Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape

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Jacky Bowring’s Melancholy and the Landscape offers a wide-ranging insight into how melancholy can join the eighteenth-century triad of Beauty, Sublimity and Picturesque as a new measure of landscape’s scope and effect. As she explores the role of shadows, fragments, weathering, among other elements of melancholy, the role of empathy in landscape is made clear and a potent factor on its reception. John Dixon Hunt Emeritus Professor of the History & Theory of Landscape University of Pennsylvania, USA

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Melancholy and the Landscape

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina. Jacky Bowring is Professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the author of A Field Guide to Melancholy.

Routledge Research in Landscape and Environmental Design Series editor: Terry Clements

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Associate Professor, Virginia Tech

Routledge Research in Landscape and Environmental Design is a series of academic monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and cutting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding literature in all areas of landscape and environmental design. Regions and Designed Landscapes in Georgian England Sarah Spooner Immigrant Pastoral Midwestern Landscapes and Mexican-American Neighborhoods Susan L. Dieterlen Landscape and Branding The Promotion and Production of Place Nicole Porter Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East Edited by Mohammad Gharipour Melancholy and the Landscape Locating sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape Jacky Bowring

Melancholy and the Landscape

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Locating sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape

Jacky Bowring

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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© 2017 Jacqueline Bowring The right of Jacqueline Bowring to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bowring, Jacky.Title: Melancholy and the landscape : locating sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape / Jacky Bowring. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research in landscape and environmental design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002252| ISBN 9781138946989 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315670386 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes--Psychological aspects. | Melancholy. | Landscape design. | Nature (Aesthetics) | Environmental psychology. Classification: LCC BF353 .B686 2016 | DDC 152.4--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002252 ISBN: 978-1-138-94698-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67038-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

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Contents

List of figures

ix

PART I

The place of melancholy 1 Placing melancholy in landscape architecture

1 3

2 Defining melancholy

12

3 The Sublime, the Beautiful, the Picturesque … and the melancholy

18

4 Aesthetics

23

5 Emotion

30

6 Ethics

34

7 Empathy

42

PART II

The places of melancholy

53

8 The places of melancholy

55

9 The void

58

10 The uncanny

73

11 Silence

84

12 Shadows and darkness

87

13 Aura

92

14 Liminality

99

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viii

Contents

15 Fragments

109

16 Leavings

117

17 Submersion

133

18 Weathering and patina

143

19 Ephemerality and transience

149

20 Camouflage

152

21 Monochrome

157

22 Intimate immensity

161

Conclusion

170

Index

174

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Figures

9.1

9.2 9.3 9.4

9.5 9.6

10.1 10.2 10.3 12.1 14.1 15.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 17.1

Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs, Oklahoma City National Memorial, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, 2001 Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned Room’), Berlin, Germany, 1988–1996 Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, memorial at the site of the former Great Synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, 2001 Rodrigo Mora, Angel Muñoz and Jorge Lankin, A Place for Memory, monument to the victims of the Caso Degollados (‘Slit-Throat Case’), Santiago, Chile, 2006 Peter Majendie, Empty Chairs Temporary Memorial for the Christchurch Earthquake, New Zealand Georges-Henri Pingusson, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (‘Memorial of the Deportation’), Paris, France, 1962 Andy Goldsworthy, Garden of Stones, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, USA, 2003 Rachel Whiteread, Nameless Library: The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2000 Menashe Kadishman, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), at Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2001 The shadowy melancholy of darkness, Monaco, France Jacky Bowring, Otira Roadworkers’ Memorial, 2000 Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1873 Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial, Manhattan, New York, USA, 2002 Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, Irish Famine Memorial, Sydney, Australia, 1999 Alberto Burri, Il Cretto (‘The Crack’), Earthquake Memorial, Gibellina, Italy, 1984–1989 Dani Karavan, Passages, Memorial to Walter Benjamin, Portbou, Spain, 1994 Kolmanskop, Namibia

60 60 61

62 63

68 76 78 82 88 102 113 122 123 124 128 137

x

Figures

17.2

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18.1 18.2

James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The High Line, Manhattan, New York, 2009 (showing graffiti before being painted over, and the replaced ballast and railway tracks) Abandoned sound mirror, Denge, England Orford Ness – Landscape with Pagoda

140 146 147

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Part I

The place of melancholy

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1

Placing melancholy in landscape architecture

Melancholy is at once complex and contradictory. For some it is an emotion, for others a mental illness, or even a mood, a disposition, an affect, an effect. Melancholy’s extensive history ranges across everything from cures for something considered a disease, to paeans to its poignant beauty. While in the Dark Ages the ‘melancholy of monks’ – also called acedia – necessitated a redoubling of prayer and an extra dose of courage, by the Romantic era melancholy was a source of inspiration for the poetry of Milton, Coleridge and Keats.1 Melancholy imbues artworks from Dürer’s Melancolia I (1514) to Anselm Kiefer’s Melancholia (1989),2 literature from Shakespeare to Sebald, and music from the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to Nick Cave.3 But it is to the landscape that this book turns. Landscape is itself a convoluted term, a ‘slippery word’ (Stilgoe, 1997, p.64).4 In its original form as landschaft, the term referred to ‘a compact territory extensively modified by permanent inhabitants’, holding within it the idea of an occupied and ordered environment, a particular type of place (Stilgoe, 1997, p.64). When paintings of these kinds of places were taken to England, the word became landskip, and was forever transformed into the idea of something seen, of scenery and views, which ultimately became the complex word ‘landscape’. The word carries with it, then, both a pictorial appreciation of that which is beheld in the outdoors, as well as a holistic sense of the landscape as the place of dwelling, where culture inscribes itself. This expansive etymology means that ‘landscape’ also encompasses architecture, as a contiguous element of the lived-in world. Both landscape and architecture constitute this continuous fabric, as the expressions of culture, the negotiations of the bio-physical givens, the inscriptions of ideas, the revealing of values, and all that makes up our occupation of places. Collectively, landscape architecture and architecture are professions which explore, analyse, speculate on and design the landscape, and both bodies of thought coalesce within the writings which follow. Across its vast compass, landscape in its expansive incorporation of gardens, environmental design, architecture, agriculture, infrastructure, and everything between and beyond, is the embodiment of identity. Points of reference are found as much in the representations of landscape – paintings, films, texts – as in the experiential, sensory,

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4

The place of melancholy

phenomenological realm. Whether landscape is a mirror,5 a theatre,6 a text7 or a seamless continuity with its inhabitants,8 it is the place from which we draw meaning, feeling; it is the armature for existence, the realm in which place and culture co-exist, and where the self dwells. As David Crouch majestically invokes, ‘Landscape is not perspective and horizon, a particular shape or defined aesthetics, but caught in its occurrence of affects: felt smudges, smears, kaleidoscope, a multi-sensual expressive poetics of potentiality, becoming and poetics: shuffling, unstable and lively’ (Crouch, 2015, p.244). Within this expansive and meaning-imbued terrain the landscape holds within it the natural habitat for melancholy, as the locus of places of contemplation, memory, death, sadness. Yet, the place of melancholy within the landscape is one which is often resisted, marginalised and edited out. As part of the salvaging of the idea of melancholy as a dimension of existence, this book also offers a critique of the impoverishment of the emotional content of the contemporary designed environment. Juhani Pallasmaa’s critique of contemporary architecture is a lament which is true too of the broader sphere of the designed landscape, regretting how architecture tends to be engaged with visual effects, and it lacks the tragic, the melancholy, the nostalgic, as well as the ecstatic and transcendental tones of the spectrum of emotions. In consequence our buildings tend to leave us as outsiders and spectators without being able to pull us into full emotional participation. (Pallasmaa, 2001, p.91) Melancholy appears in tension with prevailing cultural attitudes at large, and the designed landscape is no exception. Design is an embedding of values and ideals, and a critique of any landscape at any time is therefore an examination of the societal context, as much as of the work of the individual designer. Landscape architecture is gaining a much more visible presence globally, and ‘landscape’ as a concept has developed a certain cachet in a range of disciplines, including architecture, urban design, art and geography.9 The many seductive and lavish survey books on contemporary landscape architecture bear witness to its popularity, and browsing through these is to open a window into the prevailing trends. The extensive tomes 1000 X Landscape Architecture (1,024 pages) and The Sourcebook of Contemporary Landscape Design (600 pages), for example, exhaustively sample built landscapes and present them uncritically, as a form of ‘eye candy’ or perhaps twenty-first-century pattern books.10 The everyday landscape is also a barometer of contemporary values. In the popular media, in real-estate magazines, and mass market home and garden publications, landscape design has become a commodified realm, one of the main forms of conspicuous consumption. ‘Reality TV’ shows such as Extreme Makeover Home Edition (USA), Backyard Blitz (Australia) and Garden Wars (New Zealand) reduce the designed landscape to little

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Placing melancholy in landscape architecture

