and to which Turrell is responding. His extraordinary project in the desert Roden Crater takes this philo­ sophical aspect to another level through its breathtaking ambition and celestial orientation; but fundamentally, it is in the tradition of the ancient stones of many sites in the UK, including West Penwith (the specific area around Tremenheere). The association between Land Art and prehistory is thoroughly documented by Lucy Lippard in her indispensable work Overlay (Lippard 1983). Covering the same mid-20th century period as Lippard, Nancy Holt’s first-hand account brings landscape to the fore.1 It is about her visit with Robert Smithson to the West of England and Wales in 1969. 1969 was the year before Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty, and four years before Holt began Sun Tunnels, both among the earliest and most important works in what was to become the Land Art movement. Although they did not visit Cornwall as far as I know, they certainly did visit related ancient sites in Wales – sharing with Cornwall a Celtic heritage and related language – such as the Pentre Ifan dolmen in Pembroke National Park. Sun Tunnels in particular uses the sun in ways that clearly reference monuments in Cornwall such as Lanyon Quoit (c.3000 BC), Carn Euny Fougou (Iron Age: c.1000 BC) and even more closely the circular form of the early Neolithic Mên-an-Tol (c.4000 BC) in West Penwith, all three about 8 miles from Tremenheere. It is not only ancient history that is evoked by Holt, since her reference to the history of the English garden brings out a less considered aspect of Land Art, as she observes: Bob researched in advance some of the places he wanted to explore. At the time, we were both interested in the ideas about the Picturesque put forward by the Reverend William Gilpin, as well as Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque,1794. Price, like Capability Brown, understood how to work with the landscape – to work as nature’s agent. Gilpin (1724–1804) and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) do not read­ ily spring to mind when experiencing Land Art, or considering its genesis. The same goes for Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), whose work on the picturesque is generally even less cited in this context, even though the picturesque was about ‘nature’ as much as it was about art or the garden. But Holt’s mention of them, together with what she says about Robert Smithson’s fascination for maps

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demands at least our consideration; at the very least, it highlights a more involved historical take on a movement and the works since constructed as part of it, espe­ cially as in that ‘revolutionary’ time, they are perhaps more usually associated with breaking with tradition. It is a more complex and nuanced framework that emerges. Georges Descom­ bes’s allusion in this volume to Smithson’s 1967 text The Monuments of Passaic, and his conceptualisation of his own work on the Swiss Path as a kind of layered mapping and excavation casts further light on these initially improbable conjunc­ tions. Holt commented that ‘Walking on that Dartmoor trail was a pivotal experience’, documented in her 1969 photographic work Trail Markers, made in Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor. Holt’s ‘pivotal experience’ and Descombes’ practice may be further explored in light of Grosz’s work (2008). Not only is the perceiving mind part of art, and even an element of its materiality (see Colour Plates 18 and 19; in certain light, the former, the plant appears as art; in the latter, the art as water), but also all such elements resonate in a unique and intensified event. Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy, but also to inten­ sify – to resonate and become more than itself. […] Art is the regulation and organization of its materials […] according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and inten­ sify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (Grosz 2008 4) The language is very far from that of duende mentioned previously; moreover, ‘nature’ and the ‘inanimate’ are brought into the frame whereas Lorca only goes so far. Yet the experience of intense and highly specific bodily sensation can be understood as of the same order. It seems to me that we have to bring these languages together if we are to make progress in re-aligning art as a profound and embodied human experience in which environmental concerns are part of the same embodied logic. Separated disciplines need to talk to each other. We are positioned, not between sculpture and plants, but as part of an event in which no language or living organism is privileged. Margaret Grose’s concept of ‘constructed ecologies’ (Grose 2017) is very useful here; that is, a situated, mobile and permeable understanding of ecology and design that is neither rulebook nor blueprint, but rather a way of thinking an approach to the variable issues of specific design situations. Her first chapter title is indicative: ‘The environment is not a human construct’. I want to borrow an anecdote from the book as a way of highlighting the unique potential of the sculpture garden in awakening disciplines to the need to listen to each other, and in at least beginning to become alive to what the nat­ ural element in this expanded sense of event signifies. It is also relevant in that it is a reminder of a similar necessity in terms of history; history in general, and within disciplines. It may not be the same as the majority view.

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Grose tells the story of a student assignment in which she was asked to imagine a dinner conversation between seven famous landscape architects about their designs. Most students included André le Nôtre, the designer of the garden at Versailles, caricaturing him as sycophantic towards the king and arrogant towards everyone else. In fact, the master of the French Baroque was described by those of his contemporaries who knew him as humble in general and yet unafraid of the king to the extent that he would call him Louis to his face. Truth was a very different thing than supposed by many (loc.cit. 4). The alternative was more ‘fun’. Her point is that ‘in design, we cannot ignore the truth of ecological process […] if we are to work in the world’, and she illustrates it dramatically with the example of the tsunami and earthquake of 2011 in Japan. Ancient temples survived, placed as they are above known tsunami ranges, but modern towns were destroyed in an instant. ‘The tsunami’s range was not a point of debate between us and natural processes […]. Natural processes do not discuss; the environment is not a human construct’. I have argued that genuinely equalising plants, landscape and sculpture, as Arm­ strong does at Tremenheere, is more radical than it may at first seem. The role of plants in this trio is still as neglected as it was when James C. Rose wrote that The Beaux Arts system – and it seems incredible that almost every Land­ scape school in the country is bound by it – has an amazing scorn for plants. They seem to be totally dissociated from design and knowledge of them a matter of indifference […] Plants are to the Landscape designer what words are the conversationalist. Anyone can use words. Anyone can use plants; but the fastidious will make them sparkle with aptness. (Rose 1938) Climate change may mean that species indigenous to one part of the world need to move to another to survive. The conscientious plant-hunter can become the conservationist, and in fact there are rare species at Tremenheere at risk of extinction in the wild.2 Conversely, some parts of the world will only maintain their ecologies through the introduction of new species; the ‘anthropocene’ has already interfered with nat­ ural selection on many levels. The issue is not to become some kind of essentialist over ‘native’ vs, ‘non-native’ species; it is to recognise that habitats can relate to one another globally (Rainer & West 2015). This means that species can survive without the artificial maintenance that results in soil degradation and the vicious circle of ever-increasing demand for artificial soil ‘improvement’ and human intervention. The implication in this era of mass extinctions is that cultural ecologies have to shift from any underlying philosophical opposition to the ‘natural’ world, thereby bringing to the fore the necessary synergy between human intervention, animals, plants, and landscape/geology.3 Material continuity with art can then be thought as a specific form to be interpreted in its own terms, with its own time, like kinetic sculpture. Artist and garden designer Susanna Dadd lives in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. She and her husband, artist James Griffith, hand-built cult

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music venue The Folly Bowl in their garden (Figure 9.1).4 It perfectly embodies their complementary philosophies. Dadd’s view is that: [...] planting is a form of active kinetic sculpture, or even painting. When combined with moving land/earth around to add drama or interest, it can become both stationary and kinetic [...]. My focus is in designing and building spaces that reintroduce the equality of other species (birds, mam­ mals, insects, reptiles) as users of the land, getting away from solely anthropocentric ideas of gardens. Hybridizing nature and gardening to optimize productivity of food, shelter, and beauty. Griffith has for some years worked in tar, focusing on natural selection (see Colour Plate 22).5 Through the materiality of the tar, he condenses time, bringing his creatures directly into relation with ‘tar’s primordial origins’, embodying geo­ logical and biological processes. As he paints, he finds that both ‘cellular and astro­ nomical forms sometimes appear to erupt in the body of the animal and the body of the environment’. It is a far-reaching sense of ecological crisis, invoking the deep time of previous evolutions and extinctions; the deep structures of matter. Recent extremes of drought, fire and rain have impacted greatly on this area of Southern California, as it has on many others. Through variations in their growth patterns, plants connect with global patterns of weather systems and seasons, the timescale ranging from years (as in some forms of Land Art) to the previous day or hour, thereby revealing a great deal about energies

Folly Bowl. Susanna Dadd & James Griffith. Hybrid amphitheatre/perform­ ance space/private garden, permeable to local wildlife, including bears. Altadena, Ca.

FIGURE 9.1

Photo: Folly Bowl

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on a vast scale to very small. Coastal trees, if my understanding is correct, when they shape to the wind, change at a cellular level. They don’t just bend or lose leaves and twigs to the seaward side. They express their own specific microclimate in their form, while articulating a general truth about survival in liminal coastal areas, as we saw in Richard Long.6 But the elements work this way in any garden, too; take one plant out and the way it grows in its new location is completely different, while the gap left will be filled by the remaining plants, either gradually through new growth, or within a day or so as they realign to optimise photosynthesis. It’s about survival, the absolute necessity of change in response to the conditions. Life began in the sea. It seems as if Turrell’s Aqua Obscura is a rebirth of vision, at least in the sense that, as in almost all his work, you are awakened to the complexities of how we see; and the experience is as if you might be under water. The work responds to the water in the landscape that is the reason for the existence of the water tank in the first place: it is beside two rocky streams, quite probably the contemporary manifestation of the water that was the original carver of the valley, as with so many features in the vicinity. Cornwall’s geology is famously rich and varied, and Turrell’s way of relating this earth history to light enables a marvellous (I mean this; you marvel at it) comparison with the Skyspaces as a series, thence to Roden Crater and the planetary. We are simultaneously in the time of the fougou and of space travel, since most of Roden Crater is underground, while it looks to the skies. In Aqua Obscura, as we have seen, you are also underground, and therefore in the place where the work of plants is unseen; you need to know a great deal about any given plant to know with any accuracy at all what it looks like under­ ground. You have to wait in an absence of vision. The deep analogy between the canopy and the roots of trees presents itself readily as analogous to the unconscious, or perhaps the preconscious. The invisible substructure of the land­ scape here is brought to the fore as a highly influential7 factor in all its aspects, and especially in its composition; whether it is of a single texture (sandy, loam, clay, etc); the presence of stones, their size and origin. Turrell’s work is a scientific inquiry into vision, but not as an abstract sense. He is quite literal in his idea of vision as haptic: light is material; it touches the lens and enters the body through the eye to be transmitted along neural path­ ways to the brain. His major retrospective at LACMA in 2014 demonstrated furthermore that this is a two way street: it was it not only your viewpoint that mattered; the viewpoint changed what was.8 As a scientific exploration of vision in art, Odilon Redon’s extraordinary 19th century lithographic series9 is a kind of precedent. They are perhaps best known as an investigation of the dream, and indeed, in the way they relay between word and image they are structured as in the dream work as understood by Freud.10 Each image echoes elements of the others to varying degrees, an open-endedness extended by the long ‘titles’ or captions to form a non-linear interchange in a complex signifying event. But they are also a kind of scientific hypothesising. Redon was 19 when The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and although Redon is not strictly Darwinian, it is hard to imagine a work like his Les

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Origines pre-Darwin: it begins with a moment when life began in ‘dark matter’ (‘matière obscure’) and ends with the emergence of humanity in ‘sombres clartés’. While Redon’s phrase ‘dark matter’ obviously did not in 1883 connote the hypothetical subatomic matter now posited as accounting for a large proportion of the universe, it now reads as consistent more with this understanding than with the scientific model of the well-oiled machine that was then mainstream. Grosz’s account of ‘sensation’ as the ‘neural reactions to inhuman forces’ that are the body’s response to ‘perhaps the vibratory structure of subatomic particles themselves’, sounds in a direct line with the thoughts of Redon’s contemporary and friend, Mal­ larmé on the strangeness of seeing anew through art that contrasts with the old idea of the artist as dreamer to articulate ‘that absolute and important sentiment which Nature impresses on those who have voluntarily abandoned conventionalism.’11 So in an approach that resonates with both Darwin and Freud, we might see this as scientific.12 It is certainly syncretic. Les Origines, in any event, is explicit in seeking to understand how a connected world has changed from common beginnings. It does this through art, approaching almost the evolution of art. The second lithograph in the series, Il y eût peut être une vision première essayée dans la fleur (Perhaps vision was tried out first of all in a flower), suggests a human head with an unfurling, almost foetal flower head with a leaf suggesting first a single eye and then a mouth. Together with the caption it simply suggests the possibility a flower and vision might stand in some initial unspecified relation based on similarity. This is to posit the ‘continuity between animal and vegetable life and encourage[s] speculation on the creative possibilities of unthought-of conjunctions’ (Florence 1986/2009 66). Pointing towards the shared force peculiar to all the arts, Grosz draws on Deleuze (drawing in turn on Merleau-Ponty) to say: ‘Each of the arts is con­ cerned with a transmutation of bodily organs as much as it is with the creation of new objects, new forms: each art resonates through the whole of the sensing body, capturing elements in a co-composition that carries within the vibrations and resonances the underlying rhythms of the others arts and the residual effects of each of the senses.’ This applies to painting as much as to all the arts. ‘Paint­ ing makes the eye mobile, it places it throughout the body, it renders the visible tangible and audible as well as visible’ (Grosz 2008 82). Planting has to take account of these factors, opening on to the possibility of an extended form of companion planting in which plants are kinetic becomingart, created through a knowing cross-cultural synthesis or, from another direc­ tion, through experimental juxtaposition. Both the garden centre gardener and professional design have attempted to override how plant communities thrive in the wild, resulting in impossibly high-maintenance and weakened plants13 and cutting across natural selection. Generally speaking, the art of the plant is also a long way from what appears to be meant by ‘living sculpture’, where plants are made into designs or shapes, although there is no clear dividing line.14 We do not have to be literal or oppositional in considering the material and differential equality of landscape, art and plant. Nor, perhaps, do we have to go

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as far as The Eden Project’s innovative microbe sculpture of 2018 Infinity Blue (in blue ceramic, puffing smoke from cyanobacteria),15 although again, there is no clear division; it’s a differential.16 Artwork in conventional materials has a role to play in this kind of reconfigur­ ation, and its material is not just the medium. In Susan Yi Sencindiver’s concise if highly abstract terms, ‘new materialism foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter as an active force is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in condi­ tioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience’.17 The philosophy of Mono-ha explicitly works to reveal these invisible energies; art simply provides the structure through which they might manifest. The vocabulary is quite different from Mono-ha, but Penny Saunders’ Restless Temple18 does exactly this. Sited to catch the wind, so that its vertical columns

FIGURE 9.2

Restless Temple, Penny Saunders. 2015. 6x12m approx, cedar battens &

skin, steel.

