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Many who have visited Japanese
gardens will agree that these gardens tend to be highly effective in
inducing a high level of appreciation for nature as apparently displayed
there. Allen Carlson goes so far as to argue that the aesthetic appreciation
elicited by Japanese gardens is such that the sort of critical attitude
that he deems appropriate for the appreciation of artworks is out of
place there [12] . Rather, although qua gardens they are
artefacts, he proposes that they are more fittingly appreciated as nature
is. This sort of observation may lead one to conclude that Japanese
gardens provide first rate models for nature restoration because, while
artefactual, they make us feel that we are surrounded by nature. As
we will see, however, this is a highly paradoxical judgement.
If Japanese gardens appear like examples of the closest that art may
come to nature restoration, earthworks likely are considered the most
removed from it. Earthworks are a kind of site-specific art that came
into prominence in the late sixties and has more or less flourished
since, but that, as various authors remind us, has existed ever since
prehistoric times although it was not recognized as art for most of
its time of existence
[13] . The term 'earthwork' is not well defined and is often
used interchangeably with 'land art' or 'earth art,' but I propose to
focus here exclusively on those site-specific works that require a considerable
amount of disturbance of earth and other natural materials, and that
explicitly treat land, with its rock and dirt, as mere material.
Motivations for earth working varied, of course, but the underlying
idea in the works created since the sixties seems to have been to make
good use for art of spaces and earth as found in abundance in places
such as deserts, mesas, and dry lakes. Michael Heizer's Double Negative
(1969-70), for example, is located in a bend of Mormon Mesa at Virgin
River, near Overton, Nevada. It consists of an incision into the edge
of the mesa 30 feet wide, 42 feet deep and 100 feet long on one side
of the mesa, continued across a wide gap on the other side of the mesa
in an identical manner
[14] . In the process, Heizer moved 240,000 tons of rhyolite
and sandstone. He explained that he was interested in drawing attention
to the 'negative space' encompassed in the total distance of 1500 feet;
the piece, he claimed, is about absence
[15] .
Notwithstanding the artistic merit of earthworks, they have been severely
critiqued by environmental aestheticians and ethicists such as Carlson
and Peter Humphrey. Carlson thinks that such works constitute an "aesthetic
affront to nature" because, in the process of their creation, they
neglect to respect the aesthetic value of preexisting nature [16] . Humphrey objects
to such works because of their present and/or foreseeable negative ecological
consequences [17] . It may be questioned, however,
whether singling out earthworks in this manner is fully justified.
Certainly earthwork artists are not doing anything very different from
what their non-artist contemporaries in industry are doing when mines
are dug or urban developments and highways are blasted through hills
and glades. In some cases these critical assessments may be symptoms
of a Philistine preference for the merely utilitarian over the artistic,
the reasoning being perhaps that we need those mines and roads
and new suburbs but not these new kinds of artworks. Moreover, although
making earthworks can cause a certain amount of disturbance in natural
spaces, it remains unclear whether the painter with his oil paints and
turpentine, or the photographer with her emulsions, are not doing more
damage to the earth in the long run. (Earthworks are hard to make or
to get funded, so very few are made by each artist.) Nonetheless, it
seems quite clear that earthworks are, if anything, counterimages
to what nature restoration may be, but perhaps this judgement is too
precipitated.
Artifice and nature
As noted, Japanese gardens may seem veritable models for nature restoration,
both in execution and underlying ideology, while earthworks may seem
to represent the very opposite. Nonetheless, even if Japanese gardens
may constitute highly engaging representations of the essence of nature,
both their creation and their maintenance require thoroughgoing artifice.
As in the 'Arcadian'-seeming, pastoral English gardens designed by Lancelot
Brown'Capability'(1716-1783). Japanese gardening may require considerable
earth moving, water basin creation, rock transport, planting, and consistent
pruning. Japanese gardens may be as thoroughly artefactual as their
various European counterparts.
Ironically, earthworks, which when first executed resemble lands that
cry out for restoration, eventually tend to turn into the opposite.
That is, in as much as earthworks when first executed may resemble industrial
interventions in the land, after some time they are redeemed back by
nature. This is the case with many of the early earthworks. I found
this out through personal experience when I sought out Heizer's Double
Negative in 1994. To my surprise the site had changed considerably
from its appearance in the photographs in circulation, which date back
to 1970 when the work was first made. Those photographs (which still
are being reproduced in publications printed as late as 1995) show a
neat cut in the rocky mesa intended to illustrate Heizer's desire for
works that demonstrate "durability and precision" [18] . In 1994, though, I could see that on both parts
of the piece the walls had begun to crumble, large rocks and mud washed
out of the walls had accumulated in the supposedly empty spaces of each
'negative,' and various local plants had taken root here and there.
These counterintuitive observations regarding Japanese gardens and earthworks
lead me to a consideration of the bigger context in which our appreciation
of these artworks figures.
My personal experience is that neither Japanese gardens nor earthworks
make me feel uncomfortable, despite the evident display of human control
issuing in their thoroughgoing artefactuality, while industrial and
urbanisational development does, especially if located on crown or public
lands (as much of the logging, ranching and ski development is in Canada).
