ALLEN S.

WEISS

UNNATURAL HORIZONS
PARADOX
&
CONTRADICTION
in
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

UNNATURAL HORIZONS
Unnatural Horizons
Paradox and Contradiction in
Landscape Architecture

Allen S. Weiss

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Published by Library of Congress

Princeton Architectural Press Cataloging-in-Publication Data

37 East 7th Street Weiss, Allen S., 1953-

New York, New York 10003 Unnatural horizons : paradox and contra-
212.995.9620 diction in landscape architecture / Allen S.

Weiss.

For a free catalog of books, p. cm.

call 1.800.722.6657. Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

Visit our web site at www.papress.com. ISBN 1-56898-139-2 (alk. paper)

I. Landscape architecture History.

1998 Princeton Architectural Press 2. Gardens Design History. 3. Gardens

All rights reserved Philosophy History. 4. Gardens
Printed and bound in the United States Symbolic aspects-^History. i. Title.

02 01 00 99 98 54321 First edition SB470.5.W45 1998

7I2'.09 DC21 97-43587
No part of this book my be used or repro-
duced in any manner without written
permission from the publisher, except in the About the author

context of reviews. Allen S. Weiss has most recently published

Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (suny,

Editing and design: Clare Jacobson 1994); Flamme et festin: Une poitique de la

Cover design: Sara E. Stemen cuisine (Editions Java, 1994); Mirrors of

Special thanks to: Eugenia Bell, Jane Garvie, Infinity: The French Formal Garden and ijth-
Caroline Green, Therese Kelly, Mark Lamster, Century Metaphysics (Princeton Architectural
and Anne Nitschke of Princeton Architectural Press, 1995); Phantasmic Radio (Duke
Press Kevin C. Lippert, publisher University Press, 1995); he has coedited Sade

and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge

University Press, 1994) and edited

Experimental Sound & Radio ( The Drama

Review 1ti%\, 1996) and Taste, Nostalgia

(Lusitania Press, 1997). He teaches in the

Departments of Performance Studies and

Cinema Studies at New York University.
 Contents

8 Syncretism and Style

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the
Italian Renaissance Garden

44 Dematerialization and Iconoclasm

Baroque Azure

64 The Libidinal Sublime

Libertine Gardens of the Enlightenment

84 No Mans Garden
New England Transcendentalism and the
Invention of Virgin Nature

108 In Praise ofAnachronism

Garden as Gesamtkunstwerk

155 Notes

171 Bibliography

175 Acknowledgments
Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax ofsplits and
ruptures.

Robert Smithson
 for
Ron Scapp, Earth
Hibou Blanc, Air

Jean-Paul Marcheschi, Fire

Mathilde Sitbon, Water
Dictating garden of lengthening dreams.

Leonard Schwartz
Syncretism and Style
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the
Italian Renaissance Garden

CM
ty and
gruities
ideahrt'.

that arise
ost

in
of the history of Western philosophy and
theology from Parmenides through
attempted to resolve the inherent contradic-
tions between sensation and cognition,
However, the paradoxes, antinomies, and incon-
this

paradigms that underUe the history of art and

quest f)erennially inform

ideas.
H^el

numerous
This study
has

\Tsibih-

promenade through the landscapes and gardens, paintings and
poems that have inspired me proposes a sketch of the implications

of such poh'semic and equivocal conventions as the\- relate to the

histor)' of landscape architectiu-e.

The origin of modem European landscape architecture vs-as

contemp>oraneous with the rediscover)' of the beaut)' of nature in the

early Renaissance. In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,

Jakob Burckhardt describes this paradigm shift in the perception of

the external world, the moment in which the distant Wew, the "land-

scape" proper, was first valorized:

But the unmistakable proob of a deepening effect of nature on tbe human

spirit began with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few \-igorous

lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the distant

ocean, or of the giandeur of the stoim-beaten torest, but he makes tbe ascent

of k)fty peaks, with the only possible obfect of en^vying the view the first

man, peihaps, since the days of antiquity who did so.'

 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

This appreciation of natural beauty, couched in the poetry of the

sublime, was further instantiated in the work of Francesco Petrarch

(1304-74), often cited as the first humanist, indeed the first "mod-
ern" man. His relation to the landscape was intense and manifold,
poetic and practical, as he was a gardener whose favorite site of med-
itation was his own gardens at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. He describes

them in one of his letters:

I made two gardens for myself: one in the shade, appropriate for my studies,
which I called my transalpine Parnassus; it slopes down to the river Sorgue,

ending on inaccessible rocks which can only be reached by birds. The other

is closer to the house, less wild, and situated in the middle of a rapid river. I

enter it by a litde bridge leading from a vaulted grotto, where the sun never

penetrates; I believe that it resembles that small room where Cicero some-
times went to recite; it is an invitation to study, to which I go at noon.^

Two gardens, one for each side of his temperament, inspired either

reverie or melancholy; two gardens, one for each extreme of nature,

extensive and picturesque or protective and chthonic; two gardens,
one leading towards the empirical, the other towards the spiritual.

For Petrarch, as for Cicero, his predecessor in literature and garden-

ing, the landscape was a major source of inspiration, both literary

and empirical; for while these gardens evoked the great sites of clas-
sic culture, they also constituted a rudimentary botanical laboratory
and collection, where Petrarch experimented with different varieties

of plants according to meteorological and astrological conditions,

geographic placement, seasonal growTih, and so forth. He also used
these gardens to amass collections of rare plants. As Gaetane
Lamarche-Vadel demonstrates in Jardins secrets de la Renaissance,

such secret gardens, "appertain to the double register of the fictive

and the real, the physical and the mystic; they echo with the adam-
ic garden, the paradigmatic place and origin from which gardens

draw their spiritual energy."^ It is precisely for this reason that the

study of gardens necessitates formal, cultural, and psychological

analyses: the symbolic significance of any garden is derived from,
yet surpasses, its formal characteristics, and can only be grasped in
relation to the artistic works that both inspired and were inspired
by the site.
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

Petrarch's most celebrated consideration of the landscape is

the description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, recounted in a letter

to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro, written in 1336. In this text, he

explains the reason for this difficult ascent: "My only motive was the

wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. "4 Though

inspired by literary motives specifically, the tale in Livy's History of
Rome^zx recounts Philip of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemus in

Thessaly, with its attendant views the experience shifted from the

literary to the sensory, where revelation becomes visual. Indeed, the

subsequent history of landscape architecture often reveals mythical

tales, literary inspirations, and pictorial models behind the creation
of gardens; here, Petrarch's vision is already predisposed to concep-

tual density by being couched in myth and history. "At first, owing
to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great
sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. I beheld
the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and
Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same
things from a mountain of less fame."^
The force of the poet's vision surpasses all previous literary

descriptions. Is it the poet's unique, hyperbolic sensibility, or the

inherent magnificence of nature, that is at work here? Or is there a

third term that mediates the poetic imagination and the natural
world? The letter continues with a detailed appreciation of the mul-
tiplicity and uniqueness of the natural world Petrarch witnessed,
until the moment he realizes, in a flash of intuition, that the ascent
of the body must be accompanied by a concomitant ascent of the
soul. Thus, opening a copy of Saint Augustine's Confessions he had
with him, he felicitously chanced upon the following passage: "And
men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the
mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of the rivers, and the
circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves
they consider not."^ This is the ironic moment of revelation, where
experience becomes allegory and visibility becomes a metaphor for

spirituality:

I dosed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly

things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers
Mont Ventoux seen from Malauctne

View from peak ofMont Ventoux

 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

that nothing is wonderftil but the soul, which, when great itself, finds noth-

ing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough

of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time

not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.

The three major realms that informed early humanist sensibility

were thus interwoven in an allegory of spiritual revelation: inspira-

tion from antiquity, sensitivity to nature, and salvation within

Christianity. Certain technical, mathematical, and financial consider-

ations would be added to these preconditions to localize and system-

atize such apperceptions in the creation of the Italian Renaissance
garden. The consequent transmigration and intercommunication of

symbols and allegories would henceforth enrich all the arts, radical-

ly impelling some of them towards their modern forms.^

Within these rubrics, the major influences on the Renaissance

transformation of man's relation to nature could be schematized as
follows. The theological revolution of Saint Francis of Assisi
(1181-226) redeemed nature's state of grace. His "Canticle of
Creatures" indeed, every act of his life expressed a mystical rela-

tion to a cosmos in which all nature was a reflection of God; thus

nature itself was the foundation of spiritual values. As Ernst Cassirer

explains in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Phibsophy,

a book that will serve as a metaphysical guide to the current study:

With his new. Christian ideal of love, Francis of Assisi broke through and rose

above that dogmatic and rigid barrier between "nature" and "spirit." Mystical

sentiment tries to permeate the entirety of existence; before it, barriers of par-

ticularity and individualization dissolve. Love no longer turns only to God,

the source and the transcendent origin of being; nor does it remain confined

to the relationship between man and man, as an immanent ethical relation-

ship. It overflows to all creatures, to the animals and plants, to the sun and

the moon, to the elements and the natural forces.

In this unscholastic "nature mysticism" we find one of the origins of

Western ecological and environmental thought. (Indeed, in 1979

Pope John Paul 11 proclaimed Francis the patron saint of ecologists.)

Yet, more immediately, he not only redeemed the state of nature
in a postlapsarian world, but praised nature specifically the

picturesque and fertile central Italian landscape of Umbria with a

 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

glorious and beatific lyricism that has inspired those who would
transform nature according to human desire and volition into a new
form that would become the "humanist" garden.
Yet the major paradigm at work in establishing new ways of
experiencing and re-creating the landscape did not stem from theo-

logical transformations; rather, they arose from the rediscovery of

antiquity and the consequent valorization and appropriation of
pagan mythology. This is especially the case insofar as such myths
express a profound connection to the natural world, as evidenced

most notably in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Apuleius's The Golden Ass,

Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and the writings of Pliny, Cicero, and
Horace, with the latter's crucial notion of ut pictura poesis. The rise

of a new literary scenarization accounted for the expression of a spe-

cific sense of place within nature such that the genius A?a would once
again have a voice, as in Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Decameron

(describing the Villa Palmieri near Florence), Erasmus's Convivium

religiosum, and especially in Petrarch, for whom, as Cassirer notes:

"The lyrical mood does not see in nature the opposite of physical
reality; rather it feels everywhere in nature the traces and the echo
of the soul. For Petrarch, landscape becomes the living mirror of
the Ego."^

If one were to formulate this sensibility in relation to the his-

tory of landscape architecture, it might be said that the new form of

garden is no longer delimited by either cloister walls or restricted

cosmological symbolism (the latter allegorically corresponding to

the medieval hortus conclusus, or closed garden), but rather by the

limits of the imagination responding to the very act of human per-

ception. Rather than serving as a static allegorical form, the garden

reveals the dynamic, creative relation between humanity and nature.

The view shifts from the interior (the cloister, the soul) to the exte-

rior, encompassing not only the ambient scene, but also distant

views; space is no longer treated as metaphoric, but is revealed in its

localized and particularized reality. Nature incarnate, in its vast mul-

tiplicity, offers sites of pleasure and wonder, terror and awe prefig-

uring the fiiture aesthetic distinctions of the picturesque, the beau-

tifiil, and the sublime.

14
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

Coincident with this new sensibility was the development of

a system of pictorial representation the quattrocento rediscovery

and refinement of linear perspective that both drew upon and

informed the multifarious Renaissance modes of appreciating the
landscape." The intersection of mathematics, technology, and aes-

thetics in perspectival representations constitutes a major structure

that articulates the reciprocal influences between landscape, garden,
literature, and painting, one that marlcs the subsequent history of
landscape architecture. Here, the varied and often incompatible
beauties (ancient and modern) of nature and painting interacted and
enriched each other's iconographies.
Specifically, three works of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72)

codified the intricate interrelations between perspective and vision,

pictorial representation and landscape architecture: Delgoverno delta

famiglia (c. 1430), a treatise on family life that celebrated the advan-

tages of country living, thus instilling a taste for gardens and the
landscape; Delia pittura (1436), which codified the system of linear

perspective; and De re aedificatoria (1452), which, in establishing

"rational" architectural rules based on ancient models (notably
Vitruvius), necessarily dealt with the question of gardens and sites,

with a particular attention to and fondness for the Italian land-

scape.^^ For Alberti, the most important aspect of choosing a build-

ing site was a sloping terrain with open perspectives from which the
countryside could be seen. Though the view into the garden was

protected by enclosures, the slope of the terrain established views of

the distant landscape. Furthermore, the garden was conceived in

direct relationship with the villa as a sort of prolongation of the

architecture, thus bringing the outdoors in, all the while linking the

cultivated garden with the wild spaces beyond to establish an archi-

tectonic continuity between the natural and the human realms.
Such strategies, both structural and narrative, offer a dynamic, com-
plex synthesis linking the constructed, geometrized spaces of habita-

tions with the non-geometric, organic realms of the natural world.

Alberti's text proffers many of the characteristics of the

humanist gardens of the Italian Renaissance:'^ the use of perspective
in the deployment of objects and space, grottos and the "secret
Villa Medici, Fiesole
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

garden," symmetrical plantings, groves, clipped and sculpted plants

(topiary and espalier), architectural details, and statues of mytho-

logical figures as invocations of ancient culture, surprise effects

caused by both perspectival and technical means, and especially the

myriad uses of water fountains, pools, canals, panerres, troughs,

water staircases and theaters, hydraulic organs and automata, even

artificial rain and water jokes {giochi d'acqua). It was through the use
of water that both illusion and motion were introduced into land-
scaf)e architecture, creating the sort of instability, surprise, and
evanescence that would become central to the baroque sensibility,

with its taste for motion, dematerialization, dissimulation, and

contradiction.'**

This irmiijdng of artifice, theatricality, and nature was well

expressed in that epoch by the sixteenth-century philosopher JacofK)

Bonfadio, influenced by Petrarch: "I have done much that nature,

combined with an, has turned into artifice. From the two has

emerged a 'third nature,' to which I can give no name."'' Such a

"third nature" might well be a synonym of the garden itself, for how-
ever "natural" a garden may be (as in the ideal of the eighteenth-cen-

tury EngUsh garden, where the desire to dissimulate all artifice estab-

hshed a simulacrum of wild nature), its forms always evince

aesthetic, even painterly, paradigms (even true for the notion of "vir-
gin" nanire in the North American landscape, as will be explored in
a subsequent chapter). Yet this "third nature" is never a purely for-
mal artifact: it is always enmeshed in both philosophical and narra-

tive systems, as exemplified by Petrarch's appreciation of the land-

scape. Henceforth, the history of landscape architecture will entail

the intertwining and hybrid histories of poetry, literature, philoso-

phy, painting, sculpnire, architecture, surveying, hydrauhcs, and

botany. In order to grasp the conceptual and cultural systems that

influenced the sensibilities, as well as the forms, that underlie the

Italian Renaissance humanist garden, a synopsis of the philosophical

trajectory of the Platonic Academy of Florence (c. 1462-94), found-
ed by Marsiho Ficino under the auspices of the Medici, is in order.
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

The principal foundational tenets of Renaissance ontology and epis-

temology were expressed by Nicholas Cusanus (1401-64) in De docta

ignorantia (1440), the initial systematic philosophical study that

began to modify the relatively rigid and often dogmatic closure and
hairsplitting of medieval scholasticism. According to medieval
thought, the closed, ordered, hierarchical universe, that "great chain
of being" of ecclesiastic Aristotelianism, was one with a moral and
religious system of judgment and salvation in which the role of epis-
temology was a ftmction of man's limited place in that system.'^

Though Cusanus's writings never called the theological foundation

of this system into question, they did entail a radical epistemologi-
cal shift, insofar as the relation between absolute divinity and finite

humanity was no longer taken as dogmatically posited, but was

rather analyzed according to human limitations. This revision of the
ontological ratio between the absolute and the empirical implies an
indeterminable conceptual relation to infinity. Cusanus's key princi-
ple expanding on certain nominalist analyses is that there exists

no possible proportion between the finite and the infinite, thus loos-
ening the bond that had held together scholastic theology and logic
within a homogeneous system. As a result of this separation of
realms (human from divine, relative from absolute infinity), the syl-

logistics of speculative theology and metaphysics would henceforth

become disciplines distinct from logic and mathematics, prefiguring
the materialistic quest for a universal systematization of knowledge

that culminated in the ideal of the Cartesian mathesis universalis.

The amor Dei intellecttmlis (the intellectual component of the love

of God, prefiguring the notion of "Platonic love" that inspired the
neoplatonism of the Florentine Academy) established a new mystical
theology. Yet, by strictly delimiting such mysticism to its proper the-
ological domain the ultimately unknowable realm of the dens

absconditus, the hidden god the ftiture development of the worldly

sciences would not be impeded. Theology and mathematics would
henceforth proffer incompatible yet complementary worldviews.

Central to this speculation is the principle of the docta

ignorantia, a "learned ignorance" based not on passive mystical con-

templation but on active mathematical thought, revealing the

 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

unknowable nature of divinity, which can only be expressed in con-

tradiction and antithesis. This results from the unfathomable nature

of God, such that the maximal ontological conditions of existence
are constituted by a qualitative, not a quantitative, determination

whence the cognitive paradoxes that result from all intellectual

attempts to resolve the divine mysteries. All human thought oper-

ates according to finite determinations, generating predicable and
measurable differences; yet beyond any given determination, an
absolute term can always be postulated, even if it is not deter-
minable. However, between the finite and the infinite there is no
common term, thus no possible predication. This is a metaphysics

of maximal contradiction, of complicatio, not explicatio. The infini-

ty of the godhead is unpredicable and inexpressible. Whence the

necessity of differentiating between the infinite and the indefinite,

wherein the mutually exclusive relation between the ideal, uncondi-

tioned, indeterminable realm of the divine and the empirical, con-
ditioned, determinable realm of the human. Where the axiomatic
knowledge of mathematics fails, the limits of comprehensibility end,

and the realm of negative theology begins.

Knowledge, for Cusanus, was the progression of thought
towards its incomprehensible limits, in the attempt to understand
the fundamental ontological contradictions of existence. Whence
the notion of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of oppo-

sites the very form of such ignorance which is the outcome of

this new metaphysical speculation, revealing the limits of the ancient

philosophical dichotomy of immanence and transcendence, thought

and being. The infinity of the godhead is indeterminable yet appar-

ent to human knowledge precisely in terms of our "learned igno-
rance," which evolves an intuition of what surpasses the limits of
human cognition. As Karl Jaspers explains: "Speculative thinking

must remain the thinking of the unthinkable, it must preserve an

unresolvable tension. The fundamental concept remains paradoxi-
"'7
cal. Thus the docta ignorantia establishes a worldly, human
domain of knowledge, apart from theological speculation, differen-

tiating the calculable and operable mathematical infinity from the

impenetrable infinity of God. Here, knowledge becomes an active

19
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

function of the dynamics of attempting to connect the impercepti-

ble universal to the sensible particular, with its attendant concrete

symbolizations. Not only did this system offer a foundation for
modern science and mathematical speculation, but it also estab-

lished the grounds for a new, "rationalized" aesthetics, as explained

by Cassirer:

The De docta ignorantia had begun with the proposition that all knowledge is

definable as measurement. Accordingly, it had established as the medium of

knowledge the concept of proportion, which contains within it, as a condi-

tion, the possibility of measurement. Comparativa est omnis inquisitio, medio

proportionis uteris. But proportion is not just a logical-mathematical concept:

it is also a basic concept of aesthetics Thus, the speculative-philosophical,

the technical-mathematical, and the artistic tendencies of the period converge

in the concept of proportion. And this convergence makes the problem of

form one of the central problems of Renaissance culture.'^

In the arts, this is most apparent in the relation between theory and
practice in Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti, the latter

of whom had direct links with Cusanus, utilizing Cusanus's specula-

tions in his own work. Yet while Cusanus was mainly preoccupied

with mathematical and cosmological issues, the philosophers of the

Platonic Academy of Florence were especially concerned with the
role of beauty as a spiritual value and so extended his studies into

other realms. Following Cusanus, beauty was deemed an objective

value determined by measure, proportion, and harmony. Beauty

might exist as an intelligible sign of God, but it is gauged according

to human proportions, values, and limits.

A year before his death, Cosimo de Medici wrote, in a letter to

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), "Yesterday I arrived at my Villa Carreggi,

not to cultivate the fields, but my soul. "'9 This sentiment where
inner and outer nature exist in reciprocal symbolic resonance was
fully in accord with Ficinos philosophical temperament, as it was
in the Medici's Villa Carreggi in Florence where Ficino founded
his famed Academy. Here, the gardens provided a site of retreat.
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

inspiration, meditation, and discourse, while the villa ofifered a ver-

itable compendium of the arts, with its library, music room, and gal-

leries of artworks. This would suggest not only that nature and its

aesthetic simulacrum, the garden, played a major role in Ficino's

philosophy, but also that a consideration of his philosophical system

might bear upon our understanding of the landscape and develop-

ments in landscape architecture of the period.
On the basis of an expanded model of the principle of the

coincidence of opposites, Ficino demonstrated the central place of

man in the universe. In his cosmology, the soul is the privileged

midpoint between the intellectual and the sensible world, mediating

the higher and lower realms, dynamically embracing the universe

through the process of knowing and self-determination. The soul is

the means by which the universe reflects upon itself through a

dynamic unity, as opposed to the static hierarchy posited by scholas-

ticism. Whence the new status of the dignity of man, who is seen

(following Plato's tripartite schematization of the soul) to share

attributes with both the lower and the higher beings, midway
between the cosmic mind and the cosmic soul above, and the realms
of nature and of pure, formless matter below. As the terms of this

hierarchy are emanations of God (following Plotinus's mystical read-

ing of Plato, and hardly distant, either intellectually or geographi-

cally, from Saint Francis's nature mysticism), all cosmic zones par-
ticipate in, and somehow symbolize, divine creation. All realms of
existence are therefore interconnected, and the cohesion of the cos-

mos is reflected in the microcosm of human intelligence. As Cassirer

writes of a Ficino dialogue between God and the soul:

God says: "I fill and penetrate and contain heaven and earth; I fill and am not

filled because I am fullness itself. I penetrate and am not penetrated, because

I am the power of penetration. I contain and am not contained, because I

myself am the faculty of containing." But all these predicates claimed by the

divinity are now equally attributable to the human soul}

As such, fact becomes truth, and the world becomes meaningful,

through the ^rf of cognition; symbols can be effectively derived from
all facts, objects, and events; thought is liberated to become a cre-

ative, and not merely reflective, activity.

 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Inspired by the theory of love developed in Plato's Symposium

and Phaedrus, Ficino places mystical love (in a manner very differ-

ent from that of Saint Francis's more immediately sensual and intu-

itive mysticism) at the center of his system, as a cosmological, and

not a psychological, principle. Erwin Panofsky elaborates:
Love is the motive power which causes God or rather by which God caus-

es Himself to effuse His essence into the world, and which, inversely, caus-

es His creatures to seek reunion with Him. According to Ficino, amor is only

another name for that self-reverting current {circuitus spiritualise from God to

the world and from the world to God. The loving individual inserts himself

into this mystical circuit.^'

Whence the much misunderstood notion of ;he highest form of

love, "Platonic love," that "divine madness" which is the source of

poetic inspiration and genius as introduced by Plato, enriched by

Plotinus, Augustine, and the twelfth-century Neoplatonists, and
transformed by Ficino. Such love entails a desire guided by cogni-
tion, which seeks as its ultimate goal the beauty diffused throughout
the universe. The contradictory and oppositional totality of love is

symbolized by the two Venuses, celestial and natural, representing

sacred and profane love: beauty as supercelestial, intelligible, and

immaterial, and beauty as particularized and perceptible in the cor-

poreal world.^^ Within this context, three sorts of love are possible:
amor divinus (divine love, ruled by the intellect), amor humanus
(human love, ruled by all the other faculties of the soul), and amor
ferinus (bestial love, which is tantamount to insanity). Love is the
factor that mediates the higher and lower worlds, transcendence and
immanence, cognition and perception. Cassirer stresses the import
of this theory for an incipient humanism:
This contradictory nature of Eros constitutes the truly active moment of the

Platonic cosmos. A dynamic motif penetrates the static complex of the uni-

verse. The world of appearance and the world of love no longer stand simply

opposed to each other; rather, the appearance itself "strives" for the idea.^'

Love is both psychological and theological, human and divine, con-

templative and active, intellectual and passional; it achieves a central

epistemological status due to its vast, synthesizing function; it is

ontologically all-encompassing precisely because of its profoundly

 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

paradoxical nature a complex scenario that will be dramatized, in

a manner crucial to the subsequent history of landscape architecture,
in Francesco Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, discussed later in

this chapter.

In this context, the entirety of creation is an emanation of

God, therefore the realm of nature is no longer deemed evil, for only
nonbeing is evil. Panofsky:

Thus the Realm of Nature, so full of vigour and beauty as a manifestation of

the "divine influence," when contrasted with the shapelessness and lifelessness

of sheer matter, is, at the same time, a place of unending struggle, ugliness

and distress, when contrasted with the celestial, let alone the super-celestial

world.^

The human soul is the site of the reflection and expression, if not
quite the resolution or synthesis, of these universal antinomies and

oppositions. The spiritual is present in the natural world, such that, a

fortiori, nature offers itself for human expression in terms of what

Panofsky terms zpaysage moralise {moraliTjed landscape). As such, the-
ological and cosmological symbolism is not at all obviated by the real-

ism and perspectivalism of quattrocento art. Quite to the contrary, it

offers a supplemental semiotic layer to imagery and allegory, adding

the realm of "perspective as symbolic form," as Panofsky stated it, to

previous symbolic systems. In fact, within this theological cosmology,

all symbols and objects are simultaneously moralized and humanized.
This transformation of vision and knowledge holds great promise for
the arts, and especially for landscape architecture, insofar as the

benevolence of the natural world is now theorized as a modality of

divine love, and thus connected to what will later be subsumed under
the rubric of the sublime through the human act of contemplation.
In this theory of Platonic love, the artists of the Renaissance
found a system that expressed their most profound aesthetic con-

cerns, notably that the eternal values of beauty and harmony they
sought need be expressed through material forms. Thus the artist is

necessarily a mediator of the spiritual and the sensible realms. The

very nature of artistic creativity, in all its complexity, paradox, and

multiplicity, was expressed therein. Cassirer delineates what is aes-

thetically at stake:

23
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

The enigmatic double nature of the artist, his dedication to the world of sen-

sible appearance and his constant reaching and striving beyond it, now
seemed to be comprehended, and through this comprehension really justified

for the first time. The theodicy of the world given by Ficino in his doctrine

of Eros had, at the same time, become the true theodicy of art. For the task

of the artist, precisely like that of Eros, is always to join things that are sepa-

rate and opposed. He seeks the "invisible" in the "visible," the "intelligible"

in the "sensible." Although his intuition and his art are determined by his

vision of the pure form, he only truly possesses this pure form if he succeeds in

realizing it in matter. The artist feels this tension, this polar opposition of the

^5
elements of being more deeply than anyone else.

This new metaphysics of art was in great part based upon the notion
of the representable order of nature. The subsequent imaging of the
world became a function of the profound affinities between mathe-
matical research and aesthetic production, insofar as they both share

a sense of form, based on the newly representable order of the cos-

mos. Cassirer: "For now, the mathematical idea, the a priori' of pro-
portion and of harmony, constitutes the common principle of
empirical reality and of artistic beauty. "^^ And as Cassirer insists,
regarding the primacy of form in the Renaissance poetry of writers

such as Dante and Petrarch, such lyricism does not express a preex-

istent reality with a standard form, but creates a new inner reality by
giving it a new form: "stylistics becomes the model and guide for the

theory of categories."^'' This claim may be generalized for the textu-

al arts (philosophy, rhetoric, and dialectics) and extrapolated for the

visual arts. It was, indeed, a model for the new nature of thought,
where style is not a formal effect bounded by the limitations of sheer
representation, but rather where representation itself is a creative act.

Within this context, the garden would no longer be conceived

as merely a microcosmic or Edenic symbol, nor as a theological alle-

gory of the body of the Virgin. In a sense, every theory of the micro-
cosm is a theory of mimesis, of levels of representation. Henceforth,
there would be a reciprocal relationship between the mimetic activ-

ity of art and the perception of nature, such that, concurrently, art

would attempt to represent nature, and nature would be seen

according to the work of art. Consequently, mimesis would play a
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

decreasing metaphysical role in the light of the new theories of

human creativity and productivity.

Mediating this reciprocity, the garden would be a "third

nature," simultaneously patterned upon the idealizations of art and

reinventing the way that the landscape was experienced. This aes-

thetic was summed up by Giordano Bruno in Eroici furoi: "Rules are

not the source of poetry, but poetry is the source of rules, and there
are as many rules as there are real poets. "^^ "Nature" had always
been, and would always be, invented. But now, the verity of this

perpetual reinvention, its cultural inexorability, was recognized and

thematized as a function of artistic creativity.

The ultimate extrapolation of this mode of philosophical specula-

tion was achieved by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), a

disciple of Ficino who joined the Florentine Academy a quarter of a

century after its inception. ^9 Xhe radical aspect of Pico's thought was
the reversal of the relation between being and becoming or acting in

the cosmic hierarchy, a problem predicated on the role of freedom.

In the scholastic universe, every being, including the human being,

had a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy; the sphere of human voli-

tion and cognition was strictly delimited and conditioned. For

Ficino, to the contrary, though man's role in the universe was to rec-

ognize and celebrate the entirety of creation, human difference and

dignity consisted in man's role as a metaphysical mediator between

the higher and lower realms. Pico radicalized and potentialized this

mediative role by positing the entirety of the cosmic hierarchy as

man's proper place. Thus man, endowed with no essential particu-
larities, no longer had a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy: the
placement of each person within the cosmos was a function of indi-
vidual activity, so that man could degenerate towards the beasts or
ascend towards God, according to the value of his acts. Human
nature consisted precisely in not having a predefined nature or form.

In this proto-existentialist philosophy, man's being is defined

as becoming; man's essence is constituted by the unique trajectory of

25
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

each individual existence. In this system, where existence precedes

essence, coincide the roots of both Pascalian anguish and existential

optimism; the origins of both a theological anxiety at the eclipse of

God and the joys of a radical liberation of the human soul. Though
the system still operated within a Christian ethos, it established the

preconditions for a secular realm of thought. This openness towards

the world implied that human volition and knowledge must traverse

the entire cosmos in order to achieve individual spiritual fiilfillment.

As Pico wrote, concerning the creation of man, in his Oration on the

Dignity ofMan,

At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been

able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of what-

ever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore

took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in

the middle of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither a fixed abode nor a

form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given

thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy

judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what

functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited

and constrained within the bounds of the laws prescribed by Us. Thou, con-

strained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand

We have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have
set thee at the worlds center that thou mayest from thence more easily

observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor

of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and

with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion

thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to

degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the

power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which

are divine. "'

This self-transforming, metamorphosing nature is ever-changing,

establishing no fixed form. In the aesthetic realm, Pico's theory of
total potentiality and mutability justified a renaissance of artistic cre-

ativity, with a newfound juxtaposition and inmixing of forms, styles,

and symbols. This metaphysics of action and creativity is at the ori-

gin of an aesthetic lineage leading to the baroque and culminating

26
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

in romanticism. It is interesting to note that Pico's philosophy was

dramatized by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-540) in
Fabula de homine (c. 1518), where the full mimetic powers of protean
man are acted out on the stage of the Roman gods. After imitating

the gamut of natural forms, man achieves a quasi-apotheosis: "The

gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes when, behold, he
was made into one of their own race, surpassing the nature of man
and relying entirely upon a very wise mind Man, just as he had
watched the plays with the highest gods, now reclined with them at

the banquet."^' But this theatricality did not end with the allegori-

cal staging of theology in a mythical setting; Vives also considered

the implications of this apotheosis, entailing newfound powers of

human creativity in relation to the observation of the natural world,
claiming,

all that is wanted is a certain power of observation. So he will observe the

nature of things in the heavens in cloudy and clear weather, in the plains, in

the mountains, in the woods. Hence he will seek out and get to know many
things about those who inhabit such spots. Let him have recourse to garden-

ers, husbandmen, shepherds and hunters ... for no man can possibly make all

observations without help in such a multitude and variety of directions.'^

This protean ontology was not lost on the natural sciences. The
specificity of landscape would be determined with increasing preci-
sion following the development of the new sciences of geography,

astronomy, meteorology, botany, zoology, etcetera; furthermore, the

physical sciences would increasingly serve the arts, with all their the-

ological and metaphysical symbolism, however archaic or obscure.