Photo: Ali Braybrooks

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can move about above the café at Tremenheere, it is something of a favourite with general garden visitors, although some art enthusiasts appear to underestimate it. Perhaps, despite the long tradition concerning the alliance of seriousness and levity, they find its humour, theatricality and popular appeal difficult to square with seriousness; the comic is arguably a mode that is more accepted in literature than in fine art. The ghost of Michael Fried continues to haunt.19 This is appar­ ently despite Baudelaire’s positioning of the comic and of caricature as artistically serious over 150 years ago, and, further, in its ambiguity and analysis of subjectiv­ ity, as fundamental to the ‘painter of modern life’.20 Saunders’ conversational and deliberately demotic articulation of art as ‘making people happy’ is in direct line with this, as is clear when she goes on to define it more seriously as ‘becoming unselfconsciously interested’.21 Speaking of what she calls Jeff Koons’s ‘vulgarity’ in ‘brutal’ urban settings, she brings it into stark contrast with homelessness on the one hand and the ethics and social engagement of an artist like David Kemp on the other.22 Kemp’s recent Old King Cole (2018) is a prime example of his low cost projects in recycled/scrap materials marking the disappearance of heavy industry without the spurious sentiment exposed by Descombes in this volume. Sited along a section of the Sustrans long distance cycle path, it engages with the industrial landscape and its histories. Similarly, The Ancient Forester (1981) in Grizedale Forest brings the pre-industrial into the present landscape, not only by represent­ ing it, but by placing the human and our interventions as inseparable from it. Kemp’s wonderful private garden is an example in the spirit of the Watts Towers in LA, if not the form. He shares with Saunders her interest in combin­ ing sculpture, performance art and theatre. Saunders travelled all round Cornwall looking for the right site for this work that had been in her mind for about 16 years. She compares her thought process to holding a wet cloth up to the wind and seeing whether it dries out well. ‘I kind of hold the source up against other thinking and I’m always testing whether it stands up, whether it’s got legs.’ The site at Tremenheere satisfies her criterion that there has to be synergy between the work, significantly including the artistic process it embodies, and the surroundings. Restless Temple appears to be a classical ruin whose pillars are nevertheless intact. Standing on an openwork iron plinth, its mechanism of weights is clearly visible. The temple itself is something of a trompe l’oeil in that its ‘stone’ pillars are ‘hollow, just a light cedar skin. The engineered strength is similar to that of a ship’s mast. A core of tensioned steel runs from temple top to the counterweights at the bottom,23 their comparative lightness meaning that they sway in the wind’. The mechanics of the work are integral to its meaning as well as its function­ ality. Honed through many years of theatre work, Saunders’s skills are consider­ able and always associated with staying close to the means. For example, clay is a favourite medium, partly because it’s completely natural, but also because ‘you can’t get lost in the technology’ as you can with demanding media ‘like oil paint, which has to be mixed and go on in a certain way, there’s a real culture

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about oil paint.’ The danger is that the artist loses touch with ‘the art they’re trying to find’; the art is already present, and the artist’s job is to reveal it. In an interesting aside, Saunders remarked ‘you could build Stonehenge using snow, by building a ramp and sliding it up, but you look at Fast Castle24 [jutting into the sea] or early temples and you think, God, the thinking that went into working out where everybody should be, when and how did you build scaffolding […]’. Both historical inquiry and actual barometer, Restless Temple is an embodi­ ment of time in such a way as to become a meditation on its essential quality, like a clock without hands.25 It looks robust, but is knowingly fragile. Its responsiveness to the immediate present and its simultaneous frame of reference including the histories of urban culture and of the landscape destabilise any assumed indestructibility of the values its columns evoke; those values pedalled through the ubiquitous urban representation of Classicism in the pillars that front banks and public buildings – and, in more direct contrast to nature, that appear in garden follies and refuges – to proclaim the ideology of the ‘European’ as civilised. Saunders’s satire is subtle at the same time as it is, at least on one level, accessible. It emerges out of mutability that derives from the natural pro­ cess that is the wind, the same process that is inevitably destroying the work, as its maker acknowledges. ‘Any decay is seen as part of its journey. Hopefully it will have time enough to attract plants, lichens and mosses.’ Like light, its transience works in a way that would be complemented by another work she has in mind (at the time of writing), that of a face that would only emerge when the light strikes at a specific angle, comparing its operation as well as its effect with cloud formation. By implication, it is still air currents that are necessary to the work as event. So while it would be a diversion to go further into the debates over Fried and Greenbergian modernism, the notion of theatricality serves in this instance as an indicator of an even greater broadening of the factors constituting a semiotic ‘event’ from those of major 20th century currents in modernism that Fried opposed and that he exemplified in Robert Morris. The contemporary framework is expansive, without centering on human con­ sciousness, but rather working in and through the elemental forces that deter­ mine previously understood ‘objects’ like plant communities and ourselves. What is sought is the expression of ‘a common origin […] in the forces of the earth and of the living body, what ways they divide and organize chaos to create a plane of coherence, a field of consistency, a plane of composition […]’ (Grosz 2008 4). The power of the garden and of sculpture has transformative potential because both are active in the creation of coherence in time, thereby enabling the event that is art. Take for example Turrell’s work with light and its absence at Tremenheere. Turrell is never far from inquiring into vision. His work is scientific as Peter Randall-Page’s work is scientific: it is based in fact and in mathematics, and works out from this in ways that constitute an inquiry both into art and science as event. Both forms of knowledge work together in synergy, which was already

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apparent when he signed up in 1967 for LACMA’s innovative Art & Technol­ ogy programme,26 building the foundations present through his father, who was an aeronautical engineer. The title of the Skyspace at Tremenheere, Tewlwolow Kernow, was selected by the artist to emphasise its connection with the landscape and its mysti­ cism. ‘Kernow’ is the Cornish name for Cornwall, and derives from the Cornish word for ‘horn’, describing the shape of the county (and of its coastline and headlands, I like to think). ‘Tewlwolow’ means half-light, or twilight, thereby referencing both liminality and light, the connected qualities for which West Penwith is famous, and which made St Ives the home of British Modernism. The presence of the Skyspace Tewlwolow Kernow at the top of the garden and his second work, Aqua Obscura, at the bottom satisfyingly inform the visitor’s overall experience.27 Tewlwolow Kernow is part of a vast international series of over 80 such architectural sculptural works comprising an austere room open to the sky and with simple benches encouraging quiet contemplation. Turrell’s website describes them as follows: ‘a specifically proportioned chamber with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. Skyspaces can be autonomous structures or integrated into existing architecture. The aperture can be round, ovular or square’.28 They relate to the Skylight series, and especially to the Ganzfelds, ‘a German word to describe the phenomenon of the total loss of depth perception as in the experience of a white-out’. The same goes for the Space Division Constructions ‘(also called an “Aperture” work) which consists of a large, hori­ zontal aperture which appears to be a flat painting or an LED screen but is a light-emitting opening to a seemingly infinite, light filled room beyond’. To this one might add the Perceptual Cells Series, ‘enclosed, autonomous spaces built specifically for one person at a time, in which one’s perception of space is challenged by light’ and so on. Taken together, they are, of course, an explor­ ation of perception, but as with Turrell’s very early work on sensory depriv­ ation, they explore the experience of the dissolution of the ego. In other words, they are both a ‘trip’ and a meditation. The same goes for Aqua Obscura, which is an installation that turns a disused water tank29 into a multivalent event. Turrell discovered the tank for himself30 and immediately wanted to use it. So it is ‘site-specific’ in a very particular sense31, growing out of the history of fresh water supply – a sine qua non of urban civiliza­ tion – and responding to the much longer history of water in the formation of the landscape. Light and geology are two of the defining characteristics of the tiny West Penwith peninsula as it juts into the Atlantic and the setting sun. There is therefore a technological exploration underpinning the works whose conversation for me constitutes a significant element in the semiotic field that is Tremenheere. Randall-Page, as I say, is part of it, as is Mat Chivers, through his piece, Hybrid (2015) (Figure 9.3). Chivers remarks:

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FIGURE 9.3

Chivers Hybrid. Installed 2015. Sandstone.1.5x1.5m.

Photo: Penny Florence

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have made tools, and those tools have shaped us in return. The idea of extended cognition centres around the way thinking is something that happens in relationship with material real­ ity – that thinking is an infinitely complex network of processes that radiate back and forth from the wetware of the brain through the physiology of the sensorial body and into the world of animate and inanimate form, fusing organic and inorganic in a web of reciprocity. We instinctively knead a ball of clay in our hand – squeezing it, turning it and repeating time and again in order to know it. In grasping this primary material we experience the func­ tional action of the hand that has allowed us to shape our world.32 Sited at the lower edge of the garden, a shiny white cube of a plinth on a corner of the path draws attention to the work in stone that it supports, marking it out as no other work in the garden is marked. Part organic, part digital, it nudges like the irritant in an oyster, simultaneously evoking the appearance of a rounded rock out of which crystals grow and a 3D design on a computer screen. It is a discordant presence that dispels any easy romanticism through what might seem perhaps a contradictory message, but which is con­ sistent with the artist’s approach to the embodiment of ideas. They are pro­ foundly environmental:

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I often work with stone because it is such a primary and sensuous material, historically bound up with our cultural evolution. I’m interested in how sculptural form can communicate ideas in a way that goes in on a more bodily level. I find data interesting for different reasons. Raw data can pro­ vide an abstract that enables us to understand the nature of hyper-events – like climate shift […] – that are so massive and complex that they are almost invisible to perceive otherwise. Bringing the two things together results in objects that can be greater than the sum of their parts.33 It is thus a seeming-hybrid approach – even that is unstable, so that the notion of the hybrid, which inevitably poses questions concerning limits and border­ lines, destabilizes its own basis.

FIGURE 9.4

Tim Shaw, Minotaur. 2x2.5m on 1m plinth approx.

Photo: Ali Braybrooks

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Tim Shaw puts this centre stage in his piece Minotaur (2008). Situated in an elevated position among the trees at the upper edge of the open meadow that slopes along the valley, it is a threatening presence when you come upon it. But the magnificent head is literally ‘mounted’ (as in a trophy-hunter’s spoils). Its eyes are mere slitted depressions; this is a defeated beast, unseeing, bodiless (Figures 9.4a,b,c). Half bull, half man, the Minotaur is obviously also a hybrid, and, appropriately for a presence both animal and mythological, it is a shapeshifter, in this and other ways bringing to mind Victor Ehikhamenor’s piece Isimagodo (The Unknowable, 2016) in the sculpture garden of the Norval Foundation in South Africa.34 From the rear quarter view, the Minotaur’s haunches seem to materialise to unnerving effect. Depictions of horned cattle of course go right back to the earliest paintings on rock formations, where, as in Lascaux, the unchanged rock has been used as part of the form. The effect is especially powerful when lit by torch light from below, as it would have been in prehistory.35 The ancients’ use of paint seems to enhance what is already there in what would today be part painting, part polychrome sculptural relief, but which seems more like the emergence of the life force of the rock. In this, they challenge our ideas not only of formal categories, but also of representation itself. The bull is also a significant trope in Modernism, with Picasso’s frequent depictions moving seamlessly in their relation to formal modes. Shaw’s Minotaur prominently features the same long, curved horns, and can also seem to flicker between abstraction and figuration, while at the same time foregrounding the animal. Head on, it is clearly a bull. But there is no body. Instead, there is a flat-ish plane that could be either the creature’s massive shoulders or a trophy mount. From three quarters behind, a body is suggested, though it is not human. Unsettlingly, it almost seems that from behind; you, the viewer, supply the human body. If it is not to stretch the point too far, one might contrast Lunch on the Grass (After Manet), sited far below on the other side of the meadow beside a pond in the trees, which plays with abstraction in a very different way. Small scale and evanescent where Minotaur is massive, Caroline Winn’s fragmented piece somehow manages to capture something of the interrogative wit of the Manet painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1862/3 that is its genesis.36 Its metal rods run through porcelain squares that for me seem to mock the plinth, since the rods continue to hold up the forms alluding to the painting (a seated naked woman, the baffling pointing finger). One of the most famous works at the birth of Modernism, the Manet’s bravura play on its sources, on gender and on the sensuality of picnicking among the trees has baffled and charmed in equal measure for over 150 years, yet still retained its radical aura. Winn’s ceramics are not easy to see in the dap­ pled light; just like any work on the edges of abstraction, it becomes mobile in

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FIGURE 9.5 Caroline Winn. Lunch on the Grass. 2017. Size variable, components 0.3x0.3m. Ceramic on 2m steel rod.

Photo: Penny Florence

response to the eye’s indecision, in the manner of trying to catch a dream. Here, too, there is a Japanese connection, since Manet was as influenced as the rest of his gener­ ation by the Japanese print. His illustrations for L’après-midi d’un faune are taken directly from Hokusai’s Mangwa. It’s an intuitive connection, not explicit, for Neil Armstrong, and the choice and siting of this work exemplifies his consistency. But this is how, on reflection, the evanescence of Winn’s piece appears necessary; like Mallarmé’s nymphs ‘So fair, they’re light, light incarnate, floating in air’ (Si clair,/Leur incarnat léger, qu’il voltige dans l’air).37 When asked what made Armstrong site it where it is, he said, That was a collaborative work, completely, just a walk round the garden with Caroline Winn, she saw the site and then saw the vision, if you like […] she liked the area – the idea – very conceptually […] to try to capture some of the ambiguity [of the painting] in the setting. Slightly staged painting, I think, and the final work has the same feeling of being placed in a way which is … unusual and slightly intriguing.’ [ … ] ‘I think it works very well. I’m probably in the minority [said with wry irony]. I like the idea of 5 figures in a green backdrop, then the detail becomes another level and it makes use of what could have

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seemed a rather featureless walk around a circular walkway … not necessarily dull, as I don’t dislike the idea of nothing much happening, having a quiet area. But it does provide a moment of focus in that journey around and it kind of sits well, since you go almost through the work, very restrained and of a completely different cultural way of thinking. Ceramics have a strong relation to place at Tremenheere, since it is only about 45 miles from St Austell, once the heart of the china clay industry in Cornwall – and now, of course, home to the Eden Project. Like pottery in general, it is one of Cornwall’s traditional arts that connect to the Far East, to China as the origin of the technology that bears its name and to Japan through Bernard Leach and his close association with Hamada Shōji in St Ives (about 7 miles away). We might forget that clay is earth, but we should remember that it has retained its closeness to its origins (largely unlike paint) [Figure 9.6]38 with many contemporary artists digging their own materials including glazes out of the ground. As one of several works in ceramic in the garden Lunch on the Grass appears at first to be the smallest in scale. Yet one of its interests is that its scale is indeterminate; where does its force-field begin or end? Tony Lattimer’s large works at the other end of the scale are well represented with Companion and Pregnant Silence in the gardens, and an installation in the café. Lattimer aspires to the creation of ‘movement fired into the stillness of ceramic form,’39 and their presence lightly references the menhirs of the nearby moorland.

Samuel Bassett. Lost Karenza. 2016. 0.5x0.5m approx. (‘Karenza’ is Corn­ ish for ‘Love’).

FIGURE 9.6

Photo: Penny Florence

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Black Mound (2005, then untitled), David Nash RA, with the artist.

Charred oak. 5x3m approx.

