The Art Of A Week

Ten days back I arrived at Bennington College's bucolic campus to teach my master course Landscape and Meaning for Art New England. Over the course of five days I watched the fields shift from tall meadow to cut hay, then rolled into yodels for ungulate fodder. You could say nature was converted to culture before my eyes. Above, a sixty thousand dollar view (education included).

Sunday arrival and orientation.

There was a twelve-hour ice cream bin, but I did not partake. I did think it looked awfully like a tray of watercolors. The food was designed by a corporate service for college kids and as it happened -I ate like one. Probably my only weekly weight gain since I chose to eat quite a bit differently last winter.

On the final evening the students bring the week's work to exhibit in the main arts building. We had only four students but they had more than enough work to fill the enormous wall. And they worked beyond the limits of painting -there were nearly 200 pages of reading, hour long discussions morning or afternoon, and one student even wrote a two page essay.

The final critique, Saturday morning. Only brave people sign up for a course titled Landscape and Meaning where the description contained words like conventions and interrogation. My students were open, inquisitive, focused and productive. A teacher could hardly ask for more.

I cannot teach meaning, but I can provide context and cultural attitudes, we can view our works through the perceptive lenses of Marxism, Feminism, and social or cultural geography. We can tap into the deep well of literature and its criticism for parallels to our project. Why paint the land and if we must, how? Not easy questions, but then the class was just a beginning, a seed.

Storm King

I've been a fan of Storm King Art Center's embellished landscape since I was twenty, a trip inspired by a professor who chased me down after class to tell me all about it. I recall that first visit, an installation by Ursula von Rydingsvard and a team of assistants were actively chainsawing one of her large sculptures. I loved the idea of art made in, of, by or for the landscape.

Above is a sculpture by Barnett Newman, a sculpture that takes advantage of Cor-Ten steel -its red rust inserted here into a haze of lush greenery. You will find the contrast of rust and vegetation again and again at Storm King and most sculpture parks, but rarely done as well as Newman's 'Broken Obelisk.' Its siting lays bare an intimate dialogue between Modernist geometry and formal Wilderness, a contrast more surprising than Houston's Rothko Chapel siting (admittedly, one I have not seen in person), and a work worth experiencing as much as any other at Storm King. Its power resides in its planes concentrated at the point between two pyramidal forms, one darkened in shadow and the other lit by the sun. The work displays exceptional poise, balanced as it is at this point, but its formal grace is interrupted by the jagged, "broken" top plane which roughly mimics the angle of the base pyramid, forging an undecipherable relationship between the grounded pyramid and the precariously balanced, broken obelisk. That uneven, broken edge disturbs the precisely manifested union, threatening to topple the obelisk. The implicit movement creates an experience of inherent kineticism, a monument about to fall.

Andy Goldsworthy's 'Storm King Wall' is as innocuous as any New England dry laid stone wall as it approaches the body of water, but then emerges a serpentine folly on the other side, rising up into the forested hillside.

This playful work heightens an awareness of the frivolity of artistic labor via the urbane interest in a landscape demarcated by hard won assemblages of stones dispatched from difficult fields.

Zhang Huan's disembodied Buddha head, glimpsed while climbing a minor hill, first suggested to this painter my memory of a Philip Guston work, below. A head not fixed, its connection to the earth concealed by lushly growing field plants, but one in motion, rolling uphill. It is a sight both haunting and comic.

Which is the case for many of Huan's pieces and yet their humanity is inescapable despite the sculptures' grotesque distortions. I find myself applauding their perverse acrobatics.

At play here is a sensibility for relic and ruin, sited in landscape, and excited by landscape. Huan's broken monuments suggest ancient religious ideologies breaking under the force of cultural upheaval. This is complicated by placement in a Western landscape where the sculptures become a ruin enhancing the romantic aura of Storm King's Hudson Valley site. The ancient Chinese culture transmogrified by these works is conflated with Western imagery, bridging the destructive aspects of Cultural Revolution with the exertions of Western political, economic, and cultural influence.

