Alan Ward's Designed Landscapes

[Note: This morning (May 17th), my previous post on Alan Ward was restored by Blogger, after having been "removed" inadvertently a couple of days ago, and then reinstated in its incomplete draft state. I'm leaving both posts up, just in case either one is "lost" again. -CF]

Alan Ward's book, Designed Landscapes, was published in 1998 by the Spacemaker Press [Washington D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts] which specializes in books on landscape architecture. Ward himself is both an architect and a landscape architect by training, but he had been photographing gardens and landscape for 20 years when this book was published. The book might be treated either as a documentation of landscape design, or as a pure landscape photography monograph.

In my case, I have a degree in landscape architecture, and am also a committed landscape photographer as well, so my interest in this work is at least twofold. Landscape design and landscape photography come together as different expressions of the same matter, but it's important not to confuse the two disciplines. Designing a landscape for use, is not at all the same thing as making an image of a finished landscape (or a wild landscape). The way a landscape "works" in reality, as a space one moves through or rests within, has really not much to do with the way it is "seen" photographically. Part of the confusion about why, for instance, the International Style, in architecture, was so persuasive and astonishing to its first audiences, seems to have had more to do with the canonical images which were made of its earliest iconic examples (i.e., Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, or Le Corbusier's Savoy Villa), than the actual experience of seeing and and being inside these structures in person.

Photographs are not reality. They present a certain view of space, from a certain vantage, in the moment of their taking, the light and atmospheric conditions varying according to the case, and they may seem more or less "true" to the actual space they depict, than the experience of literally being inside those spaces. Photographic space is a kind of "virtual" space, in which objects and perspective and tonal range are organized by the lens, and by the composer (photographer) to achieve a two dimensional construction which behaves according to the laws of representation. Being in a space is a much more complex phenomena, including, as it does, the other senses (than the visual) and the sensation of movement through it, its smells, sounds, felt textures, subtle shades of color, and so on.

All of which, by way of preface, suggests that I regard landscape photography as a poor stepsister of practical landscape architecture; as, indeed, the process of landscape design is a much more involved and laborious exercise in imagining and realizing arrangements and rearrangements of space and matter. But considered alone, landscape photography is its own art, which--though it depends upon the pre-existence of a landscape or a "garden" or cemetery or park--deserves to be treated as an art on its own, almost without reference or dependence upon its subject.

Ward's photographs in Designed Landscapes are arranged according to a series of eighteen specific sites, i.e., University of Virginia, Dumbarton Oaks, Blue Ridge Parkway, etc., with a set of plates devoted to each space. The work is exclusively black and white, and thus tends to emphasize the visual relationships and gradations of tone, rather than the interplay of colors, which would tend to detract from a purely abstract appreciation of the imagery. Again, it's important to understand that photographs, as I say, are not actual spaces, but only versions derived from them, and as such, black and white photographs are better able to define the qualities of visual definition which often may seem to trump the meaning inherent in objects and spaces in context. Colors (chromatography) have their own language and associations which relate to qualities outside the frame of any given image. And aside from this, the experience of black and white (monochromatic) imagery carries its own special interest.

I have reproduced five images from Ward's book--the first one of which is of Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I've never been to this place, but it appears to be a fairly woodsy space, compared to most cemeteries which I've seen. Sylvan settings are typical of traditional cemeteries, though usually more of the space is given over to the grave stones and monuments than to trees, shrubs and turf, than seems to be the case here. What I particularly like about this composition, is the magical light which seems to highlight the little classical pedimented rotunda to the right center of the scene. It lends a vaguely elegaic mood. When I visit cemeteries (or "graveyards" as we call them), I seldom am moved to consider the lives of those buried there. Instead, I tend to think poetic thoughts about nature, which may be the point. We would rather think of pleasant pastoral things in places dedicated to the dead, though decay itself--which one often sees in really old cemeteries--may become the overriding impression.

One of the considerations of photography like this, is its evident static quality, as if all activity and "accidental" occurrence had been removed from it. I often hear people criticize landscape photographs, because they're "sterile" or "emptied of life." Landscape photography is, however, primarily a contemplative art, which emphasizes control and precision above accident and chance. A dog achieving a frisbee at the height of a graceful jump may be a miraculous image, but it has nothing to do with the careful arrangement of objects in space--it's the expedient capture of an evanescent occurrence, all action and response and energy.

This quality--of purified perspectives and arithmetical precision of line and scope--characteristic of the best architectural photographers, such as Cervin Robinson or Ezra Stoller or Yukio Futagawa--asks that we perceive such imagery as the timeless vision of man's control over nature and materials. Art may be both an imposition and an augmentation of the order inherent in wild nature, and the resulting integration of natural forms and man-made (conceived) forms may be the perfect marriage.

Biltmore - South Terrace and Wisteria Arbor at Sunset

Ashville, North Carolina

This sense of integration between inside (man made) and outside (nature) is nowhere more apparent than in this view into the garden space at Dumbarton Oaks, where the external world seems to beckon through opened doors, a symbolic seduction which carries the metaphorical implication of departure, or exile, or even mortality. Inside and outside are poised at the threshold of decision, just at the point of release. The sense of classical balance, of stasis, calm, and certainty are overwhelming, almost as if one could stop time.