Already in this epoch, the hortus conclusus, the enclosed clois-

ter gardens of the medieval monasteries, gave way to the secret gar-

dens of the Renaissance, and later to the more systematically orga-

nized botanic gardens, initiated in Venice in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, with their increasingly open collections of in-

digenous and exotic plants. When the first public botanic garden

was created in Padua in 1545, the secret garden gave way to the pub-
lic garden. As explained by Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel,

The secret garden henceforth became a laboratory of minutious observations

of all the states of plants' growth, of their reactions to the seasons, climates,

27
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

and adoptive soils. Petrarch already gave himself over to such scrupulous

experimentations and annotations in his gardens at Vaucluse, The attempts at

transplanting pursued a century later accelerated and changed in scale: the

exchanges were no longer local but intercontinental. ''

Unknown roots from the New World arrived to be planted in the

ancient earth of the Old World; new names of plants abounded;

exotic herbs, spices, and produce transformed cuisine; old maladies

found cures; the eye received novel pleasures. What arrived to incite

mystery and wonder slowly gave way to knowledge and order: the
notion of the world as a closed microcosm was replaced by the con-
cept of an infinite universe, open to sensory observation and increas-

ingly rational classification. Each new botanical discovery demand-

ed a place on the cosmic great chain of being; as the examples

became more and more numerous, and less and less coherent with
the previously contrived system of botanic knowledge, the old cate-

gories became insufficient to the task, forcing both a new system of

classification and ultimately an entirely new conception of the cos-

mos (coherent with analogous discoveries in the other sciences,

notably those of the great Copernican and Galilean astronomical

revolutions). Under the stress of an increasingly heterogeneous

empirical field of objects collected, beginning in the fifteenth centu-

ry, from the corners of the earth including all the orders: animal,

vegetable, mineral the old system of classes was subverted and

transformed. These objects decorated both cabinets of curiosity and

gardens (living, outdoor cabinets of curiosity), radically transform-

ing the order of nature including the aestheticized reordering of

nature that is the garden in a scenario of hybridization beyond any

adequately totalizing knowledge. Hybrid species gave rise to hybrid
thoughts. However, as this process of demythification was a slow one

(evolving over the centuries), each epoch bore a particular ratio of the

inmixing of myth and science a ratio that would remain crucial to

all aesthetic representations and transformations of the landscape.

Ficino's notion that all of creation is divine and beautiful

opened the way for the historicizing of knowledge, which is one of

the key tenets of humanist thought, no longer restricted to the

Christian limitations of scholastic scholarship. For if all cosmologi-

28
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

cal levels of the universe participate in divine goodness and beauty,

then by extension all historical moments of thought participate,

albeit partially, in universal truth. The result was a new syncretism,

most immediately effected by Ficino in a reconciliation of Platonic

and Aristotelian systems, but also extending to the positive recon-

sideration of such thinkers as Plato, Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes

Trismegistos, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Virgil, and Plotinus. Further-
more, the implications of this intellectual openness and mobility
were vast for both philosophical historicism and a theory of natural
religion: the fact that consciousness must survey the entirety of the

universe implied the necessity of discerning the truth value of every

system of thought. Christian or otherwise, insofar as they all partake

of a vaster universal truth. Pico's syncretism was even greater than

that of Ficino, including not only Ficino's sources but also the

Greek, Latin, and Arabic commentators of Aristotle, as well as the

Jewish Cabalists. Furthermore, and crucial for modern hermeneu-

tics, Pico went beyond the medieval scheme of interpreting scripture

at four different levels literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical

according to a hermeneutic centered on the master narrative of the

Bible. Rather, he argued for a multiplicity of meanings to scripture,
as heterogeneous and polyvalent as the complexity of the universe to
which they pertained.

In Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, Edgar Wind discusses the

implications of Pico's conceptual revolution for art and aesthetics.

The notion of the deus absconditus, the hidden God, implies that no
single symbolization of God can be adequate, for God is fundamen-
tally nonrepresentable. Witness Cusanus's discussion, in De docta

ignorantia, of the many names of the pagan gods:

All these names are but the unfolding of the one ineffable name, and in so far

as the name truly belonging to God is infinite, it embraces innumerable such

names derived from particular perfections. Hence the unfolding of the divine

name is multiple, and always capable of increase, and each single name is

related to the true and ineffable name as the finite is related to the infinite.^'*

29
Hypnerotomachia PoUphili
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

As Wind suggests, "Poetic pluralism is the necessary corollary to the

radical mysticism of the One."^^ This polytheistic, or at least poly-

morphic, vision of the deity achieved the reconciliation of theologi-

cal opposites in the hidden God, necessitating an application of the
intellectual syncretisms of Ficino and Pico. Yet those irreconcilable
opposites, w^hich previously could only have been united within

God, could now be provisionally reconciled in human conscious-

ness. But insofar as this central theological doctrine could only be
stated in the form of a paradox, its manifold expressions, whether
conceptual, symbolic, pictorial, or ornamental, needed to share the

conceptual and ontologicaJ equivocation of its foundation. This

would be the source of a new iconographic richness in the arts.

Pico was intimately familiar with the ancient pagan mystery

religions being rediscovered during his time, as well as with the role
of initiation in the acquisition of knowledge; indeed, he had
planned to write a book on the subject entitled Poetica theobgia. He
discerned the various formal levels of these mysteries ritualistic,

figurative, and magical all of which were continuously intermin-

gled during the Renaissance. Within these systems, truth was always

hidden, to be revealed only to the initiated through hieroglyphs,

fables, and myths. The dissimulation of truth was a protection
against profanation; revelation was thus a function of disguise, dis-

simulation, concealment, equivocation, and ambiguity.

Wind's analysis of the much-admired Renaissance maxim, ^^-

tina lente (make haste slowly), which originated in Aulus Gellius's

Nodes Atticae (Attic Nights), is a concrete case in point. This oxy-

moron simultaneously sums up, at a poetic level of understanding,

the metaphysical principle of divine totalization, the epistemological

principle of the limits of human comprehension, and a certain eth-

ical principle for regulating one's earthly existence. Here, the meta-

physical is reduced to representable (and thus apparently compre-

hensible) oxymoronic hieroglyphs or emblems such as a dolphin
around an anchor, a butterfly on a crab, an eagle and a lamb, and
countless others all intended, "to signify the rule of life that

ripeness is achieved by a grovi^ih of strength in which quickness and

steadiness are equally developed. "^*^ Metaphysics is thus expressed in
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

the realm of popular imagery by reducing philosophy to the

emblematic. The result of this reduction of the cognitive to imagery
is that while aesthetics always implies a metaphysics, metaphysics is

no longer the prime guarantor of aesthetics.

This is apparent, for example, in a seminal^'' book in the his-

tory of Western gardens, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream). Here numerous versions
oi festina lente are illustrated; each one provides a unique nuance to
the idea, specifically attuned to the demands of the narrative. As
Wind explains, these emblems in fact serve as part of the initiatory
mechanism of the allegory.

The plan of the novel, so often quoted and so little read, is to "initiate" the

soul into its own secret destiny the final union of Love and Death, for

which Hypneros (the sleeping i,ros funeraire) served as a poetic image. The way
leads through a series of bitter-sweet progressions where the very first steps

already foreshadow the ultimate mystery oi Adonia, which is the sacred mar-

riage of Pleasure and Pain.^^

The coincidence of opposites is revealed through sundry conjunc-

tions, such that not only the marvels and miracles of the world, but
also its most commonplace objects, reveal human destiny. Needless

to say, if basic imagery is thus manipulated, the most complex forms

of expression the arts, including landscape architecture ^will bear

witness to similar metaphysical formations and deformations. These

techniques lead to the realm of what, as Cassirer reminds us, Goethe

referred to as an "exact sensible fantasy, "^^ where science, nature,

and art coalesce in an empirical realm that utilizes its own standards,

paradigms, and forms; where abstraction and vision merge; and

where fantasy and theory, literature and metaphysics, share a com-
mon ground of expression.
If poetry and images were but a veil upon the truth, they nev-

ertheless offered an alternate entry into the theological system, a

means of circumventing the obvious social restrictions of a more the-
ological approach. This syncretism was reciprocal: "An element of
doctrine was thus imparted to classical myths, and an element of

poetry to canonical doctrines. "'^ Thus there obtained a hybridization

of elements within imagery; theological connotations were granted to

3^
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

secular figures, and, conversely, sacred scenes evinced secular and

contemporary truths. What Wind termed a "transference of types''"^'
was in fact more than a stylistic feature of Renaissance art; it estab-

lished an epistemological overture that indicated the metaphysical

foundations of a major lineage of subsequent art and aesthetics.

This syncretism was not lost on the arts. Though earlier hybrid

works were evident in both pastoral dramas and mystery plays, the

first Gesamtkunstwerk proper, in the contemporary sense of the term,

was the opera, developed at the end of the sixteenth century, with
the appearance of Peri's Euridice created in Florence in 1600, and
Monteverdi's Orfeo created in Mantua in 1607.

Monteverdi utilized all the resources of the art, ancient or new. This distinc-

tion between old and new, most honored around 1600, held little value for

him. Thus on every page one finds archaic connections of tunes, traditional

procedures of writing and orchestration, as well as modulations, dissonances,

enharmonics, and chromaticisms engendered by tonality, by Greek metrics,

and by the rhythmics of declamation. But what pertained uniquely to

Monteverdi was his knowledge of gauging, choosing, blending, and ordering

all these elements to create a moving and animated work with great lyrical

inspiration."*^

Beginning with Orfeo, Monteverdi established a musical synthesis of

court airs, madrigals, recitative, canzone, and arioso; this entailed a

corresponding scenographic synthesis of the varied arts.

As the Cartesian mathesis universalis sought the synthesis of

the sciences in a unified theory, so would the opera syncretize the

arts on the spatially homogeneous, but stylistically heterogeneous,

stage of baroque drama. And yet, structurally speaking, it might be

argued that the humanist garden of the Italian Renaissance is the

major precursor of the totalizing artwork, insofar as it already served

as the ground, synthesis, and scenarization of all the other arts.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna (1433-527)

was published in Venice in 1499."^^ The tale consists of the phantas-

mic quest of Poliphilus, presented as an initiatory erotic drama

 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

couched in the form of a dream, recounting the protagonist's expe-

riences and tribulations as he searches for his beloved Polia.

Beginning in the anguishing soHtude of a wild, dark, labyrinthine

forest, he finally emerges, by invoking divine guidance, into a beau-

tiful, sunny landscape of absolute perfection. Here he discovers a

world filled with gardens and palaces, containing enigmatic and
emblematic monumental sculptures and ruins representing the arts

of the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, such as pyra-

mids, obelisks, and temples, all evincing a perfection lost in the con-

temporary epoch. The archaic is brought into the service of the

arcane. The allegory then thickens as Poliphilus continues his

Neoplatonic quest towards love and truth, encountering five girls

representing the five senses, a queen symbolizing free will, and final-

ly two young women symbolizing reason and volition. After visiting

the palace, guided by the latter two women, he is taken to the three
palace gardens, which are ultimate expressions of human artifice:

gardens of glass, silk, and gold. This passage is worth quoting at

length, as the descriptions of gardens in the Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili are of inestimable importance in the subsequent history,

imaginary and practical, of landscape architecture.

When we arrived at the enclosure of orange trees, Logistic said to me:

"Poliphilus, you have already seen many singular things, but there are four

more no less singular that you must see." Then she led me to the left of the

palace, to a beautiful orchard as large in circumference as the entire dwelling

where the queen made her residence. Around it, all along the walls, there were

parterres planted in cases, intermixing box-trees and cypresses, that is to say a

cypress between two box-trees, with trunks and branches of pure gold, and

leaves of glass so perfectly imitated that they could have been taken for nat-

ural. The box-trees were topped with spheres one foot high, and the cypress-

es with points twice as high. There were also plants and flowers imitated in

glass, in many colors, forms and types, all resembling natural ones. The
planks of the cases were, as an enclosure, surrounded with slides of glass, gild-

ed and painted with beautifiil scenes. The borders were two inches wide,

trimmed with gold molding on top and bottom, and the corners were cov-

ered with small bevels of golden leaves. The garden was enclosed with pro-

truding columns made of glass imitating jasper, encircled by plants called

34
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

bindweed or morning glory with white flowers similar to small bells, all in

relief and of the same colored glass modeled after nature.

These columns rested against squared and ribbed pillars of gold, sup-

porting the arcs of the vaulting made of the same material. Underneath, it was

trimmed with glass rhombuses or lozenges, placed between two moldings.

Upon the capitals of the protruding columns were placed the architrave, the

frieze, and the cornice in glass, figures in jasper, as well as the moldings

around it, golden rhombuses with polished and hammered foliage, such that

the rhombuses were a third as wide as the thickness of the vaulting. The

ground plan and the parterre of the garden were made of compartments

composed of knotwork and other graceftil figures, mottled with plants and

flowers of glass with the luster of precious stones. For there was nothing nat-

ural, yet there existed, nevertheless, an odor that was pleasant, fresh and fit-

ting the nature of the plants that were represented, thanks to some compound

with which they were rubbed. I long gazed upon this new sort of gardening,

and found it to be very strange.^^

The brilliance and genius of this pure artifice invokes Poliphilus's

admiration and wonder; the inherent artificiality of mimesis is

revealed. While this garden was never imitated in its totality, it

established a certain sensibility, and many of its elements have served

as models for both details and major elements throughout the his-

tory of landscape architecture as well as in the subsidiary art of

pastry making, with its parallel history. Poliphilus's discovery of

these artificial wonders continued:

"Let us go to the other garden, which is no less delectable than the one which

we just showed him." This garden was on the other side of the palace, of the

same style and size as the one made of glass, and similar in the disposition of

its beds, except that the flowers, trees, and plants were made of silk, the col-

ors imitating those of nature. The box-trees and the cypresses were arranged

as in the preceding garden, with trunks and branches of gold, and underneath

were several simple plants of all types, so truly crafted that nature would have

taken them for her own. For the worker had artificially given them their

odors, with I know not what suitable compounds, just as in the glass garden.

The walls of this garden were made with singular skill, and at incredible cost.

They were assembled with pearls of equal size and value, upon which was

spread a stalk of ivy with leaves of silk, branches and small creeping runners

35
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

of pure gold, and the corymbs or raisins of its fruit of precious stones. And,

equidistant around the wall were squared pillars, with capitols, architraves,

friezes and cornices of the same metal, resting upon it as ornaments. The
planks that served as slides were made of silk embroidered with gold thread,

depicting hunting and love scenes so surprisingly portrayed that the brush

could not have done better. The parterre was covered with green velour

resembling a beautiful field at the beginning of the month of April. 45

They then enter a third garden, in which is located a golden trian-

gular obelisk, decorated on its three sides:

Logistic turned towards me and said: "Celestial harmony consists of these

three figures, square, round, and triangular. Know, Poliphilus, that these are

ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have a perpetual affinity and conjunc-

tion, signifying: 'the divine and infinite trinity, with a single essence.' The

square figure is dedicated to the divinity, because it is produced from unity,

and is unique and similar in all its parts. The round figure is without end or

beginning, as is God. Around its circumference are contained these three

hieroglyphs, whose property is attributed to the divine nature. The sun which,

by its beautifiil light, creates, conserves, and illuminates all things. The helm

or rudder which signifies the wise government of the universal through infi-

nite sapience. The third, which is a vase full of fire, gives us to understand a

"4
participation of love and charity communicated to us by divine goodness.

The Neoplatonic resonances are worth noting. Continuing his

quest, Poliphilus is confronted with three doors, representing the

major paths of life, leading towards either the glory of God, the plea-
sures and wonders of the world, or love. As Poliphilus chooses the

last justifying the text's extreme voluptuousness he is led to the

most perfect garden of all, Cythera, residence of the goddess of Love

(and historic site of the Greek cult of Aphrodite): "That region was
dedicated to merciful nature, intended for the habitation and
dwelling of beatified gods and spirits."47 The description of the gar-

dens of Cythera is so complex as to escape precise visualization and

defy synopsis, yet it has inspired much of the Western imagination
of landscape architecture. Here, the new Renaissance sense of nature

combines with the contemporary exigencies of the arts: cosmic

symbolism is reflected in architectural detail, the fecund sensuality
of nature is circumscribed by the most rigorously geometricized

37
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

geography, and the beauty of the landscape is accentuated, or even

simulated, by the most refined artifice of the artisan's craft.

Each aspect of this site inaugurates a type of perfection later

to become stereotypical. The island is circular, with crystalline earth,

beaches surrounded with ambergris, and its circumference is defined

by ordered plantings of cypresses and bilberry bushes trimmed to

perfection every day. The island's river has a shore adorned with

sand mixed with gold and precious stones, and banks planted with
flowers and citrus trees. The island's major divisions are mathemat-
ically organized and separated by porphyry enclosures of artificial

foliage and knotwork decorations interspersed with marble pilasters;

each of these divisions delimits a different sort of planting: oak, fir,

shrubs formed into figures representing the powers of Hercules,

pine, laurel and small shrubs, apple and pear, cherry, heart-cherry

and wild-cherry, plum, peach and apricot, mulberry, fig, pomegran-

ate, chestnut, palm, cypress, walnut, hazelnut, almond and pista-
chio, jujube, sorb, loquat, dogwood, service, cassia, carob, cedar,

ebony, and aloes.

In what appears as a prototypical version of Michel Foucault's

"Chinese encyclopedia" where the introduction of fantastic ele-

ments shatters empirical taxonomy the animals to be found there

are no less diverse, so as to maintain the Utopian aspect of the site:

satyrs, fauns, lions, panthers, snow leopards, giraffes, elephants,

griffins, unicorns, stags, wolves, does, gazelles, bulls, horses, and an

infinity of other species (excepting only those that are poisonous or

ugly). Furthermore, the decorations within the sundry orchards,
prairies, and parterres offer nearly the entire gamut of what shall

become the standard features of Western landscape architecture:

trellises, bowers, altars, decorative bridges, topiary, sculptural and

architectural features, and fountains. There are herb gardens con-

taining a variety of medicinal plants as vast as that of medieval clois-

ter gardens, including absinthe, birthwort, mandragora, fiimitory,

devil's milk, sumac, betony, calamint, lovage, St.-John's-wort, night-

shade, peony; and also aromatic and edible plants such as lettuce,

spinach, sorrel, rocket, caraway, artichokes, chervil, peas, broad

beans, purpura, pimpernel, anise, melons, gourds, cucumbers.

39
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

chicory, watercress, etcetera. The flowers in the prairies, whose

description evokes the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval tapestries

such as the unicorn cycles, are no less varied, and the parterres, plant-

ed with extremely complex, interlaced, and varied patterns of flowers

and other plants, have become classic models for subsequent gardens.

Finally, there is the veritable "source" and destination of the

quest, the mystical fountain of Venus (which, most tellingly, remains
unillustrated, but for a schematic ground plan), with columns made
of precious stones, detailed carvings, and zodiacal and mythological
symbols. The source of the water could itself be seen as an allegory
for the "third nature" that characterizes the art of gardens:
The cover of this marvelous fountain was made of a rounded vault like an

overturned coupe without a foot, all of a single piece of crystal, whole and

massive, without veins, flaws, hairs, kerfs, or any macula whatsoever, purer

than the water spouting from the solid, artless, raw, unpolished rock, just as

nature made it."**

The Italian Renaissance produced copies, however flawed, of certain

aspects of these gardens. Henceforth, mathematics and mythology
would join within the art of landscape architecture. Yet, however
imperfect the imitation, an entire worldview was evident in these
gardens. As Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel remarks,
The visions freed by the reveries are not always images of paradise lost; they

also sometimes prefigure models of a perfection yet to come. The island where

Poliphilus ends his journey is one of those: Venus, in concert with mathe-

matical reason, conceived the plans for this garden. Fecundity is allied with

order, measure, and proportion."*?

The metaphysical allegory is always upheld by the most extreme sen-

suality and preciosity. Indeed, one of the inscriptions on the foun-
tain may serve as an epigraph for the entirety of the Hypneroto-

machia Poliphili: "Delectation is like a sparkling dart."^

No synopsis of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili can satisfy, for

it is precisely due to the eccentricity of its quasi-encyclopedic char-

acter through the heterogeneous allusions and evocations of each

object, and the symbolic interrelations between these objects that

the nature of this synthesizing, moralizing, and aestheticizing sym-

bolic system appears. The heterogeneous enumeration shatters the

 SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

effects of mimesis, giving rise to art as an activity of the autonomous

imagination. Such a pluraUstic mode of Usting and narrative para-

taxis operates as a conceptual expansion of horizons, utihzing pre-

vious symbols, forms, and taxonomic schemes retrospectively to

recreate their classic origins; proleptically, they create a modern aes-

thetic.^' Here, a vast syncretism rules the combination of botanic

(Egyptian, Cypriot, Greek, Syrian, etc.), architectural (ancient

Greek, Roman, Italian, Gothic, monastic, etc.), and textual (Pliny,

Virgil, Dioscorides, Theophrastus, etc.) elements, establishing a

totality imbued w^ith the most extreme, and fruitful, anachronisms.

And yet, it is perfectly coherent with the Neoplatonic metaphysical

speculation of the epoch; for all classicism is inherently revisionis-

tic, transfiguring ancient forms according to contemporary

motives. It is precisely here that we can appreciate the allegorical

weight of ruins in landscape architecture: signs of an ideal and ide-

alized past now disappeared, symbols of a creative consciousness

that recuperates and transforms, indices of an aestheticization that

combines and refines.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili thus offers not only specific details

and general models based on a synthesis of the contemporary

arts for the subsequent history of landscape architecture; it also

proffers an aesthetic of complexity, contradiction, and paradox that

will inspire, both consciously and unconsciously, the most profound
garden creations. Its style, plot, and characterizations are complex
and heterogeneous; ancient, medieval, and Renaissance objects are

contemporaneously juxtaposed and overlaid with both sacred and

profane symbols; multiple discourses interweave myth and rational-

ism, erotic drama and mundane description, fantasy and utility,

nature and geometry; varied, often contradictory, ideals of beauty

are interwoven. Furthermore, the metaphoric dimension of artifacts

is always apparent, revealing the landscape itself as an emblematic,
symbolic, or allegorical space parallel to the mental state of
Poliphilus, in 2i psychomachia that organizes the dynamic principle of
the narrative, as Gilles Polizzi explains: "Such is the book of
Colonna that in the problematic conjunction of its books and its

subjects, science and desire, the Apuleian weave of its mysteries and
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

the experiment with natural hieroglyphs it opens to a polysemy

that makes it a world-book or a monster-book. "^^
Crucial for the present study is the fact that Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili stresses the central importance of narrative in establishing

the structure and significance of gardens in general. For not only is

the garden a reflection of mental states, but its allegorical structure

is based upon the active, and not merely mimetic, aspect of vision as
a creative, dynamic, mutable process. This pertains to the garden's
visible and mathematical forms as well as to its visionary and mytho-
logical dimensions. Thus the "objective" geometry and sciences

behind these inventions, the "third nature" realized from combining

artifice and nature, are instantiated or activated, as it were, by the

narrative phantasms of those who created the gardens, and subse-

quently by the phantasms of those who enter them. In Hypneroto-

machia Poliphili, the garden is literally a dream; the real gardens of

the world, conversely, are sites that evoke reverie. The liberated plas-

ticity of the imagination a major consequence of the new meta-

physical system elaborated by Cusanus, Ficino, and Pico corre-

sponds to the historic relativity and alterability of truth in its

manifold and often contradictory manifestations. For the conditions

of the possibility of any work of art include not only the material
and spiritual traditions of the period, but also all the conceivable

phantasms, misreadings, variants, and heresies all the paradoxes

and paralogisms of the arcane and often unstated traditions that

are foundational of an epoch.

Contradiction, complexity, and paradox are fundamental
principles in both the genesis and the structure of Western landscape
architecture. The coherence, formalism, and stylistic closure all too

often sought by historians of gardens in fact dissimulates the inco-

herence, heterogeneity, and conceptual intricacies that underlie

most great gardens. The organic, dynamic, chaotic space of nature is

always at odds with the geometric, static, mathematical space of

conceptual form. "Worked through by the Demon of Time
whether in its human and historical manifestations as narrative, fan-

tasy, and destiny, or in its natural manifestations as seasonal change,

growth, decay and death the garden is a fortiori a dynamic, syn-

thetic, syncretic entity, escaping all formalist definition.

Tell me which infinity is yours, and I will know the meaning ofyour
universe; is it the infinity of the sea or the sky, is it the infinity of the
earth's depths or that of the pyre?

Gaston Bachelard
 Dematerialization
and Iconoclasm
Baroque Azure

^^ m ^ laise Pascal (1623-62) observed, "Reason never totally

% l^^ surmounts the imagination, but the opposite is com-

m M mon."' This theological pessimism, the nostalgia for an
M ^ unadulterated faith, established a new phantasmic space

at the origins of the modern age. For while seventeenth-century the-

ology and scientism are at the antipodes regarding epistemology and
ontology, they share a quite decided aesthetic iconophobia. The lim-

its of the seventeenth-century imaginary exist at the intersection of

a Jansenist theology according to which God no longer has any sym-
bolic space or function, and a new Cartesian scientific epistemology,

a mathesis universalis, whose axiomatic principles obstruct the sce-

narization of the imagination by reducing visuality to logical and

rhetorical schematization. Aesthetics is diminished or denied,
reduced to discourse, to symbol, or to mere divertissement. It is

commonly accepted that French formal gardens

"Cartesian gar-

dens" such as Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles represent the ratio-

nalized aesthetic epitome of the mastery of nature, where the garden

serves as an instrument of knowledge and power. Here, I wish to

pose the question not only as a rhetorical flourish, but also as a

cognitive paradoxof what would constitute a "Pascalian garden."

In the French formal garden, the panoptic Utopia of a single,

perfect viewpoint would seem to present the landscape in an unam-

biguous pictorial unity. This ideal viewpoint, situated, for example,
Versailles, the Grand Canal seen from the Fountain ofApollo

Versailles, the chateau seen from the Fountain ofApollo

 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

at the ballroom of Vaux-le-Vicomte or the Hall of Mirrors at

Versailles, reveals the visual representation of what the Due de Saint-

Simon referred to as '' la grande mecanique" symbolizing the moral
imperatives of both the royal court and the aesthetic geometrization

of nature. The geometric, perspectival construct of the formal gar-

den creates a "captured view^." But, unlike the symbolic views orga-

nized by the Chinese garden or the pastoral scenes captured in the

Italian and later in the English garden, what is circumscribed in the

French formal garden is infinity itself, brought into the garden
scheme thanks to the optical exigencies of linear perspective. The
horizon between earth and sky, punctuated at the vanishing point by
the frontal visual axis of the garden composition, is a major feature
of the formal composition. While the geometrization of the earth as

well as the position of infinity have received much comment in the

history of landscape architecture, the role of the baroque sky in the

symbolic landscape warrants further study.

Erwin Panofsky has shown in Perspective as Symbolic Form
how one-point linear perspective permits the empirical representa-
tion of God, inscribed as the vanishing point of the pictorial space

at infinity. The same observation obtains for the role of infinity in

the formal garden, where, as in all projections in linear perspective,

there exists "the concept of an infinity for which there is not only a
model in God, but which is actually realized in empirical reality."^

Whence the symbolic existence of such a garden as a "moralized

landscape," proffering what, to invent a theorem, I would term an

"optical proof" of the existence of God (based on the symbolic value
of infinity manifested as the vanishing point). The latter may be
added to the more classic Cartesian proofs, and may stand as an

ironic introduction to the Pascalian garden, in counterdistinction to

the extreme baroque pictorializations of the Counter- Reformation.

The mobility of the body as it traverses the garden establishes

baroque effects at the core of the geometrized French garden. The

baroque insinuates itself at the very center of neoclassicism as

anamorphic distortion, where the multiple, incompatible, supple-

mental perspectives (frontal, oblique, transversal, aerial, isometric)

are synthesized by the deployment of the spectator's body and the

47
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

concomitant idiosyncrasies of perception. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the

aesthetic closure of the garden space is a fiinction of the reversibiU-
ty between viewpoint and vanishing point. This reversibiHty is estab-

Hshed by the garden's formal constraints: the major visual axis com-
pels the spectator to walk towards the vanishing point at the

horizon; this promenade reveals a series of optical illusions and dis-

symmetries in the landscape; at the end of the walk the extreme limit

of the garden is reached, where the topographic feature of a lawn in

the shape of a natural amphitheater motivates one to turn and view

the space just traversed. The ontological suppleness of space is

revealed through the unfolding of depth, such that the ruses of

bidimensionality (the initial "perfect" view of the garden) are

exposed: the chateau, originally the viewpoint, is transformed into

the new vanishing point. The multiplicity of divertissements, the

perspectival distortions, and the disparate symbols are all unified by

the instability of motion and temporality, by the ambiguity and

fragility of perception.
Examination of the symbolic attributes of landscape architec-
ture may be advantageously informed by the methodology of
Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The
book opens with a manifesto entitled "Non-Straightforward Archi-

tecture: A Gentle Manifesto," in which he exclaims, "I am for rich-

ness of meaning rather than the clarity of meaning; for the implicit

function as well as the explicit fiinction. I prefer "both-and" to

"either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or

white. "^ This is a theorization of inclusion, not exclusion; of the

irrational, not the rational; of discontinuity, not continuity. It is no

accident that the baroque, which celebrates the architecture of ten-

sion, complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox, plays a

major role in his analysis.

The very conception of the formal garden rests upon the

ambiguity between baroque and neoclassic modalities of spatiality.

Consider the fact that Andre Le Notre drew the plans for his gar-

dens in mixed perspective, combining in the same drawings both

ground plan and perspectival projection. The topography of the

landscape corresponds to the ground plan, while objects (such as

48
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

buildings and trees, accentuated by shadows) are drawn in isometric

relief, also known as "parallel perspective," that is, a projection in

which all parallel lines remain parallel, a representation without van-

ishing point and without horizon. Thus there is an apparent confla-
tion of two- and three-dimensionality in the same representation.

Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier explain: "As objectified

representations, isometry and axonometry occupy the ambivalent
space opened up between the geometries of [Gaspard] Monge and
[Jean-Victor] Poncelet, oscillating between the extremes of self-

evident representation (accurate description) and self-referential for-

mulation (freedom from representation). ""^ The symbolic space of

the landscape thus exists at the intersection of description and for-

mulation, ground plan and axonometry, lived experience and

abstract mathesis a symbolic matrix radically transformed by the
ambivalent limitations inherent in the differing modalities of per-
spectival projection, and continually haunted by the imperious need
to represent the unrepresentable site of infinity.
Did Le Notre utilize this sort of projection for practical or for
symbolic reasons? While "central perspective" (one-point frontal lin-

ear perspective) privileges those immeasurable, incommensurable,

hyperbolically phantasmic baroque views where the entire scene

seems to be fleeing towards a sacred and ever-vanishing point, the

"parallel perspectives" of isometric and other types of axonometric
projections offer a measurable, proportional representation of its

objects, independent of the exigencies and distortions of the visual

field. Such representations thus correspond to no single visual point

of view (being drawn as if the eye were placed at infinity): they are

theoretical constructs used for practical purposes. But this in no way

implies that they are without their own symbolism. It is as if such

representations created a tension or equivocation between the lofty,

yet embodied, overview inherent in aerial projections of ground plan,

and the disembodied, dematerialized view-without-a-vievi^oint of
axonometric projections the vision of a purely spiritual being.

Just as optics, geometry, and perspective played a key role,

both practical and symbolic, in the formation of the French garden,

so too did considerations of technology and engineering. The

49
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

geometrization of the landscape necessitated surveying techniques

whereby straight Hnes could be established for the realignment of
topography and the orderly disposition of objects. These tech-
niques to connect distant spaces, or, in their aesthetic version, to

create a harmony of disparate parts were in great part appropriat-

ed from contemporary military engineering, since landscape archi-

tects faced the same problems as military engineers, albeit for differ-

ent reasons. (In this regard it is interesting to note that, perhaps not

coincidentally, in 1640, at the age of twenty-seven, Le Notre married

Fran^oise Langlois, daughter of the Conseiller Ordinaire de
I'Artillerie de France.) Helene Verin explains: "The greatest difficul-
ty, according to the engineer Fabre in 1629, concerned 'continuous
lines' which 'exceed 100 or 120 even to the extent of 200 toises [400
yards] for a certain proportion must be observed between the place
defended and the distance of the places from which comes their de-
fense.' "5 Taken into account in such measurements were topograph-
ical features, the disposition of buildings and apertures, angles of sight,
direction of fire, and questions of ballistics. What is of special inter-

est in the present context beyond that of the technical problems

pertaining to the construction of landscape architecture is the fact

that considerations of ballistics linked visible lines of sight to invisi-

ble places, where death determined the articulation between the vis-

ible and the invisible. The symbolic correlates of this invisible space
revealed an iconoclasm that simultaneously stressed human mortal-
ity and vanity, and ultimately manifested the theological sublime.
The problem of the dynamism of the human body within the

formalized, geometric garden was thus prefigured by issues of ballis-

tics. The optical rigidity of the "perspective cavaliere" or "military

perspective" (versions of axonometric projection) used to represent

static fortifications connoted the extreme, mortal dynamism of the

projectiles intended to destroy such fortifications. Here, as Philippe
Comar explains, the drawing served an operational, tactical purpose;

"the goal was to construct the image not of a simple edifice, but of
an entire strategy."^ Comar rightly suggests that though such pro-
jections were pragmatic, since they represented the just proportions

of the objects and spaces depicted, they were far from symbolically

50
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

neutral, due to the inaccessibility of this infinite (axonometric) view-

point to any spectator except God. The symbolic value that may be
drawn from such representations is that they are "visionary" precise-

ly because they are divorced from visibility visionary according to

the eternal, mathematical rhythms of measure and proportion inde-

pendent of all perspectival limitations and mutations.
This axonometric representational space is a function of the

control of spatiality central to Cartesian rationalization. Here, depth

is effectively suppressed; depth is conceived as the third dimension,

intuited from the primary dimensions of height and width. Depth
becomes a function of reasoning; depth exists due to the limitations

of perception; depth exists because man is not God. Such an intel-

lectualized, mathematized, technocratic space is isotropic, homoge-

neous, quantifiable, clear, and unambiguous; it is a projection of
cognition, not a topology of perception.