In the southern reaches of the five hundred acre campus is one of Storm King's few projects that actually is formed out of the land -Maya Lin's "Storm King Wavefield." Here a sea of grass becomes an illusion of fluid rumpled by the transference of energy through it, a display that would be menacing if its artifice wasn't so apparent. The waves have direction and when seen from below, they subtly evoke the surrounding mountains. Lin's interested in wave forms, although concocted from scientific observations and technological means, generate an abstraction that is most analogous to a raked zen garden. The view from the amphitheater encourages this comparison because it enables you to take in the whole field, much as we view a zen garden as a whole, from the outside. 

But when drainage permits, visitors are given access (we were not) to the field, offering an uncanny experience of a landscape of perpetual, immobile waves. One can travel the length of peak or valley, or tack diagonally, cresting and falling with each "swell" so that we become the motion to a fixity of earthen waves. 

High Time For High Line

There has been one major park in all of New York City that has managed to go from waste land (or structure) to park land in 10 years, that is the High Line. Recent money donated has given the completion of the new parkway a boost. In fact, as the New York Times pointed out, "This could be the friendliest public/private venture ever attempted in New York City." With a total cost of about $150 million, the High Line has created a stir at under half the cost of the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Of course, no one can complain about the private capital connected to the High Line, as that it is of its essence. While the city owns most of the High Line trestle and NYC Parks appears to have some role to play, it is not a stretch to view this parkway as a privately funded and maintained park with public access.

As a public/private partnership, it makes the most sense that this new parkway has a dual personality -its public and private function. In this sense it is the most viscerally dual-purpose, built landscape that I can think of. On the one hand it is a high fashion, high design plinth for the the viewing of NYC architecture. On the other, it is a lowly, industrial structure, re-visioned as a metaphor for a car-less NYC. One aspect serves the vanity of private institutions and developers' dreams, the other serves the public imagination of a future NYC.

The High Line is an elevated parkway connecting destinations and residential neighborhoods, not unlike Vaux and Olmsted's original NYC parkways designed for horse, carriage, and pedestrian strolling. Unlike Robert Moses' parkway system (connecting parks throughout the region via the gentler travel of non-commercial road traffic, with screen plantings designed to provide a serene, bucolic driving experience), there is only modest screening provided by the planting design. In fact, this new parkway functions as a platform for taking in the sights of lower and midtown Manhattan, auspiciously relying on the local architecture. Imagine it as a stroll through a sculpture garden, but the sculptures are the size of buildings. If you live or work in one of these new buildings, you can take the step back to appreciate how wonderfully your own starchitect designed sculpture resides in the New York landscape. If you do not, you can stroll the High Line, panoramistic foldout in hand, ready to identify any building seen in the growing architectural landscape. This is the essence of the private High Line.

On another level we have the romanticization of the railway ruin. Functioning and defunct railways have been seen as picturesque components of landscapes for decades, and their minimal infrastructure is easily incorporated into park designs. The ruins have hosted many parkways throughout the country, mainly as part of the rails to trails initiative. In Paris, the Promenade Plantee created a formal garden from an elevated railway. Many cities are now looking at conversion of their dilapidated high rail. In our own city, Gantry Plaza State Park had, less than fifteen years ago, incorporated industrial rail into its park design. The incorporation of rail into park design, then, is nothing new as landscape design needed to make sense of the wasted, post-industrial landscapes -often the only new space open for park development in our urban centers. What is new, however, is the attitude of an elevated railway park in NYC.

The primary public aspect of the High Line is its manifestation of the changing attitude towards street vehicles and traffic. It does this by anticipating the elimination of the vehicular traffic below, rather ironically through the preservation of the conduit for a mode of vehicular traffic previously considered too dangerous to keep at street level. It allows us to walk along what most of us recall as the unsafe terrain of train tracks and in doing so, gives us a glimpse of a future where walking on the street is possible and safe. The High Line removes vehicular traffic from the urban experience in an apolitical, non-threatening fashion high above the streets, out of sight and mind of the political body of racing vehicles below. In fact, the elevation of the High Line mimics the sense of civic idealism to which it speaks while, to the speedster below, perhaps it's the floating spectre of a return to biological speed.