FIGURE 9.7

Photo: Neil Armstrong

David Nash further references at once the materiality of art making and of organic natural processes in his Black Mound, a charred oak huddle like a wooden parody of a stone circle. Nash’s practice focuses primarily on wood sourced from ‘waste’; timber felled due to disease or for reasons of safety, for example [Figure 9.7]. Burning the surface into an even, seemingly moulded contour creates a softness of texture and outline that contributes to the quietness the piece induces, while it appears to inhabit or silently populate its shady loca­ tion under the high canopy. The effect of the sly eroticism of Nash’s Black Egg and Stump (2004, Charred Sycamore, 123 x 55 x 45 cm), is comparable with Randall-Page’s Slip of the Lip, suggesting some kind of hermaphroditic ancient being or life-form, at once male and female, plant, mythic sylvan presence. In other works, Nash burns recessed lines into geometric or natural forms, leaving areas of natural, unpolished wood, as in Mosaic Egg (2004, oak, 46 x 90 x 47 cm) or in the 2004 installation Pyramids Rise, Spheres turn and Cubes stand still. The latter, like Rain at Night and Mountain (2014, sycamore and pastel on paper, 121 x 40 x 41 cm and 153 x 112 cm) pairs the sculpture with carefully placed drawings in soft pastel or charcoal. Nash’s frames themselves are sometimes charcoal. Charcoal was a highly efficient traditional fuel, producing twice the amount of heat as wood. It is a practice that grows directly out of his early work making living sculpture, starting in the context of the Land Art of the 1970s. Made consciously as part of the environmental movement, partly as a protest against political short-termism, Nash’s

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Ash Dome (1977) consists of a circle of ash trees trained towards the centre and incorp­ orating the vagaries of nature. It was intended to outlive the artist (in spite of the first version having been eaten by clearly dangerous sheep) and to remain as a conceptual work through the 21st Century. Nash has come to terms with the fact that it now has ash die-back, the deadly fungal disease. He accepts it as part of natural process.40 Calling it a ‘living project’, the artist’s gallery, Annely Juda, details another, com­ parable long term action indicative of Nash’s commitment to ecology and the environment. In 1978, Nash rolled a large wooden sphere into a river near his studio in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales. He documented this action in words and in the video Wooden Boulder. The project was to last 25 years, over which Nash traced the passage of his boulder until it reached the sea in 2004.41 Both works are performative in an aspect of Land Art that is easy to miss within current critical frameworks: ‘what the work is’ changes over time, and decisions have to be made about how to negotiate its ongoing preservation, degradation and/or restoration.42 It is a work that further extends the notion of ‘event’ with which this chapter began, and which it has loosely explored. To adapt Grosz’s term ‘rhythm’ (which refers to place, so that it also embraces time) the journey of the boulder through the landscape makes expressive qualities newly emergent through ‘the differential relation between different milieux’ (Grosz 2008 49) thereby trans­ forming them into ‘territories’ in her expanded sense. The intensity of territory here is co-emergent through differentials, through structures of time and place, revealed by being brought into true relation. This ‘truth’ concerns ‘sensory experiences, not mediated representations of the real, but the real itself in absolute self-proximity, true form.’43

Notes 1 This and the following quotations and references are from Holt’s interview with Simon Grant, Notes from an Ancient Island. https://tate.org.uk/search?q=nancy±holt 2 Conversation recorded at Tremenheere, March 12, 2018. Subsequent quotations and references to Armstrong’s methods and thought are taken from the the transcript, unless otherwise indicated. 3 What the British think of as typical landscape is very far from ‘natural’: neither Horse Chestnut nor Sycamore nor Laurel are native, for example. The last Ice Age left the UK with very few native plant species: as noted above, 600 compared with 17,000 in Yunnan or 22,000 in Mexico. 4 Colour Plate 22. See https://jamesgriffithpainting.com/statement/accessed 05.06.2019. Cf. below on Redon. For Dadd, a descendant of the British painter Richard Dadd, see https://www.realgardens.net 5 For cult music venue The Folly Bowl, Altadena, Ca. see www.facebook.com/TheFollyBowl/ (Figure 9.1 above). 6 See also Chapters 1 and 8 on Richard Long. 7 See also the following chapter where underground communication between trees is discussed (the so-called ‘wood wide web’). 8 Comparable, perhaps with anamorphosis in painting as distinct from trompe l’oeil. 9 Interestingly, lithography relies on chemistry; the process works through the chemical difference between the inked areas and the stone (or metal plate) on the same plane, not on relief. This enables greater freedom from line.

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10 For an explorationof the fluidity of boundaries between art and theory, see Bowie 1987. 11 Stéphane Mallarmé, The Impressionists and Edouard Manet 1876 (Florence 1986/2003 27). 12 Redon, however, did not. See Florence 1986/2009. For Freud’s ‘dreams of knowledge’ see Bowie 1987. 13 While, for example, garden designer Piet Oudolf’s philosophy is one of ‘inclusivity and egalitarianism’ and his inspiration is overwhelmingly of nature, he has also ‘emphatically stated’ that ‘All my work depends on gardeners 100 percent, without gardeners you lose this in a few years.’ (Burkhalter and Workman 2018 52.) 14 For an exploration of Living Sculpture See Cooper (2001) and Cornell’s community oriented http://hort.cornell.edu/livingsculpture/ 15 https://edenproject.com/media/2018/05/giant-breathing-sculpture-by-studio-swine­ unveiled-today-may-22-2018-at-the-eden-project 16 The term ’differential’ is one I have worked with for over twenty years, and it aligns with what has in the intervening time become known as new materialism. It is useful in part precisely because it relates to difference in physics and mathematics as well as to qualities more explored in the humanities. 17 ‘[ … ] new materialism has emerged mainly from the front lines of feminism, phil­ osophy, science studies, and cultural theory, yet it cuts across and is cross-fertilized by both the human and natural sciences.’ http://oxfordbibliographies.com/view/docu ment/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0016.xml (accessed 01.05.2019). 18 More on this work and a live webcam are available at www.restlesstemple.co.uk. 19 Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art & Objecthood’ continues to exert considerable influence. His farreaching argument incorporates production and aesthetic to assert that art degenerates the closer it becomes to the condition of theatre. 20 See De l’Essence du Rire, et généralement du Comique dans les Arts plastiques of 1855. 21 http://forkbeardfantasy.co.uk/peopleandskillspen.php (accessed 02.05.2019). 22 Conversation recorded at Tremenheere, March 12 2018. Subsequent quotations and refer­ ences to Saunders’ methods and thought are taken from the transcript, unless otherwise indicated. For Kemp, see https://davidkemp.uk.com/works/. As a comic engagement with homelessness, Saunders made a snail shell sculpture large enough to get inside and packable into a rucksack. It seems a good example of Joyce’s ‘chaosmos’ (Grosz 2008 9). 23 Saunders acknowledges input on this design from many university designers, but especially Rob Higgs, a sculptural engineer based in Penryn, near Falmouth. 24 Situated precariously on a tiny headland in Berwickshire on the Scottish Borders with England, these ruins date back to at least 1333. The castle seems continuous with the cliffs. ‘The site is surrounded by sheer cliffs which fall 150ft to the sea at its landward end and 100ft to the sea at its seaward end. The sea cliffs to the north west and south east of the castle are around 300ft high, and the land behind them rises steeply to the 570ft summit of Telegraph Hill.’ https://undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/ coldingham/fastcastle (accesssed 11.05.2019). 25 To borrow the formulation of B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014). 26 Turrell and Robert Irwin were the only students to sign on at the time. Both artists became prominent in what was to become the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Olafur Eliasson – born the year it was founded – is perhaps the best known European artist related to the movement. His 2003 installation The Weather Project was among Tate Mod­ ern’s most successful and popular works for the difficult Turbine Hall. 27 Aqua Obscura is not always open, however. Nevertheless, once you have visited it, you cannot pass by without being reminded of its presence almost under your feet. (It is just through the entrance in a very shady area of mature native woodland). 28 jamesturrell.com, accessed 10.05.2019. The organization of the website into succes­ sive links encourages an interconnected reading of the varying forms of the artist’s work rather than, say, chronological or formal groupings. 29 It once supplied the town of Marazion below. See also Chapter 1. 30 Armstrong recounts how, while having dinner with the artist, he began to tell him about it, when Turrell, leant forward and said, ‘I know’. He had apparently already

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36

37 38

39 40 41 42

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climbed down the inspection ladder to explore (not something many of us would do with a 19th century iron ladder into an unknown and long-deserted wet space) and decided he wanted to make a work there. Much experimentation followed, as the pro­ portions of the tank and the angle of the light at the manhole were very difficult to reconcile. It seems that the size of the pinhole were at least partly the result of this. For further discussion of site specific, see the following chapter. https://matchivers.com, (accessed 10.05.1019). Mat Chivers interview with Mark Westall, FAD magazine, 24 Jan 2017. https://norvalfoundation.org/. Of course, the original caves have been closed since 1963. Visitors can experience an approximation of what they must be like by visiting the reproductions in nearby caves. It’s a mixed and compromised impression, but at less busy times, it can convey enough to feed the imagination. So much has been written about this painting, including by me, that to suggest any single reference seems invidious. However, unsurprisingly, I think my earlier work is relevant here in that it explores this landmark painting as part of early Modernism’s articulation of a ‘new problematic of the imaginary’, relating the perpetual metamorphosis of Impressionism structurally to that of French Symbolism, as for example in Redon (Florence 1986/2009). The poet knew both painters well and there is a fundamental cor­ relation between their works indicative of larger historical and critical issues. L’après-midi d’un faune (1865/1876). My translation. See Florence op cit. See https://magazine.artland.com/artist-interview-samuel-bassett/, accessed 7/1/2020. Bassett’s closeness to the land is perhaps remarkable in the digital age, in which it’s so easy to forget how much the actual media count; his use of clay signifies. It recalls for me the continuity from egg tempera to grinding lapis lazuli to how new ‘artificial’ pig­ ments contributed to Impressionism. https://tonylattimer.com/archive/. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artist-living-sculpture-starts-dying-david-nash-sto ical-life-death-ash-dome-1307201 (accessed 11.05.2019). http://annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/pyramids-rise-spheres-turn-and-cubes­ stand-still-david-nash (accessed 13.05.2019). This is not an exhaustive study of the works at Tremenheere, but rather an exploration of its overall meanings and what they can tell us about the contemporary sculpture garden. This is what has determined my selection. The current full list is reproduced at the end of the book. Raymond Ruyer, cited in Grosz 2008 100.

References Bowie, Malcolm. (1987) Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge University Press. Burkhalter and Workman. (eds) (2018) Beyond the Town: Conversations of Art & Land, Hauser & Wirth 52. Fried, Michael. (1998) Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. University of Chicago Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press. Wagenknecht-Harte, Kaye. (1989) Site+Sculpture: The Collaborative Design Process. Van Nostrand Rheinhold, Routledge.

10

CONCLUSION The art of the plant; the art of the earth (far other worlds) Penny Florence

As we have seen, Neil Armstrong at Tremenheere shares with American Land­ scape Architect James C. Rose close affinities with both Japan and Modernism, manifest especially in the ways they approach the shared qualities of sculpture, landscape and plants. At the same time, the differences between all of these retain their variable weights. In this final chapter, I want to bring Rose’s appreciation of painting to bear on the issues, beginning with the work of what he calls ‘the abstractionists’ (Rose 1938 642); of course, Tremenheere’s emphasis is overwhelmingly, though not dogmatically, on abstraction. From here, we open out into painting and printmaking thematically and in relation to process and consider some broader issues about art wherever it is to be found. In Freedom in the Garden, Rose presents illustrations of one of his garden plans alongside Picasso’s Cubist work, Figure; Doesburg’s Russian Dance alongside a house plan by Miës van der Rohe; and Braque’s Music, Schwitters’ Rubbish Construction with another of his own designs (Rose 1938).1 This is not about flattening garden design to two dimensions, but rather concerns the recognition of the plural spatio-temporalities of Cubism and of the undefinable maker of the Merzbau. It is also about how ‘the sense of transparency, and of visibility broken by a succession of planes’ translated outdoors can ‘free us from the limitation imposed by the axial system’.2 The inherent qualities of the materials are vital. They are are ‘a subtle art, and worthy of specialized study, a sense of form more difficult to achieve ‘because of the looseness and instability of growing material.’ Art has shifted profoundly in relation to the studio since early Modernism;3 when Turner went outdoors to paint, he fully recognized that it was not just about ‘seeing what was there’. That is how I understand John Ruskin’s well-known anec­ dote about Turner having the sailors tie him to the mast of a ship in a storm so that

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he might experience its terror.4 I doubt whether he would have been able to see as much as he might have done through a well-placed porthole; but he was an experi­ enced sailor who knew the sea at first hand. The point is the level of his engage­ ment with natural forces and its impact on what art is. Turner might not have been a sculptor, though it is fascinating to consider what his cross-disciplinary practice might have been had such a thing existed in the 18th/19th centuries.5 What art is remains inextricable from what thought is, with neither assimilable to the other. By bringing into view a variety of explorations, I have sought to open onto an understanding of the sculpture garden not only as a hybrid and fluid form that nevertheless is recognizable through the relatedness of its specific elements, but as itself art, as event. The elemental forces of the natural world are indispensable to this change in all the constituents of art, plants, landscape and human (for want of a specific term to express whatever part the human organism plays in the dynamics of event) – and they are all comprehensible as art, individually selectively and collectively. The sculpture as form continues, but the quality of its objectness changes. It is no longer discrete, but rather an element in a force field that goes beyond the frameworks of the semiotics of the last 50 or so years. In Ursula Le Guin’s lightly ironic and witty Sci-Fi short story, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, the narrator is a linguistic scientist. S/he speculates about what a putative Art of the Plant might be and what might distinguish it from the Art of the Animal. ‘What it is, we cannot say; we have not yet discovered it. Yet I predict with some certainty that it exists, and that when it is found it will prove to be […] the first passive art known to us’6 (Le Guin 1974/2012). It is an idea whose time may well come, but it will not do so without some fundamental changes in how we think. This is where language comes in and where Le Guin’s tale now appears prescient. (Rose observes, ‘Plants are to the landscape designer what words are to the conversationalist’ [Rose 1938 642]). Le Guin’s story turns on a gentle satire of scholarship through three articles published in the fictional Journal of Therolinguistics,7 the study of non-human languages. In a world where animal languages have become fully accepted, the fields of plants and the ‘inanimate’ have been neglected, even though the ‘transient lyrics of the lichen’ and the ‘cold volcanic poetry of the rock’, are all part of the voice of the earth ‘in its immense solitude within the immenser community of space’. Therolinguists take as their premise the assumption that plants do not com­ municate. In this, they follow Tolstoy’s argument in What is Art?, which is that the answer to his eponymous question includes communication. This means there can be no art of the plant. What, however, if some art is communicative and some not, asks the Presi­ dent of the Society of Therolinguists? ‘Perhaps in vegetable art there is no com­ munication and no time. The plants may use ‘the meter of eternity’. S/he chides the membership for their failure of imagination.8 Just because we don’t recognise something, we cannot assume it does not exist. Not only is it a failure of imagination, it is also a failure of logic.