I am curious about what makes for the difference between them. Perhaps
it has something to do with the fact that, qua artworks, Japanese
gardens and earthworks invite us to look beyond their immediate impact
on human interests. In fact, both Japanese gardens and earthworks enunciate
very particular sorts of human-nature relationships.
So, what can we learn from these contrasting sorts of interventions
in nature? Japanese gardens are like fingers pointing to what nature
has to offer to us. By making, for example, a space for asymmetries
and what seem to be imperfections they also put human lives into the
context of nature by suggesting ways in which the skewedness and imperfections
in our lives may be acceptable. These gardens promote what the ancient
European schools of philosophy called 'the look from above': even if
from close-up our lives often seem miserable, they may make some sense
when seen in relation to nature. Moreover, by making us feel comfortable
in what seem to be natural spaces, Japanese gardens help to make alien
nature somewhat less alien, without failing to point out with their
unexpected turns and vistas that nature will be surprising at times.
Furthermore, by creating the illusion in the visitors of being in natural
spaces, while simultaneously displaying the illusory character of those
spaces, they bridge the gap between the artefactual and nature without
denying it.
Earthworks, in contrast, are like fingers pointing to what little we
offer in exchange for nature. They show this by mimicking the rough
handling of wild, natural spaces carried out by our industries, and
whitewashed by our policy makers, on a daily basis. But, at least in
many cases, to look at earthworks is also to look at the wilderness
that surrounds it. From Double Negative's cut into the subsurface
of the land, for example, we come to the presence of the workings of
the earth from a long time back, the distant mountain ranges with their
impregnable walls, and the daunting desert floor that calls on the eye
to travel to a far horizon; together all these facets of the land highlighted
by the sitedness of the artwork function as reminders of the otherness
of nature, of its alien character. They also are warnings about the
blindness that results from coming too close to nature in the process
of treating it as mere material for our passing consumptive urges: if
all we see is a future mine or road or housing development we may fail
to see all those other faces that nature freely offers.
While earthworks are artefacts without any pretense of representing
nature, they, like Japanese gardens, may also provide us with something
like a bridge between the artefactual and the natural. Even if these
works represent assaults on nature, calculated aesthetic affronts if
you will, they are also essentially human gestures in nature. Despite
our distaste for the sort of gesture they are we may recognize ourselves
in them just as we may recognize ourselves in the tragic heroes Oedipus
or Medea of ancient Greek tragedy. We may not feel inclined to identify
with the sort of gesture earthworks represent, but, by taking ownership
of those gestures, we are more fully enabled to think about what sorts
of gestures are possible for us in nature.
Moreover, while in the case of Japanese gardens we can only fight their
illusory powers by noting the markers of their utter artifice, in the
case of earthworks we have the opposite task. We can only grasp that
they have a relevance that goes beyond their nature-assaulting artefactuality
by noting how they expose us to nature in the raw. These two sorts of
art make both epistemological and moral points. They present alternative
ways of cognising nature and our relationships with it, and, consequently,
raise the issue of how we may act with respect to that nature.
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Nature restoration without dissimulation
Japanese gardens and earthworks can bring us closer to nature by pointedly
different strategies. Both types of art, though, seem to forcefully
argue against dissimulation because of our actions. Dissimulation, as
Jean Baudrillard has reminded us, is to feing not to have what one does,
while simulation is to feign to have what one does not. The accusation
of forgery and fakery with regard to nature restoration arises because
of the fear that the restorers hide their human interventions
in nature. Japanese gardens and earthworks seem to show that even very
considerable interventions in nature can aid rather than hinder our
appreciation of nature - if the interventions are distinguishable from
nature's doing. So, does nature restoration make sense? Nature restoration
is not the act of nature. Consequently, human agency should be
acknowledged and shown in the restoration work if it is to avoid
the charge of fakery, forgery or big lies. Furthermore, human agency
in nature restoration needs to be evident so that we may remember to
grieve for what nature is already lost, and be incited to look beyond
to the ever-shrinking parcels of our world that remain non-artefactualized.
And human agency in restored areas should be openly displayed so that
human visitors may benefit from the fact that restoration is a way of
relating the artefactual and the natural. That is, nature restoration
may bring about a bridge to non-human nature, even in its most alien
manifestations.
Practically, what does this mean? It suggests at least a judicious combination
of a policy of letting be, insofar as natural processes can be allowed
to come into their own again through it, and a policy of intervention,
to remove human-created obstacles to those natural processes [19] , all the while
leaving clear sign of what the human, artefactual contribution is. So,
this might mean to regrade old roads in such a way as to make their
renewed use unlikely, but not in such a way that all trace of human
intervention is hidden. And it might mean to take logging and roadbuilding
debris out of creeks to enable local fish species to reclaim them, but
probably not to restock them, and certainly not on a regular basis or
with 'improved' species.
Naturalness seems to come in degrees once artefactuality has been introduced.
Certainly our limited ability to make peace with the land through restorative
work can in no way justify further incursions into what little wild
nature is left [20]
. But, where the damage has already been done, it would seem
justifaible. In those cases it is relevant that the less intervention,
and the less dissimulated it is, the more plausible nature restoration
will be.
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