There will be those who lament the loss of an urban "wild" space. They may have disdain for the "high design" approach. I sympathize with the sentiment for the tangled, messy spaces and the sense of discovery they contain. Yet I won't harp on it, that debate is over, it is built. I think the planting design looks good and the hardscape is nicely textured. I have noticed, however, the lack of what every overpass in this city has come to acquire -the protective chain link fence. Will it grow one in the future? I think we can all hope not.

This landscape offers the kind of close-quartered plant and hardscape experience that I expect to require high-maintanence. Time will tell how well-suited the plants are to this environment, but I am willing to give the High Line designers the benefit of the doubt. This park experiment has been well-funded, and that usually means better care for plants and hardscape. In fact, managing the horticulture and park operations will be a horticulturalist formerly of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. How well the High Line is maintained and at what cost, in conjunction with how much use or abuse it gets will be instructive for any future, parkway proposals.

As we watch the collapse of the American auto industry, and entertain the idea of a city free of personal automobiles, what new urban landscapes will we dream up? Look out Broadway, your next.

The first section of the High Line has been completed, from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, and is projected to open in June 2009.

Thoughts on a Stroll Through Prospect Park

Last weekend (the hot one, not the wet one) the weather was for sprawling and strolling. So I strolled. All the way to the Farmer's Market to buy ramps, via the Midwood trails.

Prospect Park is amazing in a city filled with really good parks. We've seen a lot of restoration and it looks great. Yet I've always been let down by what I perceive to be lax maintenance and re-construction in the southern end, around the lake. This area is not only my entrance to the park, but one of my favorite places.

A woman pushing a stroller around a large muddy puddle.

The north side of the lake shows a restoration moving forward, defeating the phragmites and restoring plantings along the shore. The remaining perimeter appears unmanaged as we encounter compacted earth, belgian blocks falling into the lake or overwashed by it, trash littering the phragmites colonies, and muddy disintegrating pathways.

The lake sits in a large basin which extends out to the paved park drive. Rain water collects at the pathways. At the base of Lookout Hill there is erosion carrying soil deposits over the roadway. In both areas there needs to be an investment in rebuilding the pathways above grade and re-configuring drainage patterns.

This decrepit staircase leading to the Concert Grove should be fixed. Why has it been like this for years? The under-privileged staircase leads to a really sweet spot in the park that is rather under-used. Why? Disrepair like this is the visual cue that lingering here won't be pleasant. The grove has park benches, seasonal plantings, as the name indicates -large plane trees, a pavilion, and a statue of Abe Lincoln. Yes, thank you ghost of Robert Moses, the woefully ugly Wollman Rink is there as well, but not too visible from the benches.

Walk through the Concert Grove and you may notice the staircase on the left leading up the slope. Take the staircase up and not 50 feet from it you'll find the desire line on the right leading back down to the Concert Grove. Desire lines are a product of poor design and human will. I'm not sure which came first, the staircase or the foot path. Either way, plant in a way that interferes with the desire to avoid the staircase.

As I strolled up the East Drive, I see a family eyeing the Audubon Center. There is black chain link fencing between them and their destination. The horse trail appears to head in the direction they want to go, but they have strollers and are hesitant to get stuck in the gravelly sand. They ask me how to get down there. I tell them to walk up East Drive and they'll see the ramp that allows them down to the Audubon Center. Yet I know that they may be easily confused; it will feel too far as they overshoot their destination, then backtrack.

When people see their destination, yet the designed pathway to it is perceived to be out of the way, people begin to make their own path. The park management response is to create obstacles to this instinct -the chain link fence.

The photo above shows you the entrance to the ramp which takes you to the boathouse, crossing over the horse path, from East Drive. It is a poor solution to the problem, which is this: the Audubon Center is not meant to be approached from the East Drive. This is because the Boat House was built on top of Olmstead's design along with a number of other classical-styled buildings in the park. The McKim, Mead, and White period created a number of "destinations" in the park out of sync with the Olmstead design.

I finally made it to the area known as Midwood. It's been under restoration, and generally looks good.