5

more than instantaneous horizontal wallpaper. Gardens are designed and laid out in a matter of hours, rolled out by the square metre, with the expectation that enhancing the exterior décor of a home will either increase its value or provide an instant cure for whatever might be troubling the occupants. The economic value of well-designed gardens, as well as their healing properties, are inherent within landscape architecture, yet the theatrics of reality TV reduce all of this to superficial sensationalism. In this context of reality TV, the emotional dimension of landscape, rather than possessing the subtle timbre of melancholy, becomes a melodramatic attempt to provoke extreme displays of overwhelment by the recipients of the garden makeover. Within the culture of spectatorship – the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 2014) – the voyeuristic observation of a stranger’s exhibition of emotion serves as entertainment, with a touch of schadenfreude, the ‘pleasure of flinching’. The anaesthetising effect of reality TV detaches us from really feeling, and condemns us to wander in the ‘desert of the real’.11 Martin Jay warns that only if aesthetic spectatorship declines the opportunity to conflate itself entirely with the entertainment industry’s cinema of attraction can it provide a possible alternative mode of relating to a world that threatens to dissolve the distinction between reality and simulacra entirely and make every experience vicarious, derivative, and ultimately hollow. (Jay, 2003, p.117) Bound up in the aspirations of reality TV garden makeovers, and in the vast numbers of self-help books on dealing with sadness, and in the selfmedication for ‘depression’ is the fact that happiness has become an obsessive compulsion, and the inability to be constantly happy is perceived as a failing, or even a mental illness (de Graaf et al., 2002; Hamilton and Denniss, 2005). As a consequence of the relentless pursuit of happiness, melancholy tends to be suppressed within contemporary society. Paralleling the pharmaceutical and popular psychological remedies, which are insistently promoted as a means of divesting us of any emotion other than joy, landscape interventions can simply become part of the drive for an eternal euphoria. In this context, the contemporary designed landscape is characterised by a one-dimensional existential spectrum, lives become sanitised and emotionally aseptic. Melancholy’s marginalisation reflects in part modernity’s ontological objectification – the splitting of subject and object. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben lamented: Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as ‘unreal,’ was the supreme medium of knowledge. (Agamben, 1993, p.11)

6

The place of melancholy

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The loss of the rich realm of the imaginative, through its placement within the subordinate category of subjectivity, is echoed in the words of geographer Tim Edensor: The illuminating searchlight of modern science, in its rendering history, life and things transparent, whilst no doubt valuable in its contribution to the sum of knowledge, tends to subject all spaces to its pitiless glare, fostering the illusion that all might be revealed everywhere. This monumental banishment of the dark and mysterious within such a modern topography leaves little room for gloom and the disordered yet evocative matter which might lurk there. (Edensor, 2005, p.135) Related to this severance from the world of imagination is the loss of the introspective dimension of life. Melancholy was not simply a heightened awareness of the poignancy of existence, but the capacity for contemplation. A productive solitude is afforded by melancholy, in distinction from an imposed isolation, as in the ‘acedia’ or melancholy sloth of the monks in devotional exile in the Desert of Cells in the Egypt of the Dark Ages. A modern-day equivalent of acedia is found in the self-imposed exile within the isolation of technology, where all manner of personal devices have served to construct a virtual landscape of separation. As with the monks suffering from sloth in their cells, these worlds of isolation lack the restorative powers of melancholy solitude. The world of MP3 players and mobile phones is filled with noise and constant stimulation, imparting a sense of estrangement and ennui – a negative form of melancholy which is associated with boredom and anomie. Ever more introspective modes of entertainment, and the idea of communication-as-entertainment, challenge the authenticity of interpersonal relationships – as when someone who is essentially a stranger invites you to be a ‘friend’ on an internet social networking site. The landscape has a role in proffering places of escape, of re-building the capacity for contemplation. Pallasmaa states the house is a ‘metaphysical instrument, a mythical tool with which we try to introduce a reflection of eternity into our momentary existence’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.95). Echoing philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s conception of the house as ‘an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.46), Pallasmaa advocates that a house is more than simply shelter, but in the words of Karsten Harries, it can create places of meaning, places which transform ‘chaos’ into ‘cosmos’ (in MacKeith, 2005, pp.59–60). This vision of the house as a place in which to find one’s self in the world is also true of landscape architecture. From the tradition of hermitages in Picturesque gardens to the practice of seeking solace within wilderness, the landscape is the locus for contemplation, for meaningful solitude and melancholy reflection. However, despite landscape’s potential as a site of melancholy, the embracing of sadness or contemplation is avoided in much contemporary

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Placing melancholy in landscape architecture

7

design thinking. The single-minded pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of places of solitude and contemplation are nowhere more evident than in contemporary attitudes towards tragedy. James Steven Curl describes a contemporary condition of ‘emotional anaemia’, a turn away from the ‘celebration of death’ (Curl, 1980, p.359). While ‘celebration’ might have unfortunate connotations of festivity, Curl’s diagnosis highlights the tendency to create diversions from the emotional depth of the tragic. Many contemporary memorials are characterised by an overloading of information, an emblemisation of the ‘data’ associated with the tragedy – the numbers of dead, the volume of debris, the ages of victims, creating death datascapes.12 Thomas Keenan suggests that this type of response aims for an ‘almost automatic machinery of remembrance’, and that this ‘can shield us from the powerful disorientation of the event the [memorials] seek to mark’ (Keenan, 2003). In her study of genocide memorials in Cambodia and Rwanda, Shannon Davis found that tourists were drawn towards the informational elements of the sites (Davis, 2009). Having the respondents draw maps and take photographs, Davis noted that the tourists migrated towards signs or other informational sources wherever possible. At the less formalised site of Choeung Ek in Cambodia, where there were few directions or descriptions for visitors to gravitate towards, the tourists were left feeling adrift. Some felt that because of the lack of data on the site, they were left uninformed of the facts. Yet, this is a site which is emotionally charged, where visitors wander on paths formed only by footsteps. Through the slow erosion of the site by foot traffic, the teeth, bones, and other fragments of those buried in the unmarked mass graves surface and appear along the paths. Even after such a visceral experience of the tragic, it seemed that visitors simply wanted information, to have things neatly conveyed, perhaps manifesting a desire for the aseptic, detached, informationally intense media culture with which they are familiar, rather than a gut-wrenching immersion in place. In his discussion of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Agamben wrote of the two dimensions of the ‘memorable’ and the ‘unforgettable’ (Godfrey, 2007, p.243). The memorable is that which is able to be archived, stored, sorted and placed within the orthodox devices of memory. This parallels the predilection for informational content. The unforgettable, however, exceeds these containers, and was applied to Eisenman’s memorial in the context of its abstraction: the memorial is nonrepresentational, it is in essence a void and seeks to elude reading. Agamben’s ‘unforgettable’ is the place of melancholy in the context of memory, it is about a wound kept open, one that is lived, suffered, rather than being catalogued and simply ‘remembered’. It is within such moments that melancholy’s vital role is realised, and as Rico Franses observes, such memorials generate [...] affect, making the stranger into a melancholic griever. And this as well is the social role of the memorial, and the social purpose

8

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which melancholia serves; through the memorial, melancholia comes to function as an agent of social binding. (Franses, 2001, p.102) Melancholy and the Landscape embraces more than simply an exploration and amplification of melancholy itself, it also encompasses the allied resuscitation of an emotional life, as well as contributing to the revival of the phenomenological. Landscape architecture shares disciplinary territory with architecture and geography, and developments in these fields complement the striving for an emotional, phenomenological engagement with place. Geography, for example, has recently undergone an ‘emotional turn’. The collections Emotional Geographies (Davidson et al., 2005) and Emotion, Place and Culture (Smith et al., 2009), as well as the journal Emotion, Space and Society and books such as Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion (2002), mark the resurgence of the emotional self as a significant consideration in the exploration of the lived environment. Phenomenology continues to be an important thread within architectural theory, most notably in the work of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Steven Holl, and Juhani Pallasmaa, and in the theory of Critical Regionalism as propounded by Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre. More recently, phenomenology has gained significance within the geographical literature; after the earlier writings of David Seamon and Yi-Fu Tuan in the 1970s, there is a renaissance of sorts instigated by contemporary geographers such as John Wylie. The interest in the multisensory domain (Rodaway, 1994), including in particular the non-visual (Macpherson, 2006) and the haptic, and the experiential and embodied (Crang and Thrift, 2000) within geography provides useful terrain for landscape architecture, and most especially for a landscape of melancholy. This book is divided into two parts. Part I sets out to form a definition of melancholy, and as part of this imparts some of the complex and imbricated history of the idea. Following that, connections between the aesthetic conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque with melancholy are discussed. This first part of the book is then concluded by a series of chapters exploring the problems raised by a melancholy landscape architecture, under the headings of Aesthetics, Ethics, Emotion and Empathy. Part II offers a guide to melancholy places, tracing the conditions that are conducive to beautiful sadness, including The Void, The Uncanny, Ephemerality and Transience, and Intimate Immensity.

Notes 1 See, for example, Milton Il Penseroso (1631), Coleridge The Nightingale (1798) and Keats Ode on Melancholy (1819). 2 Melancholy art was the subject of a major exhibition, Mélancolie: Génie et Folie en Occident – ‘Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West’ – staged at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and then in the Neue Nationalgalerie

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in Berlin, in late 2005 and 2006. A catalogue, edited by the curator Jean Clair, was published by Gallimard in 2005. 3 For an overview of the breadth of melancholy, see the precursor to this book (Bowring, 2008). 4 For more on the etymology and development of the idea of ‘landscape’, see also Jackson (1984) and Cosgrove (1985). 5 The conception of the landscape as a ‘reflection’ of culture is a pervasive one; for example, as simply stated in the iconic essay by Lewis ‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape (1979)’. 6 As a theatre, landscape was seen as a setting for the playing out of culture, framed, as Cosgrove (1993, p.1) put it, ‘a stage for human action’. See also Jackson (1980, p.75). 7 The poststructuralist concern with text was applied to landscape most explicitly by Barnes and Duncan’s Writing Worlds (1992). 8 For an overview of a phenomenological sense of landscape, see Wylie (2007). 9 For architecture and urbanism this is most evident in the development of the theory of Landscape Urbanism – see Waldheim (2006) and Mostafavi and Najle (2003). The concept of ‘landscape’ in geography is well-articulated in Wylie’s Landscape (2007). In art, see Elkin and deLue’s Landscape Theory (2008), which provides a useful investigation of the concept of ‘landscape’ within art. 10 Pattern books were produced during the Victorian and Edwardian eras as a means of providing mass market access to design. The ‘patterns’ included in such books included standard designs for houses and gardens, exemplified in the work of Andrew Jackson Downing, including Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, 1841, and Cottage Residences: or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Adapted to North America, 1842. 11 ‘Desert of the real’ is a phrase from the 1999 film by Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix. The phrase has been adopted as a commentary on contemporary life, notably by Slavoj Žižek (2002). 12 Datascapes is a term coined by Winy Maas of Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, and describes designs generated by information. See, for example, MVRDV (1998). A critique of the dehumanising nature of datascapes follows in Chapter 7.

References Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published 1958). Boston: Beacon Press. Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Bowring, J. (2008). A Field Guide to Melancholy. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. Cosgrove, Denis (1985).‘The idea of landscape’, in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London: Croom Helm. Cosgrove, Denis (1993) The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth Century Italy. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Crang, Mike and Thrift, Nigel (2000). Thinking Space. London: Routledge.

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Crouch, David (2015). ‘Afterword: From Affect to Landscape and Back’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 239–246. Curl, James Steven (1980). A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Davidson, Joyce, Bondi, Liz and Smith, Mick (2005). Emotional Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Davis, Shannon (2009). ‘Ma[r]king memory’. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, New Zealand. de Graaf, John, Wann, David and Naylor, Thomas H. (2002). Affluenza: The AllConsuming Epidemic. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Debord, Guy (2014). Society of the Spectacle (originally published in Paris by Éditions Buchet-Chastel; trans. Ken Knabb). Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Edensor, Tim (2005). Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg. Elkin, J. and deLue, R. (2008) Landscape Theory. New York: Routledge. Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104. Godfrey, Mark (2007). Abstraction and the Holcaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hamilton, Clive and Denniss, Richard (2005). Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Jackson, J.B. (1980). The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Jackson, J.B. (1984) ‘The Word Itself’, in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jay, Martin (2003). Refractions of Violence. London: Routledge. Keenan, Thomas (2003). ‘Making the dead count, literally’. New York Times, 30 November 30. www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/design/30KEEN.html?page wanted=all Lewis, P. (1979) ‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape’, in Interpretations of Ordinary Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press. MacKeith, Peter (ed.) (2005). Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Essays. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Macpherson, Hannah (2006). ‘Landscape’s ocular-centrism – and beyond?’, in Barbel Tress, G. Tress, G. Fry and P. Opdam (eds), From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning: Aspects of Integration, Education and Application. Dordecht: Springer. Mostafavi, M. and Najle, C. (2003) Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for a Machinic Landscape. London: Architectural Association. MVRDV (1998). FARMAX: Excursions on density, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy. Rodaway, Paul (1994). Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place. London: Routledge. Smith, Mick, Davidson, Joyce, Cameron, Laura and Bondi, Liz (eds) (2009). Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Stilgoe, John (1997) ‘Landschaft and linearity: two archetypes of landscape’, in Char Miller and Hal Rothman (eds), Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Waldheim, C. (2006) The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wylie, John (2007). Landscape. Abingdon: Routledge. Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso.

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Defining melancholy

Melancholy is elusive. Slipping and sliding between widely disparate fields, it is as common to find a debate over the definition of melancholy in a psychiatric journal as it is in a journal of literature, art, design or philosophy, as illustrated in two conferences from the last decade. The first, in 2002, was in the area of the humanities and titled ‘Culture and Melancholy’,1 and the diversity of interpretations of melancholy characterised contributions which ranged from late medieval recognition of melancholy as the truth behind supposed witchcraft; Burton’s voracious effort to encapsulate a frayed, fugitive subject; the romantic manifestation of a melancholy both uneasily masculine and insistently feminine; the nineteenth century’s poetic reappraisal and refraction of medieval, Renaissance and romantic models; the uncanonized interstices of Freud’s ostensible monolithic formulations; and the contemporary significance of a specifically American, fictional, variant of a suffering in some ways so acutely European. (Dillon, 2003, p.202) The breadth of subject matter and interpretations of melancholy might be presumed to simply reflect the disciplinary range, including scholars in literature, philosophy, film studies, and languages, yet the second conference, focused only on the field of psychiatry, offers no more precision in terms of a formulation of melancholy. The conference ‘Melancholia: Beyond DSM, Beyond Neurotransmitters’ was held in 2006,2 with psychiatry researchers concerned that a ‘single, widely accepted definition [of melancholia] has proven elusive’ (Coryell, 2007, p.36) and conceptualising it as ‘a potpourri of depressive diseases, disorders and syndromes, and more, awaiting definition and measurement’ (Parker, 2007, p. 30). Eluding definition in either the arts or sciences, and threading its way through all manner of disciplinary fields, melancholy persists as an enigmatic and provocative concept. This complexity has accumulated over two millennia, and while allied ideas, such as beauty, have a similarly lengthy genealogy, melancholy alone has challenged both the arts and sciences.

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Unlike concepts like beauty, which undergo constant metamorphosis, and at any point in time can mean something quite different, melancholy has remained surprisingly constant.3 Throughout all of the debates, questions, and contradictions, there has persisted what Agamben terms a ‘constellation’ of melancholy, which is not that different today to any time in its history.4 As psychoanalytical theorist Julia Kristeva puts it, melancholy is ‘essential and transhistorical’ (Kristeva, 1989, p. 258). Melancholy has two distinct poles, the scientific and the poetic. The scientific embraces efforts to define melancholy objectively, to pinpoint its psychological and physiological symptoms and classify it. Categorising melancholy was a preoccupation in the development of medicine in ancient times, and has become again a concern in more contemporary psychiatric diagnoses. In the context of medicine and science, the complex of depressed mood and allied ailments is often referred to as melancholia, as in the work of Sigmund Freud. By contrast, melancholy has also been explored and documented for its poetic qualities, as a literary ideal or aesthetic quality. Oscillating between body and mind, melancholy has been an enticing condition that eludes a definitive categorisation. The melancholy complex is rooted in the ancient idea of the humours, the hypothesised four fluids that rule the body and mind. Phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile were identified as the four humours which needed to be in balance. This four-part humoral frame was reinforced by alignment to colours, planets, temperature and moisture, season, time of the day, element, and body organs. Melancholy and sanguine sit opposite each other on the quadripartite diagram of humours, and should be in balance, so that an excess of one humour would be balanced by an addition of a supplement of another. Melancholy is associated with black bile, the colour black, the planet Saturn, coldness and dryness, twilight, autumn, earth, and the spleen. The idea of the humours has contributed to the elusive nature of melancholy, as on one hand humoral medicine was devised as a means of establishing degrees of wellness, but on the other was simply a categorisation of types of disposition. As the authors of the iconic text, Saturn and Melancholy, Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, explain, there were two quite different meanings to the terms sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy, as either ‘pathological states or constitutional aptitudes’ (Klibansky et al., 1964, p.12). Melancholy became far more connected with the idea of illness than the other temperaments, and gained recognition as a ‘special problem’. The blurry boundary between an illness and a mere temperament was a result of the fact that many of the symptoms of ‘melancholia’ were mental and difficult to objectify, unlike something as apparent as a disfigurement or wound. The theory of the humours morphed into psychology and physiognomy, with particular traits or appearances associated with each temperament. As a pathological state, melancholy was associated with ideas of illness and evil. Behaviours or abilities which could not be explained were perceived as madness, what one of the key theorists of melancholy, Frances Yates,

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called ‘bad melancholy’, as opposed to the ‘good melancholy’ of geniuses and heroes (Yates, 1979, p.154). Satan rather than Saturn become the governing force for melancholy in the eyes of those who considered it a sign of possession by the devil, or a punishment for evil. The fear of melancholy was encapsulated in both physiological and religious explanations, as in the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century. Cotton Mather, a Puritan New England minister involved in the trials, explained melancholy as being related to ‘flatulencies in the region of the Hypochondria as well as a degree of diabolical possession’ (Jimenez, 1986, p.31). The relationship of intelligence and melancholy was a central theme in the Renaissance concept of sensibility, along with Robert Burton’s concept of ‘love melancholy’. Burton’s 1621 work remains one of the key texts in the history of melancholy, with its title embodying its inherent complexities: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up (Burton, 1821). Burton, writing under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, set out to describe all the forms of melancholy, including head melancholy, hypochondriacal melancholy, religious melancholy, love melancholy, and ‘Maids, Nuns, and Widows’ Melancholy’. Rather than formulating a precise definition of melancholy, Burton’s 783-page volume further emphasised its complexity. Burton placed the spleen, which became synonymous with melancholy, firmly on the map, defining it as that organ which ‘draws this black choler [melancholy] to it by a secret virtue, and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as an excrement’ (Burton, 1821, p.25). Spleen was one of the dimensions of George Cheyne’s ‘English Malady’ (Cheyne, 1991) and poets like Matthew Green, known as ‘Spleen Green’, who wrote about the prevention of spleen in 1737: how to ‘drive away / The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas / Men prove mere suicides in ease / And how I do myself demean / In stormy world to live serene’ (in Doughty, 1925, p.265). The cult of ruins and the Gothic sensibility of the Romantic era were inherently melancholic. The development of the aesthetic of the Picturesque incorporated these various threads, favouring scenes, both painted and actual, that were imbued with signs of the passage of time. Melancholy also related to the aesthetic companion of the Picturesque – the Sublime – but as discussed in Chapter 3, melancholy was not as intensively cultivated as the other conventions during the exhaustive discourses on the definition of aesthetics during the eighteenth century. One of the purest statements of a melancholy aesthetic is in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude, begun in 1805, with its ‘Moods melancholy, fits of spleen, that loved / A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds, / The twilight more than dawn, autumn than spring; / A treasure and luxurious gloom of choice’ (in Doughty, 1925, p.267).