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Following recent work on the underground ecology of trees and forests, popularised by Peter Wohlleben (whose Shandyean name translates as ‘good life’ or ‘living well’), the notion of plant communication has begun its journey from margins to centre. The so-called ‘wood wide web’ may be less felicitous a name than Wohlleben, but it highlights the point not only that the interdependence of trees is such that they form something very like a community, it is a collectivity based on communication. It is extensive and applies to the entire tree: apparently their more widely known capacity to warn each other of insect attack through the release of hormones above ground, and to take defensive action, is complemented underground.9 What’s more, this transmission of sense between coevals relies on an inter­ mediary that is not the same life form. That form is fungal, and fungi are neither plant nor animal. Whereas mycology was once classified as a sub-discipline of botany, it is now known that fungi are genetically closer to animal life, forming a third ‘kingdom’ alongside those of plant and animal in the overall threedomain system.10 Not only do plants communicate, they do it using through an exchange of value with non-identical life-forms. The combination of roots and fungi that form what has become known as the mycorrhiza goes even further; symbiosis becomes mutualism, nutritional require­ ments are exchanged and the boundaries between life forms are blurred. Perhaps in light of some theorisations of AI, ‘wood wide web’ is not so infelicitous after all.11 How would we define the essential difference between this and neural networking? This dendritic mutualism with fungi crosses at least two of the domains through which we humans try to understand the living world. It signals a fluidity of matter into which the painter Kate Walters brings the whole of the third domain, the eukarya, so that the animal and the plant in her work are inseparable from the human. A recent painting, In The Beginning, exemplifies this, while at the same time invoking communication, since its title is familiar in a Christian context as the opening of the Gospel of St John: In the beginning was the Word. But her syncretic work cannot readily be brought into any field, whether that of religious belief or of contemporary art, research or ‘movement’. It can, broadly speaking, be approached as bringing together, or bridging, two fields, both of which it can be seen to extend. These are the ‘sex­ uate’ and the shamanic. Neither is generally understood in art in the way I propose; both are seamlessly brought into different understandings through an approach that excludes no life form. Starting at the top of Walters’ triple image (Figure 10.1),12 the interrelation between the three parts immediately resists the unidirectional, with the brachiate form that rhythmically joins the two related forms either side suggesting constant upward, back­ ward and forward motion through its wave-like peaks and troughs. Perhaps this is a circular form opened out into two dimensions, in the manner of the globe presented as a map. The association with the ocean though the wave-form is reinforced by the growth pattern of this structure, which is like some seaweeds. On the upper left is

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FIGURE 10.1 Kate Walters, ‘In the Beginning’ 2018. (Triptych). Watercolour on paper.

40 x 30 cm approx.

Photo: Kate Walters

a somewhat amorphous, yet clearly bounded shape that could be placental; (signifi­ cantly, the whole triptych is predominantly a dark sanguine, more or less transparent).13 It is anchored to the lower right of the form which it resembles by the concentration of colour at its juncture with the wave-like plant form, the ‘apex’ of which could be simply that: a peak in the rise and fall of one single organism. But it could also be three other things: a change of direction on the horizontal plane; the point where two organisms become entangled; or where at least two organisms merge (some of the marks are unattached at one end and appear to sit on the main ‘stem’). On the right, the larger silhouette has two areas of more solid colour: the lower, where the sides join what might be an abstraction of a woman’s pregnant body; and the upper which might or might not be an erect nipple.

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In the second of the three sections, this putative nipple now looks more like a beak, partly because the rounded mark on the right resembles a bird; young birds feed from their parents’ beaks as from the breast. The leg and three toes of this becoming-bird seem to join the lateral form, which has levelled into a simple curve, rising from right to left, while the leaves/branches/roots have resolved into a meshed tube that would look as much like veins as vegetable growth were it not for the occasional tapering ends that render its already deli­ cate connections precarious. In the lowest of the three images, the rhythmic lateral curve has resolved more clearly into an umbilicus, while the left hand form resembles a poppy and the right a crested bird. The crest, if such it be, returns us to the first image, while the appearance of a third dark area at the point where the navel would be on a human body leads us back to both previous images: it is just a spot on the second image, but that body is not as reminiscent of the human as the first. There are now three roughly equivalent darker areas on the right which, as well as taking the eye to those above it in the triptych, also echo the three on the left of the work as a whole, creating a virtual rising diagonal. Finally, the lateral mark, now a fine line that pales in the middle, links the darkened, perhaps bloody area on the right with its near mirror image on the left. But it is ambiguous, and because the form on the left looks so much more like a flower than an embryo, it also suggests the seed from which the flowering plant grows. Flowers are the reproductive organs of the plant, and this is what is referenced here, not the sentimentalised signifier of romance. Evocation of plant life takes us back to the first part of the triptych and its simultaneous resem­ blance to veins, roots, leaves and branches, but the embryo or seed is now on the right, with the mature form on the left. Technically, all this movement and ambiguity in the medium of watercolour requires great precision, and it is perfectly married to meaning. The contours are clearly articulated by the spread of washes from the very pale to the very dark, so that they are formed by the movement of paint initiated by the artist rather than following her gesture. In the application of watercolour, variations in the amount of pigment affect its properties to a far greater extent than with oil paint: more pigment means greater viscosity and less flow. The process takes time. Areas have to be moistened to exactly the right degree; the paint has to be directed by moving the paper (whose weight and composition play a part) as well as by the brush, and every move is indelible. One false step and you have to start again. These paintings are revealed as much as they are made; the intention is all. Their precision is only really evident because the three images are very close in size and shape, as if they were successive iterations of the same single image. What this detailed analysis demonstrates is that every move in the creation of these works is semantic; every mark means something necessary to the work as whole. That meaning is the interconnection of all life forms, of matter.

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The paintings are also finely balanced between control and release, active and passive, chance and design. Human agency is essential to this art, but neither as the masterful Subject, nor as impotent object. This is where their relevance to thinking the sculpture garden lies. It is a conceptual process, a way of thinking that traverses categories at a deep level. Ultimately it derives from the shamanic, and Kate Walters is an experienced shamanic initiate. I said above that the shamanic in Walters’ work needs to be differentiated from what is often meant by the term in the art world. For example, in the 2017 Venice Biennale, curator Christine Macel included a section she called the ‘Pavilion of Shamans’, which is an interesting and worthwhile idea in theory. But apparently it meant the loosely anthropological, the ‘primitive’ and the indigen­ ous—and, at worst, a ‘chill-out zone’.14 It sounds disturbingly ‘other’. The same goes for the sleeping artists in the show representing ‘the dream’—shamanic vision is not this. It is being fully awake. For example, Walters’ 2016 performance/drawing Clearseeing Drawing or ‘becoming the hollow bone’15 draws on long-established ritual work to bring viewer and/or purchaser into the making. The artist sits with her subject in the gallery (or indeed, anywhere) and ‘channels’ them to create a unique monotype, which the person can take away with them. This process appears not entirely unlike invoking the Nagual,16 an entity similar to a double after which Walters has named a recent painting. Since the Nagual manifests in a different incarnation, or energetic confluence, it comes from an expanded sense of the human; perhaps from Marvell’s ‘far other worlds’ (referenced in the title to this chapter). So this is quite a long way from audience participation or setting work up to which people can respond in various ways. It is not at all about a ‘shamanic trend’. Furthermore, although the co-participant is brought right into the making of the work, the artist remains key as guide and, to an extent, guardian. It is therefore ethical, in that the artist works to reveal what the co-participant can handle. Shamanic practice and art can be a powerful combination; expanded consciousness is not for the unprepared. Earlier in this chapter, I also linked ‘becoming the hollow bone’ (in Walters’ phrase) with the sexuate, a term from feminist theory, specifically from Luce Iri­ garay, in whose work it means, broadly, something that does not yet exist because sexual difference is based on the male body.17 That something would be the articulation of an equal but differentiated ontology between all sexes, a mobile subjectivity I have named the ‘sexed universal’ as a position through which the subject may pass, but not may not occupy (Florence 2003). Perhaps in the present context it is through Luce Irigaray’s understanding of the navel that the reconfiguration of the sexuate comes most readily into view, partly because its derivation is less directly related to Lacanian frameworks of phallogocentrism than most—I must emphasise ‘less directly’; of course Irigaray is famously a Lacanian dissenter, having been thrown out by Lacan of his École Freudienne de Paris.18 But, as figured in Walters’ painting, the navel is more

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readily open to the kinds of expanded understanding under discussion here because it is common to all human beings, almost all mammals19 and carries none of the psychoanalytic baggage of either penis or phallus. Nor is it confined to one sex or sexual practice, or to the maternal. It is the mark of a being’s entry into the energetic field of the earth. By assuming that conceptual frameworks erase sexual difference (they are, or were, all masculinist constructs) and by beginning from another place in the life cycle, birth rather than conception, Irigaray steps away from many of the oppositions fundamental to the psychoanalytic work of the mid-late 20th cen­ tury. Griselda Pollock comes very close, both to the emphasis on birth and the navel under discussion and to the animal, when she re-reads the story of Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphynx that ghosts a great deal of late 20th century art and philosophy. As she says, the monstrous female-as-other is everpresent in psychoanalysis. She also recognizes that the matrixial will not ‘invert or replace’, but rather will ‘complement and shift’ (Pollock’s emphasis) phallocen­ trism (Pollock 2006 58). Pollock’s excellent analysis of the blockages and seeming prohibitions that impede so much of feminist thinking in this area stops short of the animal, while the plant is, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be seen.20 The step towards the animal or the plant may sound absurd in this non-Deleuzian context. Yet perhaps Freud’s notorious observation, to the effect that individual women ‘may be human’ in respects other than her sexual function, is a kind of clue as to why; perhaps we should embrace hysteria as the language of the womb, of fertility. The conceptual fields of neither Freud nor Lacan can admit of the animal or the plant because of the indispensable centrality of language. The ‘mirror stage’ in Lacan is like another birth, another separ­ ation from the m/other. Despite the extensive use of images in both thinkers and their inheritors, it is a modern/ist male language that is the determinant of all thought and communication; not for them ‘a green thought in a green shade’. By way of contrast, Ursula LeGuin’s thinking draws on the long history of environmentalism and Land Ethics, as in the work of Aldo Leopold.21 We now have the more recent research of their inheritors, as in the work of phil­ osopher Roberta Millstein,22 who focuses on precepts such as causal process, material/physical process and causality, including in natural and sexual selec­ tion. This brings her work in biology into relation with that of Elizabeth Grosz, who, for the present purposes, bridges Darwin, Bergson, Deleuze and contemporary science with art, but not with botanical science. Millstein is editor of the journal Philosophy Theory and Practice in Biology whose transdisciplinary approach is very different from, though complementary to, that of Grosz. There is more than one transdisciplinarity, more than one interdiscipli­ narity; how we take those words also matters. Grosz’s notion of ‘event’ appears at present to be supple enough to do it. Grosz embodies continuity of matter in her example of the mountain devil (or thorny devil, moloch horridus), problematising any clear separation between the animate and inanimate, while yet not homogenising them. Its body surface

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can become indistinguishable from the habitat that its spiky form already mimics. The transformations of this chameleon-like lizard are apt as an embodiment of an art in which human consciousness and agency are de­ centred. Camouflage in its modern form is the invention of the American painter Abbot H. Thayer.23 As Thayer points out, it can be understood not only as disappearance, but also as hiding in plain sight, as in dazzle painting on ships, where the changeability of the surroundings renders colour adaptation impossible. Thayer believed that ‘nature’ was acting as an artist in its use of the optics of colour and light. Unsurprisingly, his thinking was controversial, but whether or not it is worth taking seriously can depend less on personifying nature and more on how you understand the work of an artist. Thayer observed that his ‘law’ makes a creature cease to appear to exist at all. Under­ stood in this light, Andy Warhol’s 1986 ‘Camouflage Self-Portrait’ places his understanding of ‘what an artist is’ (arguably the concern of all his varied output and performances) at least on the way to the non-binary constructions under discussion. He is never simply either one thing or the other, present or absent.24 This can be understood as the camouflaged being or entity mer­ ging into the background, but it can also be approached in terms of the observer. In the latter case, it is the scattering of the gaze that creates the dis/ appearance [sic].

Tracy Hill, ‘The Waste’ 2015 Intaglio-type Etching, 96cm x 59cm on somerset paper.

FIGURE 10.2

By permission of the artist

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It is a mode that is not confined to camouflage, as we can see through the work of the artist Tracy Hill. Her landscape drawings and prints are made with the aim of ‘un-mapping’ the neglected wetlands in which she specializes. They create, in the artist’s words ‘a hybrid space where technological controls meet the emotion and memory of the human experience’[Figure 10.2].25 But the process begins with the rediscovery of a kind of relational walking: Reading the land through my feet was one of the first ways in which I learnt to alter my walking. The need to test the stability and the ground under your feet is a basic and instinctive act but understanding how the ground responds is not so easy and demands an awareness of our own bodies that most of us have no need to use on any daily basis and so have forgotten.26 This is of the same order as the ‘sensory reconnaissance’ of Lisa Rappaport and Christopher Pommer’s work at Sweet Farm in Canada, ‘a process of explor­ ation, which in today’s landscape of signs, labels and aggressive programming is usually dormant’ (Amidon 2001/2003 166). The strategy for the site, based on the idea of how rare it is that we actu­ ally take in and consider the typical aspects of our environment, brings idiosyncrasies and experiential moments to the fore […] there are no metaphors. Each object and event is just what it is. (ibid. 165) Hill’s wetlands require haptic experience, proprioception and bodily concentra­ tion on what is immediately before you as well as visual scanning of the middle dis­ tance, to avoid the real danger of drowning in what looks like firm ground: In order to walk across the wetland it is necessary to understand very site specific conditions such as naturally occurring vegetation and the under­ lying geology. Seasonal variations in the water levels mean that the stabil­ ity of the ground can change very rapidly, and without knowledge and understanding anyone crossing the space can become misguided by visual clues making navigation difficult but also dangerous. Different grasses help to indicate a change in the water table, which at certain times of the year is hidden from view, cotton grasses and reeds suggest standing water while heathers and hazel suggest higher, drier ground.27 Dating back over 10 thousand years, the mosslands of North West England have been disappearing at a rapid rate, falling by 94% since the early 19th century. But when intact, they ‘provide a geological and archaeological heritage […] inextricably linked with their communities and the rivers which run through them. These liminal spaces sit on the edge linking and connecting villages, they mark borders and define modern transport links’ (Stevenson & Hill 2017). Until

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very recently, wetlands have been denigrated on the one hand and exploited on the other, a kind of non-landscape or dangerous hinterland ripe for control and exploitation that has been linked to their ‘negative feminisation’ as a kind of environmental ‘femme fatale’ (Giblett 1996 in Stevenson & Hill 2017: 18).28 Re-appropriating geomatics in the form of a terrestrial laser scanner of the kind used by archaeologists to make high resolution maps, and/or to extract photorealis­ tic 3D models of the landscape, Hill manipulates the resultant data to create ‘impos­ sible’ landscapes in which, for example, the viewpoint is reversed so that it appears in the image. The sensors in the scanner work by emitting ‘laser signals to calculate distances based on the time delay of the returned laser pulses’. The data are ‘highly accurate renditions of in situ conditions at the time scanning is done. […] The spa­ tial resolution of the resulting data is orders of magnitude higher than data derived from satellite- or airplane-based mapping and remote sensing techniques’.29 Hill’s experience is that it can seem as if the data tries to control what she’s doing, requiring considerable investment of time and effort to get the software to allow her to extract what she wants against the grain of its original design.30 ‘My work is not a description of what is seen, but a visualisation of the possibil­ ity to explore and the potential of what might be’.31 Once the battle with the data is won, Hill’s process is analogue, with the final work either in delicate black and white drawings, or photopolymer prints. Both are appropriate, since chalk and charcoal reference the earth and polymer resin is activated by UV light. By distilling huge amounts of data through her own corporeal experience of the landscape and her long artistic process, the artist finds her image: I deliberately de-construct, manipulate and reconfigure the collected data before exporting it out of the digital world, giving me the opportunity to create my images. A more sensory visualisation of my experience is created based on aes­ thetic decisions as an artist and my understanding as a walker. In scientific and mapping terms this renders the scanner data useless but the resulting images I feel, offer value beyond the captured physical information and mapping of the location. My works are not a description of what lies before us but the possibil­ ity to explore and visualise my re-imagining and memory of place. In a synaesthetic move to link the senses and thought, she seeks to create both new experience and new memory, constantly altering and remaking the initial stimulus, both in the use of data and sometimes, for example, also in the use of conductive inks that can activate recorded sound. It is entirely consistent with this that she does not use fixative for her wall drawings in easily effaceable media. These meticulous and precise works are transient, ‘deciduous drawings, and their extinction is part of Hill’s plan’.32 The large scale of the work is important to its effect on viewpoint; Hill’s prints often take the process of photopolymer prints its limits, their size requiring up to a day for the exacting inking process alone. By utilizing the entire scale of the walls onto which she draws in great detail, she enables the kind of mobility of looking required in the field.