Dumbarton Oaks - View from inside the Orangery

In rural settings, the arrangement of space into a meaningful balance has different implications. Blue Ridge Parkway, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia [below], bears the hand of man as deliberately as Dumbarton Oaks, but less oppressively. Land which may once have been given over mostly to agricultural use, fades gracefully into the picturesque, as a caricature of pastoral values. We visit our past, as surely as we visit our future (as with cemeteries), knowing full well that the meanings we deduce from it are as tremulous and fugitive as our dreams.

I often think that the sensation of light falling, from above, onto a space signifies a sort of benediction--though not in any strict religious sense--but perhaps in the same sense we have of rainbows, or the Northern Lights, a mystical happenstance of light and atmosphere. Such moments are several times less common in photographs than they are in real life, since they happen so infrequently, that the likelihood of their being caught on film may elevate them to the status of small miracles. An annunciation--of the arrival of the sun's light, or of its inclination just at a specific angle and instant--may be like the sound of a trumpet fanfare. Or, as below, quietly breathtaking.

Miller Garden, Columbus, Indiana

Government Out of the Arts !!!

As an example of a transgressive or disobedient aesthetic act, Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" is a famous focus of public controversy involving public funding of the arts. Exhibition of the piece caused a scandal when it was shown in 1989. The photographic (Cibachrome) image is of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a golden yellow liquid, which Serrano declared to be his own urine. Were he not to have made this claim, the liquid might have appeared to be, or be seen to be some other fluid. Serrano also stated that the work refers to the commercialization or compromising of Christian icons in contemporary secular culture. The image itself is diverting and strange, though not formally very innovative. It bears comparison with religious imagery from across the historical spectrum of art. While it is not overtly critical of religion per se, it does resonate with unsettling energy, and, taken together with the artist's descriptive captioning, is clearly meant to arouse viewers in ways that certainly include negative intuitive feelings about Christianity--though, again, what those negative feelings might be directed toward, or against, remains stubbornly non-distinct (ambiguous).

Enlightened members of any democracy want to preserve the letter and the spirit of free speech. It is the foundation of our political system, and any attempts to abridge or curtail it--no matter from what quarter, or for what purpose--are to be regarded with suspicion and resistance.

But tolerance and encouragement are not the same thing. The National Endowment for the Arts, which began in 1965, is intended to encourage artistic activity through direct financial support to organizations, communities and individuals--"to help create and sustain . . . a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry." The Congress, concerned that NEA not become a kind of cultural czar, urged that "there be given the fullest attention to freedom of artistic expression" and that "the standard should be artistic excellence."

During the 1930's--the period of the Great Depression, and the Administrations of FDR, the Works Progress Administration [1935-43] was created to support artistic activity in America during a time of social and economic hardship, and also to facilitate the creation of documents and events which would dramatize and bring to public attention, conditions which would awaken the national conscience of the electorate to the difficulties of the period, and inspire pride among the citizenry in our homegrown cultural accomplishments. By most accounts, the WPA was a signal success.

Government support of the arts is not a new idea. Noble and religious patronage has been going on for centuries. Pre-democratic support of the arts sustained the Renaissance, and religious and secular glorifications of all kinds have kept painters, artisans, performers, writers, sculptors busy for thousands of years. The question today, of course, is a different one. In a time when kings and bishops and generals ruled, responsibility and justification for support of artistic activity began and ended with vested authority--it was an expression of power. Since the inception of parliamentary democracy, with its power, theoretically at least, vested in the people (or the people's majority, or the people's organs of popular representation), the right and privilege of patronage of the arts has an entirely new dimension.

If the power to tax and regulate and fund commerce and standing armies is extended to cultural realms, the question of how that power should be administered is always under dispute. In aesthetics, there can be no fixed dogma. No one can define the public's interest as a judgment of taste in artistic enterprise.

Any kind of entertainment, any kind of artistic product or artifact is an expression of a specific and individual talent, creative energy, and taste. Though it may well be "in society's interest" to foster an environment in which the free expression of artistic production can occur, the manner in which such encouragement is to be carried out is fraught with contradictory interests and factions. Who is to say what the public's interest should be with respect to the production of art or literature or entertainment?

Writers, artists, performers all are free, in a free society, to express themselves through their artistic media. Private philanthropy and support owe no allegiance to any public interest. It is free to encourage any kind of artistic activity, without limit, as long as it doesn't tread on the rights and freedoms of other members or groups in society. But when government sets about trying to decide whom or what to support--in the public interest--contradictions abound. It is not the business of government to determine public or private taste. Taste is a matter of fashion. It changes over time. There are vast disagreements about what constitutes the value and purpose of all artistic activity. Art and literature and music and performance are, in fact, luxuries, which do not sustain humankind's need for food, shelter, and safety from harm. Nor does art serve a purely political interest. The public's right to be informed and consulted through media does not require that it should necessarily believe in, or invest in, any form of public speech or expression which arises from private, personal or limited ends.

Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" is a legitimate form of personal expression which is protected by the 1st Amendment. It does not follow, however, that the public, through its elected officials and administrators, has any obligation whatever to support such forms of expression. Serrano's work is a private, personal vehicle of artistic expression. Not one penny of the public's wealth should go to support its creation, or the life of its creator, or any institution which supports it (or him). There is no argument that can be brought forward to defend Mr. Serrano's dependence upon the public purse. If he is independently wealthy, or enjoys private patronage, or is a letter carrier, or a teacher of art at a private college, or sells his art on streetcorners--it matters not, as long as the public is not obligated to judge the value of his art through financial or quasi-financial support. Because it cannot judge. It doesn't have that authority, and it doesn't have that mandate. No one can take the public's tax money and decide--by whatever means--who or what constitutes "the standard of artistic excellence." There can never be agreement about this, and that is a very good thing.