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Defining melancholy 15 Charles Baudelaire further developed the melancholy of ‘spleen’, presenting it as a desirable aesthetic quality, as in his Spleen de Paris (1869), where he sighs: ‘How poignant the late afternoons of autumn! Ah! Poignant to the verge of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague; and there is no sharper point than that of Infinity’ (Baudelaire, 1970, p. 8). In his Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Baudelaire includes several poems titled ‘Spleen’, invoking the dark moods ingrained within landscapes, as in his vision of ‘When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid / On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui, / And from the allencircling horizon / Spreads over us a day gloomier than the night’ (Baudelaire, 2015). The early twentieth century brought another significant dimension to the defining of melancholy, in Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia. Freud related ‘normal’ grief to mourning, where loss is processed by the individual and they gradually recover. ‘Abnormal’ grief is the pathological condition he termed melancholia, where mourning is arrested and the process of recovery fails to reach completion. In melancholia, the individual, or ego, embeds their sense of loss within themselves, refusing to recover, not willing to let go of the loss. Freud described how ‘[t]he shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ and ‘the loss of the object had been transformed into the loss of ego’, so that the loss of the object, whether it be a person or an idea, becomes the same as the loss of the self, the ego (Freud, 2005, p. 209). A further significant dimension of melancholy’s legacy in the twentieth century was found in the work of philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Benjamin, concerned with the cultural crises related to progress and modernity. Rapid change and progress brought with it a sense of optimism, but at the same time feelings of alienation and estrangement produced a sense of ennui as the promises went so often unrealised. For Kierkegaard this was, in the words of Ferguson, ‘the empty depth of modernity’ (Ferguson, 1995, p.35). Benjamin, too, theorised melancholy in the face of twentiethcentury culture, most extensively in his major work The Arcades Project. Another kind of emptiness was recognised by Benjamin, that of ‘linke Melancholie’, or ‘Left Melancholy’, which encapsulated melancholy as a narcissistic self-obsession, which he cast as a form of criticism. The inertia that comes with melancholy, the wanting to resist closure – as in Freud’s ‘open wound’ – is in political terms a type of inactivism: a ‘mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist’ (Brown, 1999, p.22). Left Melancholy resulted in a state of paralysis, as in the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977–1981, a time of terrorism, murders and hijackings, where left-leaning intellectuals found themselves unable to act. Consumed by cultural pessimism, an existential crisis of sorts, a feeling of abandonment, they entered a state of melancholy detachment.

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As well as this negative critique of melancholy, Benjamin contributed significant layers to the aesthetic of melancholy, as in his writings on the connection of melancholy and memory in photography. Here, Benjamin divined the presence of aura as something that he believed was lost when photographs moved from having value as part of the ‘cult of remembrance’ to succumbing to their ‘exhibition value’ (see Chapter 13). Aura inheres within the connectivity to intimacy, to the notion of an original, authentic presence, and Benjamin believed: It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. (Benjamin, 1969, p.226) Defining melancholy is evidently impossible. The diverse threads of humoral imbalances, witchcraft, political inactivity, abnormal grief, romantic beauty, and aura present a confounding array of concepts. Landscape architecture is no stranger to difficult definitions, itself bridging the gulf between art and science, so that at any one moment it might concern the physics of highway construction and the poetry of an attachment to place. Yet, in adopting Agamben’s concept of the ‘constellation’ of melancholy, there is the provision for both the breadth and allegiance of ideas which make up the rich and elusive term.

Notes 1 The conference was held in 2002 at the University of Kent, England, and papers were published in 2003 in the Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4). 2 The conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006, with papers published in a 2007 special issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 433. DSM is the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is the American standard reference book for the diagnosis of mental illnesses. 3 This constant shift in the development of concepts is well-illustrated by Umberto Eco (2004). 4 The term ‘constellation’ is Giorgio Agamben’s, and captures the sense of melancholy’s persistence as a collection of ideas, rather than one simple definition. See Agamben (1993, p.19).

References Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L, Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudelaire, Charles (1970). Paris Spleen (trans. Louise Varèse; first published 1869). New York: New Directions Books.

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Defining melancholy 17 Baudelaire, Charles (2015). The Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal (English and French edition, trans. William Aggeler). Digireads.com Publishing, Kindle edition. Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Schocken Books. Brown, Wendy (1999). ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’. Boundary 2, 26(3): 19–27. Burton, Robert (1821) An Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621). London: J Cuthell. Cheyne, George (1991). The English Malady (first published 1733). London: Routledge. Coryell, W (2007). ‘The facets of melancholia’. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 115(Suppl. 433): 31–36. Dillon, Brian (2003). ‘Introduction’. Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4): 199–202. Doughty, Oswald (1925). ‘The English malady of the eighteenth century’, The Review of English Studies, 2(7): 257–269. Eco, Umberto (ed.) (2004). History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli, Eco, Umberto (2007). On Ugliness. New York: Rizzoli. Ferguson, Harvie (1995). Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Soren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund (2005) On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (trans. Shaun Whiteside; Mourning and Melancholia essay first published 1917). London: Penguin Books. Jimenez, Mary Ann (1986). ‘Madness in early American history: insanity in Massachusetts from 1700–1830’, Journal of Social History, 20(1): 25–44. Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz (1964). Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Kristeva, Julia (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Parker, G. (2007). ‘Defining melancholia: the primacy of psychomotor disturbance’. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 115(Suppl. 433): 21–30. Yates, Frances A. (1979). The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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3

The Sublime, the Beautiful, the Picturesque … and the melancholy

Alongside the debates over melancholy’s psychiatric, metaphysical and artistic dimensions is an area of particular relevance to landscape architecture – melancholy as an aesthetic. While the familiar aesthetic conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque readily bring to mind a range of exemplars, a melancholy aesthetic lingers at the edges of the familiar. The paradox of a beauty founded in sorrow, a love of loss, of longing, is melancholy’s gift to aesthetics. Despite the potency of this bittersweetness, melancholy has been largely marginalised within landscape architecture, overshadowed by the aesthetic conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. While melancholy was well established in the lyrical and pictorial traditions of the late sixteenth century, its significance later paled in the face of the eighteenth-century codification of aesthetics. Vigorous debate was focused on defining and categorising the nature of aesthetic experience, and general ideas like ‘beauty’ gave way to more particular definitions. But melancholy was never elevated to a capitalised aesthetic type, nor given the definite article, like the other categories – there was never ‘the Melancholy’. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant designated the first two significant aesthetic domains, the Sublime and the Beautiful, both of which are in themselves immensely complex conditions (Kant, 1960). The Sublime is that which is unbounded, beyond comprehension and awe-inspiring, and imparts feelings of horror. The Beautiful, on the other hand, brings feelings of joy and pleasure. The ancient concept of the humours is resuscitated by Kant in his critique of each of the four temperaments from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation. Both the phlegmatic and the choleric temperaments were lacking in their appreciation of aesthetics, with the phlegmatic too apathetic and the choleric too moralistic. The sanguine has a feeling for the beautiful, and is sensitive, noble and compassionate. Kant referred to these as adoptive virtues, which are charming and beautiful, and genuine virtues which are sublime and venerable. It is the melancholy temperament that possesses genuine virtues, and has a ‘profound feeling for the beauty and human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind’ in contrast to the ‘changeable gaiety’ and inconstancy of a ‘frivolous person’ (Kant, 1960,

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pp.63–64). The melancholic is gentle and noble, feels awe in the face of danger as something to be overcome, and aspires to self-conquest. Kant’s relating of melancholy and the Sublime is significant in recognising the potency of solitude as a way of being in the landscape. In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant set out the boundaries for a Sublime solitude, where melancholy is motivated by self-sufficiency or even asceticism. But a misanthropic solitude lacks these genuine virtues and is not a condition to aspire to. The idea of a Sublime sadness embraces imagination, retreat and contemplation. Philosopher Dylan Trigg underscores this: The awareness of the self and so necessarily the Other is … accentuated in the melancholic: he is aware of all that he isn’t; and the sublime is always a contrast between microscopic and macroscopic polarities – the greater this is realized, the higher the sublimity. (Trigg, 2004, p.168) This melancholy sublime is vividly seen in James Corner and Alex MacLean’s Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Corner and MacLean, 1996). The book’s aerial photographs and montages give a distancing effect, transforming the landscape into an abstract composition. There is a sense of detachment, like the ocularcentrist, or eye-centred, aesthetic conventions of the Picturesque. Just as followers of the Picturesque enlisted optical devices as part of their aestheticising, Corner and MacLean have been described as resembling ‘Claude-glass-toting eighteenth-century visitors to the English Countryside’ (Herrington, 2006, p.33). Yet, these images are not picturesque, but they are Sublime in their melancholy, as Susan Herrington puts it: ‘The cultivation of melancholy is stimulated by the insignificance of the human figure in contrast to the significant scale of the human drama portrayed’ (Herrington, 2006, pp.33–34). Kant, however, believed that for a genuinely virtuous melancholy, this sense of solitude in the vastness should not be inhospitable. A Kantian melancholy of the sublime might be called a ‘spirited sadness’, grounded in a moral frame. Kant strives to distinguish this aesthetic pleasure from the ‘languid emotions’ and also from the perversity of the grotesque.1 The third aesthetic convention, the Picturesque, was also complex and extensively theorised. The underpinning for the Picturesque was its aspiration towards being picture-like, of achieving the effects of the works of seventeenth-century artists Salvator Rosa, Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain – who gave his name to the ‘Claude Glass’ for its evocation of his works.2 Rosa, Poussin and Claude painted landscapes that were culturally rich, with historical narratives, where ruins and dead trees reflected the passage of time. As one of the aesthetic ideals of the wealthy young men on the Grand Tour of Europe, the Picturesque became embedded in the practice of travelling to look at scenery, and in turn of making gardens that looked like these scenes.