It has a lacework of trails that can be disorienting to anyone unfamiliar with its meandering. Not a stone's throw away people by the hundreds are sprawled on the grass in barely any clothes paying little attention to those around them. However, in the woods, somewhat wary are the eyes of the few whose paths you cross. The wood isolates, and few bask there as they do the field.

When you come upon the aging Rick's Place sign you feel as if there is a history here you couldn't possibly know. Was he murdered here, did he just hang out here, or both. Maybe he planted trees or watched birds here. The old sign adds to the feeling of stumbling on a ruin, a ruin of one man's habits and preoccupations.

Midwood and its neighboring Ravine are the closest thing Prospect Park gets to the Ramble of Central Park. Like its Central Park cousin, it's filled with desire lines.

I exit the woods and make my way to the farmer's market at Grand Army Plaza. On my way back, I take to the road.

Shepard on Shepherd

Deep down my left sidebar I have a list of books that have been important to the development of my ideas about landscape, nature, the garden, and us. There have been few more informative to my way of thinking than Paul Shepard. I picked up Man in the Landscape a half-year ago. As with another book of his I read a year earlier, its slow going at first, with fits and starts. The enormity of his understanding seems to be condensed into every sentence. Its easy to spend minutes unpacking them and since I do most of my reading on the subway, you'll see me holding the same page for multiple stops.

My training in art and my interest in landscape makes some of his ideas familiar territory, but his books read like a guide to the missing link. How does a fish eye evolve to a human eye and how is the woods like the under sea? What kind of God would a pastoralist dream up? What are the roots of class structure? And then I leap to new thoughts about the Venus of Wilendorf or what it may have been like for the first man to see another man "flying" on horseback (think -Tatars invading on horseback in Tarkovsky's Adrei Rublev), or why we wish never to die.

I'm still involved with chapter three, "The Image of the Garden." The quote below is the final paragraph from chapter two, "A Sense of Place."

"My point is that their origin is inextricably associated with a surplus agriculture, that cities tend to grow beyond what the local agriculture will support, and that there is an urban attitude toward nature which is insular, cultivated, ignorant, dilettante, and sophisticated. At the same time, by virtue of the very polarity in the landscape that cities create, they contain and educate and produce men who retreat to nature, who seek its solitude and solace, who study it scientifically, and who are sensitive to its beauty. The very idea of a sense of place is an abstraction, a sort of intellectual creation like sex or climate or fashion, which is impossible except in a world of ideas whose survival depends on the city. The dilemma is that those who yearn for the warm garment of landscape security are already deflowered. They can only go back so far. They can regain the hunter's, pastoralist's, farmer's nonverbal responses, limited to an extent by their self-consciousness; but the yearning is thrust upon them in any case, for they were all children once and they had wild ancestors and they dream and to some degree all have premonitions of special places."

99.44 Picturesque or Notes On Michael Pollan's "Against Nativism"

Below is an excerpt from the 1994 NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan on the subject of the native landscape movement. I came across it in a comment by Susan Harris of Garden Rant under the post Pollan Takes On The Great American Lawn. Although Pollan's article goes on to describe other complications (xenophobia) of the nativist movement, he also touches on some aesthetic themes I've been thinking about for some time, and my focus here is on these.

The quote:

"Environmental pretensions aside, the esthetic of the natural garden would appear to represent an extreme version of the 18th-century picturesque-gardening style, which was the first to maintain that gardens should closely resemble "natural landscapes." It turned out, though, that the natural landscape the picturesque designers strove to emulate was one they found not in nature but in the 17th-century landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Although today's neopicturesque garden designers claim to be emulating actual natural habitats, they too seem to rely on an artistic model. Instead of landscape painting, however, these gardens aspire to the condition of a contemporary nature photograph, an Eliot Porter, say, or an Ansel Adams. Whenever I visit a natural garden I can't help thinking I've walked into the pages of a Sierra Club calendar."