To the contrary, the very existence of the baroque is a fianction

of the primacy of spatial depth, implying the inherence of time in

space, the existence of hidden objects and scenes, and the possibili-

ty of motion. Dynamism replaces static geometrization in a scenario

of perpetual motion and metamorphosis. It is no accident that

descriptions of baroque spatiality are ofi:en couched in military

metaphors: baroque space is described as "dynamic, in perpetual

morphogenesis and 'catastrophe,' "^ where "the line is vector and the

point is force. "9 Depth is experienced as the first, not the third,
dimension of lived spatiality. It creates the possibility of all possibil-
ities according to which a world takes form: a reversible spatiality
that surrounds and includes the spectator; a spatiality that maintains

and reveals an invisible, encompassing transcendence that is inti-

mately related to immanence. In Vaux-le-Vicomte, the static and the

dynamic combine: lived vision traces a flexible, serpentine, disequi-

librious optical line across the geometrized axis of the garden's con-

crete configuration. Whence the ambiguity of this space, where the

epistemological scenario and metaphysical allegory of the garden

arise from corporeal presence and mobility. Thus the poetic logic of

the French formal garden is not purely visual, but synaesthetic; the
equivocations of stasis and motion, two- and three-dimensionality,
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

viewpoint and vanishing point, geometry and chaos, are all resolved

only through active spectatorship. The baroque trajectory of the

body in space creates a veritable instability within the neoclassic

perspectival projection, where the dynamic anamorphosis resulting
from mobility establishes the synthesis of the different perspectives.

The fantasy of neoclassic proportion, closure, and perfection is sub-

tended by a baroque instability that renders any such closure
impossible.

In La folie du voir, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains, "The

baroque ordains a 'retreat of being,' an 'insufficient reason' at the

heart of the neoclassic epoch. "^ Indeed, if the baroque fascination

with infinity is considered in terms of my "optical proof" of the exis-

tence of God, then we cannot avoid Pascal's anguish regarding the
retreat of God, deus ahsconditus. This anguish is created by the finite,

mortal condition of man situated within "those terrifying spaces of

the universe that surrounds me,"" located between two invisible,

unlocalizable, unknowable, incalculable infinities: nothingness and

God. For Pascal, theology necessitates the consciousness that "True
conversion consists in annihilating oneself before that universal being
whom we have irritated so often and who could legitimately destroy

us at any moment."'^ Only an anti-aesthetic, counter-perceptual

metaphysics of insufficient reason is adequate to this situation.

Were we to remain strictly within the realm of Jansenist the-

ology, the imagination would fall victim to an intensely iconoclastic

spirituality. But entering the realm of poetics necessitates a quite dif-

ferent term: sublimation. In L'air et les songes, Gaston Bachelard

explains how the symbolism of the air, the sky, and the heavens gives
rise to a dynamic mode of the imagination characterized by the
mobility of images: a fleeting, vectorial imagination. It is thus appro-
priate that the major celebration of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Jean de La
Fontaine's Le Songe de Vaux, commences with a recognition of the
relations between the conjuration of dreamful sleep and the
windswept summer night:

52
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

When the Year is renewed,

In that lovely season

Where Flora brings with her

The Zephyrs on the Horizon,

A night when silence

Charms all by her presence,

I conjured up Sleep

To defer my awakening

Well beyond Aurora. '3

While the empty black sky of night brings with it rest and dreams,
the azure daytime sky induces an extreme, vibrant energetics. A dif-
ferent contrast of darkness and light is expressed in a letter written in

1660 by Andre Felibien, chronicler of the court of Louis xrv. Felibien

describes Charles Le Brun's painting for Vaux-Ie-Vicomte, L'Apotheose

d'Hercule, a portrait of Nicolas Fouquet alluding to his motto, Quo

non ascendet. Le Brun paints Fouquet as Hercules ascending to the
heavens in an attempt to render his hero in victory over his passions.
The black horse and the chestnut horse who draw his chariot repre-

sent man's two principal passions, for here black signifies hatred and
chestnut signifies love. Though the early iconography of Versailles

under Louis xrv also symbolized the king as Hercules, this was soon
surpassed by a ubiquitous solar symbolism, though the scenarization

was similar. Consider La Fontaine's description, in Les amours de

Psyche et de Cupidon (1669), which celebrates the sculpture located in

the Bassin d'Apollon at Versailles and the sun itself:

There, in golden chariots, the Prince and his Court

Come to taste the freshness at day's decline.

One and the other Sun, each unique of its kind.

Display to the onlookers their pomp and richness.

Phoebus shines, envious of the French Monarch;

Often one does not know whom to applaud:

Both are full of radiance and resplendent with glory.'**

Like the golden fleurs-de-lis on an azure background that symbol-

izes the House of France, the Prince's golden chariot, contesting the
sun itself, traverses the celestial regions forming the roof of the
gardens at Versailles.
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

The mutability and dynamism of the imagination traces the trajec-

tory from the real to the imaginary, from transcendence to imma-

nence. The blue sky is the basis of a quite special imaginary, what
Gaston Bachelard terms the aerial "dynamics of dematerialization"
where there obtains "the fusion of the dreamer with a universe that
is as little differentiated as possible, with a soft and blue universe,
infinite and formless, of minimum substance."^'^ This occurs a fortiori

beneath the cloudless, azure sky for, as poets, artists, and dreamers
know so well, clouds are already the prototype of images; clouds,

like smoke and fire, are among the natural sources of figuration. The
dematerializing, celestial imaginary is of the most extreme solitude,
resulting in the dissolution of matter, the erasure of images, a pure

transparency represented by the empty, azure sky. Appearance is

reduced to an imagination without images. This purest form of

poetic meditation is not far from the consciousness of religious tran-
scendence and mysticism, entailing, according to Bachelard, the
replacement of the "method of doubt" with a "method of erasure."'^
Before the Renaissance geometrization of space, with its con-
sequent materialization of infinity as vanishing point, it was the pure
empyrean azure that most closely symbolized the infinite and the
divine. Indeed, one of the subde sources of aesthetic tension in the

French formal garden consists of the opposition between azure and

infinity, between pictorial openness and geometric closure, where the
ambulatory experience of the gardens depth destroys the illusive pic-

torialism inherent in the initial viewpoint. For Bachelard, the infinite

expanse of the open sky implies one-dimensionality, where unframed

space attains cosmic proportions: "The dream escapes from the flat

image. Soon, in a paradoxical manner, the aerial dream has nothing

but the dimension of depth. The two other dimensions enjoyed by

picturesque or painted reveries lose their oneiric interest. "'^

The stages of visual reduction are transfigured into a meta-

physical declension: contemplation of the sky leads from uniformi-
ty to blueness to discoloration to depth to the void to the unreal.
This ultimately attains the most extreme reduction of dimensions, a

54
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

non-dimensionality that "gives the impression of an absolute inti-

mate subhmation."'^ Such a poetics is no longer limited by a meta-

physical "kinophobia," that anxiety about depth and motion inher-
ent in Cartesian philosophy. This pneumatological, moral imaginary

alone is sufficient to manifest the formless, nonsymbolic infinitude

of the universe. For Pascal, too, theological infinity exists in a non-
dimensional space beyond the limits of the imagination, an infinite
sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference
nowhere: "In short, it is the greatest perceptible aspect of God's

omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in this

"''9
thought.
One limit of this modality of the imaginary is sheer icono-

clasm; the other is the unbounded iconophilia of the aerial sublime,

where the azure sky serves as the ultimate background. On the one

hand, the azure sky of Jesuit iconology designates a sacred dome, the
unclouded vault of the heavens, where mirages of holy visions gov-
ern the flight of angels, the ascent of saints, and the fall of the
damned in a celestial whirlpool of unmediated depth. On the other

hand, given the Jansenist disdain for the depiction of the sacred,
there can be no adequate representation of the deus absconditus. The
pictorial designation of God's infinitude can reveal no more than the
aesthetically and geometrically perfect vanishing point of perspecti-
val space: such would consist ofthe impossible icon ofa vanishing point
without a picture. Between the baroque and the neoclassic, between
the Jesuit and the Jansenist, the fate of miracles is tied to the apor-

ias of representation. However, the aerial imagination, governed by

an equivocation between the visible and the invisible, mediates these

antithetical cases, supporting both Jesuit fabulation and Jansenist
elimination.

Consider in comparison the stage of seventeenth-century comedy

and drama. The creation of the proscenium arch (codified in 1619

with the creation of the Teatro Farnese in Parma, but already in use
in the Italian court theater of Francesco Salviati nearly fifty years
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

earlier) was a key technical feature guaranteeing the possibility

of representing a rationalized theatrical and operatic space.

Subsequently, the heterogeneous, polymorphous outdoor space of

religious and secular festivals gave way to the unified, isotropic space

of the theater; spatial homogeneity was accentuated by suppressing

spectatorial mobility in the theater. ^ This newfound unity of space
and place depends upon a double binary that replaces the polymor-
phous, and often participatory, spatiality of previous festival and
spectacle: auditorium/scene and scenic on-stage/scenic off-stage.
The visible and the invisible (in their sundry manifestations) are
articulated by discourse; the visible action of the play determines the
invisible, phantasmic space off-stage; diegesis regulates mimesis.^'

This invisible off-stage space becomes the topography of the

most disturbing phantasms, those that teleologically guide the pro-

tagonists' destiny. As Roland Barthes suggests in Sur Racine, off-

stage is a fortiori the space of death. The inexorable death that

defines the tragic is a fianction of the intertwining of two invisible

domains, immanent and transcendent: uncontrolled libido and

divinely ordained destiny. Yet this obviates the presentation of what

may literally be termed "spectacle," insofar as off-stage theatrics are

always transmitted on-stage via dialogue, resulting in a disquieting

incertitude about the veracity of such information. Indeed, off-stage

phantasms go far beyond the complexity and contradiction of trag-

ic dialogue and plot: they manifest, as Barthes explains of the work
of Jean Racine, "the art of failure, the admirably twisted construc-
tion of a spectacle of the impossible. "^^

One may go fiirther: insofar as off-stage space is the site of the

imaginary, of what is forbidden or impossible to represent on-stage,
there is a radical ontological rupture between on-stage and off-stage.

This obtains despite the putative homogeneity of theatrical spatiali-

ty, implied by the scenic unity established by the proscenium arch,

and the spatial/temporal unity established by narrativization and
psychological characterization. Off-stage determines the "other
scene": as opposed to the verisimilitude of on-stage scenarization,
off-stage is the phantasmic space of illusion, distortion, obsession,

mortality, madness, eroticism, transgression, crime, dreams, visions,

56
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

the miraculous, the spectral, the fantastic, the grotesque, the

monstrous and death. We find in Racine's Phedre, for example,

reports of hell, the labyrinth, the kingdom of the dead, and dark
infernal night. ^^

Heaven and hell are thus prime paradigms of off-stage space,

where the unrepresentability of a detds absconditiis supplants the pre-

vious baroque representability of a dens ex machina, which may sud-

denly appear from the residual, interstitial space existing in the the-

ater, hidden between stage and auditorium. This technical space

permitted the baroque spectacle of the miraculous, the marvelous,
and the illusionistic spectacles suppressed and relegated to the

phantasmic off-stage in neoclassic theater. In this sense, off-stage

space preserves baroque phantasms at the heart of neoclassic scenar-

ization and psychologization. Indeed, it is precisely off stage where

the tumultuous forces of the libido materialize in their phantasmic

manifestations. This is a key to understanding the radical transfor-

mation of the structures of fascination from the sixteenth to the sev-

enteenth century: the unification of scientific method in the quest

for a mathesis universalis brought with it a unification of representa-
tional space, time, mimesis, and narrative. The epistemology of
causality superseded the epistemology of resemblance; narration dis-

placed spectacle; the camera obscura replaced the cabinet de curiosites

as the prime paradigm of representation. Yet all the while, a surrep-

titious, supplemental, disquieting, unrepresentable space haunted all

systems of representation. Centuries later, this space would be

renamed the "unconscious."
It is within this context that the Jansenist disdain for all things

theatrical and representational must be understood. As Pascal insists,

"Everything in the world is concupiscence of the flesh or concupis-

cence of the eyes or pride of life. Libido sentiendi, libido sciendi,

libido dominandi."^^ This can almost serve as a description of neo-

classic tragic theater, the earliest stage of the transformation of the-
ater into psychodrama, where the dramaturgy of the passions
enjoyment, knowledge, and domination guides and codifies the

imagination within a unified narrative. The iconoclasm of Pascalian

and Jansenist theology sets the stage, as it were, for the ultimate
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

interiorization of tragedy. Yet is it not curious that no mention is

made here of the libido vivendi, the desire to Hve, which is precisely

the irrational animal passion that has come to be seen as underlying

all other manifestations of libido? Regardless of this omission, the

space of libido is the space of the unrepresentable, of passion, a space

metaphorized by the impossible bodies and scenes of off-stage

theatricality.

This hidden off-stage space exists as dramatically homoge-

neous with that of on-stage drama, accessible to the characters, but
inaccessible to the spectators; yet they do not exist in a relation of
epistemological reversibility. As John Lyons explains, "the verbal

account is able to use space without being subject to the centraliz-

ing control of spatial uniformity imposed on the plastic arts and on

the theater as an art of space. "^^ The implied, putative homogeneity

of theatrical space is yet one further illusion manifesting the divine

chaos that undermines and uproots the lives of the dramatis person-
ae. There is as of yet no common locus; interiorization is not com-
plete; the fabulous still exists apart from the personal unconscious.
This scenographic and psychological binarism is illuminated by

Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, where he describes Carte-

sian subjectivity as an empirical/transcendental doublet, determin-
ing a heteroclitic space where the radical ontological difference of

sites excludes a common locus of truth. ^" (It is for this reason that a

theological discourse is still possible in the writings of Rene

Descartes; and that a scientific discourse makes sense in those of
Pascal.) Such heterotopisms undermine the structure of myth,
knowledge, and language; tragic drama denies the possibility of
Utopia, as mortality guarantees the ultimate dystopian disposition of

the subject anguished about death and damnation. Until the realist

psychologization of theater, all remained vanity.

The fragile but inexorable relations between phantasmic space

and death show the interconnections between tragedy, theology,

landscape architecture, and engineering, revealing variations of

anguish based on the sundry modalities of the unknown. For these
diverse scenarizations all contain an invisible locus that is identified

with our mortality: the off-stage of tragic drama, the theological

 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

heaven or hell, the perspectival infinity of landscape architecture,

and the object of ballistics in military engineering. The latter two are

site-specific and perspectival; the former two non-site-specific and

non-perspectival. These differences will guide the conclusion of this

study of the imaginary space of the formal garden.

In The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, Vincent Scully explains the

symbolic relations between sacred classic Greek architecture and the

natural setting:

Not only were certain landscapes indeed regarded by the Greeks as holy and

as expressive of specific gods, or rather as embodiments of their presence, but

also that the temples and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so

formed in themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each

other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict,

the basic meaning that was felt in the land.''''

The symbolic significance of each religious sanctuary differed from

place to place, according to the specific relations between the attrib-

utes of each god and the symbolic aspects of the topography. Thus
the relations between landscape and architecture were fully recipro-

cal in both meaning and form: the gods existed as determinate,

localized entities, and the site-specific articulation of nature and arti-

fice were central to the theological experience. But these relations

obtained in the classic Greek era, before the retreat of the gods,

before the final, ironic, ontotheological, neoclassic dissimulation of

God. In the classic epoch, the gods were everywhere manifested in a

profoundly symbolic landscape. In the neoclassic epoch, as Pascal

recounts, God surpasses the very limits of the imagination, as well as

the topography of the surrounding world, resulting in the total dis-

proportion of man. For Pascal, the visible world is but a speck with-
in a nature that is "an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere. "^^ The ubiquity of infinity, the

omnipresence of God in geometric symbolization, renders all theo-

logical personification and all symbolic landscapes obsolete.

In a neoclassic rhetorical flourish of personification. La

59
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Fontaine, in Le Songe de Vaux, depicts the abode of Morpheus, god

of sleep, within the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte: "The abode of the

god is in the depths of the woods, where silence and solitude make
their home; it is a cavern hewn by nature with her own hands, such

that all the entrances are protected from light and noise."^^ Such

respite giving rise to dreams, to the space of the imaginary is

impossible in the civilized, geometrized, panoptic space of the for-

mal garden itself In Morpheus's classic, mythic, pagan woods, the

melange of lyric and epic precludes the tragic. All is elegy, all is plea-

sure, all is libido. Fate is suspended, if not altogether avoided. One

cannot sleep on-stage in the garden proper; oneiric space exists, par

excellence, off-stage.

This localized, sylvan calm is very different from Pascal's sen-

timent that "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with
dread. "^ While La Fontaines Morpheus invites the visitor to rest-

fiil sleep in a protective forest solitude, Pascal's hidden God incites

fear and trembling in the paranoid emptiness of an infinite uni-

verse. Pascal refers not to the depths of the forest, but rather the
depths of the soul, when he writes of man's search for his true place

in the universe: "He seeks it everywhere, with disquietude and with-

out success, in impenetrable shadows."^' For Pascal, not only is the
universe empty; not only art, but nature itself, is corrupt; theatrical

space, including that of the garden, must also remain uninhabited,

as his suspicion of all divertissements shares the iconoclastic

Jansenist distaste of representation.^^ The hyperbolic Jesuit passion

for baroque representations of the miraculous and the sacred is

countered by the sober Jansenist considerations of the futility of

imagination, representation, and symbolization. According to

Pascal, one of the effects of recognizing the disproportion of man is

the veritable dissolution of the figural imagination: faith and visual

imagination are incompatible.

In Mirrors of Infinity I investigated the manner in which the
ultimate scenarization and symbolization of Le Roi Soleil as divine

monarch obtains in the topographic disposition of the gardens at

Versailles, where the celestial trajectory of the sun follows the central
axis of the garden. Infinity penetrates the domain of Versailles; the

60
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

King is incarnate as Divine, due to the symbolic conjunction of the

sun and infinity. But this celebration of Le Roi Soleil is not without
its inherent anguish. The sun traces its path beyond the canal and
disappears "off-stage," as it were, setting at the vanishing point

framed by the groups of trees known as the Pillars of Hercules.^^

This is described by La Fontaine in Les Amours de Psyche et de
Cupidon:
The Sun, weary of seeing this barbaric spectacle,

Hastens on its way; and, passing beneath the waters.

Leaves to bring light to other peoples:

The horror of these deserts increases in his absence.

Night arrives on a chariot led by Silence;

Bringing with it fear into the Universe. '^

This is the moment of the tragic flaw in the gardens of Versailles,

offered as an unmitigated representation of vanity. Might it be sug-

gested that, to grasp the metaphysical contradictions that establish

the dialectic of seventeenth-century metaphysics, it would be neces-

sary to mediate the seemingly irreconcilable differences between on-

stage and off-stage, between the baroque and the neoclassic,

iconophilia and iconophobia, imagination and representation?
All this, however, is scenarized by the Cartesian garden. What,
then, would constitute a Pascalian garden? A pagan might be tempt-
ed to search for the solution to this enigma in that which is not gar-
den, in that realm from which the garden makes a lucid, marvelous

appearance: the mythical domain of the woods or the wild forest,

evoking both the bounty of nature and the attendant anguish of the
unknown. But this would maintain a visual, representational logic.

Whether the imagination treats nature as pure chaos, or rather

reveals the subtly beautiful order that nature can attain in the hier-
archy of aesthetic objects, the garden cannot avoid the metaphysical
traps of symbolization. In response to the conundrum of the
Pascalian garden, Pierre Saint-Amand suggests the following:
We must imagine a garden of anguish, a garden of the weakness and misery

of the broken self, bridled by its desire for infinitude. The promenade would

everywhere reveal an ontological proof of the limits of humanity. A garden no

longer inhabited by the pathos of disproportion, but rather by that of

6l
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

restraint and suffering. Perspective would no longer reign, would no longer

fiirnish the unique figure of subjectivity. . . no longer self-reflexive certitude,

but the agonizing finitude of the subject.''

Here, where the real is not equivalent to the rational, the Pascalian
garden would be totally unrepresentable. It is an impossible site,

where the heterotopic spaces of human finitude and divine infini-

tude meet, beyond all possible phantasms, within language, in a ver-

itable Bachelardian "method of erasure." As such, it is the space in

which tragedy itself is abolished not merely by rationalized Cartesian

doubt, but by the incertitude and anguish inherent in Jansenist

faith. While we might approach the darkest forests that exist beyond
the borders of every garden with fear and trembling, this does not

represent, however, the "Pascalian garden." For, as Pascal insists,

"Nature is corrupted," a corruption impervious to Cartesian

schemes to master nature.^^ The Pascalian garden exists in contra-

diction: it is paradise, forever lost; it is the garden of earthly delights,

forever sinful, forever postlapsarian; it is the thrust of chaotic nature

that inwardly corrupts the beautifiil artifice of every earthly garden.

I would like to conclude with an allegory anachronistic, disturb-

ing, iconoclastic, mad taken from Gerard de Nervals last work,

Aurelia:

The woman I was following, displaying her slender waist in a movement that

mirrored the folds of her shifting taffeta dress, gracefully enwrapped the long

stem of a hollyhock wdih her bare arm, then, beneath a bright ray of light, she

began to grow, such that litde by litde the garden took on her form, the

flower-beds and the trees became the rosettes and festoons of her clothes,

whilst her face and arms imprinted their contours upon the purple clouds of

the sky. She disappeared from view in proportion to her transfiguration, for

she seemed to vanish into her own grandeur.'^

In this passage written at the moment of the nineteenth century

immediately predating the restoration of Vaux-le-Vicomte not
only is the garden scenarization symbolized by the human body, but
it actually becomes indistinguishable from it. The body here serves

62
 DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

as a system of symbols to represent the world: simultaneously the

garden is personified as the human body is metaphorized. As such,
Nerval s tale would be the perfect allegory of the garden as symbol-

ic space, where the transformation of sensible data exists in direct

proportion to divinization, or at least to dematerialization. Person-

age becomes cloud; the dreamer becomes his world.

This scene presents an archetypal hypotyposis. "Hypotyposis

paints things in so vivid and energetic a fashion that it places them
as if before one's eyes, and transforms a tale or a description into an
image, a painting, or even a living scene."^^ Such is the true madness

of vision. It is precisely within this figure that the visual image is

confounded with the rhetorical image, placing it at the threshold of

the hallucinatory. Neither Jansenist erasure nor Cartesian certainty,

but poetic madness.

Inauspiciously, the subsequent paragraph of Nerval's text
offers a tragic finale to this otherwise sublime vision. "I collided with
a bit of damaged wall, at the foot of which lay the bust of a woman.
Upon picking it up, I was convinced that it was hers."^^ Sublimation
is countered by desublimation; euphoria becomes tragedy, the gold-
en sun and azure sky are clouded by the black sun of melancholia
and death. At this point beyond hope, revealing "the agonizing

finitude of the subject," and prefiguring Nerval's imminent sui-

cide he hears voices that reveal to him the unavoidable finale that

we have already seen in La Fontaine and Pascal, one which sets the

lugubrious mood of the Pascalian garden: "Night has fallen on the

Universe!"4

63
A degraded paradise is perhaps worse than a degraded hell.

Robert Smithson
The Libidinal Sublime
Libertine Gardens of the

Enlightenment

/n his
his last

imprisonment
will and testament, written
at Charenton,
in 1806 during
Donatien Alphonse
Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) gave very explicit

instructions about his burial. He wished to be laid to rest

at his property at Malmaison,

without ceremony of any kind, in the first copse standing to the right as the

said wood is entered from the side of the old chateau by way of the broad lane

dividing it. The ditch opened in this copse shall be dug by the farmer tenant

of Malmaison The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be

strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back

thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth

as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nev-

ertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and

of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave.'

Coming from the author of The 120 Days of Sodom (1784), Justine

(1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1793), and Juliette (1798), these

words suggesting his desire to create an anti-monument, in tacit

defiance of the monumentalization of figures such as Jean-Jacques

Rousseau might appear strange, disingenuous, excessively literary,

even romantic. They were, in fact, at least partially in accord with

the sentiments of the time. In his study. The Architecture of Death:

The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris,

Richard A. Etlin traces the history of the shift: from the ideals and

65
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

practices of intramuros burial in churchyards to burial within land-

scape gardens, revealing the conflicting paradigms of city versus

countryside, formalism versus informality in landscape architecture,

public versus private property and space.

The origin of this transformation was inspired by the writings

of the Swiss pastoral poet Salomon Gessner, whose Idyllen (Idylls,

1756) received the greatest admiration from writers (including

Rousseau), landscape architects, and the general public, and
spawned many imitators, especially in France. This work established
a sentimentality based on Arcadian values and the virtues of every-

day life, stressing exemplary domestic behavior, sweet melancholy,

and gentle nostalgia. It is from the Idylls that the practice of making

sentimental visits to the tomb of the beloved arose; this inspired, for

the rich, a transformation of landscape architecture such that the

funerary monuments that had previously graced the landscape

(notably in the English garden) would be replaced by actual tombs.

As these beliefs and practices were contemporary with catastrophi-

cally worsening conditions in the insalubrious and lugubrious
Parisian cemeteries, there developed a strong practical impetus to

transfer death to Arcadia, with the consequent attenuation of

macabre terrors. The picturesque replaced the sublime, vanitas and

memento mori disappeared, in an Edenic scenarization of death.

The epitome of this practice, which has never ceased to

inspire both landscape architecture and literature, is the burial place

of Rousseau at Ermenonville, the estate of the Marquis de Girardin,

where the author spent the last weeks of his life and was buried in

1778 in a tomb that immediately became a site of touristic pilgrim-

age and artistic inspiration. The author of Z,^ Nouvelle Helo'ise (1761),
to which so much of the French taste for the picturesque is indebt-

ed, was buried on a small poplar-encircled island, the He des

Peupliers, in a landscape inspired by both the English landscape gar-

den (particularly William Shenstone's estate at The Leasowes) and

Rousseau's own novels, the landscape contained a copy of the

Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, the Tower of Gabrielle (inspired by

Gabrielle d'Estrees), an Indian teepee, a hermitage, and numerous
other follies. Etlin describes the monument to Rousseau:

(>(>
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

At Ermenonville, the Marquis de Girardin offered an Arcadian version of

Stowe s Elysian Fields. In place of a Temple of Ancient Virtues with busts of

Lycurgus, Socrates, Homer, and Epaminondas, Girardin erected a Temple of

Modern Philosophy with columns consecrated to Newton (Light), Descartes

(Physics), Voltaire (Satire), Penn (Humanity), Montesquieu (Justice), and

Rousseau (Nature). With the last column dedicated to Rousseau, this unfin-

ished monument stood as an incitement for future generations to complete

the work through further contributions to mankind.^

The property also included other monuments and tombs, notably-

one that commemorated a spot where Rousseau often rested during

his promenades, the Alter of Reverie, a red brick obelisk dedicated

to poets "who excelled in presenting the sweet image of nature":
Theocritus, Virgil, Gessner, and James Thomson.^ Here, the univer-
sality of rational knowledge combined with the sundry inspirations
of poetry to celebrate, within the garden itself, those sources that

served as the aesthetic and intellectual paradigms for the contempo-

rary landscape.

Rousseau's tomb immediately inspired the development of

funerary architecture and cemetery landscaping, both theoretically

and practically. On the one hand, it served as a model for works such
as Christian Hirschfeld's Theorie de I'art des jardins (1779-85), Abbe
Delille's influential poem, Les Jardins (1782), and Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre's Etude de la nature (1784). Etlin describes the common themes

of these works:
All three authors shared a common conviction about the moral force of the

pastoral and elegiac landscape garden. None of them coiJd tolerate thejardin

anglo-chinois, which was becoming so popular in France, with its mbcture of

scenes from all countries Greek temples, Christian hermitages, Chinese

kiosks and bridges, Gothic ruins, Turkish tents, Egyptian obelisks, and assort-

ed tombs. Delille explicidy condemned gardens that assembled the "four cor-
"4
ners of the world into one park.

Rather, they called for a pictorially coherent pastoral setting, with

both visual and poetic unification. And yet, another sort of hetero-

geneity prevailed in these Elysian Fields, as Bernardin insisted:

In the cemetery individual tastes and caprice would ensure variety. In a na-

tional Elysium, one had to legislate against the ever-present threat of visual

67
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

monotony. Thus all types of monuments were to be erected here

"obelisks,

columns, pyramids, urns, bas-reliefs, medallions, statues, pedestals, peristyles,

and domes." The tombs and mausoleums would be fashioned from stones of

all colors so that they would not seem to have come from the same quarry.'

One subtle aspect of the reaction against the geometric formality of

the jardin a lafrangaiseyfzs this manner of amalgamating vastly dif-

ferent tastes and styles in a confluence that would harmonize the

cemetery with the landscape. The variety of individual styles in

death would, ideally, be no less than that in life. In practice, these

considerations informed the first cemetery designed as a landscape

garden, P^re Lachaise, established in 1804 in Paris. Here was found

penciled in 1813 a telling poem that concluded with the line, "For

the home of the dead has become a new Eden."^

And yet, Eros would share its place with Thanatos in these

landscapes, where the originary sin of Adam and Eve that led to
human mortality would be infinitely repeated in the most extreme
libertine scenarios. For the great French parks of the eighteenth cen-
tury, while providing the sites for tombs and monuments, were also

settings for the follies and pleasure houses of the aristocracy, the

locations par excellence for the ultimate refinements of the arts de

vivre of the ancien regime. Typical is the Pare de Monceau in Paris,

designed by Carmontelle in 1773 for the Due de Chartres; though it

contained a Bois des Tombeaux that sheltered varied monuments, it

was conceived as a veritable amusement park. Carmontelle offers the

rationale for this creation:

It was hardly an English garden that one was hoping to create at Monceau,

but exacdy what it was being criticized for, the uniting in one garden of all

times and places. It is a simple fantasy, the desire to have an extraordinary gar-

den, a pure amusement If one can transform a picturesque garden into a

land of illusions, why not do so, since only illusions amuse ... we should bring

the changing scenes of opera into our gardens, letting us see, in reality, what

the most accomplished painters offer on canvas all periods and places.

Here, heterogeneity is valorized as a fianction of pleasure, seduction,

and libertinage, not of the totalizing effects of Enlightenment egali-

tarianism or universal reason; taste follows both fashion and the

sundry demands of the passions. Based on an assembly of ephemer-

68
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

al fashion and artistic style, the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos

in these gardens would serve worldly, rather than spiritual, desires.

Among the other gardens noteworthy in this regard is

Maupertuis, designed in the decades of the 1770s and the 1780s by

Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart for the Marquis de Montesquieu.
This estate contained two stylistically antithetical gardens linked by

an underground passage: a formal garden, attached to the chateau

designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and a pastoral anglo-Chinese
garden referred to as the "Elysee" because of its beauty that was
entered through a pyramid designed according to Masonic princi-

ples.The latter contained a tomb, erected near the pyramid, in

memory of the Protestant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, killed dur-
ing the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Another garden in this lineage, albeit in a much lighter sym-

bolic mode, existed at the estate of Betz and was created by Louis-
Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Conde, for his mistress, Marie-
Catherine de Brignole, Princesse de Monaco. It was designed in part

by the landscape painter Hubert Robert, according to the pic-

turesque melancholy of his painterly style. The gardens contained a

Gothic turret, an Oriental kiosk, a Chinese bridge, a druid's temple,

a pavilion of repose, a ruined Roman bath, a hermitage, Tancred's

Column, and an obelisk. Two of its most important features were

the Temple of Friendship (often characterized as a parthenon of

love) and the Valley of Tombs, which contained several monuments

taken from the recently dismantled Cemetery of the Holy Inno-
cents in Paris, including a sixteenth-century obelisk and ancient
tombstones.

It must be remembered that such artificial ruins in the landscape

served both as mementi won and as symbols of the "work" of nature.