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But just as Kant grappled with elevating the melancholy of the Sublime above being languid or immoral, the Picturesque was confounded with ethical dilemmas. The Picturesque’s love of ruins and dead trees – even to the extent of building ruins and planting dead trees – treads a fine line in the context of ethics. The late eighteenth-century theorists, including Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, could defend the melancholy attraction of picturesque ruins, but the perversity of such an aesthetic became apparent when applied to people, where it might be called grotesque.3 Could those same signs of picturesque decay be found to be aesthetically pleasing in a person? Price reflected that if a woman was afflicted by the signs of ‘irregularity’ that he could wax lyrical about in the landscape, ‘You will hardly find a man fond enough of the picturesque to marry a girl so thoroughly deformed’ (in Lowenthal, 2003, p.166). Ruins sit at a crossroads between the aesthetic conventions of the Beautiful, the Picturesque and the Sublime, and also of melancholy. Prior to the ruination of a structure, the Beautiful might prevail, achieving the aesthetic qualities of smoothness and completeness. As Uvedale Price set out in his Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, the moment that decay sets in beauty is diminished. However, this alters as the embellishments of buildings are exchanged for the embellishments of ruins, ‘for incrustations and weather stains, and for the various plants that spring from, or climb over walls – the character of the picturesque prevails over that of the beautiful; and at length, perhaps, all smoothness, all symmetry, all trace of design are totally gone’ (Price, 1810, p.260). With their alluring chiaroscuro, variety and evocation of culture worked over by nature, ruins were the epitome of Picturesque beauty. Beyond these formal characteristics, ruins also satisfied the complementary thread of Picturesque theory, which averred association as the source of aesthetic pleasure. Ruins were particularly rich in their store of associative triggers, with a wealth of allusions to times past. This hybrid appeal to both the formal and associative qualities was pointed to by William Shenstone in his Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764), observing that RUINATED structures appear to derive their power of pleasing, from the irregularity of surface, which is VARIETY; and the latitude they afford the imagination, to conceive an enlargement of their dimensions, or to recollect any events or circumstances appertaining to their pristine grandeur, so far as concerns grandeur and solemnity. (In Hunt and Willis, 1988, p.291) Ruins were also Sublime, where pictorial effects of light and shade, and other attributes of scale and proportion, were exceeded, becoming instead an image of awe and even fear. Diderot’s critique of the paintings of Hubert Robert’s Salon of 1767, for example, evaluated them as being too picturesque. Diderot’s ideal of ruins was one informed by the aesthetic of the Sublime,

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and in this context he found Robert’s paintings to be overpopulated, and advised him to remove three-quarters of the figures, such that Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should be retained. A solitary man who’s wandered into these shadowy precincts, his arms across his chest and his head inclined, would have made a greater impression on me; the darkness alone, the majesty of the building, the grandeur of the construction, the extent, serenity, and muted reverberation of the space, would have sent me shuddering. (In Thomas, 2008, p.81) Diderot goes on to expand on how his conception of ruins is allied with the Sublime, as ‘The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures’ (in Thomas, 2008, p.81). While ‘the Melancholy’ was never elevated to the level of the Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque, it was an integral part of the theorising and debates. From Kant’s admission of melancholy as a ‘vigorous affection’ to its appearance in discussions of landscapes and particularly ruins, it was recognised as a critical yet complex element of aesthetic appreciation. Melancholy’s potency within an aesthetics of landscape is underlined by these debates, and demands an expanded understanding of the very idea of ‘aesthetics’.

Notes 1 The grotesque in the writings of Kant remained, like melancholy, a minor category, and a qualification used to express the limits of aesthetics. Tracing a range of reactions to literature, religious practices, and relationships with others, Kant used the terms sublime, noble, adventurous, trifling and grotesque. See Kant (1960, pp.56–57). 2 The Claude Glass is described further in the following chapter. 3 As with Kantian aesthetics, the grotesque remained a minor element in the theories of the Picturesque, and Richard Payne Knight listed ‘grottesque’ alongside ‘sculpturesque’ as some of the many adjectives which could extend Uvedale Price’s descriptions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. Knight suggested that ‘grottesque is certainly a degree or two at least, further removed from the insipid smoothness and regularity of beauty, than [Price] supposes the picturesque to be’. See Knight (1806).

References Corner, James and MacLean, Alex (1996). Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Herrington, Susan (2006). ‘Framed again: the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary landscapes’. Landscape Journal, 25(1): 22–37. Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter (1988). The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820. Boston: MIT Press.

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Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of California Press. Knight, Richard Payne (1806) An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste. London: T. Payne. Lowenthal, David (2003) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Uvedale (1810) Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: J. Mawman. Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Trigg, Dylan (2004). Schopenhauer and the sublime pleasure of tragedy. Philosophy and Literature, 28(1): 165–179.

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4

Aesthetics

Melancholy’s presence within the early development of aesthetic conventions was largely as a footnote, rather than a clearly defined species. Arguably, however, there is an aesthetics of melancholy which might take its place alongside the Picturesque, the Sublime and the Beautiful. Defining an aesthetics of melancholy requires an identifiable complex of features, and perhaps the first instinct is to think of this as a distinctive appearance. Aesthetics in the arts has been commonly elided with ideals of ‘beauty’, and most often resides in the domain of appearance, the realm of the visual. Martin Jay and David Michael Levin have written extensively on ocularcentrism, and the ongoing intersection of ideas of knowledge with those of sight (Jay, 1994; Levin, 1988). While the dominance of the eye can be traced back to the Greeks, it was primarily through developments such as perspective and the picturesque, and the rise of viewing-based practices such as museums, zoos and tourism, that sight became elevated to the position of the pre-eminent sense. In the design professions, the shorthand of aestheticsas-appearance is yoked to the need to solve design problems. For landscape architecture this often means that aesthetics is the visual foil to the challenges of utility, and embedded in the profession’s history is an attention to aspects such as mitigation of infrastructure (e.g. screening a power station) and visual impact assessments. Landscape architecture’s origins in the eighteenth-century theory of the Picturesque amplifies this sense of detachment, particularly during the later phases which were, in the words of Sidney K. Robinson, characterised by ‘the end of complexity and the triumph of gross sensory abbreviation’ (Robinson, 1991, p.114). The concurrent development of Picturesque theory and the profession of landscape architecture created ideal conditions for an elision of the two, something which has continued to be a source of criticism within the discipline. Laura Haddad describes landscape architecture as a discipline whose method of design has in large part been mired in the safety and preservation of visual representation since the late eighteenthcentury advent of the Picturesque. Symptomatic of this quandary is the condition that too many projects are designed to be seen, to be

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photographed and published as pictorial works in glossy magazines, and not to be experienced in any way that transcends visual stimulation and elicits subjectively perceived emotional content. (Haddad, 1996, p.48) Haddad’s observation echoes the critique by Catherine Howett, that landscape architecture is ‘trapped … in a tyranny of the visual imposed by an inherited picturesque aesthetic’ (Howett, 1987, p.7). The way in which the picturesque contributed to the diminishment of the breadth of environmental experience is acutely illustrated by the Claude Glass. This device is a small, polished convex mirror, sometimes made of obsidian, used to transmute the environment into ‘landscape’, into a picture, into scenery. The convexity of the surface forces the landscape reflection into a repoussoir or framed composition, while the dark colour of the speculum reduces the spectrum, mimicking the sepia tones of the paintings of Claude Lorrain. Nature is ‘corrected’ into the compositional conventions of the picture. The expansiveness of the landscape in time and space, and its sensory richness, becomes inert, something to be held in the hand. The detachment from the landscape occurs not solely through these transmutations and reductions, but also through the mode of looking, where the glass was held out in front of the viewer, in order to view the landscape over their shoulder, behind them. The Claude Glass metaphorically encapsulates the dominance of the visual, the dislocation from the landscape, and the concomitant reduction of sensory experience. The Picturesque consolidated the dominion of the visual over the fields of art and design, extending the hold established by the development of perspective some centuries before, during the Italian Renaissance. Implicated in the dominance of the visual as the means of apprehending the world, perspective created a sleight of hand, morphing the real into the represented. Julian Thomas describes how perspective allowed painters to represent a three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface, through a technique which organised represented objects in relation to each other. Yet this technique was regarded not as an artifice, but as a means of revealing truth. (Thomas, 1993, p.21) Kenneth Frampton reinforces this point, explaining According to its etymology, perspective means rationalized sight or clear seeing, and as such it presupposes a conscious suppression of the sense of smell, hearing and taste, and a consequent distancing from the more direct experience of the environment. This self-imposed limitation relates to what Heidegger has called a ‘loss of nearness’. In attempting