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Hill’s slow remapping returns landscape to walking pace, to topographical fea­ tures and to reducing the human presence, minimising its usual role as the defining element. During her residency in the Hunter River region of New South Wales, she sought to bring the approaches of the southern hemisphere to bear on the work of recognising how landscape defines community, not the other way around. Perhaps this is why there is something of the quality of Aboriginal painting in this work that bears no obvious resemblance to traditional or modern Australian art. I find it hard to locate or define it, yet it always comes to mind. It is a secular version of the generation of site-related meaning through pil­ grimage discussed by David Leatherbarrow (Leatherbarrow 2004 208ff).

Waymark, Tremenheere. St Michael’s Way. Pilgrim’s Route to Santiago.

European Cultural Route.

FIGURE 10.3

Photo: Penny Florence

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Quite apart from the chapels and waymarks of traditional routes, the act of walking in itself was a reenactment of ‘an ancient form of ritual with very specific spatial and topographical meanings […] these pilgrims, like countless others before them, realized for themselves what they believed to be their true nature’. Quoting American landscape architect Garrett Eckbo earlier in this fascinating study of topographical meaning as a conjunction of elements through time, Leatherbarrow draws attention to the unique quality of place, composed as it is of different regional attributes and cli­ mates (op.cit 62–3). Both Hill and Leatherbarrow touch on ideas of sitespecificity without entering into its frameworks.33 It is to a challenge of these frameworks that I now turn. Miwon Kwon, in her indispensable exploration of site-specificity as a concept (Kwon 2004), details the observations of a number of artists active in the Chi­ cago-based group, which began dramatically with Suzanne Lacey’s action. This involved placing a hundred boulders overnight in various locations in The Loop, downtown Chicago, each with a plaque to honour a woman from the city. Weighing between half and three quarters of a ton, and measuring 4’x3’, this was no small feat in any case, but especially in such a compressed a time frame. Seven other projects were to follow, each of which was created with ‘communities’ in collaboration with Sculpture Chicago, a nonprofit public art organization in the city. This urban project overall may in itself seem to have little direct bearing on the issues under discussion; the only one of the eight constituent pro­ jects related to plants or a garden was storefront hydroponic garden to grow food for HIV/AIDS patients. What is of interest here is the critique of site-specificity that it engendered. Extending also to ‘the rhetoric and practice of new genre public art in general’ its radicality ‘depends on a fundamental redescription of site specificity’s aesthetic necessity, its con­ ceptual parameters, its social and political efficacy. Strangely echoing the argument posited against the earlier site-indifferent models of art-in-public­ places and art-as-public-places, many artists and critics now register their desire to better serve and engage the public, to further close the gap between art and life, by expressing a deep dissatisfaction with site specifi­ city’ (Kwon 2004 108). Arguments include distinguishing between ‘site’ (an abstract location) and ‘place’ (an intimate and particularized culture that is bound to a geographical region)34 in order to expose how site specificity has effectively been reversed: from bringing art into the everyday it ‘has become a means to overrun the public and the meaningful­ ness of local places and culture’. A number of terms ensue, either to bring the rationale back to a 1960s frameworks or to articulate distance from it: ‘issuespecific’ and ‘audience-specific’;35 ‘post-site sculpture’;36 ‘community as context’;37 reversing Serra’s argument over the notorious and politically motivated removal in 1986 of his work Tilted Arc (1981), once positioned in Federal Plaza, Manhattan,

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NYC. Serra’s view was that ‘after the piece is built, the space will be understood primarily as a function of culture’.38 Ultimately, ‘Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in dialectical tension the distant poles of spatial experience described by Bhaba’—referencing his remark concerning how the globe shrinks for the powerful while the ‘few feet across borders or frontiers is the most awe inspiring space’ (Kwon 2004 166). We need to focus on the inbetween rather than the successive. Equalizing the relative values between art, plants and landscape begins to address this task by shifting the premises on which we build, especially the prevalent unconscious assumption that art only occurs in the art work. Inevitably, this distorts the ways we understand most modern and contem­ porary approaches to art, its conditions and interpretation, from Baudelaire, through Merleau-Ponty, Feminism, Post-Colonialism to Deleuze-related understandings and beyond. The centrality of human agency needs to be re-thought in terms that shift the parameters. I am not suggesting mystifica­ tion here or a return to any earlier modes. Nor am I suggesting radical innovation; rather, the very notion of an avant-garde would be brought under scrutiny as part of an interrogation of the ‘new’ as an essential com­ ponent in artistic originality. It is a profound and consistent non-dualism, and a way of understanding the sculpture garden in which a straightforward contrast with any other place, including the urban, would not be possible. Science would not be the opposite of art as the logic of the non-binary clarifies, while the differential between the two epistemologies would be always in view. Artists in the context of a virtual exhibition under the aegis of the SciArt initiative exemplify a shift in this direction. Kayo Albert describes her work as ‘a bridge between physical process and mental or spiritual state, and between individual and collective consciousness’, while Laura Ahola-Young seeks to ‘pay attention to signage in the natural world’. Curator Danielle Kalamaras observes, With new technologies of the 21st century, science exposed a deeper mental reality and proved that human behavior is the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the con­ scious and unconscious levels. Even with technologies today that allow for an empirical observation of the mind, reality itself is still debated. As in gestalt theory, the brain completes external imagery the eye cannot produce—all done at an unconscious level. If a central function of the unconscious is to fill in the blanks in order to con­ struct a useful picture of reality, how does this affect our understand­ ing of the world?39

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While this represents a move in the right direction, it still does not take the final step of linking ‘territory, animality and the earth together to gen­ erate sensations’ (Grosz 2008 90–91). Discussing the contemporary art of the western Australian desert, Grosz points out that its relevance derives from a way of being in the landscape that is continuous with the Dreaming, which always has been and will continue to be, while maintaining a distinction between the direct derivation of indigenous art practice from the earth with the practices introduced by Europeans. It is an understanding that is very far from any categorization of pre- or post- in terms of tempor­ ality, technologies or materialities. ‘Works are often collective and commonly involve more than a single artist, often including members of one’s family or those who share one’s dreaming, and thus lineage, filiation, totemic identification, territory and history’ (loc. cit). The art that emerges connects to territory or ‘dreaming country’ is a dynamic that Grosz compares to the compression of an entire cinematic reel into a single highly complex frame. (Grosz 2008 92). I take this to mean that the temporal and spatially various dimensions of the work cannot be fixed as they might in a palimpsest, but rather continue to move as a film would in non-linear time and in multi-dimensional space. It is a model that has its anchor points in human time and history, but also in the detailed topography of ancestral lands, temporal maps of ancient spatial terrains The aim is to allow a coherent force-field to appear, a locus where art may be experienced as event. As in the work of Kathleen Petyarre and her sisters, its temporality and spatiality is not bounded by any moment; it is in immediacy that it comes into being, but an immediacy that has the capacity accurately to depict a landscape as if from an aerial view, while at the same time ‘mapping’ those significant human and animal events that circulate in narratives. It brings relatedness into a sense of infinity; the event that is art is at one and the same time, allowing hitherto unseen forces to enter into signification. The transformations of the spiky chameleon-like lizard known as the moun­ tain devil is as apt embodiment of this art: None of Kathleen Petyarre’s work is an image of the mountain devil, but each is a becoming-devil of paint itself, the coming alive of the corrugations and patterns of its skin, of its tracks, the arcs of its move­ ments as well as […] the belonging together of both the skin, the movements of the devil over its terrain, the home country of Kathleen and her people (the people of the Atnangker), and the earth and its secret locations. The dots of these paintings resonate not only with the eye, but ‘above all with the haptic effect that reproduces while transforming the devilmovement through linking it to the becoming of the terrain itself’ (Grosz 2008 94).

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In the culturally and geographically bounded space that is the sculpture garden, such mapping is clearly not going to signify the same, or come into being in the same way. This is not about transferring models or trying to unify; not at all. But it is an approach to the relationships between artist, gardener, art, plant and place though which they may be re-envisioned. Art, as Grosz observes ‘is the process of making sensations live, of giving an autonomous life to expressive qualities and material forms, and through them affecting and being affected by life in its other modalities’ (Grosz 2008 103). The impact of equalising the elements of landscape, plants and sculpture can only be understood up to a certain point through analysis and exposition. It forms a complex and varied range of experiences through which internal inter­ connections may be understood as event. The sculpture garden as a complex art form depends primarily on the thought that is internal to it; it is a creation that does not exist before the work, one that emerges from the dynamism and mut­ ability of its cycles of growth, decay and renewal. Kathryn Gustafson writes, in relation to the discipline most closely related to the field of the Sculpture Garden, that of Landscape Architecture: As Landscape Architects […] we have the capacity to translate. […] our work has weight and consequences—ecologically, historically, socially— that is dangerous to ignore. One mind, one design instinct, can only bene­ fit from exposure to mixed disciplines—architecture fused with land, art with science, theatre with history and so forth. […] The wider our hori­ zon of creation, the more diverse our landscapes become and the higher the tolerance the public develops to live, work and see things differently. (Amidon 2001/2003)40

Notes 1 There is also a photo of Stonehenge beside Adrian Hill’s drawing of poplars, demon­ strating a near spiral rhythm between them. Rose’s images are telling, and are readily available at http://jamesrosecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/1938-10-Rose­ Freedom-in-the-Garden.pdf. 2 Basically taking two intersecting sightlines as the structure. 3 Few artists now maintain solely a studio practice, and even if they do, fewer still do so in a single medium such as oil paint. 4 Now thought to be apocryphal, but the grounds for either view are as weak or strong as each other, and I would trust what Ruskin was saying by recounting it, which concerns an immersive engagement with natural forces. A recent show by Andy Parker, Following in the Footsteps of Turner (Burgh House, London, 3–14 April 2019) revisited some his locations. See also Turner at Sea (Thames & Hudson 2013), coinciding with the show of that title at the National Maritime Museum. The main collections of his work are at Tate Britain and the National Gallery, London. 5 He was apprenticed as an architectural draughtsman, however. 6 I have adapted this quotation from my essay-catalogue for Kate Walters’ solo exhibition ‘The Secret Worth a Thousand’, 1 December 2012–8 February 2013 at the historic

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Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. The illustrated booklet with my essay ‘The Art of the Animal, The Art of the Plant’ was beautifully designed by Erwin van Wanrooy. Le Guin interrogates the notion of communication altogether, which I do not, yet. ‘Thera’ in Buddhism is a title of respect for an elder monk. It’s very probable that this is where Le Guin found the name for her fictional science, given her interest in, and knowledge of, ancient thought. Op.cit p.272. See, for example www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-secrets-of­ the-wood-wide-web. accessed 24.05.2019. ‘A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more pre­ cise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-domain_system accessed 24.05.2019.The three domains are archaea, bacteria and eukarya, the last of which is made up of plants, animals and fungi. We belong to one subset of at least eight life-forms (the numbers, it seems, are contested), and that is only become apparent since the 1970s. The use of a ‘web’ as communication has also been explored in the work of Dr Eleanor Morgan, whose book Gossamer Days (Morgan 2016), as The Guardian points out ‘wonderfully unites history, science, art and anthropology’. (Dr Morgan is a former student of mine at The Slade.) Following up stories of spiders responding to song, she attached a thread of spider silk to her throat so that the vibrations would be directly transmitted to the web of the spider to whom she sang. The creature responded in various ways, including running towards the thread. The painting is not classically a triptych, which, of course, was three panels joined laterally, with the central image privileged and very often larger, especially in the portable versions where the side panels are hinged to form protective doors enclosing the piece. When open for contemplation, the gaze tends to return to the middle. While its devotional function may be appropriate here, it would be limiting to invoke a more precisely Christian context than is already suggested by the title. Becoming Sanguine, https://www.katewalters.co.uk/essay-and-reviews/becoming-san guine/. See also https://www.pennyflorence.com/new-page-1. Both accessed 28.11.2019. See, for example, Ben Davis’s Artnet article https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/ venice-biennale-2017-viva-art-viva-review-958238, accessed 27.05.2019. At Hoxton and at Espacio in London, Summer 2016, and in many other settings since. ‘Nagual’ is a term that derives from ancient South American languages and refers approximately to the person who is in touch with their animal counterpart. A related term, ‘Huaca’, can mean a sacred object or place, or a state of being. Both terms are free of the limitations consequent on thinking of the human as in a category of its own. This is a huge issue, and this is not the place for it. But, in brief, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial, introduced in 1995 and developed since, while it remains in the domain of the human animal only, is of the logic understood here, since it is ‘an opening up of the symbolic field to extended possibilities, in nonphallic logic’, which therefore does ‘not need to displace the other to be’ (Griselda Pollock, quoted in Armstrong & De Zegher 2006 xvii). But paradoxically, it seems to me that opening out the symbolic to a female equivalent appears to make it difficult to find another, more fluid way of moving out of the power structures that implicitly put contemporary Western ‘humanity’ at the top (I am tempted to say, godhead). She was sacked from her teaching post when she published Speculum, de l’autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman) in 1974. By privileging Irigaray in this discussion, I do not intend a similarly combative take on feminist or psychoanalytic theories and practices. I owe far too much to far too many, especially, perhaps, to Pollock and Ettinger.