That art is strongest which carries the fewest obligations, which is most free of encumbrances. If artists wish to criticize government, or anything else, they should be free to do so. But they cannot be supported by government. Government support of the arts is by its nature backward and oppressive. It should never be permitted. Not one tenth of one percent of the public's treasure should be given to it. In fascistic, or monarchical, or communistic societies, artistic control is from the top down. In a democracy, in which the arts (and religion, and business) are intended to be separate from governance, there can be no official patronage.

Richard Farnsworth as The Grey Fox [1982]

The Grey Fox, a Canadian production released in 1982, with direction by the late Phillip Borsos, script by John Hunter--has become a cult film over the years, appealing to an underground audience of sorts. Both Richard Farnsworth, the star of the film, and the female romantic lead, played by Jackie Burroughs, are now deceased. An Australian by birth, Borsos only lived to make a handful of films, passing away (of leukemia) in British Columbia at age 41 in 1995. Grey Fox, his first feature, was made when he was only 27.

That a director should have so much success in his first important effort is unusual, to say the least. Directorial debuts are typically minor efforts. Citizen Kane was Orson Welles's first feature film, but that kind of triumph is almost unheard of. How to explain Borsos's fresh and original effort?

To make it even more improbable, its star, Richard Farnsworth, had never had a significant acting role in his life, having spent the previous 40 years working as a Hollywood stuntman--principally in Westerns, where his rugged, crusty good looks worked to good advantage. So at age 61, he made his debut as a lead in an obscure, off-beat dramatic comedy set in the Canadian Northwest at the turn of the 20th Century.

To understand the appeal of Grey Fox (and Farnsworth), you have to have some feel for the world in which it's set. The Canadian Northwest was one of the last parts of the North American continent to be settled by whites, and its wild character--and cold, wet climate--kept it pure and largely unspoiled well into the 20th Century. The primary industries were extractive--logging and mining--and life in the frontier towns was rough. Stories set in this terrain would be considered "westerns" if made in typical Hollywood-style. But Borsos peels away the clichés, and presents a narrative portrait that feels as genuine as one could expect.

Outwardly, the plot involves the release of an old-time stage-coach bank-robber from San Quentin Prison in 1901 after 33 years of incarceration. Expelled from the time-warp of prison life into a transformed world, Bill Minor is predictably disoriented and dismayed at how everything has changed. Stagecoaches have been replaced by trains. The wild West has become more civilized. Unable to accommodate himself to the tame pace of a harmless post-incarceration role, he slips across the border from Washington into British Columbia and finds work in a played-out mining operation, while he plots to resume his former life as highway robbery-man. Though he's now no longer young, the spirit of rebellion is still the only role that makes him feel alive and whole. Farnsworth's innate charm and rustic bearing help us to identify with him, even as we see him edging inexorably back into the evil world of his past. This foreboding is balanced by the comic absurdity of his trying to recreate a world of derring-do and hardened criminality--the past can't be recaptured.

He meets and falls in love with a local lady of a singularly independent and liberated turn of mind.* In due course, Miner teams up with a pathetic little runt named Shorty Dunn, robs a train, not very well, and eventually is caught in a cross country tracking sequence by the Canadian police. At movie's end, Miner is seen slogging through a swampy terrain, with a text-over informing us that his successful escape from his second incarceration will enable him to live a life free of crime. Despite the bad-man-makes-good trope, we feel an enormous sense of release, as if some kind of poetic justice has been done.

Farnsworth would go on to several more acting successes, including in The Natural [1984]. His handlebar mustache and relaxed manner are so engratiating, he hardly seems to be acting at all, but simply "aw-shucksing" his way through, much in the manner of Gary Cooper, or Warren Beatty. In an imaginative sense, Farnsworth's long experience as a stunt-man was almost a metaphor for the part he played in this movie. For decades the shadow body-double stand-in for the "face" of Hollywood adventure genres, his flowering as an actor was a verité take on the cowboy persona itself. Farnsworth emerges into the limelight at the "end" of his career in the same sense that Bill Miner is released into the 20th Century after 33 years in prison. Both events are liberations. Other stuntmen have made it as actors. John Wayne began as a cowboy stuntman.

The Grey Fox hasn't been released on DVD, but you can still find it on VHS video. For my money, it's several times better than Clint Eastwood's pretentious late efforts, and it's quietly entertaining on several levels. And for verisimilitude, it can't be beat.

______________

*The part of Kate Flynn is played by Jackie Burroughs, one of acting's most original and down-to-earth ladies. She died last September after a long and varied movie career. Her homely sweetness rings completely true here.

Scarlatti or Soler?

In my youth, I was entranced, for a time, by the harpsichord. In the pre-digital days, the sound of the harpsichord was much rarer than it is today. Despite the fact that in the 1960's--when I was coming of age--baroque and renaissance music was in its first big revival, and harpsichord pieces were frequently aired on classical stations--the only way one might play a harpsichord was to rent or own one. When I got my Kurzweil keyboard in the early 90's, I could make a harpsichord sound which would satisfy most people (if not the purists).