The first "natural picturesque" landscape design that comes to this Brooklyner's mind after reading the above quote is Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY. When I look at Prospect Park, designed by Olmsted/Vaux, I see emulation of the picturesque, in this case its the picturesque, trancedentalist realism of the Hudson River School style, an American offshoot of the European, largely English, picturesque. Vaux was English, Olmsted had studied in Europe, both well known to Andrew Jackson Downing, the son of a horticulturalist and progenitor of the Hudson Valley's Romantic-Picturesque architectural style out of Newburgh, NY. All three would have been well acquainted with the work of the Hudson River landscape painters. Inherent in the work of all these 19th century landscape practitioners are romantic elements that I cannot ferret out of new native landscape design.

Fallkill Falls, Prospect Park

Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand, 1849

In defense of Pollan's assessment, I hazard that one reason landscape projects of so many current day "natural" garden designs resemble picturesque forms is that most suburban, domestic landscapes already emulate that form. Designers retool the familiar formal structure with meadow instead of lawn and native woodland understory plants instead of the typical azaleas and pachysandra.

Maybe today's natural gardens are not at all "neopicturesque" as tagged by Pollan, but instead are neo-realist. It was the Realist painters of the 19th century that imagined what was actually there, as opposed to artful conventions and idyllic representation. Of course, Realism was not at all real or virtuous, yet the pretense disturbed many taste-makers, artists, and critics. It was also no coincidence that this realist painting rose alongside, and was influenced by, the invention of photography.

Gustave Courbet's Young Ladies of the Village, 1852

 Asher B. Durand's Interior of a Wood, 1850

In the words of Kenneth Clarke, landscape painting "was the chief artistic creation of the 19th century," but the burgeoning process and product of photography (see William Henry Jackson) began a process that eventually pushed painting away from verisimilitude. By the time we see the work of the photographer Ansel Adams, 1902-1984, we see that 19th century romantic landscape eulogized in the stone monuments of the American West. Eliot Porter, 1901–1990, strikes me somewhat like J.J. Audubon with a camera -his interest was almost taxonomical. Pollan is correct to see in Porter's photographs a dialogue with our current conception of landscape "naturalism" because taxonomy is necessarily put into the service of ecology. What Pollan rejects is the photographic conventions represented by the work of Porter or Adams as a model for designing parks and gardens. More precisely, he rejects the notion that our relation to nature as represented by gardens should be mediated by pictures at all. The garden, itself, is the mediating space.

Ansel Adams' Gates of the Valley, 1938


Book cover of Eliot Porter, 1987

Photography supplanted painting as the choice medium of landscape imagery in the 20th century, but for many photographers the beauty of natural scenery became all too common and suspect -as did the photograph as a means of representing truth. New themes in landscape photography rose out of this: human changes to the landscape, machines in the garden, the overwhelming tide of waste and spoil, beauty and the brown field, and the mundane. Photographers who come to mind are Robert Adams (b. 1937) and New Topographics, Mark Klett (b. 1942) and the Rephotographic Project, Robert Glenn Ketchum (b. 1947), Richard Misrach (b. 1949), Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955), and many others.

If designing "natural" landscapes has been shaped by 20th century photography, then what of the work of these mid-late century photographers? They turn the American wilderness and Old World pastoral conventions on its head, but where does that leave landscape architects and garden designers? After all, they need to create landscapes that attempt resolve the crisis highlighted in the work of these photographers without resorting to old forms.

For many, the ecological restoration landscape -a landscape garden version of the photographic "realism" alluded to in Pollan's essay, has been the answer. Ecological parks and gardens, landscapes of verisimilitude, are a reaction to the conception of a spoiled landscape. I am not as sour on this movement as Michael Pollan may be (or was in 1994). It offers a new motivation for developing new parks in and around our cities. If our conception of urban parks was only 19th century picturesque strolling (Central Park) or 20th century athletic leisure (countless athletic fields, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park), we would find it hard to develop new parks within the limits of available urban land. Ecological-restoration offers motivation for the building of new parks in niches previously undesirable for park development.