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to counter this loss, the tactile opposes itself to the scenographic and the drawing of veils over the surface of reality. (Frampton, 1983, p.29) The Claude Glass’s landscape-over-the-shoulder and the ‘loss of nearness’ are symptomatic of the Enlightenment’s hallmark of objectification. Aesthetics was bundled up with the tendency of the age to place everything within a scientific framework. As Arnold Berleant summarises, aesthetics proceeded along the lines of ‘objectification, dissection and analysis’, and the spectator was soundly separated from the object (Berleant, 1994, p.15). The spirit of the Cartesian age was captured in the theories of Kant, in which the split between the subject and object, the cleaving of the viewer from the viewed, was embedded in his term ‘disinterestedness’. Berleant highlights the fundamental problem with this idea as a foundation of aesthetics through citing Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique: Kant had thought he was doing an honor to art when, among the predicates of beauty, he gave prominence to those which flatter the intellect, i.e., impersonality and universality…. Kant, like all philosophers, instead of viewing the esthetic issue from the side of the artist, envisaged art and beauty solely from the ‘spectator’s’ point of view, and so, without himself realizing it, smuggled the ‘spectator’ into the concept of beauty…. [W]e have got from these philosophers of beauty definitions which, like Kant’s famous definition of beauty, are marred by a complete lack of esthetic sensibility. ‘That is beautiful’, Kant proclaims, ‘which gives us disinterested pleasure.’ Disinterested! (Berleant, 1994, p.15). Nietzsche’s railing against disinterestedness highlights the way in which ‘aesthetics’ is implicated in the impoverishment of sensory experience which has characterised the modern age. Further to the detachment and distancing between the subject and object – and importantly for landscape architecture, a schism between the beholder and the landscape – were the value judgements and presumptions that aligned visuality with the intellect, and conceived of other senses as less worthy. Vision is privileged through its connection to the intellect, and the connection between seeing and knowing are entwined in language, as in the most simple confirmation of understanding: ‘I see.’ Even the ability to predict the unknown is linked with sight, as in clairvoyance, or clear-seeing. The alignment of the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ emphasises the distancing of the subject from the object, the ‘disembodied eye’, or in landscape terms, a detachment of the self from place (Jay, 1994, p.81). Liz James describes how, It is the traditions of Western philosophical thinking about the senses, based on Plato and Aristotle, that have placed sight and then hearing as

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the most significant and spiritual of the senses, relating them to the higher functions of the mind, and which have relegated smell, touch and taste to the lower functions of the body, considering them base and corporeal. (James, 2004, p.523) The elevation of vision and hearing in a ranking of the senses privileges distancing and detachment, as Christian Metz explains: ‘It is no accident that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance, and that those that depend on the senses of contact are often regarded as “minor” arts (= culinary arts, arts of perfume, etc)’ (Metz, 1982, pp.59–60). The elevation of sight over the other senses is most marked in contrast to smell. Kant dismissed smell as the sense which is least important and not worthy of cultivation, and Horkheimer and Adorno warned that ‘When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness. Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization, the sign of a lower social strata, lesser races and base animals’ (Classen, 1998, p.58). An aesthetics of melancholy is therefore a problematic endeavour. As a concept strongly associated with the emotions, sensation and experience, melancholy exceeds the visual. And, how might an aesthetic so enmeshed with emotion relate to a system which privileges the intellect? At this point a renovation of the original concept of aesthetics as that which is at the very root of the experience of the world is timely. Aesthetics was not always simply a concern with appearance, but was more intricately related to the entire sensory realm. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton states that ‘Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.’ The alignment of aesthetics and the body places it firmly within the experiential realm, rather than the purely intellectual or theoretical. Eagleton draws out the way that ‘The aesthetic concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which postCartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention, has somehow managed to overlook’, and emphasises the distinction between ‘our creaturely life of perception as opposed to what belongs in the mind’ (Eagleton, 1990, p.13). For philosophy, then, the construction of a theoretical and disinterested aesthetics led to a schism between ideas and sensations. This rift meant the ‘overlooking’, as Eagleton ironically puts it, of an entire domain: a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave, threatening to fall utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life – the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, or what takes root in the guts and the gaze and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world. (Eagleton, 1990, p.13)

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Aesthetics 27 What was lost in modernity’s objectification of aesthetics was the vital core of the word aisthesis. In its original form aisthesis referred to the breathing of the world, and invoked the full range of sensory experience. As a means of reawakening those senses which have lain largely dormant during the reign of the visual, it is worth momentarily speculating on an inversion of the hierarchy – an elimination of the visual. Democritus, for example, wanted to blind himself, so that he could see, or as the painter Georges Rouault put it, ‘I do not believe either in what I touch or I see. I believe only in what I cannot see and in what I sense’ (Soby, 1947, p.14). The experiences of those who are without the sense of sight can shed light on the latency of the other senses. Helen Keller, for example, lived in a world without sight or sound, yet in her writing the emotional compass of experiencing the world – including inflections such as melancholy – is very evident. In one passage Keller related: The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing odor made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odor and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down. (In Classen, 1998, p.153) Constance Classen responded to this olfactory and sonic moment through imagining how this might be represented, Suppose Keller’s sensations on that day were to be transformed into a gallery exhibit. One would walk into a room entitled, say, The Disappearing Forest. The room would be visually empty but filled with the sharp scent of a cut tree. The vibrations of sawing would reverberate throughout the room, followed by a heavy thud. Would such an exhibit, lacking as it does any visual referents, be any less moving or evocative than a painting or photograph of a tree being felled? (Classen, 1998, p.153) The renovation of aisthesis requires a phenomenological stance. Through re-asserting the place of the perceiving body within landscape architecture, there is expanded potential for emotional engagement. Despite the problems inherent in the origins of landscape architecture being fused with picturesque theory, there is potential for the experiential and the picturesque to co-exist within the discipline. Holly Getch Clarke argues for a ‘phenomenological or non-pictorial picturesque of modernity’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59). As a counter to the dismissing of the picturesque from landscape architecture due to it visual fixation, Clarke instead proffers the idea of the ‘phenomenological picturesque as a hybridized picturesque mode wherein bodily experience supercedes viewing alone as its primary operation’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59, emphasis in original). Drawing on the precedents that conceive of picturesque

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experience as one of movement through a series of spatial phenomena, for example the writings of Yve-Alain Bois, she proposes that ‘the picturesque is displaced from a purely pictorial operation to an experiential phenomenon of actualized space’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59). The recognition of the picturesque’s inherent, yet most often suppressed, phenomenologicality, therefore promotes the possibilities within landscape architecture to move beyond the eye candy, beyond the photogenic and scenographic. Further, Susan Herrington cautions against dismissing the picturesque as a merely visual, and therefore superficial, aesthetic. Illustrating how aspects of contemporary landscape appreciation and design embody a picturesque aesthetic, but not necessarily a picturesque style, Herrington asserts the continued value of the picturesque, particularly in the context of its associative dimensions – the way it demonstrates ‘not only landscape’s enduring ability to stir responses in the viewer, but the viewer’s ability to give shape to this experience; framing the effects and the associations it portends in ways relevant to our own times’ (Herrington, 2006, p.36). However, a distinction must still be drawn between the richly associative foundations of the picturesque, and a modern interpretation of the aesthetic, which, as John Dixon Hunt cautions, is ‘a dedication to the thin end of that particular cult and not to the careful blend of mental associations with visual stimuli that had marked its heyday’ (Hunt, 1993, p.140). Renovating aisthesis and re-tuning aesthetics elevates the emotional dimension of landscape experience and requires an expansive understanding of the picturesque as the pre-eminent means of appreciating the landscape. Eighteenth-century theorists such as Richard Payne Knight explored the ways in which emotions could be evoked by the landscape, and how that which is beheld can become a source of feeling. The paradox at the heart of a melancholy aesthetic is born of such a moment, of the seeming contradiction between finding something aesthetically pleasing which is at the same time morally wrong, or seemingly ugly or grotesque. Significantly, that which was seen, and valorised by the picturesque aesthetic, was also felt – the emotional was very present in the early picturesque theory. And in Edmund Burke’s descriptions of the beautiful in music, he makes a direct reference to melancholy. In this emphatically non-visual medium, Burke explains how the beautiful in music is ‘that sinking, that melting, that languor’ as opposed to mirth and excitement. He says that these are the qualities that define the beautiful as experienced by every sense, and the ‘passion excited by beauty is in fact nearer to a species of melancholy, than to jollity and mirth’ (Burke, 1764, p.235). A melancholy aesthetic of landscape architecture therefore rests upon a number of adjustments to some of the prevailing presumptions. These including renovating aisthesis to recognise the multi-sensory nature of aesthetics as opposed to an ocularcentric perspective; appreciating a ‘phenomenological picturesque’ which embodies the ideas of movement

Aesthetics 29 rather than one mired in the static image; and the embracing of emotional and associative aspects of landscape experience.

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References Berleant, Arnold (1994). Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley. Clarke, Holly Getch (2005). ‘Land-scopic regimes: exploring perspectival representation beyond the “pictorial”, project’. Landscape Journal, 24(1): 50–68. Classen, Constance (1998). The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination. New York: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Frampton, Kenneth (1983). ‘Towards a critical regionalism: six points for an architecture of resistance’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Haddad, Laura (1996). ‘Happening: paradigms of light a blaze (a dialectic of the sublime and the picturesque’. Landscape Journal, 15(1): 48–57. Herrington, Susan (2006). ‘Framed again: the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary landscapes’. Landscape Journal, 25(1): 22–37. Howett, Catherine (1987). ‘Systems, signs, sensibilities: sources for a new landscape aesthetic’. Landscape Journal, 6(1): 1–11. Hunt, John Dixon (1993) ‘The dialogue of modern landscape architecture with its past’. In Marc Treib (ed.), Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James, Liz (2004). ‘Senses and sensibility in Byzantium’. Art History, 27(4): 522–537. Jay, Martin (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levin, David Michael (1988). The Opening of Vision. New York: Routledge. Metz, Christian (1982). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Robinson, Sidney K. (1991). Inquiry into the Picturesque. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Soby, James Thrall (1947). Georges Rouault: Paintings and Prints, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Thomas, Julian (1993). ‘The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape’, in Barbara Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence, RI: Berg Publishers.