In L'Invention de la liberte, Jean Starobinski explains.
The poetics of ruins is always a reverie before the invasion of forgetfiil-

ness It has been said that in order for a ruin to appear beautiful, the act of

destruction must be far removed, and its precise circumstances must be

69
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

forgotten. Henceforth, it can be ascribed to an anonymous power, to a face-

less transcendence: History, Destiny.^

Starobinski cites the author Georg Simmel to explain the uncanny

powers of these effects,

However, as one can speak of ruins and not of heaps of stone, nature does not

permit the work to fall into an amorphous state of raw matter; a new form is

born that, from nature's point of view, is absolutely significative, comprehen-

sible, differentiated. Nature has made of the artwork the matter of its cre-

ation, just as previously art used nature as its material.

The ruin evokes melancholy because it is both a sign of meaning lost

and an omen of death to come. As in the experience of the sublime,

but on a more intimate scale, the ruin offers a spectacle of the
omnipotent will of nature, of the nonhuman dimension of exis-

tence this is the prime emotion of the Gothic sensibility.

Yet Sade was not a Gothic author; his conception of nature

was terrifyingly mechanistic and modern. None of Sade's properties

shared these ostentations; rather, his theatricality was focused, first

on the private theater in his chateau at La Coste in the Luberon

region of Provence, the place of his greatest libertine freedom, and

later in the even more private theater of his novels. Furthermore, it

should be noted that upon his death in 1814, Sade's will was not
respected, since the estate of Malmaison had been sold four years

earlier. After receiving a religious ceremony he was buried, against

his express wishes, in the cemetery of the hospice of Charenton,

where he had long been imprisoned. His grave bore a simple head-
stone bearing a simple cross, with no name engraved upon it.'

For Sade, and for many during the eighteenth century,

Petrarch's passion for Laura was the most extreme and perfect

expression of romantic love. Ermenonville, for example, contained

among its ftinerary monuments a factitious tomb of Laura di

Audiberto di Noves, engraved with verses by Petrarch and symboli-

cally situated at the source of a spring. But for D. A. F. Sade the con-
nection was even more profound, as he was directly descended from
Laura's husband, the proven^al nobleman Ugo di Sade. This gene-
alogical connection was not lost upon Sade's uncle, the Abbe de Sade,

who had written Memoires pour la vie de Frangois Petrarque (1J64.-J).

 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

One night, D. A. F. Sade had a dream, described in a letter to his

wife, penned in the prison of Vincennes on 17 February 1779:

All of a sudden, she appeared to me. I saw her! The horror of the tomb had

not at all altered the glow of her charms, and her eyes still retained as much

fire as when Petrarch glorified them. She was entirely shrouded in black satin,

upon which her beautiful blond hair loosely floated. It seemed that love, in

order to render her even more beautifiil, wished to soften the lugubrious attire

in which she offered herself to my eyes. "Why do you lament your fate?" she

asked. "Come join me. There is no more suffering, no more sorrow, no more

discord in the vast space I inhabit. Have the courage to follow me.""

This might well be seen as a classic prisoners dream. Yet, however

romantic this vision might have been, it did not thematically inspire

Sade's literary endeavors. It would not be through a romantic nostal-

gia for love, unrequited or otherwise, that this prisoner would dream
his freedom. Rather, in a gesture that reaches the limits of the liter-

ary imagination, Sade ^whose sensibilities were divided between an

aristocratic style derived from the ancien regime and a philosophy

inspired by materialistic thought ^would transform the closed

milieu of the prison into its opposite, a totally eroticized universe.

Rather than looking towards Laura as emblematic of a literary

enterprise (for in any case that had already been accomplished by

Petrarch at the dawn of the Renaissance), we might consider anoth-

er image that graced Sade's captivity: a picture of Vesuvius that

adorned his prison walls.'^ Here the spectacular, rich, fertile land-

scapes of Provence, adored by both Petrarch and Sade, gave way to

another ideal of nature terrifying, accursed, and destructive.

Consequently, the implicit morbidity whereby love and death were

symbolically joined in the contemporary landscape garden was here

made hyperbolically explicit. In his Voyage d'ltalie, Sade describes

visits to several famed volcanoes of that country. He first saw

Pietramala:

The terrain around it is sandy, uncultivated, and full of stones. As one

advances, the excessive heat and the odor of carbon and charcoal that it

exhales is felt for more than a hundred steps around. Coming closer, one sees

the hearth that perpetually burns, with all the more ardor when it rains. This

heanh is presendy open for only about fifteen or twenty paces around. But

71
Chateau de Sade, La Coste
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

the totality of its circumference is approximately double that, which can be

confirmed by digging into the earth to the extent I mention. As one excavates

within this circle, fire appears and seems to light up under the very instru-

ment used for digging. The earth at the middle of the hearth is baked, burnt

out, and black. That around it, though still within the volcano, is like clay,

with a certain moistness that makes it possible to shape it as one wishes. It has

the same odor as the volcano, which is not the case for that which is already

burnt. The flame that comes out of the hearth is extremely ardent; it instan-

taneously burns and consumes everything thrown into it. It is violet in color

and similar to that of a flamed spirit of wine. ^'

Later during his voyage he visited the volcano of Solfatare, and final-

ly that of Vesuvius, which he describes as follow^s:

We climbed for two hours, of which the second part was the most difficult.

For the last quarter hour the sand was very hot. A hundred steps before arriv-
ing one discovers a large number of small mouths of smoke that give the air

and the atmosphere an unbearable taste of sulfur. The entire surface of the

funnel or flange of the ancient mouth is fiill of sulfur and saltpeter; the little

valley formed by the accretions of the new mouth or new mountain is con-

siderable. One first descends into this litde valley and then ascends on the

flange of the little mountain, from which one then looks straight into all the

horror of the terrifying abyss that serves as reservoir for the hearth. A fright-
ful noise arises from there, smoke of considerable thickness issues forth, and

from time to time thick flames shoot out with great force and throw forth

very large stones, in an altogether horrible spectacle. '4

These descriptions where the picturesqueness encountered in

most of the rest of Voyage d'ltalie almost, but not quite, gives way to
the sublime certainly correspond with what most travelers of the
period would have noticed. '5 However, these descriptions were

transformed in Sade's novels into symbols of the most extreme

counter-sublime of the erotic. For as Philippe Roger suggests.

Nature shows her true face: that of indifference to humanity, of havoc, of

destruction Therefore, there exists a proof by volcano. And even, by

means of the volcano, the suggestion of a counter-progress, of a march

towards cataclysm The progress of volcanoes is the advent of evil. Those

of Tuscany begin with Pietramala, and it is upon this evil stone that Sadian

philosophy is built.'^
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Consider the passage in Juliette, in which Clairwil and JuHette lead

the unfortunate Olympe up the slope of Vesuvius, to rape and tor-

ture her:

At length, after two hours of unremitting vexations, we picked her up by

her bound hands and feet, carried her to the brink, and let her fall. Down
she went into the volcano, and for several minutes we listened to the sounds

of her body crashing from ledge to ledge, being torn by the sharp outcrop-

ping rocks: gradually the sounds subsided, and then we heard nothing

more. '7

The awe and terror that traditionally characterized aesthetic expres-

sions of the sublime are here ironically inverted by making literal

that which underlies the inherent power of the sublime, the anxiety
related to mortality; all pretense to higher values is consequently
undercut. Clairwil, perpetrator of this crime, then exclaims, "Well,

I say, if what we have done is a true outrage to Nature, then let her
avenge herself, for she can if she wishes; let an eruption occur, let

lava boil up from that inferno down there, let a cataclysm snuff out
our lives this very instant."'^ Indeed, Sade had always imagined the
possibility of an apocalyptic eruption of Vesuvius, one that would
bury the entirety of Naples in molten lava and black ash, trans-

forming it into an unfathomable mortuary. Even more cosmically

terrifying, in The 120 Days ofSodom, one character, Curval, imagines

the ultimate crime, to attack the sun, either to deprive the world of

it, or else to use its flames to destroy the earth.

Nature as a destructive principle is the foundation of Sadian

ontology. Philippe Roger sums up the implications of this vision by

claiming, in regard to Vesuvius, that "Sadian eros is this volcano."^^

This extreme symbolization of the relations between libertinage and

nature implies a cosmology described throughout his writings, based

on the ultimate extrapolation of contemporary atheistic, materialis-

tic, and mechanistic principals derived from works such as Julien

Ofifroy de la Mettrie's L'Homme-Machine (1748) and Paul Henri

Thiry d'Holbach's Systeme de la nature (1770). Sade's perverse version
of these theories can be gleaned from the following excerpt from
Justine, which regards the "sublime and sure manner" in which
nature attains its ends:

74
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion, which agi-

tates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of

crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only; the person who most near-

ly resembles her, and therefore the most perfect being, necessarily will be the

one whose most active agitation will become the cause of many crimes.

. . . Equilibrium must be preserved; it can only be preserved by crimes; there-

fore, crimes serve Nature; if they serve her, if she demands them, if she desires

them, can they offend her? And who else can be offended if she is not?^

Never has the sentiment "everything is permitted" had a more terri-

fying expression; even the Hbertine's most wanton deeds are justified,

as they can only serve nature's bhnd purposes, according to which

the destiny of every individual is never anything other than total dis-

appearance. The volcano among the greatest destructive forces

is both symbol and active principle of this mechanistic universe. In

this philosophical system, the sublime disappears, becoming just

one more instance of a universal causality.

Sade situated the Chateau of Silling, the isolated site of debauchery

in The 120 Days ofSodom, on top of a mountain in the Black Forest.

Indeed, the description of the site corresponds not only to an ideal

place of libertinage, but also precisely to what many writers would

imagine as an ideal refuge for meditation. Yet it is not its pic-

turesqueness that is attractive in both regards, but rather the fact

that the chateau exists beyond all possibility of communication with

the outside world:

He will observe with what great care they had chosen a remote and isolat-

ed retreat, as if silence, distance, and stillness were libertinage's potent vehi-

cles, and as if everything which through these qualities instills a religious

terror in the senses had necessarily and evidently to bestow additional

charm upon lust.^'

Here, the natural sublime coincides with the existential antinomy of

Eros andThanatos. The architecture of Silling is a phantasmic amal-

gam of the prison (Vincennes, La Bastille) and the theater (La

Coste)." Rarely would the literary effects of sublimation disclose

75

 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

scenes of such intense desublimation as those narrated at SiUing,

with such conviction that Sade's name became synonymous with the
perversion of sexual cruelty. How, then, could such hyperbolically

dystopian erotic fantasies inform landscape architecture?

"Utopia" implies a finite spatial or systemic closure that per-
mits an infinite affective or imaginative openness. The fixed nature

of any icon, architectural or otherwise, is always perturbed by the

open-ended variability of the narratives to which it is susceptible.

The architectural icon is sublated, often effaced, in perverse, aber-

rant, and abnormal stagings in the theater of desire, where the trau-
mas, enigmas, and joys of sexuality are abreacted and narrated. Such
mutability would seem to be antithetical to the inherent solidity of

architecture, suggesting a paradox at the core of any utopianism.

Architectural erotics evinces the contradictory need for a public,

communal, utilitarian, mercantile, statistically determined realm

(for example, the variegated yet stereotyped erotics of the brothel)

and a private, solipsistic, phantasmic, fetishistic, idiosyncratic

domain (such as the quotidian counter-architectural darkness of the

bedroom).
A resolution to this problem, however improbable, would be
an architecture or landscape architecture that exists as narrative. This
is hinted at by Chantal Thomas, who suggests, in a not uncommon
amalgam of Sade and Antonin Artaud that offers new insights into

the "theater of cruelty," that "the promenade in a Sadian garden fol-

lows step by step the path of, 'a pain that, to the extent that it

increases in intensity and penetration, multiplies its avenues and its

riches in all the circles of sensibility.' "^^ In Sade, however, only in

very rare instances is the garden depicted as a narrative, much less

allegorical, site of libertinage. One of its few mentions is in Juliette:

The weather that evening was fauhless; we were beneath a bower of roses

with Hiac bushes all around us; a multitude of candles furnished the light,

our seats were three thrones supported on artificial clouds whence came the

scent of the most delicious perfumes; in the center of the table was a very

mountain of the rarest flowers, set amongst which were the jade and porce-

lain cups and plates we were to drink from and dine off; the service was of

gold. No sooner had we taken our places than the bower opened overhead

76
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

and before our eyes there descended a fiery cloud: upon it, the Three Furies

and, imprisoned in the coils of their serpents, the three victims destined to

be sacrificed at this feast.^4

Iconographically, this eminently synaesthetic scene is informed by

baroque theater more than by landscape architecture or gastronomy;
here, in a perverse symbolization of the Eros-Thanatos connection,
garden is equivalent to cemetery. Nature is both destructive force in
itself and the setting for the subsidiary, but not negligible, destruc-

tive forces of the libertine imagination. For Sade, funerary architec-

ture is never nostalgically soothing, but actively disquieting, dystopi-

an rather than Utopian.

The scenarization of the passions as landscape was not new to

French literature. This parallel is summed up by Louis Aragon in Le

paysan de Paris, "Opposed to received opinion, it was not for osten-

tatious display that Louis xiv built Versailles, but for love, which is

also majestic, with its hiding places of trimmed hedges, its prome-
nades in grottos, and its insane population of statues."^^ The literary

origin of such a position was defined by Madeleine de Scudery

(1607-1701) in her La Promenade de Versailles (1669), in which the
royal gardens were represented as a lieu galant in a narrative that

served a double role: the detailed descriptions documented the real

site, while the plot utilized the garden as both background for
events and symbolic space. The codes of gallantry were regulated by

the festivals and divertissements of the gardens; the hyperbolic

praise of Versailles allegorically reflected the ideal perfections of lit-

erature; and the psychological development of character, in a near-

ly Cartesian analysis of the passions of the soul, was proffered in the

context of an etiquette and a value system manifested in the con-

text of the gardens and the palaces of the epoch.^^
The documentary realism of La Promenade de Versailles is

counterbalanced in another of Scudery s works, Clelie (1654-60),

one of the best-selling novels of the seventeenth century, in which
the geographical allegory of La Carte de Tendre, included in the form

of a map, offers the fantasy of an imaginary country, a masterpiece

in the genre of alternate worlds.^7 What began as a parlor game
tracing the progress of the protagonist Pelisson's attempts to gain the

77
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

friendship of Sappho was eventually concretized when the map

was engraved in 1660 and subsequently incorporated into Clelie.

The Pays de Tendre an allegory of friendship rather than love is

bordered on the west by the Sea of Enmity, on the east by the Lake
of Indifference, and on the north by the Dangerous Sea separating
it from the Unknown Lands of passionate love. The voyager may
travel to three cities: Love by Esteem, Love by Inclination, and Love
by Gratitude; the routes are varied, and one may pass, for example,
from New Friendship to Complacency, Submission, Little

Attentions, Assiduousness, Haste, Great Services, Sensibility,

Tenderness, Obedience, and Confident Friendship to arrive at Love

by Esteem; or, to the contrary, one may travel through the distress-

ing ways of Negligence, Inequality, Lukewarmness, Levity, and

Forgetting to arrive at the Lake of Indifference; or one may even fol-

low the more painful path of Indiscretion, Perfidy, Slander, and

Wickedness to finally reach the tormented Isle of Enmity. In
Scudery s work, the garden as allegory of friendship also serves as

allegory of literature, and we are always reminded that between the

two extreme states of the soul those of the melancholy artist and

the worldly courtesan the garden variously exists in the role of

poem, narrative, symbol, allegory, and phantasm.

This narrativization of love, in a decidedly more libertine

mode, is also evident in Jean-Fran9ois de Bastide s La petite maison

(The Little House, 1879), where the veritable co-protagonist in a tale

of erotic seduction is an eighteenth-century maison de plaisance, a

pleasure house, epitomizing what Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of
Space celebrates as "topophilia," the love of "felicitous space." The
seduction is orchestrated according to the manner in which the var-

ious aspects of the houses and gardens constructions variously

engage the five senses. The famous quip that "eroticism is a matter

of lighting" is apposite here for where there is architecture there is

light, designed according to structural and existential needs. As dusk

descends, the seducer Tremicour leads the innocent Melite into the

exquisite salon where, "These thirty candles reflected in the mirrors,

and this added brilliance made the salon seem larger and restated the

object of Tremicour s impatient desires. "^^ The seduction then

78
 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

continues in the boudoir, where there is an explicit equivalence

between the two major sites of seduction, bedroom and garden.

The walls of the boudoir were covered with mirrors whose joinery was con-

cealed by carefully sculpted, leafy tree trunks. The trees, arranged to give the

illusion of a quincunx, were heavy with flowers and laden with chandeliers.

The light from their many candles receded into the opposite mirrors, which

had been purposely veiled with hanging gauze. So magical was this optical

eflFect that the boudoir could have been mistaken for a natural woods, lit with

thehelpofart.^9

But it is not within this simulacra! space that the denouement

occurs, for they leave the house to attain the garden itself, where,

upon entering on a narrow path, a well-orchestrated cannon shot

throws Melite into the Marquis's arms, at which point he holds her
tightly: "Affronted by this intimate gesture, she was about to free

herself with equal vivacity when the sudden flash of fireworks

revealed in the reckless man's eyes a deep and submissive love."'

Here, light is an expedient somewhat on the erotic/ontological

level of chocolate or alcohol than

rather symbolic form. While
a

for Madeleine de Scudery the garden served as an allegorical site, for

Bastide architecture constituted an operative co-protagonist. Yet,

while the "little house" is perhaps ideal, it is hardly Utopian in the

strict sense of the term: it proffers but one fantasy, one narrative, one
architecture, one seduction.
In contradistinction, Anthony Vidler suggests that in both

Sade and Charles Fourier, "the fiction of 'architecture' as tradition-

ally understood, was dropped in favor of an art of endless mechani-

cal manipulation of space a kind of literal parallel to the mecha-
nization of eroticism in their texts through repetition and
systematization."^^ Such architecture is contemporaneous with the
anti-Enlightenment inauguration of a modernist erotics, exempli-

fied by the combinatory system of the simple and complex passions

developed in The 120 Days ofSodom. Unlike delicately decorated and
orchestrated libertine sites such as the "little house," the Chateau of

Silling constitutes the scandalous extreme of the most radical

liaisons. The apparently panoptical organization of the chateau is

ultimately belied by its secret chambers of indeterminable form,

79
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

places where unseeable pleasures and unspeakable horrors are enact-

ed, into which the libertines lead their victims, from which screams
are heard, and of which no tales are told. These invisible, dark,

untold activities constitute a textual supplement that, if deter-

minable, would totalize the erotic combinatory system. As Barthes

suggests, "all of Sadian syntax is thus in search of the total figure."^^

But such erotic closure is impossible because the libido is infi-

nitely malleable, conjunctive, and copulative and because not all

things erotic have their place: Eros exists as the aporia between the

imaginable and the unimaginable, gesture and speech, desire and

act. In Sade, the fiill richness and ambiguity of eroticism reigns, with
all its terrors and delights. Sade wrote of spaces that are obscene
because haunted by death, sites fascinating because ruled by pure
metamorphosis, scenes excessive because literature necessarily

extends beyond the limits of any single imagination, realms seduc-

tive because they permit phantasmic projection, theaters porno-
graphic because of the unspeakable promiscuity that is the essence

of the libido, domains transgressive because adequate symbolic

articulation is no longer possible.^^

In the Encyclopedic, Denis Diderot defines "libertinage" as

"the practice of yielding to the instinct that carries us to the plea-

sures of the senses; it does not respect mores, but it does not pretend
to defy them: it is without delicacy and justifies its choices only by

its inconstancy; it holds the middle line between voluptuousness

and debauchery. "34 According to this definition, the libertinage

manifested in Sade's life in no way corresponds to the debauchery

manifested in his writings, which certainly surpassed all limits of

defiance and voluptuousness. Rather, in Sade's erotic theatricaliza-

tions, eroticism was raised to the level of epistemology. This meta-

physical libertinage is scenarized in what Vidler suggests is a solip-

sistic architecture that reverses the modes of eighteenth-century

theatricality, since the staging of desire by the elite brotherhood that
rules Silling conflates author, spectator, and actor. As the storytellers'

lubricious tales inflame the masters' imaginations, the narrated

scenes are forthwith enacted by the masters and their victims.

Whence the key to this architectural paradox: in Sade, language is

 THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

theater is architecture is eroticism. Only through this conflation of

ontological realms can a truly erotic architecture exist.

This "solution" was hinted at by Roland Barthes, who ex-

plained that in Sade the enclosure circumscribes the imaginary sys-

tem, which in turn permits and organizes the speech that gives rise

to, and pervades, Sadian Eros. This subversive textual machine of

perpetual erotic motion where representation is tantamount to
deformation
"always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis."^^

Barthes concludes that the Sadian city, the Chateau of Silling, is "the

sanctuary not of debauchery, but of the 'story.'

"3*^
One might add,
on the ethical level, that in literature, destruction and production are

indistinguishable. From the aesthetic point of view, cannot architec-

ture and gardens be productively contaminated and perverted by

these lessons in erotics and rhetoric?

Architecture as phantasm, architecture as theater, architecture

as language: these three paradigms, when conflated, offer an incon-

trovertible though unbuildable anti-utopia and, when separated,

offer partial and unsatisfactory realities. Yet this does not mean that

Bastide's "little house" and gardens offer a mere architectural dandy-

ism that can never equal the hedonistic delights of the most banal
darkened bedroom in a bleak, anonymous hotel. For sex without
symbol entails a pantheon without Eros, inviting the worst forms of
repression and threatening the very existence of the imagination and
the arts. In this regard, the link between Eros and Thanatos a task

that any valid metaphysics must attempt, and one that Sade accom-
plished in so awe-inspiring a manner is crucial. Erotic Utopias

always approximate shadowy necropolises.

In December 1937, Maurice Heine drove Georges Bataille (both

great interpreters of Sade) and Bataille's companion Laure (Colette

Peignot), to the spot where Sade had wished to be buried, on the
grounds of his property at Malmaison. Bataille and Laure repeated
the journey in March 1938, this time in the company of Michel
Leiris. There was not much to be seen. That night Laure was taken
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

ill with violent fever; the illness worsened in the weeks to follow, and
she suffered greatly, referring to her agony as a "flowery corrida." She

died on 7 November 1938. Soon after, as Bataille climbed the hill

towards the cemetery to visit her grave, he reminisced on their

ascent of Mount Aetna:

After a long while, halfway up the hill, feeling increasingly lost, I recalled the

ascent of Aetna, and felt suddenly overwhelmed. Everything was just as black

and as subtly inftised with terror as on that night when Laure and I climbed

Aetna's slopes Arriving at dawn on the crest of the vast, bottomless crater

we were exhausted, with our eyes almost starting out of their sockets in a soli-

tude too strange, too catastrophic. There was that shattering moment when
we leaned over the gaping wound, the crack in that star on which we drew

breath.'^

Bataille continued, in truly Sadian fashion, to remark, "One could

not possibly imagine a place which demonstrated more clearly the
fearful instability of things. "^^ He then entered the cemetery, where
in the extreme darkness the graves appeared as vague white forms,
with only one exception: "But Laure's grave, overgrown, formed
do not know why the only absolutely black area. "^9 It was uncan-
ny how Laure's tomb had come to resemble the one Sade had
desired, a coincidence that might permit one to evoke the lamenta-
tion of Petrarch's Fourteenth Ode, "nor could it ever leave the trou-

bled flesh in a more quiet grave."

82
/ confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the

order of time and development.

Henry David Thoreau
No Mans Garden
New England Transcendentalism and
the Invention of Virgin Nature

TT" m enry David Thoreau (1817-62) detested gardens. In

M^^^J the forests of Maine he discovered remote, "virgin"

m m nature, and the view from atop Mount Ktaadn

^L -^ inspired him to v^rite, in The Maine Woods:
This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old

Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not

lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-

land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made

for ever and ever.'

The geometric garden in particular was anathema to him, as he

explains in his essay "Walking" (originally entitled "The Wild"). He

celebrated "A people who would begin by burning the fences and let

the forest stand!"

I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie,

and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heav-

en had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and

fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked

again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surround-

ed by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones,

where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of

Darkness was his surveyor.^

Thoreau described himself as a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a

natural philosopher, and, like his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

founder of New England transcendentalism, he believed that there

exists a metaphysical need for communion with nature, a need man-
ifested by a romantic individualism stressing personal autonomy in
opposition to the social conformity and nascent commercialism of
American culture. This reformist philosophy, imbued with a pan-
theistic belief in the unity of creation, is a moral philosophy more
attuned to sensitivity than system; it stresses the primacy of person-
al insight as a direct access to truth and beauty, with the experience
of a sublimated, spiritualized nature at its ontological core. Indeed,

New England transcendentalism a philosophy in which ethics,

aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology are indissociable is articu-

lated by one foundational principle: nature.

For Emerson and Thoreau, to philosophize was to poetize.

Thoreau consummated this communion by means of his philo-

sophical practice of walking or sauntering, which provided him a

direct, contemplative link with nature. While the meditative stroll is

hardly uncommon to writers and philosophers, walking, for

Thoreau, was raised to the form of an art. It is an art of transience,

as indicated in a poem included in "Walking," entitled "The Old
Marlborough Road," which defines the road:
What is it, what is it,

But a direaion out there,

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?
The poem suggests that every direction is of equal value, since it

concludes with the lines.

You may go round the world,

By the Old Marlborough Road.'

And though Thoreau's own experiences at Walden Pond, the

Adirondacks, and the Maine woods suggest that the natural settings
of the East Coast offered sufficient scenarios to support his tran-
scendental philosophical values, it was in fact towards another nat-

ural setting, one beginning to excite the American imagination, to

which he looked (even though he only once voyaged there):

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as

distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to

86
 NO MANS GARDEN

migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western

Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-

ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gild-

ed by his rays. The island of Adantis, and the islands and gardens of the

Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West

of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imag-

ination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and

the foundation of all those fables?"*

How diflFerent is this sentiment regarding the setting sun from La

Fontaine's, for whom the disappearance of the solar orb resuked in

the anguishing thought that "Night arrives on a chariot led by

Silence; Bringing with it fear into the Universe" ?5 Thoreau fanta-

sized the West at the last historic moment that it evoked wonder and
signified the unknown in European and American thought; the
hyperbole in which the West was rhetorically and poetically figured
symbolized a form of the imagination that had very definite practi-
cal effects on its representation and the struggle for its preservation.

For Thoreau the East Europewas equated with art, literature,

and history; it was the West, to the contrary, that offered the pure

setting for the transcendental spiritual values to which he aspired. As

he insisted:

I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer,

fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, our understanding more comprehen-
sive and broader, like our plains, our intellect generally on a grander scale,

like our thunder and lightening, our rivers and mountains and forests, and
our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our

inland seas.^

This psycho-geography is as telling for Thoreau's poetics as it is for

his sense of nature: his ideal was the poets who "nailed words to their

primitive senses" and for whom "words were so true and fresh and
natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the

approach of spring."7 The apparent naivete of these sentiments cor-

responds with his continued metaphorizing of American nature in
terms of paradise (an allegory already evident in Elizabethan litera-

ture), though it is an idealization most certainly belied by his polit-

ical astuteness and radicalness, as well as his recognition of the

87
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

country's ascendant technology. He understood that paradise is

always already paradise lost, and that it can only be regained in spir-

it, or more precisely in writing, and not in any worldly site. For
example, the complexity and ambivalence of Thoreau's reaction to
the railroad is evident in the following citation, where in an
extreme example of mixed metaphor the locomotive is simultane-
ously allegorized in cosmological, meteorological, mythological,

biomorphic, and anthropomorphic terms:

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving oflf with planetary

motion, or, rather, Hke a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that

velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit

does not look like a returning curve, with ip steam cloud like a banner

streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud
which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, as

if this travelling demi-god, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sun-

set sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills

echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breath-

ing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery drag-

on they will put into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth

had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.

Indeed, Thoreau was well aware of the advances of technology; he

wrote of the railroad, which passed quite close to his idyllic Walden
Pond, "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns
aside."^

Thoreau grasped nature in terms of its wholeness, not in terms of

picturesque, aestheticized scenery. This plenitude and totality was
literally divided and parceled out by the railway, which fulfilled

America's "manifest destiny" and transformed its aesthetic future.

The first American railway system was built in 1829, and its devel-

opment increased exponentially beginning around 1844, at the onset

of the American industrial revolution. Indeed, the parceling out,

and ultimately the preservation, of vast tracts of Western lands was
in part a direct result of the incursions of the railroad, for not only
 NO MANS GARDEN

were huge rights-of-way granted to the raihoad companies by the

government in exchange for their service, but the companies were
also given vast tracts for logging.

The irony is apparent, and catastrophic: the raihoad despoils

the very landscapes it makes accessible. Though many areas ulti-

mately had to be saved from hideous spoilage by the railroad and

lumber companies, the constitution of both an activist and an aes-

thetic notion of untouched, virgin nature was the result of techno-

logical advances and incursions. As the railroad made these areas

more accessible, it also transformed the very structure of perception,

creating the sort of mobile, panoramic mode of visibility homolo-
gous with the vastness of these newfound spaces. The railroad
dialectic was tragic: while it emblematized panoramic space, creat-

ing the paradigm of the vast scale of nature upon which the National

Park system could be conceived, it simultaneously opened up this

territory to exploitation, necessitating a consequent preservation

(which was, needless to say, always belated). The myth of pure,

untouched nature was inaugurated at the moment of its decline,
expressed by the new conflict between nature and technology at the

interior of the sublime.

As Leo Marx demonstrates in The Machine in the Garden, this

historic juncture, which coincided with the first great generation of

North American writers, was marked by intimations of tragedy and

loss regarding the natural setting:

Much of the singular quality of this era is conveyed by the trope of the inter-

rupted idyll. The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and

noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power. It appears in the

woods, suddenly shattering the harmony of the green hollow, like a presenti-

ment of history bearing down on the American asylum.

Like the incursion of city politics at the opening of Virgil's Eclogues

(a major source of the pastoral sentiment in the history of European

and American literature), the synaesthetic presence of the railway in
the landscape motivated feelings of dislocation, alienation, intrusion,

anguish, and conflict, both psychological and social.

Emerson noted in his journal entry of 7 February 1843,

"Dreamlike traveling on the railroad. The towns which I pass

89
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

berween Philadelphia and New York make no distinct impression.

They are like pictures on a wall."' This description is in fact some-

what imprecise, as such views in fact cannot be perceived like a

painting on a wall. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey:

The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19 th Century, describes

the transformation of perception caused by the constantly increasing

quotient of speed in the industrial era. The gaze of the spectator

through the window of a fast-moving train is disoriented by the

effect that precise definition in visual perception is diminished by

velocity. Thus, when the spectator is in motion, the closer the object
is, the faster it appears to pass by, and the less detail is visible."

Victor Hugo described such a view from a train window in a letter

dated 22 August 1837:

The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather

streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a

streak; the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long

green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling

dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shadow, a shape, a specter appears
"'^
and disappears with lightening speed behind a window: it's a railway guard.

This effect utterly transforms both the nature of the consequent

"picture" of the landscape, framed by the train window, as well as the

ontological relationship between the spectator and the landscape.

The train traveler is cut off from immediate contact with the land-

scape being traversed, both by being encapsulated in the speeding

train and through the visual disappearance of the foreground. A dis-

continuity is thus created between the spectator and the distant
landscape, such that it is only at the horizon that the landscape
seems stable and motionless.
This effect exists in counterdistinction to the perceptual

immediacy of all earlier types of mobility most especially the cor-

poreal dynamism of walking that marked baroque aesthetics,

European Romanticism, and New England transcendentalism. The

speed of foot, horse or stagecoach travel was such that the voyager
was not perceptually dissociated from the foreground and thus
remained integrally connected to the landscape. Beyond a certain
perceptual threshold one augmented with every acclimatization to

90
 NO MANS GARDEN

increased speed of travel the observer is cut off from the observed

scene, which is consequently offered as a distant and distinct

panorama. Space becomes dynamic; distances shrink; the scale of

landscape becomes geographized; the "picture" through the train
window appears as panoramic; and the traveler is accorded the novel
ability of what one contemporary of Thoreau described as "the syn-

thetic philosophy of the blink of an eye."'^ Through this aestheti-

cization, foreground becomes abstract while background becomes

panorama. The French journalist Jules Claretie accurately described
this effect in 1865:

In a few hours, it shows you all of France, and before your eyes it unrolls its

infinite panorama, a vast succession of charming tableaux, of novel surprises.