There are fifty-one Forever Wild parks throughout New York City. Although NYC Parks chooses to call these "preserves," most are anything but that. These parks are created or "restored" out of spoiled but not yet "developed" regions in each borough. A majority of these parks are on the waterfront, an outgrowth of the decline in commercial shoreline activity, the public enjoyment of water, and a concern for sea level rise and storm surge attenuation. Consider the possibility that a park can function for the public outside of the context of individual or group pleasure, as a protective formation for the public good that also happens to provide habitat for migrating species, strolling, and ecological awareness.

Yet, we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're about to restore nature to a "pure" state in any park. Restoration gardens and parks are created out of a set of intellectual and financial limitations and should only be taken on with humility. Added to the garden is an understanding of our role in changing ecosystems and an awareness of the value of the system to our own needs, beyond accepted forms of aesthetic pleasure.

How To Make an $8 Loaf of Bread or Alice Waters' March on Washington

I left a comment on Garden Rant yesterday about Alice Waters on 60 minutes. My facetiousness aside, I had a serious point or two. One was about the "Victory Garden" thing.

It is time those in the media stop calling a vegetable garden a "Victory garden." That's it really. Why are they recalling WWII wartime vegetable planting?

The U.S. government (and U.K) asked its citizens to produce some of their own food to make up for shortfalls affecting the agricultural industry supply during the war. Eleanor Roosevelt had one planted at the White House. There were complaints from the Ag industry, but by and large, the effort was popular and successful.

Much of this gardening ceased after the war. I'm sure the Ag business did what it could to promote this change through lobbying and advertising. Not growing some of our own food has been a 20th century invention, at least for most of us. Lifestyle changes, yes, but also the promotion of leisure and solid-state (copyright!) landscapes created a vision of wealth and prosperity that used to have the cornucopia, wheat bundles, dead fish and fowl, and grape vines as its symbol.

It does seem that little motivates people more than the desire to attain or to mirror wealth and prosperity. What the local food movement, Alice Waters, organic movement (still a movement?), etc. has done is create a new conception of wealth and prosperity that is as old as they come. Some people don't like it because it calls into question many of the hard-earned symbols of their prosperity, and requires a different set of skills and knowledge, some long-forgotten cultural memory.

But let's remember that people have always grown vegetables for their sustenance. Poor and rich alike have grown, or had their gardener's grow, their own vegetables. Late day immigrants to big cities grow their own in buckets on concrete. Its economical and provides them with the vegetables they need for their culture's recipes.

So I wonder if our culture is forcing the "V" for victory instead of vegetable because there is a sense of cultural warfare -a largely middle, upper-middle class warfare. What is middle class? What do we aspire to? Are we golf-playing, micro-waving, lawn mowing, backyard pool party lounging with cocktails middle class or are we vegetable growing, every meal cooking, CSA joining, garden party with a glass of local wine middle class?

This is not a battle I am having and I believe this to be true of many of us. Of course, these activities are not exclusive of each other, but I can't quite shake the feeling that this middle-class identity war is what's going on. Thoughts?

How This Article Hurts My Brain or The Savannah Hypothesis

Garden Rant picked up on a story from the Boston Globe Ideas Section titled, "How the City Hurts Your Brain." I do not disagree with the idea that we need to immerse ourselves in natural habitat. I would like to make the point that most of what this "Ideas" article is attempting to drive home, through simplified science, we already understand intuitively.

Some things I need to go on about:

"The brain is a wary machine...The mind is a powerful supercomputer...easy to short-circuit..."

I really don't like the consistent "mind as machine" analogy in this article. Its not even about philosophy or a mechanistic view of nature, but more like writing as if the reader really couldn't understand it any other way these days -oh God, aren't we so like machines nowadays. Lets leave the mechanistic ideas in the 20th century- haven't we given enough to our dear machines already.

"Imagine a walk around Walden Pond..."

This is artful. The evocation of Walden Pond without any mention of our nation's most famous nature hermit, Thoreau, who brought to the fore the idea of the poetic, transcendant escape from urbanity? Just mentioning Walden Pond, sans Concord no doubt, evokes our landscape escape fantasy. And Emerson? C'mon. Of course, Emerson owned property outside of the city to escape to.

"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan...They needed to put a park there."