Scarlatti

The big composer for the harpsichord is Domenico Scarlatti [1685-1757], and his output is truly amazing--over 500 sonatas, most of which are superior in lyrical content, and ingenious turns. But for my money, I've always liked those of Padre Antonio Soler [1729-1783]. Scarlatti was Italian, Soler was Spanish (Catalan). Soler wasn't born until Scarlatti was already in his mid-forties, so historically, Scarlatti belongs to a slightly earlier epoch. To put these dates into perspective, Bach was born the same year as Scarlatti (1785), and Mozart was born in 1756, so his work would have been known to Soler. Musical styles--that is to say--had changed considerably between the time of Scarlatti's early maturity and the last years of Soler's life. Which may account, to an important degree, for the significant differences in their respective compositional styles.

Soler

[though no known liknesses of him are thought to exist--?]

To my ears, Soler has always had what I would call a "demonic" quality to his writing, whereas Scarlatti is always--even when he is quite passionate--ultimately decorative and "appliqué" in his effects. Explaining how this may be so in purely musical terms can be--is--a difficult task, perhaps too unnecessarily abstract. Soler's pieces are usually longer than Scarlatti's, though their inherent complexity isn't really greater than his predecessor.

Years ago, a family friend and I were talking about music, and in the course of our discussion, he insisted that Soler had been the pater and Scarlatti the disciple.

--No, I said, Scarlatti was the elder, and Soler had been the junior.

--Wrong, he replied, Scarlatti learned at Soler's knee!

I'm happy now to confirm that I was correct, and my friend was not. Scarlatti was already 43 when Soler was born, and the Spaniard outlived his mentor by some 25 years. There is some dispute, apparently, about whether or not Soler ever actually did meet and/or study with Scarlatti. It's hard to imagine them as separate, given the similarity of their styles, which seem to owe as much to familiarity as to the ambient musical milieu of the time. Travel and communication were immeasurably slower in those days (17th and 18th Centuries), but Soler had to have known Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas intimately at some point in his development.

Ironically enough, Scarlatti's musical influences are notably Iberian folk music--and some even suggest guitarristic effects. Scarlatti's 500+ keyboard sonatas were not published during his lifetime. The harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick catalogued them in 1953, and they have been identified through his numeration system ever since.

Both composers worked for royalty, Soler's keyboard sonatas (apprx. 150) were apparently written for his pupil the son of King Carlos III. Soler's compositions are somewhat more elaborated than Scarlatti's, employing three or four movements, instead of just one. In some, you can just hear the influence of German classicism peeking through. Nevertheless, I always think of his strongest pieces as pure Spanish passion and fervor, with almost a romantic thrust.

In the 20th Century, the pieces of both composers began to be played and recorded on the piano, instead of the harpsichord. The range of tone and sustenance of the modern pianoforte are ten times greater than on the harpsichord--which only plucks, instead of hammering the strings--but the qualities inherent in the music--especially in Scarlatti's case--seem to work better--or at least differently--on the harpsichord than they do on the piano. Horowitz, for instance, recorded a few on piano, and his mincing, gently staccato approach provides an interesting elaboration of the possible sound to be made out of Scarlatti's plucked style. He could also make them sound simply pianistic on occasion.

Scarlatti's work strikes me as every bit as serious and introspective of the best of Bach's work. Bach frequently seems to be working out mental (mathematical) puzzles in his work--something one doesn't find in Scarlatti at all. Each Scarlatti piece seems to exploit the lyrical potential of a specific structural figure, and are almost feats of daring in this respect. They also possess a terrific range of feeling, from delicate joy to moody longing, spirited play to stern condescension.

What happens to music when instruments change? It's a ponderable quandary. In the 20th Century, the guitar underwent revolutionary design changes. What will performers of the future make of our music? What new instruments will be invented, and what of the past glories of the repertory will be played on them, to newer ears? The whole arc of the Romantic Age in music still seems to dominate our emotional (aesthetic) consciousness, though a little over two hundred years ago, the meaning of "romance" was quite different. Developments in science, psychology, medicine, behavioral disciplines etc., over the last century, have failed to alter it much. Do we "hear" romantic qualities in Scarlatti and Soler which they wouldn't have comprehended? Or were they somehow intuitively anticipating the flowering of emotional content, which would come to fruition in the 19th and 20th Centuries? We think of Beethoven or Brahms as brimming with passion and pity and ecstatic content, but perhaps this is nothing more than the difference in stylistic approaches?

The development of the grand pianoforte, which occurred between the early 18th and early 19th Centuries, both facilitated and accommodated the Romantic Era in musical performance and composition. With the vastly increased range of keys, the depth and range of sonorities, sustenance of tone, increased volume of sound, came a whole spectrum of possible expressive projection. Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms, Liszt and Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Albeniz and Ravel--all are inconceivable without the "modern" piano. Working within the much more limited range of the harpsichord, Scarlatti and Soler and Rameau and Couperin were forced to imagine their works as twinkling, flickering, chiming sounds. They had no grinding bass notes, no delicious rubato, no echoing high-register grace-notes with which to play.

Limitation may inspire invention. Undoubtedly, if Scarlatti or Soler had been born later, to later incarnations of the keyboard, they would have been different composers. But their musical natures would also undoubtedly have produced deeply felt and innovative creations. If there is a common element of aptitude in creative endeavor, which spreads across history, across the spectrum of kinds of instrumental applications, then we can with assurance honor the genius in all kinds of musicians, from Indian sitar to zydeco (button piano accordion), from oboists to bongo-players, from Chopin to Carter, from Fats Waller to Julian Bream. Trapped in their world of royal patronage and religious duty, using instruments that some now regard as "antique" or tinny in effect, Scarlatti and Soler composed haunting, inspiring, and joyous works, which characterize what we think of as the emotive machines of their age. Their sound has become their "time."