Of a landscape it shows you only the great outlines, being an artist versed in

the ways of the masters. Don't ask it for details, but for the living whole. '^

The railroad established the world as a panorama, where the combi-

nation of speed, enclosure, and framing created a new modality of
landscape such that both the monotonous and the marvelous were
"choreographed." As Schivelbusch comments, the "evanescent reali-

ty had become the new reality."'^ This transformation of vision

belies the Romantic condition of the organic totality constituted by
observer and landscape. In this new aesthetic, the circumscribed

view always implies a greater and more distant reality, an ontologi-

cal transcendence. The scope of the "organic" becomes broader than

that assimilable by instantaneous perception, since increased speed

condenses space. Speed establishes a compression of locales that
brings into contact, through rapid succession, aspects of the land-

scape that had hitherto been unrelated.

Ultimately, these eflfects of motion increase the limits of scale
beyond perceptual, and often beyond imaginative, apprehension.
Speed incites aesthetics towards greater modes of synthesis, whether
organic (as in the landscape) or dissociative (as in modernist collage

and cinematic montage); it transforms the notion of the garden by

making possible the imagination of a landscape once invisible

because so distant, forbidding, and vast. Remote, pure, untouched,
virgin, infinite nature was imaginable precisely due to these modern
forms of alienation and dissociation. Transcendence became a
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

function of a certain loss of immanence, a certain loss of innocence.

As every increase in technology entails a corresponding increase in

anxiety about the loss of the natural, so too does every such increase

in speed transform the perceptual apparatus so as to overcompensate

for such loss. The ontological takes refuge in the phantasmic.

It took some time for these effects to appear in poetry, though

the effects of speed already existed in the writings of Victor Hugo,
Alfred de Vigny, Gerard de Nerval, and Thomas de Quincy. One of
the finest, though relatively late (1870), examples is the untitled sev-

enth poem, an "impression," from Paul Verlaine's La bonne chanson:

Through the door's window frame the landscape

Furiously rushes by, and entire plains

With their water, wheat, trees, and sky

Are swept up in the cruel whirlwind

Where fall those thin telegraph posts

Whose wires bear the strange air of a paraph.

An odor of coal that burns and water that boils,

The noise as if made by a thousand chains at whose ends

Howled a thousand giants being whipped;

And suddenly, the prolonged cry of an owl.

^What's all this to me, since I have in my eyes

The white vision that makes my heart joyful,

Since the soft voice still murmurs for me,

Since the Name so beautiful, so noble, and so sonorous,

Mingles, pure pivot of all this swirling,

With the rhythm of the brutal coach, suavely.'^

Here, a Baudelairian system of synaesthetic correspondences evokes

the perceptual effects of railway travel and its transformative vision
of the world, all the while utilizing this dizzying trance as a means
of erotic reverie. Thoughts of the beloved are incorporated into a

moralized or perhaps it would be more precise to say "immoral-

ized" landscape.

The relatively late incorporation of such effects into poetry

might be explained by the fact that poets are often less precisely

attuned to unusual visual effects than are painters, for technical

9i
 NO MANS GARDEN

reasons determined by their metier. The problem of framing and

motion was already circumscribed, in a rudimentary manner, by the
invention of the "Claude glass," named for the painter Claude
Lorrain, which consisted of a small, tinted, framed, convex mirror
that, when confronted with a picturesque landscape, concentrates

the scene into a private, transitory image. John Dixon Hunt dis-

cusses one particular function of such mirrors:

Similarly, in one of William Gilpin's accounts of using his mirror, not while

stationary, but while riding in his chaise, we learn that its images "are like

visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms, and

colours in brightest array, fleet before us; and if the transient glance of a good

composition happen to unite with them, we should give any price to fix and

appropriate the scene." Cognitive and creative processes seem to unite there,

exemplifying the sense, which Martin Price drew to our attention in the pic-

turesque moment, of play between "the need for reasonable common truths"

and the "imaginative power of arbitrary structiues and accidental associa-

tions." Because of their rapid passage across the glass in this instance, the

forms and colours are both objective and dreamlike. '^

As Gilpin's observation was made in the eighteenth century, the "rea-

sonable common truths" did not yet include those experienced dur-

ing the epoch of greatly increased speed of the railway journey, and

the desire to "fix and appropriate the scene" was not yet realizable

through photography. Yet the use of the glass as frame offered the
requisite "objectivity" to capture the "arbitrary structures and the
accidental associations" that were so crucial to the constitution of

the picturesque; the relations between speed and vision disrupting

the aesthetic effects of the stationary painterly position that deter-

mined most of the previous history of European pictorial represen-

tation produced extreme, "dreamlike" effects. These dreams would

be objectified in the following century.

In "Walking" Thoreau relates that one day he went to see a panora-

ma of the Rhine, which appeared to him like a dream of the Middle

Ages, of interest mainly for its ruins. "Soon after, I went to see a

93
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river

in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted
the rising cities."'^ His description is interesting not only as yet

another celebration of the mythic America at the center of his

thoughts, but also as an indication of the importance of motion,

change, and time in contemporary representational systems. To see a

panorama was to travel vicariously. Thoreau, despite his fantasies of

untouched nature and a transcendental terrestrial paradise, certainly

noted the encroachment of technology on that purity and grasped

the essential aspect of that very same technology in relation to the

construction of a distinctly American imagination and poetics.

The popular fascination for panoramas and dioramas was to a

great extent due to the novelty of motion in pictorial reproduction,

a motion adding temporality, and thus narrativity, to the represen-

tational scene. The difference between painting and panorama was

explained by an aesthetician of the period, E. J. Delecluze, in his

Precis d'un traite de peinture (1828):

The continuity of the apparent horizon line is what essentially distinguishes

painting in panorama from a framed painting. In the latter, one only sees the

portion of the horizon line included in the angle of vision, and there is only

one point of view. In the panorama, whose surface is circular, one works from

one angle of vision to another, and consequently from one point of view to

another. To the extent that the spectators gaze moves from one side to the

other, the eye, by means of the multiplication of points of view, is successive-

ly submitted to the optical phenomena that appertain to each angle of vision. "^

Yet the panoramas gain in horizontal and horizonal richness does

not produce a richness of depth perception. Either foreground and

background are equally, and thus unrealistically, represented, or else

the use of atmospheric perspective to create a loss of detail in the

represented distance (the sfixmato technique known to landscape

painters at least since Leonardo da Vinci), does not permit any ame-
lioration of the view as the spectator approaches the panorama.
Whence the spatial "hybridization of the gaze," whereby the hetero-

geneous topoi of foreground and background are cognitively assim-

ilated in simultaneous but contradictory manners. ^ This hybrid-
ization also included the temporal dimension, as the pictorial

94
 NO MANS GARDEN

progression of the represented scene accorded with the physiological

mobility of vision.
Thoreau's vicarious panoramic experience of the Mississippi
was, in any case, epistemologically anachronistic, since the age of the

diorama and panorama, though still active, was no longer at the

technological forefront of visual representation. Schivelbusch

explains that the fascination with dioramas and panoramas (which
ended in Paris around 1840, at the very moment of the rise of French
railway travel) was a substitute for sightseeing, which was at the time
expensive, difficult, and occasionally dangerous. The railway jour-
ney changed all this; it transformed the spectator's relationship to
the landscape by making distant destinations more easily accessible.

The nineteenth-century eye needed to become accustomed to the

increased speed of railway travel; this alteration of visibility led from

loss of detail ("the face of nature, the beautiful prospects of hill and
dale, are lost or distorted to our view"),^' through boredom ("all

traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity"), ^^ to a

new aesthetics ("I love to dream through these placid beauties whilst

sailing in the air, as if astride a tornado") -^^

The mastery of space and time central to European meta-

physics since Descartes's postulation of a mathesis universalis^'^also

transformed art and aesthetics. ^^ The previous experience of the

natural sublime, central to the Romantic imagination, was assailed

by the interference of a new modality of wonder and terror, that of

the technological sublime, which came to play a major role in both
early and high modernism. It entailed, as Henry Adams allegorized

in a section of his autobiography. The Education of Henry Adams

(1900), the difference between the Virgin and the dynamo.^" Two
types of knowledge, empirical and poetic, pragmatic and mythic,
conflicted in the imagination of American pastoralism.

The ultimate representative of this transformed visualization

in relation to landscape architecture is that of the American park-

ways built after the Second World War, perhaps best defined as

"picturesque expressways." These scenic routes were meant to be

experienced at constant high speeds with only occasional pauses.

Perspectives are predicated on motion, and the picturesque is

95
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

constructed according to a strictly motorized sequence of perspec-

tives, framed by the car windows. Indeed, one of the most beautiful
of these roads, the Taconic State Parkway which stretches nearly

lOO miles north of New York City, parallel to, though not in sight

of, the Hudson River recently had its panoramic rest stops closed,

so that stationary views of the scenery are no longer possible. These

parkways offer the epitome of the "captured view," for despite the
minimal landscaping along the borders of the road, the "park" itself

does not materially exist; the "park" is actually immaterial, consisting

of the distant views of the scenery. In the case of the Taconic State
Parkway, the captured view is that of the Hudson River Valley, made
famous through the school of painting that bears its name.
Increase in speed transforms the relationship between percep-

tual reactions to motion and the pictorial imagination. Thus each

historic moment demands the recodification of visual representa-
tional systems. The eighteenth century incorporated reactions to

foot and stagecoach travel in its aesthetics; the nineteenth century

struggled with the increasing speeds of train travel; the early twenti-

eth century celebrated the then extreme speeds of wartime mecha-

nization; and the late twentieth century attempts to assimilate the

near precision of computerized military tactics, the distances of

space travel, and the instantaneity of virtual reality, all implying

speeds, distances, and scales that far surpass human perceptual

thresholds.^7

Thoreau extrapolated and allegorized from his experiences on the

East Coast of the United States especially the narrow confines of
his solitary existence at Walden Pond between 1845-7 and cast his

vision within the context of the nineteenth-century American sense

of "manifest destiny." He made this clear in a bold geographical
metaphor, reaching well beyond the range of his own hikes:

I must walk towards Oregon, and not towards Europe. The Adantic is a

Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to for-

get the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is

96
 NO MANS GARDEN

perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the

Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.^^

Thoreau makes his assumptions about the Western landscape quite

clear in one of his most famous sentences: "The West of which I

speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been
preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the

World."^9 This West, this Wild, is ideal; its scale, grandeur, and

beauty is hyperbolically described in the same text, where Thoreau

quotes Sir Francis Head, a prescient and atypical English traveler
and governor-general of Canada:
The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is

fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the

thunder is louder, the lightening is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is

heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the

plains broader.'

In terms of the history of gardens the term "landscape architecture"

is inappropriate in this context, barring consideration of the "divine

architect" those Western natural sites that became the American

National Parks were, in a sense, beyond comparison with their nine-
teenth-century European counterparts.

The situation in France is an interesting case in point. If the

Romantics epitomized the vastness of nature in the Alps (moun-
tains, as representatives of the sublime, were often the prime sym-
bols of natural powers), the quotidian mid-nineteenth-century ide-

alization of nature was considerably more bourgeois, to a great

extent based on the popularization of the forests of Fontainebleau by
the Barbizon school of painting, and by Claude Fran9ois Denecourt
in his Promenade dans laforet de Fontainebleau (1844) and Guide du
voyageur et de I'artiste a Fontainebleau (1850). These guides were writ-
ten in a style no more poetic than today's Guide Michelin or Guide

Bleu, and it was left to the gardens themselves to inspire the artists

and poets who hiked through this relatively tame nature. It is iron-

ic that this French notion of "nature" was informed by lands that

were, after all, near Paris, attached to a royal palace with a formal
garden designed by Le Notre, and that had served as hunting
grounds thus having a very definite and refined cultural context

97
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

rather than areas of France that were minimally settled and aesthet-

ically underrepresented, such as the relatively wild and certainly pic-

turesque Ardeche, Aubrac, Auvergne, or Cevennes. The aesthetic

appreciation of these picturesque and often sublime landscapes

would long remain confidential, and especially unappreciated in the

popular imagination.
This attitude is explained by Renaud Camus in Le Departe-
ment de la Lozere, where he reminds us that in the late nineteenth

century, the residents of the Lozere expressed a decided lack of aes-

thetic interest in the landscape, as well as amazement concerning the

then recent celebrity of one of France's natural wonders, the Gorges
du Tarn, which was beginning to become a much frequented touris-
tic site. He cites Emmanuel de Las Cases, writing of his voyage
through the region by motor car near the turn of the century: "The
rare inhabitants living there considered this splendid erosion to be a
sort of hell, in which they saw nothing but misery, and their souls

appreciated nothing of its splendid wildness." Rather, as Camus

points out, it took the literary sensibilities of a foreigner to first

appreciate such natural beauties, specifically Robert Louis

Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879).^'

On the other hand, the aesthetically and physically hyperbol-

ic American National Park also bore litde comparison with the

English garden, which was not an example of untouched nature, but

rather an idealized simulacrum of nature modeled on the civilized

sources of mythology and landscape painting. While the English

garden was a simulacrum of nature, the American "garden" was
nature itself

The complex history of European characterizations of the

American landscape is documented by Marx in The Machine in the
Garden. The Elizabethan imagination (and the European imagina-
tion in general) conceived of nature as a spectrum ranging from
hideous wilderness to civilized garden. Elizabethan choice of
terms what Marx refers to as "ecological images" and "root meta-
phors" to describe a new setting determined specific social ideals

in the context of an entire ideology.^^ In the age of British coloniza-

tion, to depict American land as a garden was to celebrate a pastoral

98
 NO MANS GARDEN

Utopia centered on aspirations of freedom, abundance, and existen-

tial harmony; to denounce it as a hideous wilderness was to imply

the primitive, the libidinal, and the anarchic, thus to justify the exer-

cise of power and domination on both psychological and political

levels. Crucial in this regard was the fact that the American land-

scape supported both of these conflicting interpretations, however

tendentious either one alone might have been, and however few
people realized the implicit equivocations that often entered into
such descriptions.
If America seemed to promise everything that men always had wanted, it also

threatened to obliterate much of what they already had achieved. The para-

dox was to be a cardinal subject of our national literature, and beginning in

the nineteenth century our best writers were able to develop the theme in all

its complexity. Not that the conflict was in any sense peculiar to American

experience. It had always been at the heart of pastoral; but the discovery of

the New World invested it with new relevance, with fresh symbols.''

This aporia was not only evident in opposing ideologies; it also

existed, tacitly and unconsciously, within the complexities of experi-

ence. Marx analyzes at length one of the first works discussing the
relations between the colonial experience and the pastoral ideal,

Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia (1705). This

book opens with a celebration of the bounteous state of nature in

which the Native Americans of Virginia lived, offering it as an

Edenic setting for European settlement, couched in the metaphor of
Virginia as a vast garden. Yet the discourse reveals a subtle uncer-

tainty or ambiguity, since the very richness of the natural setting,

bringing with it an ease of existence unknown to Europeans, seems

to be somehow contrary to European aspirations. The contradiction

is stated towards the end of the book, "A Garden is no where soon-
er made than there, either for Fruits, or Flowers And yet, they

hadn't many Gardens in the Country, fit to bear that name."^'^

Beverley's use of the term "garden" is equivocal, creating the appar-

ent paradox that the paradisiacal nature-as-garden that is Virginia,

inhabited by "noble savages," precludes the possibility of the exis-

tence of the civilized garden proper, "The contradiction between the

two meanings of 'garden' is a perfect index of the larger difference

99
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

between the primitive and the pastoral ideals. "^^ Beverley's soul in

specific, and the colonizers destiny in general, existed in the context

of a struggle between the wild and the civilized, between scenarios

of primitive instinctual gratification and those of civilized values. In
this struggle whose finale could either be the mediation of nature
and culture or the brutal repression of one of the terms the garden

served as a symbolic battleground.

The social and political contradictions between the primitivist

and the civilizing, in regard to the colonial apperception of the land-
scape, were resolved with the liberation of the country, only to give

rise to a new set of contradictions. As Marx points out, Thomas

Jefferson's evaluations of the landscape, as described in Notes on
Virginia, established the foundation for the mythologizing of nature
in the American context, a mythologizing that would inform
Thoreau's philosophy. According to Marx, the naturalistic basis of

Jefferson's antiurban politics and ethics can best be termed "pastoral"

(utopian and quietist) rather than "agrarian" and "pragmatic," as so

much literature claims. "But the physical attributes of the land are
less important than its metaphoric powers. What finally matters

most is its function as a landscape an image in the mind that rep-

resents aesthetic, moral, political, and even religious values. "^^ It is

precisely this function that obtained in New England transcenden-

talism by transfiguring this pastoralism into a metaphysics, one that
had unquestionable influence on the pragmatics of the rising con-

servationist and preservationist movements.

It is interesting that the great American naturalist and conser-
vationist, John Muir one of the earliest practitioners of ecological

practice and theory, whose efforts greatly influenced the creation of

the American National Park and Wilderness systems wrote a book
entitled A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulp7 The very scope of this
"walk," one-third the length of the North American continent, can
but be contrasted with the intimate strolls recounted in Thoreau's
"Walking"; Muir undertook the prodigious walks of which Thoreau
dreamt. Muir was deeply inspired by Thoreau, especially by
"Walking," and he was certainly in accord with Thoreau's claim, in
The Maine Woods, that America should create its own protected,
 NO MANS GARDEN

wild, natural preserves. Yet Muir was not a transcendentalist, and he

took exception to what he understood to be Emerson and Thoreau's
overtly metaphysical foundation for the appreciation of nature;

Muirs was a more intuitive and practical approach. Furthermore,

given his own deep relationship with the vast wilderness of the

American West, he declaimed that, "Even open-eyed Thoreau would

perhaps have done well had he extended his walks westward to see
what God had to show in the lofty sunset mountains. "^^ Muirs
experience was the empirical double of Thoreau's metaphysical

hyperbole. For Muir, the wilderness was ultimately unfathomable,

unrestricted, unconditioned, boundless, something of infinite possi-

bilities yet always inviting discovery. Though he spent his entire
lifetime exploring, enjoying, celebrating, and protecting nature, he

was in principle theoretically opposed to the notion of protected

park areas, claiming that the wilderness must not be circumscribed,

fenced in, and thus bounded. Unlike Thoreau's, the hyperbolism of
Muir's dream was practical; though in principle, Muir believed that
the entirety of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range should remain
undeveloped and be preserved in its natural state, in fact he did all

he could to protect whatever he could of it.

Yet while Muir conceived of and experienced nature as

boundless and infinite, the creation of the first National Parks, how-
ever large in relation to European gardens and game preserves, nec-

essarily belied this fantasy. Furthermore, it was not only the natural-
ists and transcendentalists who shared Muir's concerns. Frederick
Law Olmsted, the great American landscape architect of the nine-

teenth century, author of Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in

England (1852), was not a naturalist: he was best known for inte-

grating landscape design with a nascent urbanism. He designed both

New York's Central Park (inspired by the tradition of the English
picturesque garden) and the Washington D.C. Capitol grounds

(shaped by the rationalized geometry of Le Notre's formal gardens).

Olmsted was influential in the preservation of what was effectively
the first protected site, Muir's beloved Yosemite, in California.
Yosemite, discovered in the mid-eighteenth century, was revered for
its extraordinarily picturesque natural beauty, which was the reason
View ofMinor Lake. Yosemite, Califot
 NO MANS GARDEN

for its salvation; it was protected by an act of Congress in 1864, and

under Muir's influence a much greater surrounding area was pro-
tected in 1890, while the boundaries were definitively set in 1906, so

that today the park consists of approximately 1,200 square miles (as

opposed to the 6.3 square miles that constitute the present reserve of
the Forest of Fontainebleau, established in 1953). To conceive of
Yosemite in the context of the history of Occidental landscape archi-
tecture, albeit it in a mode of minimalist intervention, is to radical-

ly alter that history. Here, the beautiful and the sublime are exalted

by a transcendentalist metaphysics and an American pragmatism,

resulting in a new ideal of natural beauty: a nature pure and untrans-
formed.39

There was a time when the American West was largely unrepresent-

ed and unimagined, as is poetically evident in the following, albeit

historically late, citation from Willa Gather:

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness;

as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had

desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought togeth-

er, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country

was still waiting to be made into a landscape. '^

Visual representations of the natural landscape west of the Mississippi

began afi:er 1830, when the Rocky Mountains became an icon for the

"West." This was soon replaced by views of Yellowstone, which be-

came the first National Park in 1872 and consisted of approximately

3,500 square miles located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The

earliest major practitioner of this genre was Albert Bierstadt, whose

training in the German Romantic tradition and whose predilection

for the Swiss Alps offered a model, however limited, for his dramat-
ic and large-scale representations of the American Rockies.
The advent of photography visually opened up the distant
American West, beginning with the great government surveys orga-
nized between 1867-79 and continuing with army explorations.

Notable was the participation of the photographers Timothy

103
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

O'Sullivan and Jack Hillers, as well as the later works of William H.

Jackson, Henry H. Bennett, and Eadweard Muybridge. After the

initial government explorations, it was the railways that made these

lands accessible to all sorts of exploitation and representation, from
gold mining and ranching to tourism, the latter of which motivated
the railway companies to hire artists to depict the West for the pur-

poses of publicity. The railroads commissioned large numbers of

images of the natural landscape in the 1870s and financed painters as
well as photographers to accomplish this task; the results were

immensely popular. The painter Thomas Moran, for example, had

his trip to Yellowstone financed by the Northern Pacific Railroad,

and his travels to the Grand Canyon financed by the Atchison,

Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad; both resulted in works that were

used for promotional campaigns. Moran's paintings were repro-
duced and widely distributed in many forms, such as guidebooks,

posters, calendars, and chromolithographs. Representing such vast

natural scenes by utilizing what were, essentially, the aesthetic crite-

ria of European landscapes and landscape painting posed novel

problems. Edward Buscombe explains:
In 1873 Moran was invited by [John Wesley] Powell to join his continuing

explorations of the Grand Canyon area. His subsequent painting, The Chasm

of the Colorado, on a similar scale to his painting of the Yellowstone, again

owed much to photography. Moran and Hillers worked closely together. But

the Grand Canyon posed a problem for both painters and photographers. As

anyone who has ever tried to photograph it will know, its sheer size resists

being captured within the frame, however large. Despite his claims of geo-

logical exactitude, Moran succumbed to the romantic allure of clouds and

sky, suggesting the vast distances of the scene by obscuring the detail in haze.

The distances also tended to defeat the attempt of photographers at accurate

representation, since, inevitably, the furthest parts of the view became dif-

fused. Perhaps the most telling photographic view of the canyon is one by

Jackson, dating from considerably later and made in 1892, which surrenders

to the inevitable blurring of distance and makes the focus of the picture the

observers' sense of wonder. '

This incompatibility of natural, cognitive, and aesthetic systems is

evident in the fact that, as Buscombe mentions, the first white men

ro4
 NO MANS GARDEN

saw the Grand Canyon as early as 1540, but were not particularly
impressed, probably because they were unable to fit the spectacular

scene into any available visual, aesthetic, or natural framework.

Needless to say, the invention of panoramic photography hardly

alleviated the problem, as the gain in breadth was not equaled by a

corresponding gain in depth. "Nature" cannot be adequately repre-
sented in any frame.
Perspective, which since the Renaissance has been a central

consideration of painting and aesthetics, is here at stake. At the very

beginnings of modernism, when perspectival projections began to

be surpassed by an incipient impressionism and abstraction as prime

structural features of representation, the New England transcenden-
talist conception of nature also surpassed all possible perspectival-

ism, though in a very different context: through the ideal of the

untouched forest, of a boundless natural magnitude that inspired

awe and bliss rather than Pascalian anguish. In a journal entry for 13

March 1842 that sums up the various aspects of the present discus-

sion, Thoreau wrote,

There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as

we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. For seen with the eye

of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful; but seen with

the historical eye, or eye of the memory, they are dead and offensive. If we see

Nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as pro-

gressing, she is beautiful. '^^

Whence the role of the poet in regard to the transcendental dimen-

sion of the natural world: to make visible the invisible beauties of a

higher order, among the last aesthetics to attempt this millennial task.

At roughly the same moment, Edgar Allan Foe composed his

meditation on landscape architecture, "The Domain of Arnheim, or

the Landscape Garden" (1846), the tale of an immensely rich man
who constructs the perfect garden. His discussions with the narrator

offer a metaphysical, indeed supernatural, theory of gardens.

What we regard as exaltation of the landscape may be really such, as respects

only the moral or human point of view. Each alteration of the natural scenery

may possibly effect a blemish in the picture, if we can suppose this picture

viewed at large in mass from some point distant from the earth's surface,

105
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

although not beyond the limits of its atmosphere. It is easily understood that

what might improve a closely scrutinized detail, may at the same time injure

a general or more distinctly observed effect. There may be a class of be-

ings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our

disorder may seem order our unpicturesqueness picturesque; in a word,

eanh-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose

death-refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by

God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.'*'

Here the lineaments of human aesthetics are seen to be a fixnction of

the Hmitations of the perceptual apparatus. In an age of precipitous

scientific advances, when the senses were continually augmented by

increasingly powerful prosthetic devices (and when architecture per-

fected axonometric systems of representation, void of any point of

view), the sense of natural perfection was relegated to a transcen-

dent, and eminently inhuman, domain. It is no accident that the

conservation and preservation movements arose at that very

moment, ultimately to offer another vision of the natural world, one

in which the human being shown by Charles Darwin to be but

one of the animals found coherenta place within the natural

scheme. This effected a reversal of possible perspectives on nature:

not a view from without, but from within; not a God's-eye view, but
multiple points of view from the sundry eyes of all the other animals

that inhabit the natural landscape. Such is landscape seen from an

ecological perspective.*^

A book published in the early part of the twentieth century by the

U.S. Bureau of Land Management (the federal government agency
responsible for managing the National Park system) explains of the
term "wilderness" that "while the word is a noun it acts like an adjec-
tive. There is no material object that is wilderness. "'*' This bizarre

claim sums up the epistemological status of the notion of pure

nature as transformed by those technological advances that motivat-

ed the creation, and guided the perception, of the National Parks.

This idea seems to echo the explanation of the ontological effects of

io6
 NO MANS GARDEN

photography offered by OHver Wendell Holmes in his famous early

text on photography, "The Stereosco|>e and the Stereograph" (1859):

"'Form is henceforth divorced from matter^^^ It is as though, through

a perverse technocratic distortion, nature is transformed into its

image or spectacle in order to guarantee its purit)'; this is only one

step away from its collation in archives, its consumption, and its

ultimate disappearance. Here, the eternal becomes terribly evanes-

cent. As Thoreau might say, such is "no man's garden."

107
The certainty of the absolute garden will never be regained.
Robert Smithson
 In Praise ofAnachronism
Garden as Gesamtkunstwerk

^^^^y ^\ hile the problem of garden aesthetics at the end of

^ im g the modernist epoch might have offered new the-

Wy J oretical vistas, the issue of gardens themselves

^^^^^^ were hardly changed: they are, for the most part,

excluded from the art historical and aesthetic canons. A case in point
that exemplifies this problem, as well as provides the opportunity to

consider the relations between gardens and the other arts, is

Rosalind Krauss's article, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."' This

text, briefly stated, illustrates how during the rise of sculptural min-
imalism towards the end of the modernist epoch certain works were
produced precisely to contest and expand the traditionally consti-

tuted limits of sculpture, such that sculpture engaged contemporary

theory perhaps as much as it did the sculptural tradition itself At

stake were certain dichotomies that had articulated previous artistic

production, reconstituted in investigations that would ultimately

serve as the theoretical hinge between modernism and postmod-
ernism: monumentality and sitelessness; referentiality and self-refer-

entiality; the built and the unbuildable; universality and regional-

ism; site specificity and the nomadic.

This reconsideration of sculpture reveals how the already

intricate relations between site, sight, and sign were complicated by

an aggressive, contentious, and ofi:en politicized sculptural sen-

sibility that surpassed the nature/culture distinction at the core of

[09
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

classical structuralist categorizations and hermeneutics. Attempting

to portray all possible terms of this expanded sculptural field, Krauss
constructs an analytic grid (based on the mathematical "Klein
group" that informed Algirdas Julien Greimas's theory of semiotic
constraints) that purportedly circumscribes all the logical and phe-

nomenological possibilities of sculptural construction. The terms of

the primary grid are defined by "landscape," "architecture," "not-

landscape," and "not-architecture." The expanded grid proffers

mediations of these terms: "landscape" and "architecture" are medi-

ated by "site-construction"; "landscape" and "not-landscape" by

"marked sites"; "architecture" and "not-architecture" by "axiomatic

structures"; "not-landscape" and "not-architecture" by "sculpture."

Krauss explains in detail that

Though sculpture may be reduced to what is in the Klein group the neuter

term of the not-landscape plus the not-architecture, there is no reason not to

imagine an opposite term one thiat would be both landscape and architec-

ture which within this schema is called the complex. But to think the com-

plex is to admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been pro-

hibited from it: landscape 3rA architecture}

The fact that the conjunction of landscape ^W architecture should

be used to expand the sculptural in a mode defined as "site con-
struction" presents an intriguing categorial irony. For there is indeed
no reason whatsoever, as Krauss suggests, "not to imagine an oppo-
site term one that would be both landscape and architecture'' But
this term need not be hypothesized or renamed: it already exists, as

"landscape architecture" (however misleading this conjunction may

be), a synonym for "garden," in its full aesthetic and structural com-
plexities. Of the complex constituted by the mediation of landscape
and architecture, Krauss claims.

Because it was ideologically prohibited, the complex had remained excluded

from what might be called the closure of post-Renaissance art. Our culture

had not before been able to think the complex, although other cultures have

thought this term with great ease. Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape

and architecture. Japanese gardens are both landscape and architecture.'

It is perfectly coherent with this schematization (especially in the

context of late-modernist American sculpture), that of all the

 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

possibilities of landscape architecture existing within this complex,

Krauss includes works of another culture (specifically Japanese gar-

dens) or details of European gardens (labyrinths and mazes). The
mention of Japanese gardens is emblematic: though not specified,

it can be presumed that what are referred to are "dry" or Zen gar-
dens, since to Western eyes they are particularly esoteric, sculptur-

al, and apparently changeless. In these gardens, nothing can be

added or subtracted, form and detail remain constant, they usually
cannot be entered, and natural growth is kept to a strict minimum,
limited mainly to the infinitesimally slow accretion of moss on
rocks, not unlike the highly valued patina on ancient bronze sculp-

tures. "^ These are, therefore, the most "sculptural" of all landscapes,

and in the context of the expanded sculptural field they define a

limit of what constitutes gardens in the modernist Eurocentric

sense of the term.

One might conclude either that an ideological prohibition

within the "closure of post-Renaissance art" simply wrongfully
denies gardens the status of art (a common occurrence in art histo-

ry), or else that "landscape architecture" is a structurally inaccurate

synonym for "garden," a veritable oxymoron that opens up a new

and heterogeneous conceptual field. But this would beg the ques-
tion: the problem is neither linguistic nor categorial, since one may
well speak of "sculpting" a landscape. Rather, the reason that it is

structurally impossible for gardens in their full scope to appear in

this schema is because gardens are precisely the existential ground of

the schema itself. This is even tacitly suggested in the title of Krauss s

article, where one would only need to exchange the metaphoric

value of the "expanded field" for its literal equivalent, the "field," in

order to thematize the problem. The field itself cannot be included

in the grid precisely because it is tantamount to the grid. It is the dis-

sembling, rich ambiguity of the term "field" that epitomizes the

problem of contemporary landscape architecture: the exclusion of

the garden is necessary for the very constitution of the sculptural

specificity of the grid. For to include gardens in this field would

entail the collapse of the entire grid and the consequent conflation
of its constituent terms with their very ground, thus obviating the
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

usefulness of the categorization. Whence the need for the category

of "site construction," which is more than mere circumlocution: it

sets limits to a group that necessarily restricts its component works

to something less than gardens. In parallel, the category "landscape"

is inadequate to the complexities of "landscape architecture."

Semantic slippage reveals ontological heteromorphism.
The fact that all categorization entails limitation, serving par-

ticular polemical and theoretical purposes, is beside the point here.

My interest in this particular schematic grid is extreme because what

it excludes or displaces necessitates recognizing the garden as a prin-

cipal site of heterogeneity. The exclusion of "gardens" as a term in

this diagram is explicable because of all the modes of sculptural pro-

duction, only that of landscape architecture can serve as the inclu-

sive, if not totalizing, site of aesthetic heterogeneity as its ontolog-

ical ground. The physical existence of the expanded field would thus
be equivalent to the garden.
To thus "ground" the expanded field would be to place the gar-

den within the paradigm of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is another

manner of "thinking the complex." This paradigm fianctionally exist-

ed in European art since the late Renaissance, though it received its

name at one of the originary moments of modernism, in Wagnerian

opera. To rethink the garden in this manner increasingly polymor-

phic, polyvalent, and equivocal might well explain the historic

exclusion of landscape architecture from the fine arts, precisely due to

its potential role as the unstated site of heterogeneity itself, as the syn-

cretizing site ofall sites. There exist no discrete elements in a Gesamt-

kunstwerk: as synaesthesia is to each of the senses, so is the Gesamt-

kunstwerk to its constituent artworks. Therefore, the expanded

sculptural field must in turn be problematized, to a second degree, by

considering the virtual field of the garden as the heterogeneous

ground that permits the direct confrontation, conjunction, and

recombination of the disparate elements of this grid, establishing sites

not only for sculpture but for the other arts as well. Such a Gesamt-

kunstwerk \s a dialectical system, where the significance of every term

depends upon the existence of all other terms, and where each cate-

gory is transformed as it is situated within the garden context.

