The Fusion Thing Landscape + Architecture
by GAVIN KEENEY for CounterPunch
"Outside of this cyclic, accidental, and discontinuous emergence of sublimated aspects of architecture's implicit ground, a third order of symbolization and abstraction is to be found that represents a preliminary and provisional synthesis of subject/object relations -- i.e., most often a figurative symbiosis built into form and described as gestural or sublime fusion of 'form' and 'content' in sculpture and the hybridized field of land art, most especially, where discursive orders are stripped away and an elemental, generative, and formal essence presses forward. In the case of art, and its near-automatic assumption of conceptual autonomy, the works of Noguchi and Smithson, plus the avalanche of land art-inspired landscape architecture after the 1960s, re-present the archaic and liminal nature of almost-first nature (perhaps 'fourth nature') through hyper-sensual manipulations of form and a presentiment, if not an acclamation, of pre-linguistic forms and seminal structural operations versus aspects of full-blown discourse (full-fledged signifiers). Here, timeliness is reduced to an iconic presence tipping inexorably toward absence (timelessness). These liminal measures most often take the form of excavations or insertions (interventions) that at the least pretend to re-write the codes of occupying or mapping presence. This type of deep-sea diving comes in many forms and is not limited to the delineation of art-in-the-landscape, or art-as-landscape. The concise, inward-driven nature of such expression is primarily poetic and is found in all of the arts. This archaistic jouissance deliberately invokes the ontological ground as a place 'before' -- pre-existent to -- the emergence of the Imaginary (the phantasmatic world of doubled and/or tripled un-realities). These figures play in the dust of the Self, seemingly before the emergence of the Ego (and Super Ego). Such fictive gestures also act as analogs for the extreme interiority of works of art and architecture prior to their deployment as cultural signs and tropes (figures of speech and thought). In the process of stripping away the detritus of signifying chains (modes of expression and discourse), such maneuvers circle the same ground repeatedly. The eventual collapse of the operative figures of near-speech simply occurs as the work vanishes into the annals of art or architectural history. The dissolution of many of Heizer's and Smithson's remote works matters hardly at all given that they were putative gestures at/within 'wilderness' but overt acts of defiance aimed at the production of art and the art world."
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by GAVIN KEENEY for CounterPunch
"Outside of this cyclic, accidental, and discontinuous emergence of sublimated aspects of architecture's implicit ground, a third order of symbolization and abstraction is to be found that represents a preliminary and provisional synthesis of subject/object relations -- i.e., most often a figurative symbiosis built into form and described as gestural or sublime fusion of 'form' and 'content' in sculpture and the hybridized field of land art, most especially, where discursive orders are stripped away and an elemental, generative, and formal essence presses forward. In the case of art, and its near-automatic assumption of conceptual autonomy, the works of Noguchi and Smithson, plus the avalanche of land art-inspired landscape architecture after the 1960s, re-present the archaic and liminal nature of almost-first nature (perhaps 'fourth nature') through hyper-sensual manipulations of form and a presentiment, if not an acclamation, of pre-linguistic forms and seminal structural operations versus aspects of full-blown discourse (full-fledged signifiers). Here, timeliness is reduced to an iconic presence tipping inexorably toward absence (timelessness). These liminal measures most often take the form of excavations or insertions (interventions) that at the least pretend to re-write the codes of occupying or mapping presence. This type of deep-sea diving comes in many forms and is not limited to the delineation of art-in-the-landscape, or art-as-landscape. The concise, inward-driven nature of such expression is primarily poetic and is found in all of the arts. This archaistic jouissance deliberately invokes the ontological ground as a place 'before' -- pre-existent to -- the emergence of the Imaginary (the phantasmatic world of doubled and/or tripled un-realities). These figures play in the dust of the Self, seemingly before the emergence of the Ego (and Super Ego). Such fictive gestures also act as analogs for the extreme interiority of works of art and architecture prior to their deployment as cultural signs and tropes (figures of speech and thought). In the process of stripping away the detritus of signifying chains (modes of expression and discourse), such maneuvers circle the same ground repeatedly. The eventual collapse of the operative figures of near-speech simply occurs as the work vanishes into the annals of art or architectural history. The dissolution of many of Heizer's and Smithson's remote works matters hardly at all given that they were putative gestures at/within 'wilderness' but overt acts of defiance aimed at the production of art and the art world."
- bill 10-19-2003 5:41 pm