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19 All placental mammals have a navel, including marine mammals; Marsupials don’t. Neither does the one egg-laying mammal, the platypus. Australia’s extraordinary zoology should encourage us to think outside categorical boxes. 20 I am further tempted (why, I wonder, is the notion of temptation pushing at my con­ sciousness as I write of feminist knowledge) to co-opt the whole of Pollock’s splendid essay to my argument, since it only needs to take that one step towards the animal to open on to the territory sought by all the brilliant writers to whom she refers. 21 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962. 22 Roberta Millstein’s research brings evolutionary biology and ecology into relation with the philosophy of science, including causation, as well as exploring intersections between evolutionary biology, ecology, and the environment. 23 Thayer 1949–1921; his dates map onto the emergence of Modernism. ‘The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration’ The Auk, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1896), pp. 124–129. I acknowledge Dr Ayelet Zohar’s 2007 thesis on camouflage, Schizoanalysis and contemporary art, which I supervised at The Slade School of Fine Art. ‘Schizoa­ nalysis’ is a term introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, 1972. Thayer’s focus in the article is on birds and he stresses the importance of colour gradation from above to below, and therefore the role of light. 24 Warhol is in good company in his interest in camouflage: predecessors include the many, many artists who served in both World Wars, Picasso and the British Surrealist Roland Penrose among them, www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/art-cul ture-and-camouflage accessed 23.05.2019. 25 Pamphlet preface by the artist to ‘Deciduous Drawings/Insoluble Ink’ [Walking in Wetlands with Tracy Hill], an essay by Deborah Stevenson in response to Sensorium and Matrix of Movement, Projects by Tracy Hill 2014–2017. 26 Correspondence with the artist 2019. All following unattributed quotations from Hill are from the same source. 27 Email to me from Tracy Hill 20.05.2019. See also Stevenson & Hill 2017. For Des­ combes and Leatherbarrow in this volume, and for Richard Long, The Situationists and Stalker, the walk is an art form; for Hill, the walk is integral to a hybrid art practice.. 28 Rod Giblett 1996, cited in Deciduous Drawings, p.18. 29 www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/terrestrial-laser-scanning accessed 16.05.2019. 30 As expressed in the Q&A after her talk at the Newlyn Art Gallery 14.05.2019 in the context of the exhibition Invisible Narratives, curated by Lubaina Himid and others. https://newlynartgallery.co.uk/. 31 Hill Loc cit. 32 Deborah Stevenson, loc cit, unnumbered pages (p.14 from the first recto inside the cover). 33 Especially interesting is Leatherbarrow’s discussion of Robert Smithson’s ‘non-site’ projects, and how they ‘raise the problem of geometric figures transcending them­ selves into their fluid or “oceanic” beginnings.’ The combination of ‘bits of earth and geometry’ form what he calls an ‘abstract geology’. (Leatherbarrow 2004 242). Insofar as I understand this, it seems almost the negative to my positive in this study; they are closely related in their fundamentals. 34 Art critic Jeff Kelley, cited by Kwon loc. cit. 35 Mary Jane Jacob’s terms. 36 Dan Cameron’s term. 37 Eleanor Heartney. 38 Richard Serra, cited in Kwon 2004 110. 39 http://sciartcenter.org/the-new-unconscious.html. 40 Preface to Amidon’s Radical Landscapes.

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References Amidon, Jane. (2001/2003). (Preface by Kathryn Gustafson) Radical Landscapes. Thames & Hudson. Florence, Penny. (2003). Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art. Allworth/NY School of Visual Arts. Florence, Penny. (2012). The Art of the Animal, The Art of the Plant. Exhibition publica­ tion/Artists Book accompanying The Secret Worth a Thousand the Art of Kate Walters 1 Dec 2012–8 Feb 2013 Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. Design: Erwin van Wanrooy. Giblett, Rod (1996). Postmodern Wetlands. Edinburgh University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Col­ umbia University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1992). ‘How To Define Sexuate Rights?’, trans. D. Macey, in Margaret Whitford (ed.) The Irigaray Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Kwon, Miwon. (2004). One Place after Another: Site-Specific art and Locational Identity. MIT Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1974/2012). The Author of Acacia Seeds, from The Real and the Unreal: Selected Stories from Ursula K. Le Guin. Volume 2. MA: Small Beer Press. Morgan, Eleanor (2016). Gossamer Days. Spiders, Humans and their Threads. Strange Attractor Press. Pollock, Griselda. (2006) ‘Rethinking the Artist in the Woman, the Woman in the Artist, and that Old Chestnut, the Gaze’, in Armstrong, Carol, De Segher, Catherine. (2006/2011). Women Artists at the Millennium. pp.35–84. MIT Press. Rose, James. (1938) Freedom in the Garden. Pencil Points. October, vol. 19: 640–644. Stevenson, Deborah & Hill, Tracy (2017). Deciduous Drawings, Insoluble Ink. Projects by Tracy Hill 2014–2017. Exhibition publication, UCLAN.

APPENDIX: TREMENHEERE PLANT LIST

AND MAP

Zone 1

Zone 2

Acer forrestii Acer sikkimensis Aralia elata Aucuba salicifolia Chamaedorea ernesti-augusti Dicksonia antarctica Fargesia ningjungensis Fargesia rufa Impatiens omeiana Mahonia bealei Phyllostachys aurea Rhododendron calophytum Rhododendron crassum Rhododendron edgeworthii Rhododendron faberi Rhododendron johnstoneanum Rhododendron maddenii Rhododendron sp. Semiarundinaria fastuosa Styrax wuyuanensis Trithrinax acanthocoma Tsuga sp. Viburnum furcatum

Daphne bhloua Dicksonia antarctica Clerodendrum trichotomum Cordyline indivisa Hedychium wardii Himalayacalamus hookerianus Phormium gigantea Photinia glomerata Styrax formosanus var. formosanus Tilia mandshurica

Zone 3 Aesculus wilsonii Brahea edulis Brahea nitida Butia odorata Carpinus chingiana Magnolia rostrata Pinus yunnanensis Styrax japonica ‘Tregrehan’ Tilia henryana Washingtonia filifera

Zone 4

(Cont.)

Acer sikkimensis Arisaema fargesii Astelia chathamica Astelia nervosa Butia x syagrus Butia yatay Carpinus chingianum Fatsia megaphylla Hydrangea aspera Kawakamii group Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Rotschwanz’ Idesia polycarpa Magnolia grandiflora Magnolia maudiae Mahonia x lindsayae ‘Cantab’ Nothofagus fusca Nothofagus truncata Phormium gigantea Podocarpus salignus Pseudopanax laetus Tilia heterophylla Trachycarpus fortunei Trachycarpus wagnerianus

Zone 5

Zone 5 Acer buergerianum Acer pectinatum var. forestii Acer pictum ssp. macropterum Aesculus wangii Astelia nervosa Blechnum chilense Blechnum magellanicum Brassiopsis hispida Brassiopsis mitis Camellia tsai Carpinus fangiana Ceroxylon alpinum Cleyera japonica var. japonica Cyathea cooperi Cyathea dealbata Dahlia tamaulipana Daphne ‘Mary Rose’ Dicksonia antarctica Disanthus ovatifolius Eriobotrya deflexa Faregesia denudata Fargesia papyrifera Fargesia porcatus (Continued )

Fargesia robusta Fatsia megaphylla Gevuina avellana Hedychium ‘C.P. Raffill’ Hedychium greenii Himalayacalamus falconeri ‘Damarapa’ Holbelia brachyandra Huodendron tibeticum Hydrangea aspera subsp. strigosa (From Gong Shan, China) Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Ice crystal’ Illicium phillipinense Impatiens omeiana Juania australis Juniperus coxii Lomatia ferruginea Lysimachia paridiformis var. paridifiormis Mahonia bodinieri (Ogisu) Mahonia lanceolata Mahonia nitens x eurybracteata Mahonia russelli Mahonia ‘Sehnile Moon’ Magnolia (Parakmeria) sp. Neolitsea glauca Neopanax laetus Parajubaea torallyi Phoebe bournei Photinia glomerata Phyllocladus ‘Highland lace’ Podocarpus matudae Rhododendron arboreum subsp. zeylancium Rhododendron glanduliferum Rhododendron lindleyi Rhododendron macabeanum x sinogrande Rhododendron maddenii Rhododendron ‘Polar Bear’ Rhododendron saluensis Rhododendron sianofalconeri Rhododendron sinogrande Rhododendron sp. Schefflera gracilis x taiwaniana Schima wallichii Styrax hemsleyanus Styrax obassia Tetracentron sinensis Thamnocalamus crassinodus ‘Kew Beauty’ Thamnocalamus sp. Trochodendron araliodes (Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 5

Zone 7

Woodwardia unigemmata Yucca treculeana Zenobia pulverulenta

Impatiens omeiana Leptopteris hymenophylloides Lophosoria quadripinnata Magnolia dealbata Magnolia rostrata Magnolia sp (In style of Manglietia Vietnam) Mahonia eurybracteata Metapanax davidii Metapanax delavayii Osmunda regalis Rhapidophyllum hystrix Rhododendron nuttallii Rhododendron latouchae Rhododendron vialii Styrax hemsleyana Styrax obassia Todea barbara

Zone 6 Acer aconitifolium Aesculus wangii Aspidistra attenuata Blechnum chilense Blechnum magellanicum Camellia tsaii Chamaedorea radicalis Chusqea delicatula Crinodendron alba Crinodendron hookerianum(pink flowering) Dicksonia antarctica Fargesia albocerea ‘Yunnan 2’ Fargesia murielae (Dwarf form) Fargesia nitida ‘Nymphenburg’ Fargesia robusta ‘Red Sheath’ Fargesia sp. Fatsia japonica Gevuina avellana Huodendron tibeticum Illicium merrillianum Illicium phillipense Lonicera japonica ‘Hall’s Prolific’ Mahonia huiliensis Parajubaea microcarpa Phyllostachys bambusoides ‘Castillonis’ Phyllocladus trichomanoides var. alpinus ‘Highland Lass’ Pododcarpus nubigenus Podocarpus salignus Pseudopanax laetus Rhododendron crassum Rhododendron tsariense Styrax hemsleyanus

Zone 7 Acer japonicum ‘Aconitifolium’ Acer oblongata Clematis armandii Hydrangea ‘Belle Vue’ Hydrangea sargentiana (Continued )

Zone 8 Arbutus xalapensis Borinda lushuiensis Butia odorata Butia odorata var. strictior Butia x sygarus Cannonmois virgata (male) Cercidiphyllum japonicum Cornus ‘Norman Hadden’ Cycas revoluta Drimys granadensis Drimys winteri Enkianthus campanulatus Gordonia axillaris Hydrangea aspera Kawakamii group Hydrangea aspera subsp. Sargentiana ‘La Fosse’ Hydrangea serrata ‘Kurenai’ Liquidambar styraciflua Magnolia grandiflora Magnolia laevifolia (Tregrehan) Magnolia laevifolia ‘Velvet and Cream’ Magnolia maudia Magnolia rostrata Musa basjoo Musella lasiocarpa Nothofagus fusca (Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 8

Zone 9

Paulownia tomentosa Phyllostachys aureosulcata ‘Lama Temple’ Phyllostachys bambusoides ‘Allgold’ Phyllostachys bambusoides var. marliacea Podocarpus nubigenus Podocarpus salignus Pterostyrax sp. Restio quadratus Rhododendron sinogrande Rhus succudeana Salix fargesia Salix magnifica Sequoia gigan’Pendulum’ Schefflera taiwanensis Thamnocalamus crassinodus ‘Merlyn’ Tilia henryana Tilia heterophylla Trachycarpus fortunei Trachycarpus wagnerianus Xanthophyllum armata

Pinus devoniana Pittosporum tobira Quercus candicans Quercus robur Trichocereus chilensis Trichocereus pachanoi Trichocereus pasacana Trichocereus terscheckii Wachendorfia thyrsiflora

Zone 9 Acacia baileyana Agapanthus inapertus var inapertus Agave americana Agave montana Agave nigra Aloe striatula Arbutus arachnoides Arbutus marina Brahea armata Butia odorata Chamaerops humilis Chamaerops humilis var. cerifera Cycas revoluta Dasylirion sp. Euphorbia sp. (from Taygetos near Sparta) Euphorbia stygiana Juniper stricta Livistonia australis Macrozamia communis Musella lasiocarpa Nolina hibernica Phoenix canariensis Phyllostachys edulis ‘Bicolor’ (Continued )

Zone 10 Acanthus mollis ‘Holland’s Gold’ Acer sikimmensis Arisaema speciosum Buddleja colvilei ‘Kewensis’ Butia odorata Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’ Catalpa (yellow flowered) Cupressus cashmeriana Cycas revoluta Daphniphyllum macropodum Dicksonia antarctica Disporum ‘Night Heron’ Euphorbia stygiana (Santa Maria) Fargesia scabrida Ficus carica ‘Adam’ Fuchsia (unknown) Globba aff. hookeri Himalayacalamus hookerianus Hydrangea quercifolia Jubaea chilensis Livistona chinensis Lophosoria quadripinnata Magnolia dealbata Magnolia denudata Magnolia macrophylla subsp. ashei Magnolia rostrata Meliodendron xylocarpum Miscanthus giganteus Musa sikkimensis ‘Red Dragon’ Musa yunnanensis var jingpongensis Nandina domestica Persea lingue Phyllostachys nigra Phyllostachys vivax f. aureocaulis Pinus patula (Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 10

Zone 11

Polyspora sp. (Vietnam) Polyspora yunnanensis Populus lasiocarpa Rhapidophyllum hystrix Rhododendron crassum Rhododendron polyandrum Rhodoleia parvipetala Sassafras albidum Sciadopitys verticillata Semiarundinaria fastuosa Sinocalycanthus “Aphrodite" Stachyurus praecox Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Rex’ Toonia sinensis Viburnum cylindricum

Hydrangea sargentiana Illicium simonsii Jasminum duclouxii Juania australis Leptopteris hymenophylloides Lepidozamia peroffskyana Lophosoria quadripinnata Mahonia pallida Miscanthus nepalensis Oreopanax xalapensis Parajubaea torallyi Persea thunbergii Metapanax davidii Primula boothii ‘Renfe’ Pseudopanax crassifolius Rhododendron ‘Countess of Haddington’ Rhododendron eximum Rhododendron sinogrande Rubus ichangensis ‘Silver’ Salix canariensis Schefflera alpina Schefflera delavayi Schefflera impressa Schefflera sp. (Vietnam) Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Rex’ Todea barbara Trachycarpus wagnerianus Viburnum cylindricum Weinmannia racemosa Weinmannia sp. Woodwardia radicans

Zone 11 Acer oblongum Acer sikkimensis Araucaria bidwillii Astelia nervosa Begonia omeiana Blechnum magellanicum Blechnum novae-zelandiae Blechnum tabulare Culcita macrocarpa Cyathea australis Cyathea dealbata Cyathea cooperi Cyathea medullaris Dicksonia antarctica Dicksonia fibrosa Dicksonia squarrosa Dicksonia youngiae Disporopsis aspera Encephalartos villosus Fargesia frigidus Fargesia scabrida Fatsia japonica Fatsia polycarpa Hedychium gardenerianum Hedychium sp. Himalayacalamus falconeri

Zone 12 Aesculus wangii Aspidistra elatior Blechnum tabulare Culcita macrocarpa Cyathea dealbata Cyathea medullaris Dicksonia antarctica Dicksonia squarrosa Diplazium sp. Himalayacalamus sp. (Continued )

(Continued )

(Cont.) Zone 12

Zone 14

Lepidozamia peroffskyana Lophosoria quadripinnata Mahonia fortuneii Metapanax davidii Podocarpus salignus Rhododendron preptum (Portmeirion) Rhododendron selense Schefflera sp.