At least the article mentions Olmsted (though forgot Vaux) -someone who actually envisioned our cities with a more complex environment. Marc Berman, the psychologist the article quoted (above statement), is right, but not for the reason the article implies. By no means did Manhattan look like it does now; it grew up around Central Park and with it. Which, incidentally, had many farmers and gardeners and an African American community living within its future bounds before construction. Ultimately the siting of the future park was an administrative, government decision.

"...research has demonstrated ... the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad..."

How do we account for all the overweight people in the countryside and the overall fitness of those in cities. Nature makes us slimmer? No, but exercise does, and I sure do walk a lot in the city. So I guess we eat chocolate cake -so what, we walk it off.

"...found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery."

How many times do we need to say that correlation is not causation? Couldn't there be some other factor involved in higher domestic violence rates that also correlates with less trees, grass, and parks outside our windows and doorsteps?

"...most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis, which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved."

And finally, my favorite -the "savannah hypothesis." Not to put too fine a point on it: BUNK. Its obvious why people like low-clipped lawns today: clear sight lines, clean for laying, sitting, soft underfoot, and you can kick a ball around, etc. The deeper connection we have to the lawn has more to do with miming the tastes of European aristocrats of the last few hundred years. The aestheticized, pastoral landscape was born out of the estate home with its view of the shepard, his flock and the grass -grazed short by sheep. Central Park's Sheep Meadow puts it in name. Economics don't trickle down, but aesthetics sure do. Let us thank ingenuity for the IRON SHEEP, our lawn mower, or we'd be listening to bleats all day. The lawn is the image of order in the landscape, with its clear sight lines and simple aesthetics. I don't think many people are conscious of the roots of their landscape aesthetics, but mime them anyway.


The savannah landscape has unclean sight lines to any pleistocene man, who's greatest enemy may have been a low-stalking lion or hyena, it caught fire often, and who knows what else - so its no front lawn. Another point I'd like to make is that wealthy aristocrats had great landholdings and would have farmland, grazing land, and wooded lots for hunting, logging, etc. While we can mime the lawn aesthetic, we cannot maintain the forest that stood beside it on our little plots -its one or the other and we've largely chosen the other to our detriment.

Below is a quote from Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (beware *# language). After about one hundred pages of manic ranting:

"...The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of it is inanition. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man, therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

"Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is imperfectible. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature, as it is projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until the time comes again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to destroy. I shall make no judgements, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will come to me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will die as they lived, in disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of redemption. If one says to me, you must be religious, I shall make no answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there's a c*#t waiting for me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I shall make no answer. There will always be a c*#t or a revolution around the corner, but the mother who bore me turned many a corner and made no answer, and finally she turned herself inside out and I am the answer.

"Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is infinitely better, while attending to death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment. Infinitely better, as life moves toward a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

"I am thinking now about a rock fight one summer's afternoon..."

After this passage, Miller turns to reflect on his childhood, calmly. Its an intense shift, all turning on a park, a wild park.

Plastic Deer Becoming More Brazen

What's this all about? When you got 'em, you can't stand 'em. When you don't, you wish you had 'em? I photographed this plastic deer on a lawn on Staten Island, NYC. Is it not unlike any other landscape device that teases out our hidden desire to be one with nature, or less noble maybe, simply to represent a piece of the country life?

I guess, drawing from what J.B. Jackson states so well about lawn ornamentation, it is about owning (and displaying) what you have been willing to let go in one's quest for a better life.

"One of the more oblique ways of repudiating the notion that the garden or front yard could be a place of work is the casual display (as ornaments) of obsolete farm equipment: a plow, a wagon, even an old-fashioned hand-operated lawn mower. All make the point that work is out of date."

J.B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, pg. 132

Tractor lawn ornament

You can't quite put a deer carcass on your lawn, although maybe its skull and bones. The plastic lawn deer reminds us of another time, perhaps, when that very landscape was flush with deer and the homeowner may have been out hunting as he was then driven by necessity. The lawn deer has its function which is to remind the community, like a souvenir of our past, and to consecrate our modern self-image.