Therefore, playing the "harpsichord" compositions of these composers on the modern grand piano, involves a reinterpretation of, or introduction of new kinds of "readings" of their works--finding inside the written works subtle emphases, flourishes or nuances which the music somehow contains within it--or simply "hearing" the notes as piano notes through ears attuned to a larger bank of sound-range--a collaboration across time--as, in effect, nearly all music is. Are Scarlatti and Soler more or less important considered exclusively as harpsichord composers? Do they survive today transmuted into reincarnated "piano" versions of themselves? Of course they do, but is that somehow a misuse of their music? What would Scarlatti say today, were he to hear de Larrocha's or Horowitz's piano versions of his works? A purely speculative question....

Listening to these pieces of Scarlatti and Soler brings me unrestrained joy and inspires profound introspection. What is the difference between the ecstasy we experience as the evidence of the deity's grace, and the secular dionysian dervish?

For my money, this fellow Ivo Pogorelich is probably the best I've ever heard doing Scarlatti for piano, following in the footsteps of Horowitz, who opened the door for him--the two have met in some perfect anteroom of eternity and exchanged tips. Listening to these recordings, I'm moved to grant Scarlatti the greater praise--what can't he do with a handful of thirds?--but hearing Hinrichs navigate the emotional contours and passageways of Soler's E flat major sonata (a more ambitious work, I wager, than Scarlatti ever assayed, at least for the keyboard), I can no longer bring myself to choose between the two. I think, too, hearing all this music, that Soler benefits more from the strengths of the romantic grand piano than Scarlatti ever could, largely because, musically, he stradles two distinct periods in the development of musical history, as well as the technics of his instrument.

On harpsichord--

Scarlatti sonata in F major K 418 by Scott Ross

Scarlatti sonata K. 455 by a machine ???

Scarlatti sonata L483 by Smaro Gregoriadou on a high-tuned guitar

Scarlatti sonata K 420 played by Sergio Vartolo

Scarlatti Sonata K 49 player unknown

Soler Sonata in A minor - 1974 recording by Fernando Valenti

soler fandango

Soler sonata no. 53 in a-major

Soler sonata 54 in C major played by Scott Ross

Soler sonata no. 117 in D minor played by Pieter-Jan Belder

Soler sonata No. 7 in C major player unknown (turn down your sound on this one!)

Soler sonata in F-sharp by Michio O'Hara

Soler sonata 15 in D minor by Scott Ross

Soler sonata 49 in D minor by Scott Ross

For piano --

Scarlatti No. 15 in D minor played on piano by Ivo Pogorelich (lovely version!)

Scarlatti No 17 in E major on piano by Ivo Pogorelich

Scarlatti sonata L 104/K.159 by Ivo Pogorelich

Scarlatti no. 45 in G minor by Ivo Pogorelich

Scarlatti in G - K108 on piano - performer unknown

Soler sonata no. 84 in D major played by Michel Mananes

Soler S.R. 17 in E flat major played by Marie-Luise Hinrichs

de Larrocha Soler Sonata in g minor no. 87 (piano)

Soler Sonata in B minor by Ken Lisaka

Soler Sonata en D Major by Luis Fernando Perez

Horowitz Scarlatti Sonata L224

Horowitz makes of Scarlatti's sounds something a little beyond empirical verification. The delicacy and feathery, silken quality of the sound is something very far removed from the plucked dignity of its composer.

Alan Ward's Designed Landscapes

Alan Ward's book, Designed Landscapes, was published in 1998 by the Spacemaker Press [Washington D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts] which specializes in books on landscape architecture. Ward himself is both an architect and a landscape architect by training, but he had been photographing gardens and landscape for 20 years when this book was published. The book might be treated either as a documentation of landscape design, or as a pure landscape photography monograph.

In my case, I have a degree in landscape architecture, and am also a committed landscape photographer as well, so my interest in this work is at least twofold. Landscape design and landscape photography come together as different expressions of the same matter, but it's important not to confuse the two disciplines. Designing a landscape for use, is not at all the same thing as making an image of a finished landscape (or a wild landscape). The way a landscape "works" in reality, as a space through which one moves or rests, has really not much to do with the way it is "seen" photographically. Part of the confusion about why, for instance, the International Style, in architecture, was so persuasive and astonishing to its first audiences, seems to have had more to do with the canonical images which were made of its earliest iconic examples (i.e., Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, or Le Corbusier's Savoy Villa), than the actual experience of seeing and and being inside these structures in person.

Photographs are not reality. They present a certain view of space, from a certain vantage, in the moment of their taking, the light and atmospheric conditions varying according to the case, and they may seem more or less "true" to the actual space they depict, than the experience of literally being inside those spaces. Photographic space is a kind of "virtual" space, in which objects and perspective and tonal range are organized by the lens, and by the composer (photographer) to achieve a two dimensional construction which behaves according to the laws of representation. Being in a space is a much more complex phenomena, including, as it does, the other senses (than the visual) and the sensation of movement through it, its smells, sounds, felt textures, subtle shades of color, and so on.