 [N PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

The Gesamtkunstwerk, thematized contemporaneously with

the notion of synaesthesia in the mid-nineteenth century, is perhaps

most acutely prefigured in Charles Baudelaire's notion of "corre-

spondences," which had a vast influence on movements that

attempted to synthesize the arts within a single rubric. Yet there

developed an analytic, dissociative, detotalizing mode of such work.

This tendency took on a new form in the varied Happenings and

multimedia presentations of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the
famed 1952 "concerted action," a mixed-media event at Black

Mountain College, which shattered the previous synthetic model by

establishing the possibility of an aleatory combination of artforms.

As most of the works circumscribed by Krauss's grid react precisely

against this genealogy of aesthetic totalization, it is not surprising

that the totalizing, or at least synthesizing or amalgamating, form of

the garden is excluded from its purview.

Every epoch since the baroque has elaborated the dream of a total

work of art, a work encompassing all forms of art. Richard Wagner,

whose increasing chromaticism inaugurated the breakdown of
tonality in European music, mused upon the specific relation

between music and landscape architecture in this totalizing system.

If architecture and, still more so, scenic landscape painting can place the dra-

matic actor in the natural environment of the physical world and give him,

from the inexhaustible font of natural phenomena, a background constantly

rich and relevant, the orchestra . . . offers the individual actor, as a support,

what may be called a perpetual source of the natural element of man as artist.

The orchestra is, so to speak, the soil of infinite universal feeling from which

the individual feeling of the single actor springs into full bloom; it somehow

dissolves the solid motionless floor of the actual scene into a fluid, pliant,

yielding, impressionable, ethereal surface whose unfathomed bottom is the

sea of feeling itself"^

In this text, the use of metaphors concerning the natural landscape

is not coincidental, and serves both to establish a corporeal reference

for the abstract forms of music, and to thematize the mythological
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

substructure of his music in a celebration of earth, blood, and pas-

sion. Compare Leonard Bernstein's comments in The Unanswered

Question, specifically in relation to Gustave Mahler's Das Lied von
der Erde, but much more broadly applicable to the musical senti-

ment in general:

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature

of its sources tonal And by that metaphorical operation there can be

devised particular musical languages that have surface structures noticeably

remote from their basic origins, but which can be strikingly expressive as long

as they retain their roots in earth7

The earth is believed to resolve contradiction, from the aesthetic

aporia between tonality and atonality, to the ontological and theo-

logical opposition between life and death.

Yet it is not the opera, with its stage strictly limited in space

and its representations relatively limited in time, that is the ultimate

avatar of such a totalizing project. Rather, it is the garden in six-

teenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century France, with Vaux-le-

Vicomte and Versailles as its quintessence that constituted the

original Gesamtkunstwerk. For the garden is both spectacle and stage,

existing simultaneously as an artwork in itself and as the site of the

representation, conjunction, and synthesis of all the other arts.

Nothing less could have been expected in the context of the court of
Louis XIV, Le Grand Louis, Le Rot Soleil. Versailles as a unique work
of art is indicated by the series of texts written by Louis xrv as guides

under the generic title, Maniere de Montrer les Jardins de Versailles;

Versailles as totalizing site is described in several works by the art his-

torian, connoisseur, and Historiographe des Batiments du Roi,

Andre Felibien: Relation de la fete de Versailles du i8 juillet 1668

(1668), Description de la grotte de Versailles (1672), Description som-

maire du chdteau de Versailles (1674), and Les Divertissements de

Versailles donnes par le roi au retour de la conquete de la Franche-

Comte en I'annee 16/4 (1674).

The gardens of Versailles, the creation of which was a collab-

orative effort between the king and his gardeners, sculptors, hy-

draulic engineers, surveyors, etcetera, were the site of vast festivals,

combining all the arts into a grandiose spectacle of royal inspiration

114
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

and divine right. Here, the works of the epoch's greatest artists, such
as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Baptiste MoUere, and PhiUppe Quinault,
were performed, and the king himself took center stage, both figu-

ratively and literally. In Relation de la fete de Versailles, Felibien nar-

rated the events of Le Grand Divertissement Royal de Versailles, cele-

brating both the king's victory in Flanders and the ascendance of

Madame de Montespan.^ Following the sequence of promenade,

collation, theater, waterworks, dinner, ballet, and fireworks, this fete

took place from before dusk to dawn, revealing a structural conti-

nuity and coherence worthy of, and even surpassing, many of the lit-

erary narratives and operatic scenarizations of the period. Relation de

la fete de Versailles may be read variously as a historic description of
the events; as an alternate, albeit phantasmic, itinerary through the

gardens of Versailles; as an allegorical legend; or as a literary work in

its own right, revealing the relations between representation and
power couched in a hyperbolic quest for beauty. ^

We are constantly reminded that the garden is not merely a

visual spectacle, as the abstract theorization of so many art historical

studies focused mainly on design seem to suggest. Rather, the aes-

thetic logic of the garden necessitates and instantiates a synaesthetic

melange of all the senses, guided by a specific, highly symbolized

use-value, and culminating in an aesthetic experience that is greater

than the sum of its sensory, sensual, symbolic, and historic parts. It

is this richer experience, combining art and magic, fascination and

observation, history and mythology, that is described by Felibien,

offering a model for understanding the limits of landscape architec-

ture, baroque in dynamism and complexity, classic in formalism and

elegance. These synthesizing tendencies are effectively allegorized in

Felibien's description of the extraordinary fireworks of the fifth night

of Les Divertissements de Versailles of 1674:

We saw, emerging from the eyes, nostrils, and muzzle of the dragon set upon

the canal, a torrent of fire from which arose a thick cloud of smoke that, while

being quite terrible, also revealed its own beauties. For, from its huge red and

bluish clouds like those seen during great storms, there emerged a thousand

thunderbolts and a thousand flashes of lightening, some describing long trails

in the air, some snaking from one place to another, some first rising, to then

115
Les Buttes-Chaumont: belvedere, forest, and "suicide bridge"
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

plunge into the water, and all creating a thousand different effects. An infi-

nite number of similar fireworks simultaneously emerged from around the

canal, during which time the dragon vomited forth such a huge quantity that

his muzzle seemed a chasm from which emerged a thousand enflamed sprites

playing or battling together. The entirety of the water was covered by the fire-

works that shot forth to the end of the canal and, after having meandered

either on the surface of or in between the two pieces of water, they rose in lit-

tle whirlwinds of fire and, making a thousand turns in the air, they burst with

a terrifying noise, producing at the same time an infinitude of other fires cre-

ating new effects. Everything that could be seen within the great extent of

more than three hundred fathoms was neither fire nor air nor water. These

elements were so completely mixed together that, being unrecognizable, a

new element of a quite extraordinary nature emerged from them. It seemed

to be composed of a thousand sparks of fire that, like a thick dust or rather

'
an infinitude of atoms of gold, sparkled amidst an ever greater light.

In this spectacular pyrotechnic celebration of the cosmogonic pow-

ers of the Sun King, the nearly apocalyptic dissolution of the world
into flame was a harbinger of the new arts to come.

The heterogeneity and hybridization implicit in landscape architec-

ture exemplified by the taste for exoticism in gardens and mani-

fested by the garden follies that simulated various international

styles was made explicit in the late-eighteenth and early-nine-

teenth centuries." Typical is the extremely picturesque park in the

nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, Les Buttes-Chaumont, con-

structed from the old gypsum quarries that previously occupied the

site. This park, created between 1864-9 by Jean-Charles-Adolphe

Alphand and Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps as part of the Hauss-

mannization of Paris, contains an amalgamation of styles. Its rela-

tively small surface juxtaposes an area approximating the open fields

of the English garden bordered by lush, informal, flowery parterres

traversed by a brook fed by a small waterfall; a grotto with a larger

waterfall, not unlike those of the Jura that offered Gustave Courbet
some of his most famous subjects; a somber, miniature evergreen

117
 VHlandry: vegetable garden

Villandry: ornamental garden

 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

forest; soaring, dramatic rock formations in the style of Chinese

landscapes, paradoxically crowned with a Greco-Roman belvedere;
and a modern suspension bridge traversing a lake appropriate to an
Alpine landscape (a lake that Louis Aragon declared was, when illu-

minated at night by electric lamps, as if painted by Arnold Bocklin).

One should not forget that the park is traversed by a mostly subter-
ranean railroad line, as if to metaphorize its modernity. Missing,

though, is any hint of the jardin a lafrangaise. Indeed, the intensely

artificial qualities of Les Buttes-Chaumont were abetted by the

aleatory, informal effects of nature, as evidenced by an anecdote
culled from Frederick Law Olmsted's The Spoils of the Park:
The landscape-architect [Edouard Francois] Andre formerly in charge of the

suburban plantations of Paris, was walking with me through the Buttes-

Chaumont Park, of which he was the designer [after Alphand and Barillet-

Deschamps], when I said of a certain passage of it, "That, to my mind, is the

best piece of artificial planting of its age, I have ever seen." He smiled and

said, "Shall I confess that it is the result of neglect?"'^

Artifice simulating nature has nature as its guarantor. Perhaps the

sentiments evoked by this garden were best described by Louis

Aragon in Le paysan de Paris, where the surrealist passion for Les

Buttes-Chaumont was summed up in the following praise: "Let us

promenade in this decor of desires, in this decor full of mental

offenses and of imaginary spasms. "^^ Rarely were the surrealists more
in tune with baroque and classic emotions, and rarely did popular
urban geography correspond so closely to the aspirations of avant-
garde poetics.

One of the most extreme, though relatively unrecognized and undis-

cussed, examples of historic and aesthetic heterogeneity in garden

design is that of the restoration (or rather reconstitution) of the gar-

dens at the chateau of Villandry in the Loire River valley, generally

recognized as containing the finest extant decorative vegetable gar-

den in France. The restoration was accomplished between 1907-24

under the direction of Joachim Carvallo, who had acquired the

119
 Villandry: alley

Villandry: water parterre

 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

rundown chateau and its gardens. Carvallo, writing of his work in

transforming the chateau of Villandry, celebrated the building (in a

claim equally true of its gardens) as a site that synthesizes the histo-

ry of France from the twelfth through the eighteenth century.

Rather than restoring the gardens according to any single historic
period, Carvallo renovated them following a religious ideal, based

on a belief in the necessity of harmony between nature and human-

ity, inspired in part by readings of Saint Fran9ois de Sales and Saint
Teresa d'Avila. These beliefs are exemplified by Carvallo's claim that

"Art proceeds from a long contemplation of nature, through which

the human spirit penetrates the intimate essence of things, experi-
"'4
ences its poetry, and rises towards God in a supreme effort.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this naive and potentially reac-

tionary aesthetic, Carvallo created a garden that was hardly a restora-

tion, but rather an idiosyncratic twentieth-century creation, a fanta-

sy inspired by numerous historically (though not aesthetically)
incompatible traditions: the hortus conclusus of medieval monaster-
ies a tradition preserved in the Benedictine volume Monasticon
gallicanum offered models for both the herb garden and the enclo-
sure in general; the indigenous gardens of the peasantry and the
landed gentry of the Loire River valley revealed specific botanic pos-
sibilities; the illustrations of Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau's Les plus

excellents bdtiments de France (1576) was the direct source for the
parterre patterns in the vegetable and decorative gardens; the Arab
and Andalusian traditions (including the representation of gardens in

mosaics and tapestries) familiar to the Spanish-born Carvallo

inspired certain aspects of the garden ornamentation; and the classic

French tradition, despite Carvallo's reticence, suggested the uses of

water and open spaces.
Carvallo excoriated the English garden, citing an English gen-

tleman who said to his king, at the moment when such gardens
became fashionable: "Sire, your gardens are extremely easy to make.

It suffices to get the gardener drunk and to follow him. "'5 Xhe
French formal garden received no better estimation: "The gardens of
Louis XIV are a beautifiil cemetery."'^ To the contrary, Carvallo cher-
ished the vegetable garden of King Francois i at Blois, also in the
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Loire valley, which is unique in that its vegetables were treated as

flowers in the organization of the parterres. The contemporary

incarnation of Villandry effected by Carvallo emulated that ideal,

and it has been referred to by one specialist as "the most elaborate

and unusual of all formal gardens,"''' suggesting an alternative

model of formalism in French landscape architecture. In this con-

text, Francois Carvallo, son of Joachim and successor to Villandry,

offers a description that is certainly close to the vision that motivat-

ed his father, an avid art collector, a description that gives a fine

sense of the form of his sensibility:

The vegetables, particularly those arriving after the end of July, change color

as they develop. Thus the "Green Tomato" becomes brilliant yellow, then

bright red. A row of tomatoes, carefully topped oflFand thinned out, is a ver-

itable work of art, since each tomato appears, upon a very beautiftil green, like

a brilliant and satiny Delft porcelain The cabbage is at first gray-green,

then bluish, and finally sumptuously red: "Veronese red." . . . The celery has a

surprisingly Empire green color. . . . The light green leek darkens with age, and

ends in the colors of ancient tapestries laced with silver threads The hum-

ble beet goes from glaucous green to Bordeaux red spangled with ochre and

earth. No Christian Dior dress is made, if I dare say so, with as sumptuously

varied colors.'^

The chromatic metaphors are particularly apt. Not only did

Carvallo paint with vegetables at Villandry like Claude Monet
painted with flowers at Giverny, he also drew by means of his com-
plex parterres.

Villandry is historically heterogeneous and anachronistic,

containing elements from diverse traditions, such that the park itself

is divided into three major sorts of gardens: vegetable garden

(medieval), ornamental garden (Renaissance), and water garden

(French formal). Italianate elevations and views are offered from
both the chateau terraces and the alley set into the woods above the
chateau; a labyrinth was constructed at one corner of the property.

The theoretical and practical question of authenticity in restoration

is exacerbated at Villandry, where a historically incoherent project

culminated in the creation of one of France's most beloved and most

visited contemporary gardens. While debates about authenticity are
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

often couched in the antipodal terms of restoration or transforma-

tion, gardens themselves simultaneously embrace both terms of the

debate, as they are doubly dynamic, naturally and historically. They
are organically transformed as their constituent plants grow ^<^they
are culturally transfigured over time due to fickle aesthetic vogues

and the general forces of historical change. ^^ All gardens therefore

constitute, a fortiori, what Umberto Eco referred to as "open works":
multiple, changing, virtual entities existing and changing over time.
Gardens are, essentially, anachronistic.

Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of what constitutes

landscape architecture was problematized by the subversion ironic

and otherwise of the genius loci. The debate is typical of the avant-

garde, where every practical and theoretical limit is contested: no

sooner is a limit set than it is transgressed in word or work.^ One
might imagine that fiindamental questions of ontology and episte-

mology could no longer legitimately be avoided in the history and

theory of landscape architecture; yet the discourse of this domain
has, for the most part, remained impervious to much of the theo-

rization that has informed the other arts.

The expanded field of gardens that has transformed contem-

porary paradigms includes numerous cross-media hybrids, some
modernist, others postmodern. Certain modernist gardens do little

more than mimic the forms and effects of either historic gardens or
the historic avant-garde, and thus offer litde to the debates that must
inform contemporary transformations of landscape architecture.
These include the works of Roberto Burle Marx in South America,
whose ground plans and use of color bear features in common with

abstract painting;^^ the highly geometrized gardens at the Villa

Noailles at Hyeres, designed in 1925 by Gabriel Guevrekian, and the

cubist garden designed for the Noailles in Saint-Germaine-en-Laye

in 1926 by Andre and Paul Vera, which may be considered the ulti-

mate, and somewhat decadent, extrapolation of the formalism that

characterizes the French garden;^^ and the numerous "art brut,"

123
 Erik Samakh, Pierre sonore (ippi)

Ellen Zweig, Botanizing on the Asphalt (detail, ipps)

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"outsider art," or eccentric gardens recently being catalogued. ^^ All

these works, despite their avant-garde, experimental, or marginal

nature, are but variants of traditional gardens or aggrandized ver-

sions of other art forms. ^4

Other works, often materially more modest though concep-

tually more daring, better describe state-of-the-art landscape archi-

tecture at our fin-de-siecle. The radical situationist analysis of urban-

ism, based on the notion of psycho-geography, established a

libidinal/political critique utilizing mental cut-ups of the cityscape.

Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden of Litde Sparta in Scodand proffered
the prototype of conceptual gardens, including a quasi-militarist

sculptural presence that both comments on the symbolic history of

the French formal garden and demands a reconception of the rela-

tions between myths of nature, power, and art. ^5 Michael Snow's

film La Region Centrale (1970-1) consisting of 190 minutes of the

camera rotating nearly 360 degrees at different speeds and different

focal lengths, during day and night in an empty Canadian wilder-

ness alternately transforms the scene into both static landscapes

and kinetic abstractions.^*^ Michael Heizer's transformation of the

ha-ha into artwork in his trenchlike incisions redefine the term
"landscaping." Robert Wilsons hallucinatory staged vistas, as in

Einstein on the Beach, transmogrify theatrical time and space. Ana

Mendiata's body imprints in the earth examined notions of femi-
ninity and traditional earth symbolism. Erik Samakh's ultra-mini-

malist and ecologically sensitive trompe I'oreille sound installations,

utilizing recorded and displaced natural sounds in garden environ-

ments, offer models of minimal intervention and ambiguous signif-

icance, such as the "electric frogs" he installed in the bamboo garden
designed by Alexandre Chematoff in the Pare de la Villette in Paris

(1990), or his gallery installation Pierre Sonore (1993), where a top-lit

rock sits on volcanic ash in a dark room (recalling certain Zen gar-
dens), and frog- and cricket-like sounds heard from outside the
room diminish as the spectator enters and approaches the rock.

Lothar Baumgarten's Theatrum Botanicum garden at the Fondation

Cartier in Paris a contemporary urban hortus conclusus resembling

a wild prairie but actually containing a botanically heterogeneous

125
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

mix of species, both indigenous and exogenous to Paris bears a

particularly Duchampian clause in his work contract that transforms

the ontological status of the garden into an "artwork," a jardin-

oeuvre, which thereby accords the site exceptional status and atten-

tion: one of the consequences is that no other artworks may be

exhibited within this "art-garden," thus restricting its use-value,

while increasing its exchange- value. ^7 Moshe Ninio's works incorpo-

rating Persian rugs (depicting stylized representations of gardens) are

placed in situations where they comment on recent environmental

and political catastrophes in Israel, adding a contemporary level of

radical signification to a traditional genre. Ellen Zweig's Botanizing

on the Asphalt (1993) creates a Joseph Cornell-like storefront garden

microcosm in the midst of Manhattan. Most recently, innumerable
variants of imaginary gardens have been developed in cyberspace;
these include Rand and Robyn Millers cd-roms Mystssxd Riven^^znd
the K.RT. Bryce program that is used to create virtual worlds.

As a theoretical introduction to the vast variety of contempo-

rary landscape transformations and constructions, interventions and
interferences, fantasies and follies, one particular trope will here be

investigated: the use of glass in the landscape not glass that deco-

rates, frames, magnifies, and focuses (all fiinctions of representa-

tion), but glass that traces, marks, signals, and signs. For if it is the

case that we both see and see according to a work of art, if the garden

is both artwork and site, then the use of glass, with its variable and
alternating transparency and reflectivity, offers an appropriate alle-

gory for the history of gardens especially in light of the expanded

notion of the garden as a syncretizing field. This analysis will begin
obliquely, in a gastronomic digression that examines the interrela-

tions between gardens and cuisine, culminating in the vision of a

glass wall that articulates nature and culture, garden and kitchen.

Consideration of cuisine holds surprising revelations for the history

of landscape architecture. The legendary chef Antonin Careme
(1784-1833), usually cited as the founder of modern French cuisine,

1x6
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declaims in L'Art de la cuisine frangaise au xixf siecle, "The fine arts

are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and

architecture, which has pastry-making as its principal branch. "^9

Provocative as this statement might be, this assimilation of cuisine

to architecture nevertheless only confiises the issue, obfiiscating the

material specificity of cuisine and delaying its aesthetic liberation.

For cuisine, among the most concrete arts, eschews mimesis, as does

music, the most abstract. Like the programmatic in music, decora-

tion is incidental to the essence of cuisine, the aesthetic and materi-
al specificity of which is constituted by taste and aroma. It was only
towards the middle of the nineteenth century that cuisine finally
surpassed what Philippe Gillet speaks of as a mise-en-presence of
foodstuffs and tastes to achieve a modern, intrinsically culinary

mise-en-oeuvre, which eschewed cuisine's mimetic dimension.3

Modernist art and modern cuisine have a central trope in

common, invention, such that even structural simplification (as in

sculptural minimalism or the nouvelle cuisine) constitutes a mode of

invention. But just as the tenets of Romanticism continued to

inform modernism, so too did the forms of classical nineteenth-

century cuisine inflect the history of French haute cuisine well into
the twentieth century. To place the modernist conditions of cuisine

in their historical context, one would have to note the startling

coincidence between the advent of the nouvelle cuisine and the

nascent discourse of postmodernism in the arts, both of which
share several central tenets: self-conscious reflexivity (experimenta-

tion upon primary material quaUties), questioning of origins (the

realization that all inventions are but variations, transmutations, or

inspirations based on previous works, whence the search for ancient

sources), hybridization (the inmixing of elements, styles, and gen-

res), regionalism (the decentralization and relativization of tech-

niques, materials, and styles), and multiculturalism, albeit often

confiised with exoticism (the juxtaposition and incorporation of

foreign elements). Indeed, contemporaneous with movements of
minimalism and conceptualism, nouvelle cuisine may be deemed
one of postmodernism's precursors, thus constituting a true aes-

thetic avant-garde.

127
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

This association of art and cuisine suggests a curious genealo-

gy in which the garden of glass in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might

be reconsidered insofar as it served as a model for the interweaving

of two arts that have only recently received their muses: landscape
architecture and cuisine. For while such a garden of spun glass might
never actually have been constructed, the history of cuisine attests to
its influence in the fabulous inventions of pieces montees of spun

sugar, pastry, and candy that evoke such fragile fantasy worlds.

Culinary history abounds in examples of such constructions, even

predating Colonna. One might recall the details of a great feast

given by Amedee viii. Due de Savoie, as recounted in the 1420 man-

uscript dictated by his chef, Maitre Chiquart. The meal was an
amazing spectacle. The main course was a centerpiece consisting of

a miniature castle with a fountain of love spouting rose water and

white wine at the center of the courtyard, with a different dish at the

foot of each tower. Every animal was highly decorated and spat fire;

these included a huge gilded boar ornamented with the guests' coats

of arms, a suckling pig, and a roast swan replumed with its own
feathers. The piece de resistance was a huge pike cooked in three

manners the tail end fried, the middle boiled, and the head

roast served with three different sauces.^' Both this dish and the

centerpiece that adorned the table simultaneously constituted a sec-

ular feast and a cosmic symbol, synthesizing incompatible victuals,

contradictory modes of cooking, and heterogeneous symbols into a

flamboyant totality. Here, the taste for miracles and marvels was

laudably manifested in a culinary instance, though one might sus-

pect that such curiosities, mirabile dictu, often far surpassed the plea-

sures of the palate.

The visual aspect o^z piece montee often takes precedence over

the gastronomic value of the dish itself, however antithetical this

might seem regarding the gustatory goals of cuisine, such that sym-
bolic-value supersedes use-value. Indeed, Careme's decorative per-

fectionism often transcended his culinary aspirations, as in the use

of inedible binding materials to guarantee the longevity of his cre-

ations. Even more ftindamentally, he notes in the foreword to the

third edition of his Le Pdtissier pittoresque the extent of his passion

128
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for landscape architecture per se: "I would have ceased being a pas-

try chef if I blindly gave in to my natural taste for the picturesque

genre, as I conceive of it for the embellishment of the parks of

princes and for private gardens."^^ This landscape architect manque
sublimated his untried passion into some of the most fabulous spun
sugar edifices in the history of French cuisine. Consider the extrav-

agance of the following dessert, a moss-adorned grotto, described in

his Le PMssier royal parisien as having the most picturesque effect.

The grotto with its rock formations was composed of carefully

arranged groups of sculpted dough variously glazed with pink sugar,
caramelized sugar, and castor sugar colored with saffron. These ele-

ments were spread with crystallized sugar and chopped pistachios.

Four arcades were composed of pralined pufif-pastry sprinkled with

fine powdered sugar. It was all surrounded by glazed meringues gar-
nished with vanilla cream, and set on a base of German waffle, dec-
orated with Genoese cake crowns and beads, and topped off with a

small waterfall of silvered spun sugar.^^

This miniature landscape certainly bears comparison with the

no longer extant Grotto of Thetis at Versailles or the fairy tale blue

grotto at Linderhof created by King Ludwig of Bavaria. The style of

Careme s pieces montees was coherent with the landscape aesthetics of

the epoch, based on the intricate aesthetic conditions of a neoclassi-

cism linked to the effects of the purely picturesque; there was no allu-

siveness, no symbolism, no sublime. The result was that as long as the

pictorial models that served such mimesis remained representational,

the gustatory would be subservient to design. Only with the advent

of pictorial abstraction could the visual artistry of cuisine be freed to

serve its gustatory primacy, as is manifested, for example, by the visu-

al influence of Japanese cuisine on the French nouvelle cuisine.

Careme, the architectural autodidact whom one gastronome

referred to as "the Palladio of cuisine," spent untold hours studying

drawing, architecture, and garden design (notably works on garden

follies) at the cabinet des estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale in

Paris. This is attested to by his volumes Le P&tissier pittoresque (1815)

and Le Pdtissier royal parisien (1815), where it is evident that his inspi-

ration was both classical and romantic: a classicism that syncretical-

[29
Antonin Careme, Athenian Ruin, from Le Patissier pittoresque
 [N PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

ly and paradoxically responded to the varied aesthetics of all the

world's great civilizations, and a romanticism that w^as limited to its

most anodyne picturesque effects, minus any Sturm und Drang

whatsoever. Inspired by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignolas five orders of

architecture Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite his

spun-sugar creations in the forms of pavilions, rotundas, temples,

towers, fortresses, mills, hermitages, and ruins of all sorts were cre-

ated in the greatest diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Arabic,

Russian, Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gaelic, and Egyptian. All

this was finally combined in an imaginative melange whose results

transgressed the historical limits of both architecture and cuisine.

This conflation of styles and epochs proffers, for both land-

scape architect and pastry chef, a fantasized, schematized, stereo-

typed reduction of historical detail to imaginative fancy. In this

respect, it might be said that the superlatively decorative and archi-

tectonic side of Careme's work was at least as adventurous as his cui-

sine, which was in part a classic continuation and refinement of aris-

tocratic cuisine at the end of the ancien regime, and in part an
application of innovations that would provide the foundations of

modern haute cuisine. His architectural passion was not, however,

restricted to the art of pastry making. Between 1821-6 he published
Projets d'Architecture, which included plans for the embellishment of
both Paris and Saint-Petersburg. For example, he proposed for the
Place du Carrousel in Paris a temple dedicated to the glory of the
French nation; it would display forty-eight lions' heads, twelve tro-

phies, eight statues, and a pantheon of the names of the country's

heroes. This project is as much in keeping with the great buildings
and constructions for public festivals, both royal and revolution-
ary Utopian architectural fantasies such as those of Etienne-Louis

Boullee, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu as it is

with the art of pastry decoration.

A striking example of such architectural fantasy reveals a

strange modernity at the core of Careme's classicism, one based on a

curious hybrid of styles, materials, and natural orders. In a dreamlike

evocation, he described, in Le Pdtissier parisien, certain pieces montees

that would represent rivers, cascades, and waves of the sea. The

131
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

ephemeral art of pastry would represent the even more ephemeral,

though elemental and eternal, forms of water. This might be com-
pared with another eccentric and fascinating fantasy of edible archi-
tecture from a text by Salvador Dali, which celebrates the oneiric and
troubling nature of certain creations, specifying the relations between

architecture and pastry, and stressing an inexorable desire "to eat the
object of desire. "^4 in describing two art nouveau houses that
Antonio Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona, he
explains how one was inspired by the ocean's waves during a tempest,

and the other by the tranquil waters of a lake.

These are real buildings, veritable sculptures of the reflections of crepuscular

clouds in water, made possible by recourse to an immense and extravagant,

multicolored and glimmering mosaic of pointillist iridescence from which

emerge forms of still water, forms of spreading water, forms of stagnant water,

forms of mirroring water, forms of water rippling in the wind, all these forms of

water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of

bisyncopated, interlaced reliefs melting with "naturalistic-stylized" nenuphars

and nymphaeas concretized in impure and annihilating eccentric conver-

gences, thick protuberances of fear gushing from the incredible facade, simul-

taneously contorted by an utter suffering and by a totally latent and infinite-

ly tender calmness whose only equals are those horrifying apotheoses and ripe

floruncules ready to be eaten with a spoon with a looming, bloody, greasy,

and soft spoon of gamy meat.^'

However surreal and nightmarish, this passage is an archetypally

modernist continuation of the imaginary conflation of landscape
architecture and cuisine, typical of Dali s iconography. In this con-
text, it should be noted that, as befits his art, never does Careme
actually describe the state of his pieces montees afi:er the meal is fin-

ished, leaving veritable ruins of ruins! For to do so would be tanta-

mount to admitting the temporal and fragile nature of his art, as

well as the inexorably mortal (and horrifyingly scatological and mor-

bid) side of cuisine. One cannot help but remember the outstand-
ing role of the table, often depicted in states of extreme chaos, in

pictorial representations of vanitas. Dali concludes his essay with the

claim that, "Beauty will be edible or it will no longer be."^^ Is there

any better argument to consider cuisine as one of the fine arts?

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 [N PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

The genius /oa establishes the essence of cuisine. Consider the

restaurant Michel Bras, named for its chef and owner and situated
near the remote town of Laguiole in the Aubrac region of Frances
Massif Central. One of Brass signature dishes is the gargouillou,

ingredients of which grace the cover of his book, Le livre de Michel

Bras}'^ The term evokes the verb gargouiller, the bubbling or gur-

gling sound of a liquid an onomatopoeia for both the cooking

process and the streams that run through the Aubrac. But gargouil-

lou also refers to one of the principal regional dishes, an elementary

ragout of potatoes in bouillon. Rather than strive for a nostalgic and

restrictive regionalist "authenticity," Bras raises this simplest of dish-

es to the summits of the culinary art. His version consists of an ever-

changing combination, culled from the daily market choices, of as

many as three dozen vegetables and grains chosen from nearly a

hundred possibilities that constitute this "virtual" recipe; each ingre-

dient necessitates a separate preparation, and all are mixed and

moistened in a light butter sauce emulsified with vegetable broth fla-

vored with ham essence, then decorated with herbs, crystallized

leaves, edible wildflowers, wild mushrooms, and pearls of parsley oil.

This dish, offered as the overture to his tasting menu, effectively

articulates many of the major dichotomies informing contemporary

French cuisine peasant/haute, simple/refined, traditional/nou-

velle, regional/international, raw/cooked, wild/cultivated all the

while stressing the primacy of the seasons, revealing the gustatory

specificity of the region (the gout du terroir), and ambiguously strad-

dling the butter/olive oil line roughly situated along France's

watershed that has long separated "French" cooking from its

Proven9al other.

The synthesis of contradictions in Brass gargouillou partakes

of a gastronomic symbolic system that typifies Jean-Francois Revel's

claim that "the summits of the art are attained precisely in those
periods when the refinement of recipes associates a complexity of

conception with a lightness of results. "^^ Complexity of conception

provides the range of variations on a theme that permit continual

inventiveness; the lightness of realization assures the presentation of

the essential, primal qualities of foodstuffs, barkening back to a

Michel Bras: garden from restaurant, garden and restaurant, from within garden
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

nostalgia for simple flavors raised to their quintessential powers, as

stressed by nouvelle cuisine. Essence dominates appearance.