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5

Emotion

Recent work on emotion in geography and architecture primes the fuse for an emotional landscape architecture. Avril Maddrell writes of emotional geographies, how they are ‘particular spaces [which] become emotion-laden places, both those which we choose to identify and those affective spaces which can unexpectedly interpolate us’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.38). Emotion and affect are intertwined, and can be related to the individual and the social, respectively, and closely associated with feeling and phenomena. Brian Massumi indicates emotion and affect can also be correspondingly linked with the mind and body (in Price, 2015), but as Stephanie Clare cautions, this can reintroduce ‘a reductive distinction between mind and body’ (in Price, 2015, p.162). Bearing this caution in mind, and the various definitions of and distinctions between emotion and affect, the significant point is the shift towards acknowledging the subjective dimension of place, a counter to the objectivity which has prevailed in attempts to design and plan the landscape. This subjective connection can also be considered a dwelling perspective, a means of offsetting the distancing of objectivity, and engaging emotion and affect. Dwelling engenders proximity and temporality and connects us with place. Emotion, mood, temperament and disposition are intertwined in the nature of melancholy, and register in both the somatic and the psychic domains. The body and mind dimensions of melancholy were originally set out in the ancient notion of humours, as outlined in Chapter 2. The foursided humoral framework was based on the need for balance between complementary pairs, so that the choleric and the phlegmatic were balanced, as well as the sanguine and the melancholy. In contemporary society this concept of balance has been lost, and the emphasis is firmly upon the so-called positive emotions such as happiness and joy, while sadness and melancholy become marginalised. The necessity of experiencing a full range of emotions underpins melancholy’s place in everyday life. Landscape architecture has the opportunity to contribute to the emotional wellbeing of the world through the shaping of places which foster contemplation. Designing spaces which invoke melancholy and sadness allows for an emotional equilibrium in the

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landscape, as opposed to one which overloads the compulsion for happiness. As theologian Thomas Moore warns, If we do away with Saturn’s dark moods, we may find it exhausting trying to keep life bright and warm at all costs. We may be even more overcome then by increased melancholy called forth by the repression of Saturn, and lose the sharpness and substance of identity that Saturn gives the soul. (Moore, 1992, p.146) Resuscitating melancholy is especially vital for the landscape, for the geography of emotion. In the context of landscapes of melancholy, there is a palpability of emotional space. Davidson and Milligan remind us of the spatial attributes of emotion, that, in attempts to articulate emotion – to embody it linguistically – we speak of the ‘heights’ of joy and the ‘depths’ of despair, significant others are comfortingly close or distressingly distant. The articulation of emotion is, thus, spatially mediated in a manner that is not simply metaphorical. (Davidson and Milligan, 2004, p.523) Pallasmaa believes that ‘the standard architecture of our time has normalized the emotions by eliminating the extremes of the spectrum of human emotions: melancholy and joy, nostalgia and ecstasy’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p.29). Not only is the spectrum of emotional experience limited, it is also skewed, as those feelings which are considered ‘negative’ are likely to be suppressed in design. Joy, delight and happiness are willingly received as emotional content of the built environment, and are even used as indicators of the success of a site. The unlikeliness of melancholy as a central quality of contemporary architecture is highlighted in a recent critique of David Chipperfield’s new judicial complex in the city of Barcelona, a project that has been compared to a de Chirico painting,1 with its enigmatic tower blocks clustering around spare, urban squares. As critic Rowan Moore writes: ‘Architecture shies away from themes such as melancholy and alienation. Here [at the City of Justice], Chipperfield seems to say such things are part of cities and of the law’ (Moore, 2009, p.68). The presumption that melancholy is an emotion that is best avoided, or if one is afflicted a cure is required, is challenged by an aesthetics of melancholy. Literary theorist Jonathan Flatley names Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857) as the turning point in the relationship between melancholia and aesthetics, founded on a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between the emotional and the aesthetic in experiential terms. He describes Baudelaire’s work as ‘anti-therapeutic melancholic poetry’, which is to say it is not intended to make you better or to redeem negative experiences, but rather ‘to redirect

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your attention to those very experiences’ (Flatley, 2008, p.6). Similarly, Pallasmaa, writing about the films of Aki Kurasmaki, explains that ‘The spaces and characters of the films are ill-fated and dispirited, yet melancholy is not hopelessness nor the rejection of life, but rather a metaphysical seriousness and dejectedness, from which hope and faith in a better future grow’ (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.31). In salvaging the realm of melancholy in landscape architecture, interpretations such as Flately’s and Pallasmaa’s help to demonstrate the potency of emotional depth, stressing that sadness is not the same thing as a nihilistic freefall. Sites of memory, most especially those of tragedy, are often conceived of as needing to be places to deal with the event, to find some means of ‘moving on’ and recovering from sadness. What if, however, such sites were not conceptualised as a means of moving on, but rather as a vehicle for moving the beholder, of amplifying the emotional repertoire. Memorial designs which ‘redirect attention to those very experiences’, for example, and which acknowledge the gravitas of ‘metaphysical seriousness and dejectedness’, have the potential to resonate more powerfully with the tragic than a response which seeks to quickly dissolve weighty feelings. The overcoming of a single-minded pursuit of happiness needs to be yoked to an inclusive re-engagement with the breadth of emotions. Melancholy’s marginalisation results not only from a fear of sadness, but from the pervasive hesitancy about showing emotion that characterises the modern Western world. Even the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley revealed how his fear of displaying emotion limited his full appreciation of an evocative landscape, something which he later regretted. In a letter to ‘T.P. Esq.’ (Thomas Peacock), describing journeying through Switzerland, Shelley explained how, The hay was making under the trees; the trees themselves were aged, but vigorous, and interspersed with younger ones, which are destined to be their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a shade to future worshippers of nature, who love the memory of that tenderness and peace of which this was the imaginary abode. We walked forward among the vineyards, whose narrow terraces overlook this affecting scene. Why did the cold maxims of the world compel me at this moment to repress the tears of melancholy transport which it would have been so sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until the darkness of night had swallowed up the objects which excited them? (Shelley, 1845, p.96) Some 30 years after Shelley wandered through Switzerland, John Ruskin was musing upon his own visit to Amiens in the north of France. Ruskin expressed his unease in finding aesthetic pleasure in scenes of poverty as he walked among the slum-dwellers of Amiens, whom seemed ‘all exquisitely picturesque, and no less miserable…. Seeing the unhealthy face and

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melancholy mien … I could not help feeling how many suffering persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk’ (in Lowenthal, 1985, p.166). The tensions alluded to within Shelley’s regrets and in Ruskin’s aesthetic dilemma raise two further significant challenges for a melancholy landscape architecture – ethics and empathy.

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Note 1 Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of Italian squares are characterised by their empty, uncanny quality. The bare squares were often warped by multiple perspective points, and late afternoon lighting produced long shadows. Psychoanalysis of de Chirico’s paintings has suggested many references to the loss of his father in phallic presences, seen in smoke stacks, columns, trains and bananas. This sense of loss, and its perpetuation, is quintessential Freudian melancholy, in distinction from mourning: a means of absorbing the loss and feeding off of it. The images have also been diagnosed as being symptomatic of intestinal disorders, migraine or epilepsy, all of which are associated with melancholia in the sense of depression.

References Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies, 5(4): 523–532. Flatley, Jonathan (2008). Affective Mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lowenthal, David (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Moore, Rowan (2009). ‘City of Justice, Barcelona, Spain’. Architectural Review, 226(1349): 60–69. Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005). ‘Alakulon ja toivon tilat: paikan ja mielikuvan logiikka Aki Kaurismaën elokuvissa (Spaces of melancholy and hope: the logic of place and image in the films of Aki Kaurismäki)’. Arkkitehti, 102(5): 22–33. Price, Joanna (2015). ‘“The last pure place on Earth”: Antarctic affect in Jenni Diski’s Skating to Antarctica and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Icognita’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 161–172. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon.