Blechnum longicauda Borinda albocerea Borinda yulongshanensis Chimonobambusa tumidissinoda Cyathea smithii Dicksonia antarctica Drimys lanceolata Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’ Fargesia papyrifera Fargesia perlonga Fargesia scabrida Fatsia japonica Fatsia megaphylla Hibanobambusa tranquilans Holboellia coriacea Illicium lancelolatum Knightia excelsa Parajubaea torallyi Persea thunbergii Podocarpus elongatus Podocarpus oleifolius Primula boothii ‘Renfe’ Rhododendron fulvum Rhododendron sinogrande Rubus sp. Schefflera rhododendifolia Styrax sp. Viburnum rhitidophyllum Woodwardia unigemmata

Zone 13 Blechnum longicauda Blechnum magellanicum Brahea nitida Camellia cuspidata Chamaedorea radicalis Chusquea gigantea Clethra luzmariae Colocasia esculenta Cyathea australis Cyathea cooperi Cyathea dealbata Daphniphyllum oldhamii Dicksonia sellowiana Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’ Euonymus hamiltonianus Fatsia polycarpa (Edward Needham) Fatsia polycarpa ‘Tregye’ Gordonia axillaris Gordonia yunnanense Illicium mexicanum Knightia excelsa Livistona chinensis Lophosoria quadripinnata Magnolia sapaensis Mahonia lomarifolia Musa sikkimensis Phyllostachys bambusoides ‘Holochrysa’ Podocarpus henkelii Schefflera delavayii Schefflera rhododendrifolia

Schefflera taiwaniana Schefflera sp BMLT Thamnocalamus crassinodus ‘Gosainkund’ Trachycarpus martianus Viburnum sp. Woodwardia radicans

Zone 15 Betula nigra ‘Heritage’ Carpinus fangiana Disporum Magnolia grandiflora ‘Maryland’ Phyllostachys aurea ‘Koi Inversa’ Pieris japonica Pinus patula Podocarpus nubigenus Rhododendron boothiim Rhododendron maddenii Rhododendron sp. Rhodoleia championii Trachycarpus geminisectus

(Cont.) Zone 16

Zone 17

Aloe polyphylla Araucaria heterophylla Arbutus canariensis Arbutus xalapensis Bergenia pacumbis Brahea elegans Cheilanthes lanosa Chondropetalum tectorum Chusqea culeou Crinum album Crinum powellii Curculigo crassifolia Cyathea australis Dicksonia antarctica Erica cerinthoides Erica oatesii Euphorbia stygiana Gordonia axillaris Huodendron biaristatum Jubaea chilensis Kniphofia caulescens Kniphofia thomsonii Kunzea baxteri Jubaea x Butia Luma apiculata Macadamia integrifolia Magnolia fordiana Magnolia doltsopa ‘Touch of Pink’ Moraea huttonii Moraea spathulata Meliodendron xylocarpum Musella lasiocarpa Nerine bowdenii Nerine bowdenii ‘Isabel’ Neomarica gracilis Nolina hibernica Parajubaea torallyi Pawlonia catalpoides Pinus pseudostrobus Sabal bermudana Sabal palmetto Schefflera macrophylla Thamnochortus insignis Xanthorrhoea glauca

Zone 17 Agapanthus sp. Agave sp. (Continued )

Banksia integrifolia Banksia robur Bergenia pacumbis Blechnum cycadifolium Boconia fruticosa Brachyglottis rotundifolia Butia odorata Calopsis paniculata Camptotheca acuminata Cannomois gigantea Chamaerops humilis Chamaerops humilis ‘Cerifera’ Elegia tectorum ‘Fish Hoek’ Crinum album Crinum ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ Crinum powellii Cycas revoluta Dierama sp. Doryanthes excelsa Euphorbia stygiana Ischyrolepsis subverticillata Kniphofia caulescens Kniphofia northiae Magnolia grandiflora (‘Exmouth’?) Moraea huttonii Musa sikkimensis Musella lasiocarpa Nolina nelsonii Pittosporum tobira Podocarpus elongatus Rhodoleia henryi Rhodoleia parvipetala Telopea speciosissima Trachycarpus princeps Viburnum hoangliense (Fsp 2900m) P. Barney Watsonia ‘Tresco Hybrids’ Yucca queretaroensis

Zone 18 Acacia sp. Agave montana Brahea armata Calopsis paniculata Cistus (cultivars) Cordyline australis Dierama erectum Eryngium pandanifolium (Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 18

Zone 20

Kniphofia triangularis Macrozamia communis Michelia sp. Philadelphus mexicanus Philadelphus mexicanus ‘Rose Syringa’ Pinus armandii Stipa gigantea Teucrium fruticans

Dacycridium dacrydiodes

Watsonia ‘Tresco Hybrids’ Yucca linearifolia

Dierama erectum Pennisetum alopecuroides Philadelphus delavayi var. melanocalyx Phymosia umbellata Salvia serboana (vitifolia) Salvia stolonifera Syringa pinnatifolia Watsonia sp. Zabelia triflora Zanthoxylum piperitum (purple leaved)

Zone 19 Zone 21 Acer sikkimensis Agave ovatifolia Bucconia fruticosa Brahea brandegeei Calopsis paniculata Dasylirion longissimum Deutzia ningpoensis Dierama erectum Eleutherococcus aff. leucorrhizus Firmiana simplex Jubaea chilensis Lonicera hildebrandiana Magnolia maudiae Magnolia martini Magnolia tripetala Mahonia duclouxiana Meliodendron xylocarpum Osteomeles subrotunda Zanthoxylum giraldi Zanthoxylum oxyphyllum

Zone 20 Agathis australis Agapanthus inapertus subsp. intermedius Buddleja globosa Buddleja loricata

Cannomois virgata (Continued )

Agapanthus inapertus subsp. intermedius Agave montana Agave ovatifolia Amicia zygomeris Calopsis paniculata Cistus salvifolia Cycas panzhihuaensis Eryngium pandanifolium Dierama erectum Kniphofia spp. Pennisetum alopecuroides Pinus ayacahuite Pinus hartwegii Trithrinax campestris Watsonia sp. Yucca elephantipes

Zone 22 Agave ferox Agave montana Calopsis paniculata Dasylirion berlandieri Dasylirion glaucophyllum Dasylirion quadrangulatum Rhodocoma gigantea Sabal palmetto

Zone 23

Zone 25

Agapanthus inapertus subsp. inapertus Agave atrovirens var. mirabilis Agave montana Arbutus xalapensis Chamaerops cerifera Cistus (cultivars) Coleonema pulchrum ‘Sunset Gold’ Cortaderia richardii Dasylirion miquihuanensis Dierama erectum Eryngium pandanifolium Kniphofia caulescens Kniphofia northiae Moraea huttonii Olea europaea Puya chilensis Stipa tenuissima Yucca aloifolia Yucca linearifolia Yucca rostrata

Abutilon ‘Flamenco’ Aechmea recurvata Aechmea fendleri Agave montana Agave stricta Aloe striatula Araucaria angustifolia Baloskion sp. Banksia integrifolia Banksia robur Buddleja glomerata Chamaerops cerifera Chamaerops humilis ‘Vulcano’ Cheilanthes sp. (Mexico) Cordyline banksii Cordyline kaspar Cycas revoluta Dasylirion berlandieri Dasylirion wheeleri Dioon edule Dioon mejiae Echium fastuosum Elegia capensis Erica discolor Furcraea bedinghausii Euphorbia stygiana Grevillea ‘Bronze Rambler’ Macrozamia communis Marsdenia oreophila Melianthus major Nerium oleander Phoenix reclinata Phormium tenax Pinus canariensis Pinus nigra var. corsicana Polylepsis australis Protea sp. (Lower Kenneggy ) Rhododendron hodgsonii Rhododendron polyandrum Schinus molle Stipa tenuissima Trithrinax acanthocoma Trithrinax campestris Yucca aloifolia

Zone 24 Agave americana var. medio-picta Aloe sp. Banksia robur Chamaerops humilis ‘Cerifera’ Cistus (cultivars Dasylirion berlanderii Dasylirion serratifolium Nolina nelsonii Nolina parviflora Phoenix sylvestris Phoenix theophrastii Phormium williamsii Pittosporum dallii Trithrinax acanthocoma Trithrinax campestris Xanthorrhoea glauca Yucca aloifolia Yucca linearifolia Yucca rostrata

Zone 26

Zone 30

Agapanthus inapertus subsp. intermedius Agathosma capensis Beschorneria yuccoides Chamaerops humilis Coleonema pulchrum ‘Sunset Gold’ Cycas revoluta Dasylirion wheeleri Dioon edule Encephalartos ferox Erica caffra Erica caniculata Furcraea parmentieri Jasminum angulare Macrozamia communis Moraea huttonii Phormium tenax Puya sp. Stipa tenuissima Trithrinax campestris Yucca rostrata

Sorbus harrowiana Sorbus wardii Sorbus 6453 Quercus ithaburensis subsp. macrolepsis ‘Hemelrijk Silver’ Tilia nobilis

Zone 31 Araucaria angustifolia Betula albosinensis var. septrionalis Betula dahurica ‘Maurice Foster’ Betula pendula ‘Golden Cloud’ Betula utilis ‘Dark-Ness’ Quercus ilex Wollemi nobilis

Zone 32 Zone 27 Aristea ecklonii Dianella sp.

Cornus sp. (Mount Fan Si Pan) Quercus polymorpha Magnolia liliiflora x stellata ‘Susan’ Populus purdomii Populus tremula

Tilia chingiana

Zone 28 Zone 33

Zone 29 Zone 34 Podocarpus elongatus

(Cont.) Zone 35

Zone 37

Cornus capitata Gaultheria sp. Rhododendron Fsp. Rhodiolia championii Sorbus needhamii Tilia nobilis

Erica canaliculata Furcraea parmentieri Grevillea iaspicula Grevillea lanigera ‘Mount Tamboritha’ Grevillea victoriae Moraea huttonii Neomarica gracilis Nolina parviflora Pennisetum alopecuroides

Zone 36 Borinda grossa Callistemon sp. Carpinus fargesii Carpinus polyneura Chamaerops humilis Cornus chinensis Epimedium franchetii Fagus longiopetala Magnolia campbellii ‘Darjeeling’ Magnolia liliflora x candollei Magnolia sapaensis Magnolia ‘Star Wars’ Mahonia x savilliana Olea europaea Pinus wallichiana Pinus montezumae Plantanus occidentalis Quercus rugosa Rhododendron nobleanum Sorbus hedlundii KR 1810A Tilia endochrysea Tilia insularis

Zone 37 Arbutus unedo Agave celsii var. albicans Agave montana Agave ovatifolia Anigozanthos flavidus Banksia marginata Betula medwedewii Cantua buxifolia Chamaerops humilis Cycas revoluta

Protea subvestita Streletzia reginae Rosmarinus ‘Pointe du Raz’ Thamnocortus insignis Trachycarpus wagnerianus Watsonia ‘Tresco Hybrid’ Yucca recurvifolia

Zone 38 Agave americana Agave celsii var. albicans Agave ovatifolia Agave salmiana Carpinus omeiensis Chamaerops humilis var. argentea Fascicularia bicolor Pennisetum alopecuroides Phormium williamsii Sorbus ulleungensis (commixta) (Ulong-do) Trithrinax acanthocoma Trithrinax campestris Yucca aloifolia Yucca gloriosa ‘Variegata’ Yucca recurvifolia Yucca rostrata

Zone 39 Apollonia sp. Araucaria angustifolia x araucana Aucuba omeiensis Azara lanceolata Bencomia caudata (Continued )

(Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 39

Zone 40

Berberis sp. Brahea edulis Buddleja paniculata Butia odorata Butia eriospatha Butia yatay Calamagrostis emodensis Calopsis paniculata Camellia yunnanensis Chusqea culeou ‘Cana Prieta’ Cornus wilsoniana Drimys winteri Gingko biloba Hydrangea aspera subsp. strigosa . Wolong, sich JM Ilex sp. Impatiens tinctoria Ischyrolepsis subverticillata Juglans sibilitiaca Lobelia bridgesii Magnolia ‘Butterflies’ Magnolia figo Magnolia ‘Lois’ Mahonia duclouxiana Nothofagus dombeyi Nothofagus glauca Phormium gigantea Phormium ‘Williamsii’ Phoenix canariensis Phyllostachys bambusoides ‘Holochrysa’ Pittosporum adaphniphylloides Pittosporum bicolor Pittosporum daphnoides Quercus insignis Rhododendron praestans Stewartia sinensis Styrax japonica ‘Tregrehan’ Tilia endochryseam Trachycarpus wagnerianus Trithrinax acanthocoma Washingtonia filifera

Carpinus omeiensis Carpinus polyneura Carpinus shensiensis Cyrtomium devexiscapulae Epimedium acuminatum Epimedium leptorrhizum Epimedium x perralchicum ‘Fröhnleiten’ Epimedium wushanense Euonymus calocarpus Dryopteris goldieana Fargesia rufa Hoheria sexstylosa ‘Stardust’ Hydrangea aspera ‘Macrophylla’ Hydrangea aspera subsp. Robusta KR. 10735 Illicium mexicanum Illicium ‘Woodland Ruby’ ex pgp Knightia excelsa Lonicera elisae Lonicera periclymen ‘Belgica’ Mahonia eurybracteata Mahonia huiliensis Mahonia napaulensis Merrilliopanax membranifolius Nothofagus moorei Polystichum makinoi Pseudopanax arboreus Rhododendron calophytum Rhododendron loderi Rhododendron sinogrande Schefflera fansipanensis Schefflera rhododendrifolia Schefflera taiwaniana Sorbus aff. cashmiriana Syzygium smithii Trachycarpus wagnerianus Thamnocalamus crassinoides ‘Kew Beauty’ Viburnum carlesii ‘Diana’

Zone 41 Zone 40

Carpinus omeiensis

Aralia foliolosa Arisaema magnificum Arisaema nepenthoides

Dryopteris goldieana Magnolia zenii (Continued )

Zone 42

(Cont.)