Bras, an erudite autodidact (quite rare in the world of profes-
sional French cuisine), is concerned not only with the history of cui-
sine (French and foreign), but also with ancient and modern botany.
Indeed, his major contribution to contemporary French cooking is

the rediscovery and creative use of many long-forgotten vegetables,

wildflowers, aromatic herbs, and medicinal herbs. Among those

used in the gargouillou (besides numerous more common varieties),
are giant amaranth, orach, Basella, ironwort, white and blue borage,
comfrey, vetch, hops, pimpernel, rape, purslane, and rue. Yet at first

glance, his subtle culinary regionalism is apparently belied by the

architecture of his restaurant-hotel, set high on the west side of a hill

located four miles outside of Laguiole. The Aubrac ^with its vast,

rolling, boulder-strewn vistas of some austerity, and huge, open skies

that often resemble Turner watercolors is one of the most remote
and least populated regions of France. In contrast to the landscape,
the buildings, designed by the Bordeaux architectural firm of Eric

Raffy, are built of basalt, steel, and glass, high-modernist structures

materialized as if accidentally in the natural setting. The lounge area

is enclosed in glass walls that expectedly open upon the splendid vis-
tas, but the long, rectangular, glass-walled restaurant offers what is

at first a rather frustrating surprise: the westward view, often

approaching the sublime, is cut off at the horizon by the roofline of

one of the hotel buildings, letting only the sky appear. Between the
windows of the restaurant and the initially exasperating wall is a nar-

row rectangular garden that runs the length of the restaurant, open
at the northern end to visually flow into the countryside. Looking
obliquely northward, from inside this garden, its unmarked extrem-
ity is continuous with the landscape beyond; looking straight west-
ward from within the restaurant, the garden is framed by the win-
dows and delimited by the wall. This garden is stylistically equivocal,

not unlike many of Brass dishes: its several rugged stones placed as

if randomly on its low grass field, highlighted by wild grasses and

wild flowers, simulate the very Aubrac landscape hidden by the
facing wall. Yet these stones also refer to the Japanese Zen garden.

135
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Microcosm replaces macrocosm; international syncretism enriches

symbolic regionalism.^^
Yet this simple setting offers a complex theatricality. For upon
appearance of the
first dish the gargouillou, in the case of the
''
Decouverte & Nature' menu the relations between the garden and
what appears on the plate (the most condensed microcosm in this

scenario) are apparent. One is occasionally even served the same

sorts of flowers growing in the garden before one's gaze. As for the
outer Aubrac scenery, of which only the skyscape is visible, the sum-
mer sun initially prohibits much appreciation, as the light is partic-

ularly brash, necessitating protective shades on the glass walls to

soften its effect. But as the sun reaches the horizon, the waiters, in
choreographed synchroniciry, raise the shades, revealing the

Turneresque sky with the added surprise of double sunsets (an

ancient portentous cosmic sign) created by a combination of atmos-

pheric conditions and the double plate glass of the windows. The
symbolic, indeed metaphysical, role of the sun has played a major

part in the constitution of French landscape architecture ever since

Versailles, where the garden's central axis marks the solar trajectory,

culminating at the vanishing point where the sun sets at infinity, all

in homage to the Sun King. This tradition is continued at Michel

Bras, where the artificial horizon of the rooftop dissimulates and
doubles the natural horizon, articulating outer sky with inner garden
landscape, all framed by the glass walls that also enclose the sun in a
"captured view."

As the sun sets, artificial lighting replaces natural light, with

highlights created by spotlights. The disappearance of the sky into

night condenses the world into the space of the garden and the

restaurant, progressively narrowing the field of visibility and con-

centration. The only activity in the garden is the "performance" of

the light, first natural then artificial, establishing a theatricality the

gastronomic function of which is to turn the scene inward, towards

the pictorial and performative space of the table. In another context,

this effect is explained, mutatis mutandis, in Looking at the Over-

looked, where Norman Bryson writes of the "anti-Albertian genre"

of still-life:

136
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

Instead of plunging vistas, arcades, horizons, and the sovereign prospect of

the eye, it proposes a much closer space, centered on the body. Hence one

of the technical curiosities of the genre, its disinclination to portray the

world beyond the far edge of the table. Instead of a zone beyond one finds

a blank, vertical wall, sometimes coinciding with a real wall, but no less per-

suasively it is a virtual wall That further zone beyond the table's edge

must be suppressed if still life is to create its principal spatial value: nearness.

What builds this proximal space is gesture: the gestures of eating, of laying

the table.4

Michel Bras's restaurant meets the conditions of this anti-Albertian

genre, a site that provides a richly symboUc dining experience, one

fully orchestrated in relation to the surrounding environment and its

culinary riches.

The sculptures of Henri Olivier constitute a realm of assignation,

not designation, of inscription, not description. The "nature" of his

art sculpture, landscape architecture, conceptual works, site-

specific works, interior decor is a catalyst to set mind, sight, and

body in motion. As it were, any discussion limited strictly to the for-

mal attributes of these works minimal forms, industrial finish,

variable scale, serial structures, Duchampian titles would miss the

point for the very same reasons that the minimalist sculpture and
earthworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s belied formal analyses.
The material existence of Olivier's equivocal (though not too anx-

ious) objects fiinctions as the articulation of the perceptual and the

conceptual, where form follows placement.

Threshold, Portico, and Tunnel a.re titles that portend, sites of

passage, liminal objects, emblematic works. They are aesthetic

transformers that manifest the ambiguity between entrance and

exit, viewpoint and vanishing point, seer and seen. Here, the subtle
and cunning reversibility of space infinite overture and transcen-
dent permeability receives its aesthetic consecration. Is the spec-

tator to be oriented or disoriented? Even the most solid, the most

immobile of Olivier's works, once set in its garden context.

[37

 Henri Olivier,. Untitled

Henri Olivier, Miroirs d'eau

 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

becomes fluid and ephemeral, as is often the case for garden sculp-

ture. It is transformed by the fleeting shadows of clouds and

observers, the ever-changing intensity and quality of the light, and
the anamorphic trajectories of the gaze. It traces new itineraries for

the garden stroll, where visibility is a veritable labyrinth within

which vision is transfigured into symbols.

The material constituents of Olivier's sculpture are archetyp-

ally neutral and elemental in their substance, color, and ubiquity.

This neutrality hints at the very essence of matter itself: the stable,

phlegmatic life of wood; the innate architectonics of stone; the

immutable, melancholic weightiness of lead; the baroque virtuality

of water. As in Opus incertum, nature and culture are symbolically

fused in eminently coherent and elemental works, here forming

miniature pools to collect water, creating sculptures approximating

the inexorable existence of natural objects. The already intricate rela-

tionships between site, sight, and sign in the landscape are compli-

cated by Olivier's aggressive, yet humorous, anti-mannerist sensi-

bility that surpasses the nature/culture distinction at the core of

classical structuralist categorization and hermeneutics. The garden is

the site where memory and history intersect, where scripted theater
and spontaneous eroticism are juxtaposed, where the simulacrum of
an ideal world and the exigencies of the real conflict. Here, Olivier's

sculptures are equivocal signs within a greater totality.

A certain minimalism gives rise to thought, but abhors alle-

gory, as is the case in Olivier's site-specific garden sculptures, which

often constitute microcosmic elements of landscape architecture:

canals devolved into mirror slits, pools condensed into puddles of

rainwater filling out hollowed sculptural spaces, orchards nominally

reduced to a word or a name (as in Dans les oliviers). Yet to what

these works refer is indissociable from the spectators' acts of appre-

hension and conception, whence the constitution of the garden as a

paysage conceptualise (a "conceptualized" landscape, as compared

with Panofsky's notion of the paysage moralise). As such, Olivier's
works might be placed in the lineage of Ian Hamilton Finlay's cele-

brated Stony Path/Little Sparta, the archetypal "conceptual" garden.

For both Finlay and Olivier, garden and sculpture exist in a site-spe-

[39
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

cific and dialectical relationship, foregrounding the conceptual, sym-

bolic, and allegorical facets of the history of landscape architecture.
In investigating these works, one must avoid false tautologies

by extending the list of both sculptural qualities and subject posi-

tions to infinity. Since the terms of discourse orient the field of

vision, the theoretical realm must be as supple, open, and incom-

plete as the work in question. Whence the importance of the condi-

tional in the tide of Olivier's Si c'est un jardin (If This Is a Garden).

The interrogative aspect of this work demands an answer both phys-
ical and conceptual, quotidian and aesthetic. What constitutes, for

example, the difference between a fallen tree split by lightening in

an empty forest and a sculpture such as Allee (Path), consisting of an

alley composed of lead-encrusted split and quartered logs? One is

seen, the other organizes sight. Occasionally, nature attains the

exceptional status and solemnity of art. In Japan, for example,

Mount Fuji does not exist solely as a natural phenomenon: through

centuries of aesthetic representation, it has been transfigured into a

symbolic, spiritual matrix according to which all other objects and

images are beheld. All sculpture might well aspire to the ontological
condition of Mount Fuji.
Yet now, this aesthetic situation is complicated insofar as at the

overlapping moment of modernity and postmodernity, the genius

loci is always potentially subverted by ironic reversals and antimeta-

physical distractions. A new theatricality is offered where sculpture,

architecture, and landscape are once again united, no longer in a sys-

tematic and symbolic totalization of reference and self-reference, but

rather in the fragile complicity of intertextual cross-references, often

culminating in frustrating yet challenging aesthetic and conceptual

dead ends, paradoxes, and contradictions. The first stanza of Wallace

Stevens's poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," not unfamiliar to landscape

historians, offers an appropriate paradigm for the phenomenology of
postminimalist sculpture in the landscape domain.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild."^'

Compare Thoreau's vision of the "worldly miser," who "did not see

the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. "4^ Premodernist paradigms of landscape
would focus on the hill in Tennessee or the image of paradise, val-

orizing the untouched landscape; postmodernist paradigms center

on the perceptual and cognitive effects of the jar and the post-hole.
Sculptures, monuments, milestones, celestial signs, cartographic
coordinates, the axis mundi itself as well as Stevens's jar and
Olivier's sculptures all mark the inauguration of a virtual spatiali-

ty whose future exists in the very lineaments of the spectator's ges-

tures and gaze. These ritualistic cosmic landmarks inaugurate a
deconstruction of the garden's symbolic matrix.
Olivier's sculptures attempt to expand the ontology and epis-
temology of landscape architecture insofar as they manifest the
modernist tenets of serialism, difference, repetition, sequence, and
periodicity, all the while problematizing the relations between inte-

rior and exterior, nature and artifact, axiom and object, landscape

and sculpture, physical and metaphysical. The miniature reflecting

pools of his Miroir d'eau and Miroirs d'eau simultaneously establish

a rhetorical condensation and an ontological contraction of French

formal gardens; yet such works are deformalizing, operating as

abstract synecdoches of the garden sites in which they are placed.

Untitled, with its mirror slit as the ultimate metaphor of a garden

canal, is a further ontological declension of this series, where the

water-mirror is in turn transformed into pure sculpture, destined to

become an abstract museological proxy for the garden.

Is it the gaze that is captivated in these works, or rather the

cosmos that is captured and shrunk, through specular magic, into

diminutive spectacle and theoretical trope? The infinite malleability

of vision is prodigious, engendering the picturesque, the beautiful,

and the sublime. Do Olivier's sculptures evoke quietude or disqui-

etude? Are they physical or metaphysical? Or might it be concluded
that they proffer a detotalizing force, an ontological tension, a

hermeneutic destabilization? Such aesthetic disequilibrium may well

141
Bauduin, Vers Versailles
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

serve as an overture to the landscapes, both mental and physical, of

this aesthetically ambiguous fin-de-siecle.

If Olivier's work can be characterized in terms of a maximal inter-

vention of gardens in the field of scidpture, the work of the French

sculptor Bauduin who characterizes his metier as that of a passeur

de pierre^^ consists of an absolutely minimal, transient interven-

tion of sculpture in the landscape. Such is his aesthetic process of

implying both an of placement and
deposition act a statement or

testimony nameswhereby an
that object is set in the landscape,

either uniquely or in a complex and serial ritual of exchange with

other objects from the natural domain. "^^ Such a procedure estab-

lishes a dialectic in the landscape between presence and absence

(of art object, of artist, of observer), forgetting and recollection,

emptiness and plenitude, measure and disproportion, activity and

chance.

Typical is Bauduin's work Vers Versailles, the deposition of a

single one-square-meter sheet of transparent glass in the gardens of
Versailles on a morning in November 1992, placed five times, first

between the Fountain of Apollo and the canal, afterwards at the gar-

den's extreme limit at the end of the canal, and then at three sculp-

tures including the Enceladus. Here, several principle views are at

stake, following the east- west axis of the garden that structurally reg-
ulates the major viewpoints. One deposition offered views over the

canal to the vanishing point, and over the Fountain of Apollo to the

chateau in the background; another deposition offered but one

appropriate view, over the length of the Grand Canal to the chateau

in the background, for the opposite viewpoint established a per-

spective of what lay beyond the limits of the garden, which might
well exclude it from the purview of the work (entitled, after all,

"Towards Versailles"). Depending on the angle of vision, the glass is

either transparent or reflective, either marking the site on which it is

posed or creating a mirror, a simulacrum of the canal and the pools

{miroirs d'eau). The sheet of glass is thus both a metaphor of vision

t43
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

and a visible work, both a gesture and an object multiplying the gar-
den's signification and enriching its visibility.

Are the "icons" of this work the canal and pool, or rather the
variously transparent and reflecting sheet of glass? Both, it would
seem, as this is an art of process and instability, ellipsis and equivo-
cation, allusion and conception based on the rapid passage through
a landscape. For Bauduin, to saunter is to abandon; his depositions

entail a transparent gesture, a placement that equals displacement,

deviation, abandonment. In this ritualistic art, process equals pas-

sage: the garden is nature plus gesture, a maximal work distin-

guished by minimal signs. For Bauduin, the ethics of aesthetics is

knowing how to depart.

One of the most radical contemporary reconsiderations of the land-

scape is expressed in Robert Smithson's claim.

You know, one pebble moving one foot in two million years is enough action

to keep me really excited. But some of us have to simulate upheaval, step up

the action. Sometimes we have to call on Bacchus. Excess. Madness. The End

of the World. Mass Carnage. Falling Empires. 45

Questions of scale, process, and temporality are expanded to the cos-

mic dimension, imperceptible to the human sensory apparatus, and

nearly unfathomable to the imagination. Smithson's perspective,

transforming time, space, and objects, resulted in such previously

unthinkable works of "landscape architecture" as his 1967
Monuments of Passaic series, in which industrially transformed and
devastated landscapes of New Jersey with their oil derricks, huge
pipelines, and drainage systems were perceived, and photographi-
cally represented, as veritable sites of landscape architecture.
The last monument was a sand box or a model desert. Under the dead light

of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration

and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleak-

ly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the

drying up of oceans no longer were there green forests and high moun-

tains all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

and stones pulverized into dust. Every grain of sand was a dead metaphor and

equaled timelessness, and to decipher such metaphors would take one

through the false mirror of eternity. This sand box somehow doubled as an

open grave a grave that children cheerfiilly play in.

4^

This passage, worthy of the best science-fiction, also makes a theo-

retic proposition typical of the epoch, foregrounding the least-

common denominator of the materiality of the signifier, here the

grains of sand. Compare the theorization of the experimental film-

maker Paul Sharits, who stressed the simultaneous difference and

identity of "film as object" and "projected performance as process."

His studies, both cinematic and theoretic, of the micro-morphology

of film led to an extreme epistemological axiom, transforming cine-
matography into semiotics: "even those 'things' which are observ-

able, such as 'emulsion grains,' can be shown to be essentially

""^7
'concepts.'

In an epoch characterized by wide experimentation with the

material substructure of the art object, one might wonder why, of all
the arts, landscape architecture should hardly have benefited from

such contemporary structural-material analyses. Smithson, nearly

alone among those concerned with the landscape, explicitly brought

these issues into the context of "Western metaphysics. In order to

shatter the limitations of previous speculation on the landscape, he

revealed the phenomenological limits of perception and the icono-
graphic limits of the imagination. Thus in terms of scale, he under-
stood why Pascal could never accept Descartes's mechanistic system:

"He was always troubled by those actual scale problems, and then

the whole idea of probability springs out of that. "4^ Pascal's theo-

logical disquietude demanded an ontological rupture between world

and God, entailing a new metaphysics and mathematics; Smithson's

aesthetic disquietude resulted in a new assimilation of natural

chance and process into art, an experimentation transposed to the

realm of landscape.
Smithson's Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969) is typical of

his investigations of the aesthetic morphology of the landscape. The

work, consisting of a trip through the Yucatan peninsula with nine
"mirror displacements" mirrors set in the landscape, photographi-

145
 Robert Smithson, Sixth Yucatan Mirror Displacement (ipdp)

1
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

cally documented, then removed specifically complicates the

problem of the horiiwn:

How could one advance on the horizon, if it was already present under the

wheels? A horizon is something else other than a horizon; it is closedness in

openness, it is an enchanted region where down is up. Space can be

approached, but time is far away. Time is devoid of objects when one dis-

places all destinations. The car kept going on the same horizon. ^^^

Crucial is the site-specificity of the work physically, historically,

and mythologically stressed by Smithson in his manner of narrat-

ing the voyage in the context of Aztec theology, notably concerning

the god Quetzalcoatl. He refers to the moment of the myth where

the god, resting near a great tree, gazed into an obsidian mirror, and,
realizing that he had become aged, cast several nearby stones into the
tree, where they remained embedded. Smithson reformulates this

myth for contemporary purposes by postulating that

By traveling with Quetzalcoatl one becomes aware of primordial time or final

time The Tree of Rocks. (A memo for a possible "earthwork" balance slabs

of rock in tree limbs.) But if one wishes to be ingenious enough to erase time

one requires mirrors, not rocks.5

The vastness of geological epochs parallels mythic timelessness;

opposed to nature and myth beyond the limits of human percep-

tion, Smithson also stresses forms of animal perception beneath the

threshold of human perception. Proclaiming that in fact trees are

dedicated to flies, he asks, " Why shouldflies be without art?"^^

Depending on the angle of vision, mirrors can reflect images,

or light, or nothing. In gardens, reflecting pools and mirrors often

fiinction in baroque splendor, to multiply and glorify their subjects.

They can serve as frames and icons, as at Versailles, where the mon-
umental Grand Canal and the Hall of Mirrors capture and reflect

both the vanishing point at infinity and the setting sun, Apollonian

apotheosis of all symbols. For Smithson, to the contrary, the mirror

fractures perception and displaces horizons, unfolding the landscape

as a polymorphic site, with infinite bifurcations in both space and

time. Being has multiple entrances: it is overdetermined, sediment-

ed, chiasmatic, reversible, diacritical, and equivocal. The mirror is

no longer icon but anti-icon, decomposing rather than composing.

Robert Smithson, A Non-Site, Franklin,
w
New Jersey (ip(i8)
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

establishing an aesthetic entropy that is tantamount to a creativity

beyond all narcissism and nostalgia. The Yucatan Mirror Displace-

ments through the visual fragmentation, physical displacement,

and temporal transformation effected by aesthetic artifice denatu-

ralize and dematerialize the landscape.
These nine different mirror displacements served as a sort of
subversive, postmodern "Claude glass," while the resulting photo-
graphic documentation transformed the mirrors from reflective

tools into stable icons. Writing of the flight over the jungle towards
the site of the sixth mirror displacement, he offered a description

that is not only emblematic of the Yucatan project and of his entire
oeuvre, but also of the aesthetics of post-baroque gardens: "Down
in the lagoons and swamps one could see infinite, isotropic, three-

dimensional icnA homogeneous space sinking out of site. "5^ Smithson

reminds us that.

If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but memory
traces, for the mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were

photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in New York. The reflected light

has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories

constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension

of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be

seen. The fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their arguments. Yucatan

is elsewhere. 55

An indoor version of these mirror works also exists, inverting the

relations between landscape and gallery and thereby further denatu-

ralizing the landscape: Dead Tree, consisting of an uprooted tree

placed to fill a gallery space, with mirrors set in the branches. 54 In

this piece, blind mirrors reflect a frozen disaster, creating an art of

accidents, not essences. What Smithson wrote of the mirror dis-

placements pertains, mutatis mutandis, to Dead Tree: "There was a

friction between the mirrors and the tree; now there is a friction

between language and memory. A memory of reflections becomes an

absence of absences."^' Such is the condition of writing on art, as

well as of all metaphysical speculation; the mirror is not only a

metaphoric or mythic signifier, but it also creates specific duplicat-

ing and fragmenting effects, both perceptually and cognitively.

149
Robert Smithsoii, Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), (1969)
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

The fact that the horizon cannot be located or localized, only

reflected and displaced, is fully coherent with Smithson's major
structural contribution to the history of landscape architecture, his

non-sites. These are indoor earthworks that simultaneously disrupt

and reveal the original site, works constituted by a transfer of earth

or stone from the landscape to a gallery installation, accompanied by
photographic and/or cartographic documentation. This effects

transformations of scale, disposition, temporality, and containment,

and establishes a dialectic between prehistory and history, nature

and artifice, presentation and representation, landscape and

gallery indeed, of all the material aspects of the site a veritable

abstraction, in the root sense of the term, that expands the limits of

landscape. ^^ The non-sites ultimately permitted the postulation of

his series of Hypothetical Continents, begun in 1969, including Map

of Atlantis; The Hypothetical Continent in Stone, Cathaysia; The
Hypothetical Continent ofLemuria; Island ofBroken Seashells; Island

ofBroken Glass; Map of Clear Broken Glass Strips (Atlantis); and Map
of Glass (Atlantis). Some exist in the form of maps and drawings,
others were actually completed works, all were "anti-expeditions,"
like that in the Yucatan, which thrust landscape architecture into the

realm of science-fiction and fantasy.

At the same moment that Smithson was beginning his interventions

of the landscape, the science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard was becom-

ing internationally famous for an oeuvre that, among other innova-

tions, fantasized the landscape, natural and artificial, in manners

that influenced an entire literary and artistic generation. ^7 Typical is

his apocalyptic short story, "The Illuminated Man," where the trans-

formation of the world into a crystalline realm proffers a terrifying

and morbid beauty. This tale both opens, epigraphically, and closes
with the same text:

By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jeweled alHgators

glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers. By

night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cart-

'^
wheels, his head like a spectral crown.
 UNNATURAL HORIZONS

Such is the disquieting strangeness of a world in the process of cat-

aclysmic transformation
"in this forest everything is transfigured

and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of time and

space"59 a world containing objects resembling glace fruit, brilliant

jeweled trellises, glistening wedding cakes, Faberge gems, fountains

frozen in time, and opalescent candy, all evincing a consummate,

kaleidoscopic imagination of the limits of landscape, as the narrator

recounts:

Again the forest was a place of rainbows, the deep carmine light glowing from

the jeweled grottos. I walked along a narrow road which wound towards a

great white house standing like a classical pavilion on a rise in the centre of

the forest. Transformed by the crystal frost, it appeared to be an intact frag-

ment of Versailles or Fontainebleau, its ornate pilasters and sculptured friezes

^
spilling from the wide roof which overtopped the forest.

It is no surprise that Ballard, the author who transformed the erotic

landscape vis-a-vis automobile technology in his notorious novel
Crash (1973), valorizes above nearly all else in modernism the
"impossible or symbolic worlds" of surrealist art' (most notably the

"hallucinatory naturalism" of Salvador Dali's paintings), and the

"sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophren-

ics."^^ What is at stake for Ballard is a certain ideal of the literary

imagination:

The dream worlds invented by the writer of fantasy are external equivalents

of the inner world of the psyche, and because these symbols take their impe-

tus from the most formative and confused periods of our lives they are often

time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity.^'

This confluence of landscape and dream was always evident in the

post-Renaissance history of landscape architecture, as evidenced in
Colonna's Hypnerotomachia PoUphili and Scudery's La Carte de
Tendre, in Pascal's terror before the infinite expanses of the universe

and Nerval s erotic hallucinations of the landscape, in Smithson's

Yucatan Mirror Displacements and the rampant contemporary virtu-

al reconstitutions of the landscape. It is this thought that probably
motivated Ballard, in the rhetorical tour-de-force of a recent one-
page catalog essay, to transform Smithson's work into his own by
postulating what might be the most famous works of land art,

152
 IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

Smithson's SpiralJetty and Amarillo Ramp, as the technological prod-

ucts of a cargo cuit!^'^

Smithson foresaw that "At any rate, the 'pastoral,' it seems, is out-

moded."^^ At the end of the twentieth century, a certain type of gar-

den would seem to be in constant revolt against both the restrictions

of mathesis (universal or otherwise) and those of mimesis; a garden

that is not "natural," yet one that permits the apparition of nature;
a marginal garden, corresponding to what Gilles Deleuze wrote of as

"minor" works, with their attendant subversive effects; a garden

whose forms transcend the imagination without, however, necessar-

ily evoking the sublime. Perhaps such "time-sculptures of terrifying

ambiguity" are indeed destined to guarantee an apocalyptic trans-
formation of the landscape. In a denatured nature that discloses pro-
foundly unnatural horizons, "The gardens of history are being
replaced by sites of time.""^*^

153

 Notes

Unless otherwise noted, English translations of French texts are by Allen S. Weiss.

Syncretism and Style

1 Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, vol. 2, trans. S. G. C.

Middlemore (i860; New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 294.
2 Francesco Petrarch, Lettres familihes et secrkes (Paris: Bechet, 1816), 99; cited in

Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins secrets de la Renaissance : Des astres, des simples, et

desprodiges (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 48. This book is an excellent study of the
secret garden, from the medieval hortiis conclusus through the Italian Renaissance

giardino segreto to the jardin hermetique.

3 Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins secrets, 11.

4 Francesco Petrarch, "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux," n.t., in Introduction to Con-

temporary Civilization in the U^if (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 557.

5 Ibid., 560.

6 Cited in ibid., 562.

7 Petrarch, "Ascent," 562.

8 Two classic texts on the trading, inmixing, and syncretism of symbols are: Jurgis

Baltru^aitis, Le moyen dge fantastique: Antiquites et exotismes dans I'art gothique (1955;

Paris: Flammarion, 1981); and Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of
Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

9 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans.
Mario Domandi (1927; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 52.

10 Ibid., 143.

11 As this is probably the most analyzed topic in art history, a long list of references

would here be both inadequate and superfluous. As an introductory note, consider

several classic texts: John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London:
Faber & Faber, 1957); Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu: L'ordre visuel du

Quattrocento {?2ins: Gallimard, 1967); Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance

 NOTES SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and Hubert
Damisch, L'origine de la perspective {Vaus: Flammarion, 1987).
12 The most recent translation is Leon Battista AJberti, On the Art of Building in Ten
Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernow (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996).

13 For example, the Villa Lante (Bagnaia), the Villa d'Este (Tivoli), the Boboli
Gardens of the Palazzo Pitti (Florence), and the various Medici Villas (Rome,
Castello, Poggio, Pratolino, and Fiesole), only to name some of the most typical
and famous.
14 The literature on the Italian Renaissance garden is vast. For a fine introduction, see
Catherine Laroze, Une histoire sensuelle des jardins (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990),
32332; Terry Comito, "The Humanist Garden," in Monique Mosser and Georges
Teyssot, eds. The Architecture of Western Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1991), 37-45; and John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), especially 42-58 ("Ovid in the Garden") and 59-72
("Garden and Theatre"). Among the many fine illustrated books and guides, very
usefiil is Judith Chatfield, A Tour ofItalian Gardens (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

15 Cited in Lionello Puppi, "Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian

Garden," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 53.

16 This section on Cusanus is based on Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos. On the great
chain of being, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being {\9i6; New York:
Harper & Row, i960).

17 Karl Jaspers, Anselm and Nicholas ofCusa, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 35. Needless to say, the present essay presents

only the broadest schematization of these complex philosophical issues ^just

enough, it is hoped, to situate their interest in relation to the development of the

Italian Renaissance garden, and thus to inspire the reader to further investigations.
18 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 51. On the extension of these issues as they relate

to aesthetics in the seventeenth-century debates between the Cartesians and the

Pascalians, see Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and
17th-century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 53-77-

19 Cited in Raymond Marcel, Marsile Ficin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1958), 273.

20 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 190-1; see also 69-141. On Ficino, see also Paul

Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 89-110, 163-227.

21 Erwin Panofsky, "The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy," Studies

in Iconology (1939; New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 141.

22 See Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 129-69.

23 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 132.

24 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 134.

25 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 135. Panofsky rightly notes that the vast influence
of the notion of Neoplatonic love was effected in both direct and indirect manners,
much in the manner that psychoanalysis was influential for the history of mod-

ernism in the arts, even when inadequately understood. This idea is useful in con-

sidering the relations between theoretical systems and artistic production, where

partial readings and misreadings in no way obviate the efficacy of "influence" or

"affinities." Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence {Oxford: Oxford University

156
 NOTES SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

Press, 1973) remains the most subtle analysis of the role of misprision in artistic cre-

ation. In relation to the experience of the Italian garden, John Dixon Hunt, in

Garden and Grove {242, n.3), astutely makes a parallel claim, referring to a study by
Claudia Lazzaro-Bruno of an allegory of art and nature in the Villa Lante:

"Iconographical studies usually consider, as does this, only meanings inscribed in

artworks, rarely how such meanings were read by later visitors." The great value of

Hunt's book is that it accomplishes both feats.

26 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, i65n.

27 Ibid., 160.
28 Cited in Arnold Hauser, The Social History ofArt, vol. 2, trans. Stanley Goodman
(1951; New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), 129.

29 See Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 83-7, 115-9 and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight
Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1964), 54-71.

30 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity ofMan (1486), trans.
Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John

Herman Randall, Jr., eds.. The Renaissance Philosophy ofMan (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1948), 224-5.

31 Juan Luis Vives, Tabula de homine (c. 1518), trans. Nancy Lenkeith, in Cassirer,

Kristeller, and Randall, Renaissance Phibsophy, 389.

32 Juan Luis Vives, cited in John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
(New York: Athenaeum, 1994), 510.

33 Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins secrets, 94. On the transformations of epistemology, natural

classes, and botanic knowledge, see 79121 of this work. The locus classicus of the
subject remains Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, n.t. (1966; New York:
Vintage, 1973).

34 Cited in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958; New York: Norton,

1968), 2l8.

35 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 218.

36 Ibid., 99. Perhaps the most familiar contemporary example of this dictum is

Mohammed Alls "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

37 The erotic poetics of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili speddcaWy justifies the use of

this adjective.

38 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 104.

39 Cited in Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 158.

40 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 21.

41 Ibid., 25.

42 Maurice Le Roux, cited in Maurice Roche, Monteverdi (Paris: Le Seuil/Solftges,

i960), 70-1.

43 Although the identity of the author of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is not absolutely

certain, it is now almost always attributed to Francesco Colonna, a Dominican

Friar of the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. There is one theory that
the book was written by Alberti, which, whatever its veracity, reveals the profound
affinities perceived between the two thinkers. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was pub-

lished, with illustrations, in a mixture of Italian, Latin, and Greek, in Venice by

Aldus Manutius in 1499. An abbreviated French translation by Jean Martin

appeared in Paris in 1546, published by Kerver under the title Discours du songe de

157
 NOTES SYNCRETISM AND STYLE

Poliphilr, the English translation, entitled The Strife ofLove in a Dreame, appeared
in London in 1592; the contemporary Italian edition of Hypnerotomachia Polophili
was edited by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi (Padua, 1964). Translations in

the current study are by the author, from the recent French edition (based on the
1546 Jean Martin translation), Le Songe de PoliphiU (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale
Editions, 1994), edited, prefaced, and transliterated into modern French by Gilles

Polizzi. On the influence of this book in France, see Anthony Blunt, "The
Hypnerotomachia Pobphili in lyth-Century France," Journal of the Warburg Institute

1 (1937): 117-37; this is an important early study flawed, however, by a less-than-

rudimentary comprehension of Renaissance philosophies. The importance of the
engravings in the Hypnerotomachia Polophili for considerations of the landscape are
briefly discussed in a book that is, in its breadth and depth, a model of scholarship

on gardens and landscape, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf 1995), 268-79. For an idiosyncratic and su^estive allegorical read-

ing, see Alberto Perez-Gomez, Poliphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992).

44 Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, 120.

45 Ibid., 125. We find here the origins of Astroturf

46 Ibid., 128.

47 Ibid., 276.

48 Ibid., 325.

49 Lamarche-Vadel, Jardiru secrets, 31.

50 Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, 325.

51 On the epistemological problem of lists, see Allen S. Weiss, "The Errant Text," in

The Aesthetics of Excess (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 77-87.

Such usage evokes the sensual and critical aspects of Rabelais (who was directly
influenced by Hypnerotomachia), the phantasmic and nonutilitarian inventions of
Raymond Roussel, and the simulacral metaphysics of Jorge Luis Borges.
52 Gilles Polizzi, "Presentation," in Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, xvii.

Dematerialization and Iconoclasm

Blaise Pascal, Pensies (Edition de Port-Royal, 1670; Paris: Le Seuil, 1962), 44 (44).

References to Pensees will cite the Port-Royal section number in parentheses.

Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique {1^1^; Paris: Minuit, 1975),

157. For a more detailed analysis of this problem, see Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity,
52-77, to which this chapter might serve as a supplement.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 16.

Alberto P^rez-Gomez, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 307-8.

H^lfene Verin, "Technology in the Park: Engineers and Gardeners in Seventeenth-

Century France," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 135. See

also ibid., 266-79.

Philippe Comar, La perspective en jeu: Les dessous de I'image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992),

59; see also 53-63.