All of which, by way of preface, suggests that I regard landscape photography as a poor stepsister of practical landscape architecture; as, indeed, the process of landscape design is a much more involved and laborious exercise in imagining and realizing arrangements and rearrangements of space and matter. But considered alone, landscape photography is its own art, which--though it depends upon the pre-existence of a landscape or a "garden" or cemetery or park--deserves to be treated as an art on its own, almost without reference or dependence upon its subject.

Ward's photographs in Designed Landscapes are arranged according to a series of eighteen specific sites, i.e., University of Virginia, Dumbarton Oaks, Blue Ridge Parkway, etc., with a set of plates devoted to each space. The work is exclusively black and white, and thus tends to emphasize the visual relationships and gradations of tone, rather than the interplay of colors, which would tend to detract from a purely abstract appreciation of the imagery. Again, it's important to understand that photographs, as I say, are not actual spaces, but only versions derived from them, and as such, black and white photographs are better able to define the qualities of visual definition which often may seem to trump the meaning inherent in objects and spaces in context. Colors (chromatography) have their own language and associations which relate to qualities outside the frame of any given image. And aside from this, the experience of black and white (monochromatic) imagery carries its own special interest.

I have reproduced five images from Ward's book--the first one of which is of Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I've never been to this place, but it appears to be a fairly woodsy space, compared to most cemeteries which I've seen. Sylvan settings are typical of traditional cemeteries, though usually more of the space is given over to the grave stones and monuments than to trees, shrubs and turf, than seems to be the case here. What I particularly like about this composition, is the magical light which seems to highlight the little classical pedimented rotunda to the right center of the scene. It lends a vaguely elegaic mood. When I visit cemeteries (or "graveyards" as we call them), I seldom am moved to consider the lives of those buried there. Instead, I tend to think poetic thoughts about nature, which may be the point. We would rather think of pleasant pastoral things in places dedicated to the dead, though decay itself--which one often sees in really old cemeteries--may become the overriding impression.

One of the considerations of photography like this, is its evident static quality, as if all activity and "accidental" occurrence had been removed from it. I often hear people criticize landscape photographs, because they're "sterile" or "emptied of life." Landscape photography is, however, primarily a contemplative art, which emphasizes control and precision above accident and chance. A dog achieving a frisbee at the height of a graceful jump may be a miraculous image, but it has nothing to do with the careful arrangement of objects in space--it's the expedient capture of an evanescent occurrence, all action and response and energy.

This quality--of purified perspectives and arithmetical precision of line and scope--characteristic of the best architectural photographers, such as Cervin Robinson or Ezra Stoller or Yukio Futagawa--asks that we perceive such imagery as the timeless vision of man's control over nature and materials. Art may be both an imposition and an augmentation of the order inherent in wild nature, and the resulting integration of natural forms and man-made (conceived) forms may be the perfect marriage.

Biltmore - South Terrace and Wisteria Arbor at Sunset

Ashville, North Carolina

This sense of integration between inside (man made) and outside (nature) is nowhere more apparent than in this view into the garden space at Dumbarton Oaks, where the external world seems to beckon through opened doors, a symbolic seduction which carries the metaphorical implication of departure, or exile, or even mortality. Inside and outside are poised at the threshold of decision, just at the point of release. The sense of classical balance, of stasis, calm, and certainty are overwhelming, almost as if one could stop time.

Dumbarton Oaks - View from inside the Orangery

In rural settings, the arrangement of space into a meaningful balance has different implications. Blue Ridge Parkway, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, bears the hand of man as deliberately as Dumbarton Oaks, but less oppressively. Land which may once have been given over mostly to agricultural use, fades gracefully into the picturesque, as a caricature of pastoral values. We visit our past, as surely as we visit our future (as with cemeteries), knowing full well that the meanings we deduce from it are tremulous and fleeting. ***

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***Please note, Blogger went down, apparently, while this essay was in save mode--or at some point before it had been completed and initially posted online. Consequently, the last third or so of text was lost, and not retrievable. As frustrating as this is, there's nothing to be done about it. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote something like 1000 words on a post about Crews's Pooh Perplex, which was suddenly schnarfed by Blogger before it could be saved. I stormed around the house for ten minutes, cursing my bad luck! Perhaps this is an harbinger of things to come--? I do hope not. Composing these essays takes time and work, even if very few people will eventually read them. I try now to save the texts in Word@ while I'm composing them, just as a precaution.

John Koethe's early "New York School" Work

Throughout the latter half of the 1960's and the first half of the 1970's, there seemed to exist a nexus of style and focus which cohered around the work of the so-called First Generation New York School of poetry, whose dominant figures were, of course, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and occasionally Barbara Guest (as well as a few peripheral figures). These were writers who had gone to college in the 1950's, and were associated with an East Coast urban setting, with the "country" of the surrounding inland Mid-Atlantic region as back-drop. Through their editorial work (Locus Solus, Art and Literature, etc.), their teaching (Koch at Columbia, Ashbery--after a period abroad in the early 1960's--at various posts over the succeeding decades), and their involvement in the New York Art scene (O'Hara's curatorial position at MOMA, and the art criticism which they wrote (Ashbery, Schuyler, O'Hara))--they seemed to constitute something like a coordinated group which sought to redefine the modern lyric and meditative impulse through innovative adaptation of earlier Modernist forms and approaches. The underground literary and social scene which grew up around them in the Sixties spawned a whole generation of imitators and acolytes of their productions, mostly concentrated in New York, though there were active "scenes" in several of the major American cities during the same period--a movement and a period which has been well-documented over the last two decades.