Arisaema costatum Aucuba confertifolia Blechnum chilense Carpinus sp. Dicksonia antarctica Euptelea polyandra Viburnum odoratissimum var. arboricola

Zone 44

Zone 43

Zone 44 Abies faberi Acer laurinum Agapetes ‘Ludgvan Cross’ Alniphyllum fortunei Arbutus unedo Arbutus xalapensis Arisaema nepenthoides Aucuba omeiensis Blechnum auratum Blechnum cycadifolium Camellia brevistyla (Hengchunensis) Camellia japonica ‘Blood of China’ Camellia transtonkiensis Camellia yunnanensis Castanopsis sieboldii Clethra delavayi Daphne bholua Deutzia calicosa ‘Dali’ Epimedium membranaceum Hydrangea involucrata ‘Mihara-kokone tama’ Ilex buergeri Ilex yunnanensis Illicium mexicanum Magnolia delavayi Mahonia lomariifolia Mahonia gracilipes (Continued )

Mahonia savilliana Meliosma dilleniifolia Paeonia rockii Pellaea rotundifolia Pittosporum tobira Pittosporum undulatum Podocarpus totara Polyspora sp Pseudopanax laetus Quercus myrsinifolia Rhododendron edgeworthii Rhododendron fragrantissimum Rhododendron fulvum Rhododendron lindleyi Rhododendron ‘Mi Amor’ Rhododendron minus var. minus Sarcococca confusa Schefflera fansipanensis

Zone 45 Acanthus eminens Arenga micrantha Aucuba omeiensis Astelia nervosa Begonia (Crug 2016) Blechnum cycadifolium Blechnum tabulare Crinum powellii Culcita macrocarpa Colcasia esculenta Cyathea australis Cyathea medullaris Cycas thouarsii Dichroa cyanea Dichroa febrifuga Dichroa guizhou Dicksonia antarctica Dicksonia fibrosa Edwardia yenn Ensete ventricosum ‘Montebillardia’ Exbucklandia populnea (Continued )

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

Zone 45

Zone 45

Fargesia angustissima Fargesia papyrifera Fatsia japonica Fatsia megaphylla Fatsia polycarpa Himalayacalamus falconeri ‘Damarapa’ Hydrangea heteromalla ‘Nepal Beauty’ Hydrangea longipes var. longipes Illicium floridanum ‘Halley’s Comet’ Itoa orientalis Knightia excelsa Lepidozamia peroffskyana Livistonia chinensis Lonicera henryi ‘Copper Beauty’ Lophosoria quadripinnata Lysichitum americanum Mahonia bealei Mahonia napaulensis ‘Maharajah’ Mahonia sp. Musa sikkimensis Nothofagus moorei Pyrossia sp Parajubaea sp. (A. Pearson 2016) Parajubaea torallyii Philadelphus mexicana x palmeri

Phyllostachys henonis Phyllostachys vivax f. aureocaulis Phymosia sp. Podocarpus henkelii Podocarpus salignus Podocarpus sp. (Madagascar) Pteris umbrosa Pyrossia lingua ‘Ogon nishiki’ Rhododendron crassum Rhododendron maddenii Rhododendron minus var. minus Rhododendron ‘Sir Charles Lemon’ Schefflera digitata Schefflera gracilis Schisandra arisanensis Styrax japonica ‘Fargesii’ Taxodium distichum ‘Pendulum’ Tilia oliveri Todea barbara Trachycarpus fortunei Trachycarpus wagnerianus Woodwardia radicans Woodwardia unigemmata Zantedeschia aethiopica

(Continued )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Aalto, Alvar 147

Abrioux, Yves 135

Aesculus wangii 4–5 Ahola-Young, Laura 191

Alberti, Leon Battista 102

Albert, Kayo 191

Almost Snow Plow 120, 121

Amidon, Jane 187, 193

Andersson, Magnus 95

Andre, Carl 145

Andrew, John 131

Angelica Medoro 128

Aqua Obscura 9–10, 10, 29–31, 30, 68, 160,

164, 169

Armstrong, Neil 2, 4–6, 5, 13, 20–37,

65–66, 68, 162, 173–174, 179

Arp, Jean 119

Arte Povera 32, 64, 145

Arundel, Lord 75

Aström, Hans 95

Atherton, Kevin 81, 81

Ballantyne, David 128

Baloskion tetraphyllum 35, 36

Bann, Stephen 80

Barad, Karen 2

Bassett, Samuel 174

bees 55

Belvedere Court 73, 90

Benjamin, Walter 154

Berger, John 3

Bill, Max 112, 119

biodiversity 5–6, 20

Birmingham University 50, 52–53

Blackburn, Professor 49

Black Mound 33, 175, 175

Bogue, Ronald 151

Bois, Yve-Alain 144, 145

Bo, Jorgen 104, 104, 107–109, 107, 109,

112, 117

Boucheron, Patrick 144

Braidotti, Rosi 38

Bramall Concert Hall 52–53

Brancusi, Constantin 57

Briscoe, Barrie 24, 32–33

Broughton, Chris 134

Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 160

Browse, Philip 37

Buddhism 60, 61–62

Calder, Alexander 116, 117, 119, 120–121,

121, 123

camera obscura 9, 29–31, 68

Cardinal Cesi’s Antique Sculpture Garden 74, 75

Cathedral 81, 81, 82

Celle, Parco di 77, 83, 84, 85–86, 86, 89

Cesi estate 74, 75

Chaikin, Michael 28

Chevreul, Michel-Eugène 99

Chivers, Mat 14, 169–171, 170

Chomsky, Noam 52

Cixous, Hélène 38

climate change 3, 4, 5, 162

COLAS 89, 93

compression 29, 31

216

Index

Conan, Michel 94

constructed ecologies 161

Corboz, André 140, 144, 154–155

Cork, Richard 135

Cosgrove, Denis 143

Cubism 179

cultural ecologies 6, 162

Dadd, Susanna 162–163, 163

Darwin, Charles 12, 164–165, 185

Deleuze, Gilles 140, 141, 151–152, 165, 185

Deligny, Fernand 145–146 Descola, Philippe 143

Descombes, Georges 13, 77, 78, 87–88,

140–155, 161, 167

diffraction 2

Domaine de Kerghuennec sculpture park

128, 132

Dulwich College 50–52, 51

E6 motorway 95–98, 95–98 East Field 27, 28

Eckbo, Garrett 190

ecology 4, 10, 46, 161–163, 176, 181,

195n22

Eden Project 50, 53, 54, 58n22-23,

166, 174, 177n15

Ehikhamenor, Victor 172

Elliptic Ecliptic 22–23 Erlandson, Thomas 94–95 Ernst, Max 116

Este, Villa d’ 76, 129, 131

Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg 14n8, 194n17 eukarya 181, 194n10 Evelyn, John 86

evolution 38, 165, 176n4, 195n22

Eyres, Patrick 13, 77, 87, 89, 125–139

feminism 8, 38, 177, 184, 185, 191

Fibonacci spiral 53

Finlay, Ian Hamilton 77, 78, 79, 80, 82–83,

83, 85–86, 86, 87–89, 88, 125–136,

127–128, 130–133, 135

Finlay, Sue 125, 133

Folly Bowl 163, 163, 176n5

Forest of Dean 77, 79, 80–82, 81, 86

Frampton, Ken 154

Francastel, Pierre 78, 94

Freud, Sigmund 164, 165, 185

Fried, Michael 167, 168

Gate in the Gorge 102, 123

genius loci 77–79, 89

Giacometti, Alberto 105, 120

Giblett, Rod 188

Gilpin, William 160

Giubbilei, Luciano 48

Glasgow Garden Festival 132, 134

Godard, Jean-Luc 140, 143, 155

Goldsworthy, Andy 86, 87

Gombrich, Ernst 80

Gori Collection 77

Granite Song 56, 56

Grasskamp, Walter 134

Griffith, James 162–163, 163

Griffiths, Andrew 135

Grizedale Forest 77, 86, 167

Groom, Simon 31

Grose, Margaret 161–162

Grosz, Elizabeth 12, 38, 39, 161,

165, 168, 176, 185, 192–193

Gustafson, Kathryn 193

Hadrian’s villa 10

Handke, Peter 141

Hang-Up 57

Haraway, Donna 2, 38

Harmonic Solids 48–49, 49

Harmonograph 49

The Heart of Stone 81–82, 82

Heerup, Henry 116, 116

Hepworth, Barbara 10, 55

Hesse, Eva 57

Hill, Tracy 14, 186, 187–190

Hincks, Gary 127

Hinton, David 61

Holiday Home 28

Holt, Nancy 37, 160–161

‘A HUNDRED STONES’ 148–151,

149–150

Hunt, John Dixon 12, 13, 73–91

Hybrid 169–171, 170

Inoue, Bukichi 86

In The Beginning 181–183, 182

Irigaray, Luce 184–185

Irwin, Robert 154

Japan 8, 9, 11–12, 13, 37, 162, 179; see also

Mono-ha movement

“Jardin Monde” 89–90, 99, 99

Jensen, Knut 104, 107–108,

110, 122

Juda, Annely 176

Julius II, Pope 73

Jullien, Francois 60, 61–62, 64

Index

Kalamaras, Danielle 191

Kapoor, Anish 31, 60

karasansui 63, 65

Kemp, David 167

Kettles Yard 31

Kirby, Vicki 38

Kneeling Figure, young man planting a tree

112, 113

Kohn, Eduardo 3, 39

Koons, Jeff 167

Kounellis, Jannis 32–33 Krauss, Rosalind 38–39, 144

Kröller-Müller sculpture park 10, 132, 146

Kuma, Kengo 48

Kwon, Miwon 190, 191

Lacey, Suzanne 190

Land Art 13, 73, 125, 160, 163, 175–176

Langen, Sylvia 11

Lante, Villa 75–76, 79, 94

Lassus, Bernard 13, 77, 78, 86–87, 89,

92–100

Lattimer, Tony 174

Leatherbarrow, David 8, 13, 78, 87,

101–124, 189–190

Lee, Tim 81–82, 82

Le Grice, Jeremy 21

Le Guin, Ursula 180, 185

Leopold, Aldo 185

Léveillé, Alain 144

Le Wit, Sol 145

Lippard, Lucy 160

Lispector, Clarice 1, 38

Little Janey-Waney 117, 120, 121

Little Sparta 77, 78, 82–83, 83, 87–89,

125–139, 127–128, 130–133, 135

Long, Richard 21, 23, 32, 33–38, 34, 68,

148–151, 149–150, 159, 164

Lorca, Frederico Garcia 37

Lorrain, Claude 133

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 78,

101–109, 103–123, 113–118, 121–122

Macel, Christine 184

Magritte, Rene 102

“MAN A Passerby” 82–83, 83

Manet, Edouard 172–173

Marder, Michael 39

Mare Nostrum 129, 130

Martin, Jane 20, 29

matrixial 14n8, 185, 194n17

menhirs 19–20

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 124n7, 165, 191

Meyer, Elizabeth 144

217

microclimate 9, 20, 164

Middelheim Visits Louisiana 108

Millstein, Roberta 185

Mind Garden 68

Minör, Marie 95

Minotaur 29, 171, 172

Miró, Joan 112, 115

mitate 63

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1

Miyajima, Tatsuo 63

Modernism 10, 11, 48, 50, 57, 85, 89, 131,

134, 168, 169, 171–173, 178, 179

Momo Taro 82

monetisation 11

Mono-ha movement 11, 31–32, 33, 60–69,

166

The Monteviot Proposal 126, 128–129, 132

Moore, Henry 49, 101, 103, 110, 112,

115, 119

Morris Arboretum 82

Morris, Robert 145, 168

mycorrhiza 181

Nagel, Alexander 80–81

names 79–84

Nash, David 14, 23, 32, 33, 68, 175–176,

175

native species 4–6, 20

Needham, Edward 37

Neimanis, Astrida 38

Neuhaus, Max 153–154 New Materialism 13, 166, 177n16, 17

Nine Unequal Angles 159

Noack, Astrid 112, 113, 114

Noble, David 27

Noguchi, Isamu 64, 82, 123

non-dualism 14, 191

Nørgård, Ole and Edith 105–106, 108,

108, 109, 122, 122

Nôtre, André le 162

Oldenburg, Claes 145

pedestals 119–120 Penone, Giuseppe 32

Perrin, Carmen 151–153, 152, 154

Personnage 115

Petyarre, Kathleen 192

Phase – Mother Earth 63–64

plant ontology 38–39

Pollock, Griselda 185

Pomfrey, Noah 77–78

Pommer, Christopher 187

Pompidou Centre 77, 89–90, 98–99, 99

218

Index

Ponge, Francis 94

Pope, Alexander 79

Poussin, Nicolas 135

The Present Order 126, 127

Price, Uvedale 160

Prins, Lisa 2

Prisbrey, Tessa 78

Quiet Garden Movement 26

Rainer, Thomas 12, 162

Randall-Page, Peter 13, 23, 45–59, 45, 47,

49, 51, 54, 56, 175

Rappaport, Lisa 187

Rauschenberg, Robert 102

Reclining Figure 101, 103, 110

Redon, Odilon 164–165 Reichlin, Bruno 153, 154

Relatum – Stage 64–65 Restless Temple 166–168, 166

Riboulet, Pierre 93

Rietveld Pavilion 10

Rodia, Sam 78

Rose, James C. 1, 8, 162, 179–180 Rousham 76, 76

Ruskin, John 179–180 Sacred Grove 132–133, 133

Sacro Bosco of Bormarzo 75–76, 75

Saunders, Penny 14, 166–168, 166

Savery, Roelandt 79–80 scale 85, 103, 111, 112–113, 116, 119, 122,

188–190

Scheffleras 6, 35

School of Gu Tai 63

Secchi, Bernardo 144

Seed 53, 54

Sekine, Nobuo 63–64 Sencindiver, Susan Yi 166

Serra, Richard 62–63, 102, 123, 145, 146,

190–191

shamanism 181, 184

Shapiro, Joel 116, 118, 119

Shaw, Tim 14, 23, 29, 171, 172

Slender Ribs 120

Slip of the Lip 45, 46–47, 175

Sloan, Nicholas 80, 127, 130, 132, 133

Smithson, Robert 37, 145, 146, 159–161

Snow, Michael 146

sound installation 153–154 Standing Woman 112, 114

Stark, Hannah 38

Starobinski, Jean 143

Stevenson, Deborah 187–188

Stevenson, Robert Louis 11–12

Steven, Wallace 86

Stockwood Park 132, 133, 134

Stones for Evening Light 47, 48

Storm King 77, 82, 84, 85–86, 85,

86, 87, 89

Suga, Kishio 23, 31–32, 32, 33, 37,

38, 60, 64, 65–68

Swiss Way 78, 140–155, 141–143,

146–147, 149–150, 152

Tama Art University 63

Taoism 60, 61

The Temple of Apollo 129, 132, 135

Tewlwolow Kernow 9, 22, 23, 24–26, 29, 31,

68, 160, 169

Thayer, Abbot H. 186

Theme and Variation 52–53

Therolinguistics 180

three-domain system 181, 194n10

Three Piece Reclining Figure-Draped 115

topiary 92–93, 92, 94

transfiguration 143

Tremenheere family 21–22

Tremenheere Line 34, 35, 36, 38, 68

Tremenheere Sculpture Garden 2, 4–5,

9–14, 17–69, 19, 60, 62, 157–178,

172–175, 179, 189; Aqua Obscura 9–10,

10, 29–31, 30, 68, 160, 164, 169; East

Field 27, 28; Slip of the Lip 45, 46–47,

175; Tewlwolow Kernow 9, 22, 23, 24–26,

29, 31, 68, 160, 169; Untitled (Suga) 32,

66–68, 67; woodland 22, 24, 27

Turner, J. M. W. 179–180

Turrell, James 9–10, 10, 22–23,

23, 24–26, 29–31, 30, 68, 159–160,

164, 168–169

Ufan, Lee 62, 64–65

Universal Grammar 52

Untitled (Shapiro) 118

Untitled (Suga) 32, 66–68, 67

Valery, Paul 104

van Cleef III, Henrick 74

Vasseur, Isabel 134

Venet, Bernar 23, 159

Versailles 75–76, 88, 92–93, 92, 94, 162

Vietnamese Horse Chestnut 4–5

viewing angle 65, 84, 103, 111–112, 119

viewing distance 103, 111, 119

“The Virgilian Grove” 85, 86

Index

Walker, Sophie 60, 63

Walters, Kate 14, 181–184, 182

“Wandering Wall” 86, 87

Warhol, Andy 186

Warner, Marina 46

Watson, Gay 13, 60–69

Watts Uprising 78

Wellebom, Björn 95

West, Claudia 12, 162

Whately, Thomas 88–89

Wiedewelt, J. 77

219

wind sculptures 28

Winn, Caroline 14, 172–173, 173

Wohlert, Wilhelm 104, 104, 107–109, 107,

109, 112, 117

Wohlleben, Peter 181

Wood, Christoper S. 80–81

Woods, Richard 28

wood wide web 176n7, 181, 194n9

Wynter, Billy 29–30, 68

Zen gardens 9, 48, 61, 68