158
 NOTES DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

7 The anguish behind this phantasm of spaceless space is made clear by Edmund
Husserl, whose own phenomenological meditations, in this regard, were particularly

Cartesian: "Depth is a symptom of chaos that true science must order into a cos-

mos, into a simple order, completely clear and exposed. True science . . . ignores all

depth." Cited in Comar, La perspective enjeu, 6v, see also Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity,

33-46.
8 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Lafi)lie du voir: De I'esthetique baroque (Paris: Galilee,

1986). 77-

9 Ibid., 86. This notion is borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

10 Ibid., 75.

11 Pascal, Pensees, 184 (427).

12 Ibid., 161 (378).

13 Lorsque I'an se renouvelle,

En cette aimable saison

Oil Flore amine avec elk
Les Zephyrs sur I'horizon,

Une nuit que le silence

Charmait tout par sa presence,

Je conjurai le Sommeil
De suspendre mon reveil

Bien loin par dela I'aurore.

Jean de La Fontaine, Le songe de Vaux (1671), in Oeuvres Completes (Paris:

Gallimard/Pleiade, 1958), 81.

14 La, dans des chars dares, le Prince avec sa Cour

Va gouter lafraicheur sur le declin dujour

L'un et I'autre Soleil, unique en son espece,

Etale aux regardants sa pompe et sa richesse.

Phebus brille a I'envi du monarche firangois ;

On ne sait bien souvent a qui donner sa voix :

Tous deux sont pleins d'eclat et rayonnants de gloire.

Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amour de Psyche et de Cupidon (1669), in Oeuvres

Computes (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1958), 185.

15 Gaston Bachelard, L'Air et les songes: Essai sur I'imagination du mouvement (Paris:
Jose Corti, 1943), 188. See also Hubert Damisch, Theorie de nuage (Paris: Le Seuil,

1972).

16 Ibid., 195.

17 Ibid., 194.

18 Ibid., 17.

19 Pascal, Pensees, 103 (199).

20 The following might be cited as some of the principal fetes and spectacles of the

epoch: Bernini's L'Inondazione (Rome, 1638), II mondo festeggiante (an equestrian

ballet created in Florence to celebrate the wedding of Cosimo in, 1661), Fete de

Vaux-le-Vicomte (this celebrated and ill-fated fete given by Fouquet for Louis xiv is

described in a letter from La Fontaine to M. de Maucroix, written immediately

after the event and dated 22 August 1661), Carrousel (Paris, 1662), Les Plaisirs de Pile

enchantee (Versailles, 1664), Le Ballet de Flore (Versailles, 1668), and Bernini's

Allestimento di una Girandola (fireworks in Rome, 1659).

[59
 NOTES DEMATERIALIZATION AND ICONOCLASM

21 See John D. Lyons, "Unseen Space and Theatrical Narrative: The 'Rdcit de
Cinna,' " Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 70-90. It is interesting to note that already

in the seventeenth century the French theater used the terms cotejardin to prompt
stage left and coti cour to prompt stage right.

22 Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Puns: Le Seuil, 1963), 67.

23 These indications refer respectively to lines 384, 656, 966, and 1277 of Ph^dre. Note
that this theatrical restriction on the representation of forbidden or impossible
scenes was overcome in the eighteenth century, especially in regard to the represen-

tation of eroticism in the private libertine theater.

24 Pascal, Pensies, 254 (545).

25 Lyons, "Unseen Space," 85.

26 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, n.t. (1966; New York: Vintage, 1973), 318-22.

27 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods (1962; New York: Praeger,

1969), 3.

28 Pascal, Pensees, 103 (199). Note that what Pascal gives as a definition of nature in

this passage, Cusanus had offered as a definition of God.

29 La Fontaine, Songe de Vaux, 82.

30 Pascal, Pensees, no (201).

31 Ibid., 171 (400).

32 Ibid., 304 (764).

33 Note that in Phedre, Theseus responds to Hippolytus's presumed treachery by ban-

ishing him from the state, saying that even if he were beyond Alcides's pillars, he
would still be too near (lines 1141-2). Alcides's Pillars, or the Pillars of Hercules,

were situated at the Western limits of the Mediterranean Sea, symbolizing an

extremely distant place.

34 Le Soleil, las de voir ce spectacle barbare,

Precipite sa course ; et, passant sous les eaux,

Va porter la clarte chez des peuples nouveaux :

L'horreur de ces diserts s'accroit par son absence.

La Nuit vient sur un char conduit par le Silence

LI am^ne avec lui la crainte en iUnivers.

La Fontaine, Les Amours, 141.

35 Pierre Saint-Amand, "Morale du jardin," Critique 546 (1992): 909.

36 Pascal, Pensees, no (206). It is significant that the chapter heading (xv bis) of the
Pensies, "La nature est corrompue," was the title of a dossier that was never written.

37 Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia (1855; Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 268.

38 Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours (1821-30; Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 390; see

also Buci-Glucksmann, Folic du voir, 50-2. The role of the hypotyposis in

Emmanuel Kant's Critique ofJudgment should be noted.

39 Nerval, Aurelia, 268.

40 Ibid., 268.

160
 NOTES THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

The Libidinal Sublime

1 Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, "Last Will and Testament," The
Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Phibsophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writing,
trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1981), 157.

2 Cited in Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the

Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 207. This
section of my chapter is indebted to Edin's study.

3 Etlin, Architecture ofDeath, 207.

4 Ibid., 210.

5 Ibid., 215.

6 Cited in ibid., 303.

7 Carmontelle (Louis Carrogis), Jardin de Monceau prh de Paris (Paris: Delafosse,

1779), 4, cited in Bernd H. Dams and Andrew Zega, Pleasure Pavilions and Follies
in the Gardens oftheAncien Regime (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), 136.

8 Jean Starobinski, L'invention de la liherte (1964; Geneva: Skira, 1987), 180.

9 Cited in ibid.
10 Maurice Lever, Donatien Alphonse Frangois, marquis de Sade (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 655.

11 D. A. F. Sade, letter of 17 February 1779, Lettres ecrites de Vincennes et de la Bastille,

in Oeuvres completes, vol. 29, part i (Paris: Pauvert, 1966), 92-3.

12 Several artists of the eighteenth century were noted for their paintings of volcanoes,

such as Sir William Hamilton, Pierre-Jacques Volaire, and Charles Grenier de la Croix.

13 D. A. F. Sade, Voyage d'ltalie (1776-9), ed. Maurice Lever (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 55.

14 Ibid., 274.

15 The eighteenth-century experience of the sublime (as expressed by Anthony Ashley

Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, whose thought was influenced by the
Cambridge Platonists) was commonly related to the sea and to mountains, especial-

ly the Alps. See Alain Roger, Court traite du paysage (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 101-5.
16 Philippe Roger, Sade: La philosophic dans le pressoir (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 158.

17 D. A. F. Sade, Juliette (1797), trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York, Grove Press,

1968), 1017. Though Sade visited Vesuvius, which is cited in his novels, it was his

experience of Pietramala that was transmogrified in his novels.

18 Ibid.

19 Roger, Sade, 163.

20 D. A. F. Sade, Justine, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (1791; New
York: Grove Press, 1965), 520-1. The relations between materialism and transgres-
sion in Sade are at the center of most of the classic studies, such as those of Georges

Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Foucault. One concise recent analysis is

David Allison, "Sade's Itinerary of Transgression," in Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed.,

The Divine Sade, an issue of the Warwick Journal of Philosophy {i^^i\): 132-58. See

also David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss, eds., Sade and the
Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
21 D. A. F. Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard
Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 235.

22 See Anthony Vidler, "Asylums of Libertinage," The Writing of the Walls (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 103-24. On Sade and theater, see the excellent-

ly illustrated catalog, Annie Le Brun, ed., Petits et grands theatres du Marquis de Sade

161
 NOTES THE LIBIDINAL SUBLIME

(Paris: Paris Art Center, 1989) and Chantal Thomas, Sade (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994).

23 Chantal Thomas, Sade, I'oeilde la lettre (Paris: Payot, 1978), 54; this passage cites
Antonin Artaud, Le thi&tre et son double, in Oeuvres completes (1938; Paris:

Gallimard, 1964), 28.

24 Sade, Juliette, 241.

25 Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris (1926; Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1953), 174. The ex-

plicit relations between landscape and libido have taken many forms, from Octave
Mirbeau's Lejardin des supplices (1899) to Situationist anti-aesthetic projects of psy-
cho-geography. One charming example of the stylization and allegorization of this
tradition is the Jardin d'Omementzt Villandry, designed in the early years of the

twentieth century, which contains a box parterre consisting of four compartments

symbolizing I'amour tendre (hearts, flames, masks), I'amour volage (butterflies, fans),

I'amour folie (labyrinth), and I'amour tragique (swords, daggers). See chapter 5 infra.

26 See Rene Godenne, "Presentation" to Mile, de Scudery, La Promenade de Versailles

(1669; Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), i-xiv.

27 See Nicole Aronson, Mile, de Scudery, ou le voyage au Pays de Tendre (Paris: Fayard,

1986) and Chantal Morlot-Chantalat, La Clelie de Mademoiselle de Scudery : De

lepopee a la gazette : Un discours fiminin de la gloire (Paris: Honore Champion di-
teur, 1994).

28 Jean-Frangois de Bastide, La petite maison (1758), reprinted as The Little House: An

Architectural Seduction, trans. Rodolphe el-Khoury (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1995), 70. A masterful analysis of these issues appears in

Rodolphe el-Khoury, "In Visible Environments: Architecture and the Senses in

Eighteenth-Century France" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1996). See also

Rodolphe el-Khoury, "Taste and Spectacle," in Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste, Nostalgia

(New York: Lusitania Press, 1997), 48-62.

29 Bastide, Little House, 75-6.

30 Ibid., 92.
31 Vidler, "Preface," in ibid., 15.

32 Roland Barthes, Sade, Loyola, Fourier, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1976), 30.

33 To forget the essential role of the imagination in eroticism, with both its joyful and
terrifying aspects, is to ponend the worst. This is the error of those who abominate
Sade's writings, as most recently exemplified by the historically tendentious, theo-

retically naive, politically reactionary, and covertly homophobic article by Roger

Shanuck, "Rehabilitating a Monster," New York Times Book Review, 31 March 1996,

p. 31. Such policing of desire limits eroticism to specific sexual and symbolic choic-
es. To do so is to repress the imagination, to seriously misunderstand literature, and
to fuel the worst essentialisms and fundamentalisms.
34 Denis Diderot, "Libertinage," an entry from Encyclopedie (1751-76) in Oeuvres com-
pletes, vol. 15, ed. Assezat and Tourneux (Paris: 1875-1879), 510; cited in Vidler,
Writing ofWalb, 103.

35 Barthes, Sade, Loyola, Fourier, 37.

36 Ibid.

37 Georges Bataille, letter of 15 September 1939, trans. Annette Michelson, in October

36 (1986): 103.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 104.

162
 NOTES NO MANS GARDEN

No Man's Garden

1 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1916), 78.

2 Henry David Thoreau, "Walking" (1862), in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks
Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 602-3.
3 Ibid., 605.

4 Ibid., 609.

5 La Fontaine, Les Amours, 141.

6 Thoreau, "Walking," 612.

7 Ibid., 619.
8 Thoreau, "Walden," Walden, 105-7.
9 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 27. This work is updated in Leo Marx,
"The American Ideology of Space," in Stuart Wrede and William Howard Adams,
eds., Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 62-78.
10 Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th Century (1977; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986), 52.

11 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 56-7.

12 Cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 55-6.

13 Cited in ibid., 60.

14 Cited in ibid., 61.

15 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 64.

16 Le paysage dans le cadre des portieres

Court Jurieusement, et des plaines entihes

Avec de I'eau, des hies, des arbres et du del

Vont s'engouffrant parmi le tourbillon cruel

Oit tombent les poteaux minces du telegraphe

Dont les Jib ont I'allure etrange d'un paraphe.

Une odeur de charbon qui brule et d'eau qui bout.

Tout le bruit quiferaient milk chaines au bout

Desquelles hurleraient mille giants qu'onfouette

Et tout a coup des cris prolonges de chouette.

Que me fait tout cela, puisquej'ai dans lesyeux

La blanche vision qui fait man coeur joyeux,

Puisque la douce voix pour moi murmure encore,

Puisque le Nom si beau, si noble et si sonore,

Se mele, pur pivot de tout ce tournoiement,

Au rythme du wagon brutal, suavement.
Paul Verlaine, "Untided" [7], La Bonne Chanson (1870; Paris: Gallimard, 1979). 3^-3-

17 John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History ofLandscape
Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 178-9-

18 Thoreau, "
Walking" 613. In Saint Louis in 1848, John Adams Hudson presented an

extremely popular panorama representing a voyage of four days and three nights up
the Hudson River. From 1846-8, John Banvard traveled from the Midwest to the

163
 NOTES NO MANS GARDEN

East Coast and then to London with his panorama of a voyage on the Mississippi

River from the mouth of the Missouri to New Orleans; it consisted of over 400
meters of depicted scenes. See Bernard Comment, Le XIX^ siicle des panoramas
(Paris: Adam Biro, 1993), 35 and Stephen Oettermann, The Panorama: History ofa
Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

19 Cited in Comment, XIX' Steele, 77. It is interesting to note that one of the inven-
tors of photography, Louis Jacques Mand^ Daguerre, began his career as a construc-

tor of dioramas.

20 Comment, XIX^ sihle, 77.

21 Horse-Power Applied To Railways At Higher Rates of Speed than by Ordinary Draught

(London, 1844); cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 54.

22 John Ruskin, The Complete Works, vol. 5 (n.p., n.d.), 370; cited in Schivelbusch,

Railway Journey, 58.

23 Matthew E. Ward, English hems; or, Microcosmic Views of England and Englishmen
(New York, 1853), 72; cited in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 60.

24 The standardization of time in the industrial countries was in great part established

due to the need to coordinate railway travel. While the trains in Great Britain

could run on Greenwich time and the trains in France on Paris time, the vastness
of the United States made it impossible for the railroads to function solely on

Washington or New York time. Thus in 1884 the world was divided into twenty-
four unified time zones, and in 1889 the U.S. was divided into four zones.

25 Advances in steel and glass construction were essential to both the railway and to
architecture, both of which transformed the aesthetic relation to nature by cutting
the observer oflf from the panoramic scene. See Schivelbusch, Railway Journey,
45-51. For an illustrated history of interest in relation to botanic collection and
exhibition, see May Woods and Arete Swartz Warren, Glass Houses: A History of
Greenhouses, Orangeries and Conservatories {Htw York: Rizzoli, 1988).

26 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; New York: Modern Library,

1931). 379-90.
27 In this context, see Paul Virilio, Esthitique de la disparition (Paris: Balland, 1980);

Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinema I. Logistique de la perception (Paris: Cahiers du

Cinema, 1991); and Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark
Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

28 Thoreau, "Walking," 608.

29 Ibid., 613. This has become a catchphrase for the contemporary conservation move-
ment; the tide of a best-selling volume produced by the Sierra Club, containing
text by Thoreau and photographs by Eliot Porter, one of America's premier bird
and nature photographers, is In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1961).
30 Cited in Thoreau, "Walking," 611.

31 Renaud Camus, Le D^partement de la Loztre (Paris: PO.L., 1996), 239. In "Pays,

paysans, paysages," Court traite du paysage (24-30), Alain Roger explains that for

most peasants the concept of the beautiful is rarely applicable to the landscape,

since the land is considered in strictly practical and instrumental terms, a fact

already recognized by Kant.

32 Marx, Machine in Garden, 42.

33 Ibid., 45-6.

34 Robert Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia (1705), reprint edited by Louis

164
 NOTES NO MANS GARDEN

B. Wright (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), cited in

Marx, Machine in Garden, 84.

35 Marx, Machine in Garden, 85.

36 Ibid., 128. The breadth of this issue is beyond the scope of the present essay; see

Marx's analysis, 116-44.

37 John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf{Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1916).

38 Cited in Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation
Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 83.

39 Such is the myth; the reality is otherwise. The National Parks areas saved because

of their picturesque and sublime qualities, or because of their attraction as scenic

curiosities were, by dint of their very exposition and preservation, doomed to des-

ecration by the sightseers who began to flock to them. The visitors, those who guar-

antee the political necessity and existence of the National Parks, are often precisely
those who despoil them through number alone, even if not always in deed. Indeed,

there were already complaints of crowdedness in Yosemite in 1885, in which year

visitors were limited to three thousand; each advance in travel (completion of a
nearby railway in 1908, and of a year-round highway in 1927) increased accessibility,

so that by 1954 the number surpassed one million.

40 Cited in Edward Buscombe, "Inventing Monument Valley," in Patrice Petro, ed.,

Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, 1995), 87; emphasis added.

41 Buscombe, "Inventing Monument Valley," 97. On the complex relations between

the aesthetics of early photography and landscape painting, see the suggestive cata-

log edited by Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of

Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), which attempts to show
how, contrary to received opinion, it was landscape painting that influenced the
pictorial composition of early photography before the implied "realism" of photog-
raphy caused any revolution in landscape painting. The photographic revolution
did not, as common opinion claimed, "liberate" painting from representation;
rather, it expanded the stylistic possibilities of representation and transformed forms
of perception.
42 Cited in In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (New York: Sierra

Club/Ballantine Books, 1962), 36.

43 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Domain of Arnheim, or the Landscape Garden" (1846), in

The Complete Tales and Poems ofEdgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1938),

609.

44 For the most detailed epistemology to date from this perspective, see David Abram,
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
(New York: Pantheon, 1996).

45 Cited in Michael R Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness

(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 87.

46 Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" (1859), cited in

Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays & Images (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1980), 60.

[65
 NOTES IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

In Praise ofAnachronism

1 Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1976), in The Originality of

the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (CdjnhnA^t, MA: MIT Press, 1985),

276-90. This text offers the categorization of a disparate set of works, notably by
Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Christo, Hamish Fulton, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt,

Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Walter de Maria, John Mason, Mary Miss, Robert
Morris, Bruce Naumann, Robert Irwin, Richard Serra, Charles Simonds, Robert

Smithson, and George Trakis.

2 Ibid., 284.

3 Ibid.

4 See Daniel Charles, "Closes sur le Ryoan-ji," Closes sur John Cage (Paris: Union
G^n^rale d'fiditions, 1978), 269-88.
5 One philosophical work appropriate to the heterogeneity of landscape as aesthetic

ground is Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra ^written in sympathy with

Baudelaire's notion of "correspondences," and in fragile harmony with Richard
Wagner's operatic creations in which the symbolization and celebration of the
earth implies not the revelation of the metaphysical base of existence, but rather

that of an open field of life-enhancing possibilities (what he termed "the will to

power"), encompassing all ontological differences without dialectizing, synthesizing,

or totalizing them. If expanded to the theorization of landscape, such a revision of

this problem might well establish a discursive context within which gardens could
exist as both object and support, figure and ground, sign and context, artwork and
frame, ground and Urgrund

6 Cited in Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetic (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 250.

7 Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1976), 424.

8 Andrd Felibien, Relation de la fete de Versailles du 18 juillet 1668 (1668) in Les fetes de

Versailles (Paris: Editions Dedale, Maisonneuve et Laroze, 1994.) The infamous fete

of 17 August 1661 at Vaux-le-Vicomte, given in the honor of Louis xrv and marking
the downfall of Fouquet, was the prototype for the considerably more elaborate

fetes at Versailles.

9 See Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le roi-machine : Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis

A7y (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 93-113.
10 Andr^ Felibien, Les Divertissements de Versailles (1674) in Les Fetes de Versailles, 150-1.

11 See Jurgis Baltruiaitis, "Jardins et pays d'illusion," in Aberrations : Essai sur la

Ugende des formes {Pds'is: Flammarion, 1983), 114-53.

12 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Spoils of the Park (n.p., n.d.), cited in Jack Flam, ed.,

Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1996), 157. Edouard Francois Andr^, author of LArt des jardins : Traiti ginirale de la

composition des pares et jardins (1879), actually codified and expanded on the work
of Alphand and Barillet-Deschamps.
13 Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, 178.

14 Joachim Carvallo, preface, Jardins de France (Editions P^an, 1924), in Robert

Carvallo, ed., Joachim Carvallo et Villandry : Merits et thnoignages (Jou^-L^-Tours:
privately published by the chateau, 1990), 29.

166
 NOTES IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

15 Cited in ibid., 46.

16 Cited in Carvallo, Joachim Carvallo et Villandry, 99.

17 "Villandry: The Ultimate Kitchen Garden The Most Elaborate and Unusual of all

Formal Gardens," Garden: Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society {]2siu2iTy 1976),

cited in Carvallo, Joachim Carvallo et Villandry, 99.

18 Francois Carvallo, "Les jardins," La Gazette Illustree des Amateurs de Jardins (1956),
cited in Carvallo, Joachim Carvallo et Villandry, 51-2.

19 See Monique Mosser, "The Impossible Quest for the Past: Thoughts on the Resto-
ration of Gardens," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 525-9.
20 A useful introductory text is Stephen Bann, "The Garden and the Visual Arts in the

Contemporary Period: Arcadians, Post-classicists, and Land Artists," in Mosser and

Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 495-506. A text that begins to oudine these

contemporary theatrical manifestations of gardens is by Elinor Fuchs, The Death of

Character: Perspectives on Theater Afer Modernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1996), specifically the chapter, "Another Version of Pastoral,"

92-107. A perspective from within the history of landscape architecture that deals

thoughtfully and provocatively with these issues is Gavin Keeney, "Noble Truths,
Beautiful Lies & Landscape Architecture" (Master diss., Cornell University, 1993).
" in Mosser
21 See Fernando Aliata, "The Pictorial Technique of 'Ecological Painting,'
and Teyssot, Architecture of Western Gardens, 519-21.

22 See Catherine Royer, "Art Deco Gardens in France," in Mosser and Teyssot,
Architecture of Western Gardens, 460-5.

23 From among the many books on the topic, see Michael Schuyt, Joost Elflfers, and
George R. Collins, eds.. Fantastic Architecture: Personal and Eccentric Visions (New
York: Abrams, 1980); the major journal devoted to outsider art, Raw Vision, edited

by John Maizels, continually features articles on such environments.

24 This traditionally modernist approach to the aesthetics of gardens is well docu-

mented in various essays in Wrede and Adams, Denatured Visions. Typical of such

endeavors are most of the gardens displayed annually at the Festival International
des Jardins at the Chateau de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France.

25 See Stephen Bann, "The Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay," in Mosser and Teyssot,
Architecture of Western Gardens, 522-4.

26 See Annette Michelson, "About Snow," October % (1979): 111-25.

27 See Guy Tortosa, Un jardin divers (Paris: Fondation Carrier, 1995).

28 See Jon Carroll, "(D)Riven," WiW (September 1997): 120-81.

29 Antonin Careme, LArt de la cuisine Jrangaise au xixf sihle (Paris: 1833-5).

30 Philippe Ciller, Le gout et les mots : Litterature et gastronomic (xii/-xxf siecles) (Paris:

Payor, 1987), 104.

31 Cited in ibid., 53.

32 Antonin Careme, Le PMssier pittoresque (Paris: 1815).

33 Cited in Jean-Claude Bonnet, "Careme, or the Last Sparks of Decorative Cuisine,"

trans. Sophie Hawkes, in Weiss, Taste, Nostalgia, 176-7.

34 Salvador Dali, "De la beaute terrifiante et comestible de I'architecture modern

style," Minotaure^-4 (1933): 69-76; reprinted in Salvador Dali, 0/vol. 2 (Paris:

Denoel/Gonthier, 1971), 26.

35 Ibid., 27-28.

36 Ibid., 29. On the theoretical underpinnings of the disquieting aspects of such

167
 NOTES IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

"architecture," see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modem
Unhomely {Czmht'xA^e, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

37 Michel Bras, Le livre de Michel Bras (Rodez: Editions de Rouergue, 1991). It is fasci-

nating to observe the process whereby a chef becomes a myth, as is progressively

happening to Michel Bras. In one recent monumental work, Jean-Louis Flandrin

and Massimo Montanari, Histoire de I'alimentation (Paris: Fayard, 1996), very few
contemporary chefs are mentioned in the book's over 900 pages: three of the

founders of the nouvelle cuisine, Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, and Jean and Pierre
Troisgros, and the much younger Michel Bras. Perhaps even more indicative, in an
oblique manner, is that in the recent publication, Elisabeth Barille and Catherine
Laroze, The Book of Perfume (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), only two chefs are men-
tioned in regard to the use of aromatics in cooking: Maurice Maurin of the Paris
restaurant Macis et Muscade, and Bras. Furthermore, the cuisine of such chefs as

Bras and Marc Veyrat at the Auberge de I'Eridan in Annecy (Haute-Savoie) are

often mentioned in an ecological context, due to both their intimate and erudite

relation to the environment and their work in restituting m^y lost or unknown
plants into French cuisine. See Jean Maisonneuve, "La cuisine des champs," Gault-

Millau (May 1991): 47-52. For an intimate appreciation of the relations between
food, the seasons, and the earth, see Patience Gray, Honey From a Weed: Fasting and
Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia (New York: Harper & Row,
1986); on the geographic specificity of French cuisine, see Jean-Robert Pitte,

Gastronomic franqaise : Histoire et geographic d'une passion (Paris: Fayard, 1991); for

the relation between cuisine and the arts, see Allen S. Weiss, Flamme etfestin : Une
poetique de la cuisine (Paris: Editions Java, 1994).

38 Jean-Fran^oise Revel, La sensibilite gastronomique de TAntiquite a nos jours (Paris:

Editions Suger, 1985), 21.

39 The original plan for the restaurant had the dining room set in an interior garden,
with the tables interspersed between the stones, but structural and practical exigen-
cies prevailed.

40 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1990), 71. It might seem curious that just as Brass restaurant hides the outer

landscape, so too does his book dissimulate the restaurant. While its splendid pho-

tographs depict his dishes and techniques, as well as the natural beauties of the
Aubrac, neither exterior architecture, nor interior design, nor even the restaurant
garden appear anywhere in the book, except for the nearly abstract line drawings
that adorn the endpapers. Yet this too might be understood in terms of a gastro-
nomic-aesthetic logic, which at each point aims at foregrounding and symbolizing
the dishes themselves.

41 Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar," The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage,
1990), 76.

42 Thoreau, "Walking," 602-3.

43 "Passeur" means either a frontier runner or a ferryman, i.e., one who transports

something or someone across a border or a boundary.

44 On Bauduin, see Daniel Charles, "Du silence, et de la de-mesure," Bauduin:
D^sordre et demesure (Pzris: Galerie Michel Broomhead, 1985); Marc Froment-
Meurice, Deposition Bauduin (Paris: AAA, 1988); Daniel Charles, "Sur la route du
sel," Revue de Testhetique 16 (1989): 19-33; Daniel Charles, "Le passeur de pierres,"

168
 NOTES IN PRAISE OF ANACHRONISM

Bauduin (Bois-Colombes: Galerie Charlemagne, 1992); Allen S. Weiss, "Un abec^-

daire pour traverser le paysage, ou le processus de Bauduin, passeur de pierres,"

Lieux et liens (Paris: Editions Lahumiere, 1998).

45 Robert Smithson, "Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson" (1970), in

Flam, Robert Smithson, 251. Smithson's sense of his own place in the tradition of

American landscape architecture is indicated in his essay, "Frederick Law Olmsted

and the Dialectical Landscape" (1973), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 157-71.

46 Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967), in

Flam, Robert Smithson, 74.

47 Paul Sharits, "Postscript as Preface" (1973), Film Culture 6^-66 (1978): 4. See Sharits's

cinematic investigation of this problem in his film, Axiomatic Granularity (1973).

48 Robert Smithson, "Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert

Smithson" (1969-70), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 207.

49 Robert Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (1969), in Flam,

Robert Smithson, 119. This article contains a photographic documentation of the
work. See also Robert A. Sobieszek, ed., Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Los Angeles:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), 129-33.

50 Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel," 131.

51 Ibid., 129.

52 Ibid., 127.

53 Ibid., 133.

54 Dead Treev/zs first installed in Diisseldorf in 1969 and destroyed; it was recreated in

New York in 1997. See the exhibition catalogue on the occasion of this reconstruc-

tion, Joe Amrhein and Brian Conley, eds., Robert Smithson (New York: Pierogi

2000 Gallery, 1989).

55 Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel," 129.

56 See Robert Smithson, "A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites" (1968), in Flam, Robert
Smithson, 364.

57 Smithson was a reader of Ballard, as attested to by his placing a citation from

Ballard's Terminal Beach as the epigraph to his article, "The Artist as Site-Seer; or, a

Dintorphic Essay," (1966-67) in Flam, Robert Smithson, 340.

58 J. G. Ballard, "The Illuminated Man," The Terminal Beach (1964; New York:
Carroll & Graf, 1987), 75.
59 Ibid., 104.

60 Ibid., 90.

61 J. G. Ballard, "The Innocent as Paranoid," A User's Guide to the Millennium (1969;

New York: Picador/St. Martins Press: 1997), 93-

62 J. G. Ballard, "Which Way to Inner Space?" (1962), A User's Guide, 198. On this

topic, see the excellently illustrated catalogue, Maurice Tuchman and Carol Eliel,

eds., Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles

County Museum of Art, 1992). One of the finest monographic studies on the topic
of madness and alternate reality systems is Elka Spoerri, ed., Adolf Wolfli:
Draftsman, Writer, Poet, Composer (\t\\2iC3i, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)-

63 J. G. Ballard, "Time, Memory and Inner Space" (1963), A User's Guide, 200.

64 J. G. Ballard, "Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist," in Flam, Robert Smithson, 31.

65 Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of die Mind" (1968), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 105.

66 Ibid.

[69
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Acknowledgments

For their sundry insights and support, I would Uke to thank the following people:

Bauduin, Brian Conley, Henri Olivier, Steven Kruger, Chantal Thomas, and especial-
ly Clare Jacobson, whose editorial acuity, sensitivity, and thoughtfiilness is exemplary.
Earlier versions of certain parts of this book have appeared in the following

publications: Herve Chandes, ed., v4zr (Paris: Fondation Carrier, 1993); Architecture
New York 19/20 (1997); and Sulfur -^^ (1996).

Cover: Anonymous, hand-colored 18th-century engraving, The West Wind

Page 2: Villandry
Page 154: Ice Storm, New York
Page 176: Mont Ventoux

Photo credits

Allen S. Weiss: 2, 12, 46, 72, 116, 118, 120, 134, 154, 176.

J. C. Shepherd and G. A. Jellicoe, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance (1925; New

York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), plate 6: 16.

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, translated and reprinted as Le Songe

de Poliphile (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 1994): 30, 36, 38.

Patrick Berry, photographer, from Christian Zapatka, The American Landscape (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 105: 102.

Courtesy Galerie des Archives, Paris: I24t.

Courtesy Art in General: 124b.

Antonin Careme, Le PMssier pittoresque {Puis: 1815): 130.

Courtesy Henri Olivier, 138.

Courtesy Bauduin, 142.

Courtesy John Weber Gallery: 1461, 148, 150.

Courtesy Joe Amrhein and Pierogi 2000 Gallery: 146b.

 Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five cerff

landscape architecture, at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric

and technology, philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between

garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing further the issues raised by

author Allen S. Weiss's highly acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity.

PRAISE FOR Unnatural Horizons

"This is a brilliant, almost hallucinatory, revelation of landscape architecture

its profoundly metaphysical origins, its transfixing history, and its virtually

infinitizing future. The very term 'garden' has become so dramatically recon-

ceived by Weiss that it seizes the agency of transitivity itself all the classical

elements have been so meticulously elaborated and so theoretically energized

here as to bring an entirely new dimension to our aesthetic experience. In his

reflections on landscape architecture, from the classical period, through the

baroque, to the modem and beyond, Weiss has raised our understanding of
the garden to an exponentially higher level."
Professor David B. Allison, State University of New York at Stony Brook

"Allen S. Weiss has written a beautifiil, pioneering work, which imfolds,

among other things, a thrilling account of how natural beauty has been deter-

mined by our arts since the Renaissance. Each of the chapters is document-
ed by a wealth of philosophical and artistic material, astutely brought into
play and shown in its multifold interrelationships As ever, Weiss uses his-

tory in a firesh and imaginative (and even subtly perverse!) marmer so that

Unnatural Horizons, with its original iconography and the delightful music of
its language, sounds very much like a Gesamtkunstwerk in itself It is, indeed,

a masterwork."

Professor Daniel Charles, University of Nice/Sophia Antipolis

PRAISE FOR Mirrors of Infinity
"The freshness and unsettling boldness of [Weiss's] approach is sure to arouse
interest among those well versed in the French baroque garden."
Professor Pierre Saint-Amand, Architecture New York
"The research is impeccable; the writing strong and clear It is accessible in

style and revolutionary in thought."

Professor Lawrence R. Schehr, North Caroima State University

ISBN lSb6'=16-131-2
90000

PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

781568"981390'