Several of the peripheral figures orbiting around this period seemed to presage a continuation of the trends first acknowledged. Berrigan & Padgett, Berkson, Warsh, Elmslie, Malanga, Ceravolo, Towle, Brownstein, Perreault, Denby, among a host of lesser figures, seemed to share a common purpose of some kind, though their separate work(s) defied the kind of categorical canonization which classic art movements of the past had exhibited.

One figure whom I associated with this movement at the time was John Koethe [1945- ]. Koethe's Blue Vents [Audit/Poetry, 1968] seemed to fit right into the meditative mode which Ashbery had established with his longer efforts in Mountains and Rivers, and The Double Dream of Spring. Koethe seemed to have a clear impression of the complexity of a meditative verse form unfolding as Ashbery's did, and he also appeared to comprehend the ambiguous relationship between the text, the voice, and his own agency as maker, exploiting ironies of tone and identity--something he shared, for instance, with contemporaries such as Brownstein, Crase, Warsh, Laurance Wieder, or Bill Berkson. Koethe's second collection, Domes [Columbia University Press, 1973] won the Frank O'Hara Award. It seemed somewhat less abstract than the poems in Blue Vents, though on closer inspection, proved to be every bit as evasive in its sense of assertion and committed expression, as the earlier book. A philosophy major, Koethe went on to a position at the University of Wisconsin, and to publish several additional volumes of verse, as well as books on thought.

Koethe's poems--rather like Michael Palmer's (another poet whom I have written about here recently)--often seem to be about problems in logic and perception--though their mood and apparent setting usually seem straightforwardly descriptive--

Below the Coast

A clumsy hillock

Unmolded like a cake on the meadow

In the Laguna Mountains. Tough yellow-green grass growing up to a tree

As thick as a tooth. In winter, on the road from San Diego,

Thousands of cars crawl up to the snow

And their passengers get out to investigate it

And then drive, discoursing, back home. And that’s California,

Solemnly discharging its responsibilities.

Meanwhile we breakfast on pancakes the size of a plate

While the console radio goes on the blink.

Miss L’Espagnole looks out from her frame on the wall,

Completely prepared (though for what it is impossible to say).

Her left arm is white and dips into a puddle of fire

Or a pile of cotton on fire. And each thing is severe:

The house hemmed in by pepper trees and Mexico

(This one is white and in Chula Vista), and the paraphernalia

Strewn around home: a few magazines summing up politics,

A matchbox with a lavender automobile on the cover,

And a set of soldiers of several military epochs marching off to war on the raffia rug.

Unless, you’ve grown up amidst palm trees (and buildings that are either unbuilt, or hospitals)

It’s impossible to appreciate a reasonable tree.

I sometimes consider the parrots that live in the zoo

And are sold on the street in Tijuana. Colored like national flags,

Their heads are always cocked to pick up something behind them.

And unless you have lived in a place where the fog

Closes in like a face, it is impossible to be (even temporarily) relieved

When it lifts to expose the freshly painted trim of the city, and it seems

Like a fine day for knowledge: sunlight sleeping on top of the rocks

And lots of white clouds scudding by like clean sheets

Which, when the air in the bedroom is cold, you pull over your head

And let the temperature slowly increase while you breathe.

But California has only a coast in common with this.

The social and intellectual "setting" of many of Koethe's early poems seemed to lack conviction, inasmuch as the observational tone and credulous perspicacity provided the illusion of a firm footing, while constantly shifting from one evasive foot to the other. Superficially like Ashbery's short lyrical meditations, they had a sort of Pop Art surface which seemed intended to disorient and belie rather than to place and confirm. This was their chief innovation. I particularly liked his descriptions of ordinary things--

Copley Square

Up-and-down shafts of light brick

Lift occupants up into prisms or roofs

Of green copper, and then embark on the sky.

12:44 by the Suffolk Franklin Savings Banks's

Clock, 93o outside, inside a cool bed of dimes.

A jet overhead that gets picked up by a pigeon

Gliding by lower down, some more modern banks

And a bank of lanterns set like a row of spears,

A Try Rooti Root Beer truck almost collides

With a spiffy yellow Checker Cab, and flags

Flop in front of the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.

Plenty of seersucker walks by below, or sits

On a deep-heated long granite bench,

Listening to the library,

Half-eating a half-eaten peach,

And bakes in the breeze.

--which seemed obvious enough, except that its lazily receptive passivity seemed more camp-y than joyous.

A Sunday Drive

Two gallons of apple cider.

A jar of pungent, pasty Yankee mustard.

"Two dollars please." Boys on bikes

Are scattered around the entrance to the store.

Cold leaf smoke floats over

A toadstool-proportioned water tank

Perched slightly off to the left of Route 2.

"Are these houses mostly old or new?

I usually can't tell the difference myself."

So we are continuing down the road

Which was like a hallway whose walls were trees

And whose ceiling was open to the sky.

Large birds were browsing in the sky.

"Her character is slightly slummy

But it conceals a kindness of such concentration

Nothing shivers--not even a single leaf--

When she casts her lot where she may."

Hardly any leaves are left on the trees.

The pines, with their eternal, sickly green,

Are stuck like bottle brushes in the rack

Of the other, occasional bloomers.

"Saws Sharpened."

"The First Lutheran Church Welcomes You."

We can't find the way back, but we do.

Poems like this can pass for straightforward pastoral travelogues, but in Koethe's poems they're much less obvious in their implication. Warhol showed how the presentation of two dimensional clichés as infinitely reproducible commodities could become icons of banality--all surface and confidence and presumption. As we recede further and further into the future, the images and impressions of the indestructible past assemble and sort themselves into the congealing mass of cultural memory, as illusionistic as dreams. The sentimental subtext of our own mortality skids along the pavement, as nostalgic as a rollerskate.

Collected Poems

small war on the heels of small / war

Robert Lowell

I think they may be adequate for now,

With summer finally in full swing

As imperceptibly the days begin to shrink.

Each spring I wonder what I'll find

When I return to them again--this year it was a war

That wasn't actually a war, a lie made visible--

And how blind intuitions might be built up into facts

That someone else might think to feel and read.

The signs are everywhere, implicit in the sky,

The trees, the houses on the street I walk along to work

(The walking is the work), when something that I see

Or half-remember gets repeated from inside,

Finds its measure, and in settling inward settles into place.

They're how I wander through a day, wondering at its

Spaciousness, finding in its anonymity

These traces of my name, in its impersonality

These ways to see myself--hearing in the syllables of the

Leaves the lyrics of a song; seeing in the clouds

A human face, another lie made visible.

Word by word and war by war--

What makes one possible sustains the other too:

The urge to change, the power to deceive,

To fabricate a version of the world

Not as it is, but as someone imagines it to be.

The aim is not to say what happened

But to forge a monument by force, deploying

All the subtlety and weapons of the will,

And leaving something broken in its wake: the simple truth

As it appeared in school each day; the simple self

That wrote it down, before it all became a wildnerness

Where what's still left of them still wander,

Looking for each other, through a mutual memory

Of something irrecoverable beneath these

Shifting sands of spoken and unspoken words.

I used to think there was a different way,

A less insistent one, accepting what it finds

Without revising it, without the specious clarity

And authority of art, and its pervasive

Atmosphere of will. But that turned out to be a style too,

A sweeter one perhaps, yet just as artificial in the end.

The point is general, not confined to art: to make

Is to destroy; to act is to replace what would have been

With something signed, that bears a name. What I was a boy

I thought a life just happened, or was there to find.

Wars were aberrations. Poems were another generation's.

I didn't realize you made it up, you made them up,

And that the self was not an object but an act,

A sequence of decisions bound together by a noun

But with the feel of a fact. I wonder where that leaves me--

Hanging on a whim, on what I write? I hope not.

What the urge to dominate the world, the place, the page

Eventually becomes is just a human figures

On a summer afternoon, smiling at what happens,

Anxious for the future and the slope of age.

I think I'm done for now. It remains to save the file,

Close the notebook, and let evening come.

This is a fairly straightforward meditation on the distortion of propaganda, the subtle (or not) impositions of will, and the poet's restless urge to see in everything a sign of the times, a reverberating vision of apocalyptic disintegration, even in the reassuring quietude of an academic suburbia. But Koethe wasn't always so passive in his adjustments. In an earlier poem, from the late 1960's, such as--

Satie's Suits

Orange is the hue of modernity.

Greater than gold, shakey and poetic,

Our century's art has been a gentle surrender

To this color's nonchalant "stance"

Towards hunger and the unknown, and its boldness:

For it has replaced us as the subject of the unknown.

We still like the same things, but today we handle them differently.

Among the signs of occupation in this contemporary war

The twelve identical corduroy suits of Erik Satie

Locate importance in repetition, where it really belongs,

There in the dark, among the lessons that sleep excludes.

I want to emphasize the contribution of each one of us

To a society which has held us back but which has

Allowed love to flourish in this age like a song.

Unable to understand very much,

But prepared to isolate things in a personal way,

The acres of orange paint are a sign

Of the machine that powers our amateur hearts.

The technical has been driven back

By river stages, exposing a vacant lot

Strewn with these tools, food and clothing

Awaiting the inventions of limited strength.

We could begin selling ourselves, but the overture

Brings no response and the connection remains unsketched.

I can see there has been no change.

The body's a form of remote control

And its success is too exact to assist us.

Responding to the ulterior commandment

So much has failed in the abstract.

The phallus hid in the school bell

While the difficult fluid rose in the night.

In the apartment wild horses took you away.

--the camp deconstruction of official language is very similar here to Ashbery's distancing from subject matter. The alienation from a "stance" belongs to a specific strain of surrealism--that feeds off of a disorientation from the quotidian--turning assertion on its head to make language say things it hadn't intended. I.e., "wild horses took you away." Or "I want to emphasize the contribution of each one of us to a society which has held us back but which has

allowed love to flourish in this age like a song." The "hue of modernity" has "replaced us as the subject of the unknown." The inquiry of mind into the unknown "has failed in the abstract." The individual lines don't so much follow each other, as interact, though much more subtly, for instance, than Berrigan's loopy, explosive lines in his Sonnets. The mediation between mind and tool, perception and object, called for by Wittgenstein, stalls in an antechamber of apathy. Things lie strewn about, so we mark them, examining each in turn, putting off until some later time the task of connecting the dots to some cosmology of the provisional. The night sky arches overhead. A consolidation of means already presaged here would overtake the zeitgeist within the next decade, tamping down objections while capital raged in the streets. Koethe's avant gestures never questioned the formalities of the time, and so faded into obscurity. His accessibility assured a smooth transition from the abstract distortions of late Pop, to the moderate ratiocination of middle age, the Middle West, and the unchallenged towers of power in the literary landscape. Mick Jagger is 67.