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6

Ethics

The ethics of aesthetics troubles an appreciation of melancholy landscapes, as in Ruskin’s quandary of admitting to enjoying a scene in which others were suffering. Complicit in such a dilemma is the Kantian foundation of aesthetics, and the belief in disinterestedness as fundamental to beauty. Disinterestedness, along with voyeurism, are potentially toxic ingredients for an aesthetics of melancholy. At the extreme, such an unethical aesthetics becomes instead an ‘anaesthetics’, numbing and overcoming the beholder in ways which cause them to abandon their moral compass. ‘Anaesthetic’ comes from the same root as ‘aesthetic’, relating to the sensations, but in this case is a deadening of sensation. The ‘culture of spectatorship’ is a pernicious manifestation of the power of aesthetic desire, and Susan Sontag speaks of a lust where the ‘appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked’ (Sontag, 2003, p.41). Writing of her own trauma of seeing photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau at the age of 12, Sontag questioned the role of images of suffering. ‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize’, she wrote, and that, like pornography, the shock wears off with repeated images and eventually dulls any sense of shock or sorrow (Sontag, 2014, n.p.). Landscape shares with photography the potential to anaesthetise its beholders, and aesthetics can become seductive. This is particularly true of the picturesque, one of melancholy’s bedfellows. The picturesque remains a de facto language of landscape architecture, and its aesthetic conventions allow a type of schadenfreude, a narcosis that sees beholders suspend emotional responses in favour of finding aesthetic pleasure. The immoral, predatory version of melancholy beauty, the aesthetic of ‘miserable’ sadness, is epitomised by Charles Dickens’ character Will Fern in The Chimes. Will, ‘a poor and honest man, but who has been given a bad name’, emphasises the potential danger in the conundrum of finding beauty in melancholy suffering. His home is a leaky hovel, and evidently a popular subject for picturesque sketching, and he declares, You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the ladies draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter,

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I’ve heerd say; but there ain’t weather in picters, and maybe ‘tis fitter for that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard – how bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say. (Dickens, 1954, pp.131–132) A modern-day version of a challenge to the aestheticising impulses of the heartless picturesque is found works like Camilo José Vergara’s New American Ghetto (1995) and American Ruins (1999), where as both sociologist and photographer he documents decay in the city, and in photographer Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010). Photographic works which capture an aestheticised decay have been called ‘ruin porn’, an exploitative attitude towards images of decay (Gansky, 2014, p.119). The ethical dilemmas of ‘ruin porn’ are illustrated by Vergara’s experience in the South Bronx, New York, where when perusing a seemingly abandoned apartment building in the South Bronx, he was told by one man: ‘This is not a ruin, this is my home. If you don’t like it, lend me money to fix it’ (Vergara, 1999, p.208). Liam Kennedy underlines the heartless picturesque implicated in Vergara’s photographs, stating that his ‘aesthetic valorisation of ruin and decay ultimately presents the ghetto as a “pictorial network” of singular images that allow sensations of wonder and loss to diminish the urge for social action he periodically calls for’ (Kennedy, 2000, p.115). Andrew Moore was conscious of the conflicted aesthetics and ethics of photographing ruins, and spent time talking to residents of Detroit. He found that ‘very few residents of Detroit saw any beauty whatsoever in [its] scarred places’, and as Gansky observes, ‘Moore’s own comments suggest that Detroit’s novel appearance is imaginative fodder chiefly for those who live outside the city’ (Gansky, 2014, p.128). Landscape schadenfreude is evident in practices which aestheticise poverty and ruins, for example in landscape sketching and photography, and in the ‘heartless picturesque’, a term coined by Ruskin to express the prioritising of aesthetics over social responsibility. This immoral aesthetic position is echoed in the comments of David Harvey on postmodernist images which feed off of the conventions of the picturesque: The street scenes of impoverishment, disempowerment, graffiti and decay become grist for the cultural producers’ mill, not … in the muckraking conformist style of the late nineteenth century, but as a quaint and swirling backdrop (as in Blade Runner) upon which no social commentary is to be made. (Harvey, 1989, p.336) And ‘When “poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure”, then ethics is indeed submerged by aesthetics, inviting, thereby, the bitter harvest of charismatic politics and ideological extremism’ (Harvey, 1989, p.337).

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The place of melancholy

The aesthetic conventions of the picturesque – its anaesthetising effects – allowed all kinds of pain to be inflicted on the landscape, such as the removal of villages to create the envisioned compositions. In 1752 Joseph Damer removed the medieval village of Milton Abbas from his estate to allow for a Capability Brown design to be realised, and in 1756 Lord Harcourt destroyed the ancient village of Newham, relocating the villagers discreetly out of sight. Goldsmith wrote about ‘The man of wealth and pride’ in The Deserted Village, of the ‘Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, / Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; / Amidst the bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen, / And desolation saddens all thy green: And only one master grasps the whole domain’ (in Short 1991, p.70). Beyond the traditions of the picturesque, further ethical dilemmas were mired in seduction by lethal landscapes, as in the cult of the aesthetics of war. The Futurists elevated the imagery of war to the status of beauty, as in Marinetti’s vision of war’s contribution to landscape aesthetics: ‘War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns’ (in Benjamin, 1969, p.242). The objects of war were valorised by the Futurists: ‘War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from the burning villages, and many others.’ There are eerie resonances in the fetishisation of contemporary war machinery, as Neil Leach observes: ‘it is in this “sacred horizon of appearances” that a machinery of death – the Stealth Bomber – can seem so seductive against the pink and orange hues of the Saudi Arabian desert’ (Leach, 1999, p.26). Architect Lebbeus Woods’ proclamation that ‘War is architecture, and architecture is war!’ (in Leach, 1999, p.27) is a contemporary revivification of the intoxicating power of images of horror. In response to the war-torn landscape of Sarajevo, Woods proposed ‘injection’, ‘scar’ and ‘scab’ as metaphoric design modes. Leach contends these ideas ‘constitute an aesthetic celebration of destruction’ (Leach, 1999, p.29), again alluding to the dilemma of how aesthetic pleasure can be found in something morally wrong, amidst what Susan Buck-Morss calls the ‘panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of modernity and anesthetize its victims’ (Buck-Morss, 2002, p.xi). A similar slippage of aesthetics and ethics was observed by Bernard Tschumi in the USA’s screening of Gulf War coverage interspersed with footage of basketball games. Tschumi described this as one of many ways in which history is collapsing into a set of simultaneous images, and everything is becoming aestheticised (Tschumi 1993). The metaphor of sport is more insidious than simply appearing in the interstices of war coverage, and Kim Michasiw criticised how American football was adopted as a frame for the media discourse in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, creating a distancing from the reality of the events, and substituting an ethical response with maleness, ordered violence and the dynamics of the ‘game’ (Michasiw, 1992). Michasiw linked this back to landscape, and particularly to the British Empire’s dissemination of the picturesque to the colonies, asking:

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Is it possible that the class envy, masked violence and gaming that are embedded in the discursive frame of the picturesque provided imperial ents with … a comforting frame for activities they knew to be repugnant to their announced moral senses. (Michasiw, 1992, p.100) Aesthetics’ potential for anaesthetising is there in the Gulf War coverage, in the fixation on the images and machinery of war, in the colonisation of landscape, and seductive images of decay. For melancholy, this ethical dilemma haunts an advocacy of an aesthetics of sadness. On one hand it is acceptable to seek beauty within a quality of light or a scenic attribute, but what of seeking out decay and ruins – does this run the risk of, as in the specific case of Detroit, ‘naturaliz[ing] the social processes responsible for Detroit’s decline’? (Millington cited in Gansky, 2014, p.130). Henry James captured the quandary of this internal contrariety, ‘To delight in aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity’ (Henry James in Macaulay, 1977, frontispiece). Walking through the ruins of the Roman Campagna, James was conflicted by his own delight in speculating that a suicide may have taken place behind one of the bolted doors or barred windows. A contemporary version of the heartless picturesque, of an immoral melancholy, of a perverse aesthetics, was seen in the aftermath of 9/11. As one of the ultimate ‘Kodak Moments’, the site in lower Manhattan was extensively photographed. The desire to capture the scene – whether for its ghoulishness, as an iconic historic site or even for its aesthetic appeal – rubbed against the raw emotion of those directly connected to the tragedy. Echoing Will Fern’s outcry at the women disinterestedly drawing his hovel in their picture books, a poster at the Ground Zero site, signed Firegirl, read: ‘I wonder if you really see what is here or if you’re so concerned with getting that perfect shot that you’ve forgotten this is a tragedy site, not a tourist attraction’ (in KirshenblattGimblett, 2003, p.14). Tensions over the ways in which representations can have a masking or naturalising effect are reminders of the need to maintain vigilant to ethical transgression, conscious of not descending into the predatory consumption of images of suffering, and to remain alert to what it means to see images of post-disaster scenes, of 9/11, or New Orleans, or Christchurch, or the slow disaster of Detroit. An aesthetics of melancholy is fraught with these ethical dilemmas. The heartless picturesque always lurks nearby, deriving aesthetic pleasure from the pain and misfortune of others; as Gansky puts it, ‘trafficking in the sickening loveliness of suffering’ (Gansky, 2014, p.130). In the context of the designed environment, could this mean that poorly designed places could be sources of melancholy? After all, they are often sites of suffering, and therefore associated with melancholy. A useful distinction is found in Susan Sontag’s words, ‘Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits’ (Sontag, 2001, p.50). Although writing about a mental

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state, Sontag’s description could apply to the designed environment, where sad buildings and sad parks are nothing more than depressive because of their poor design, their bad lighting and their spatial dysfunctionality. Such places are not melancholy, they are simply depressing. An ethical melancholy makes a critical distinction between emotionally bankrupt environments, and those which induce poignancy, pathos, yearning. Melancholy is often associated with broken-down places, yet this elision overlooks its generative potential for the imagining of place. Wastelands and broken landscapes represent only one part of melancholy’s character. Finding the place of melancholy is not the same as advocating for depressing environments, just as much as it is not a plea for wholesale nostalgia or sentimentality. It is necessary to recognise melancholy’s dual quality, as expressed in the early writings attributed to Saint Augustine: ‘I discovered sadness to be double, indeed I knew two kinds of sorrow: one that works salvation, the other, evil; one that draws to penitence, the other that leads to desperation.’ This is echoed in Alucin’s belief in ‘two kinds of sadness; one that brings salvation, one that brings plagues’ (Agamben, 1993, n.12, p.10). Shuttling between these poles of sadness, or held in tension between them, is an ethical melancholy, with all of the complexity of aesthetic experience that transcends that of plain sadness. Despite the culpability of Kantian aesthetics in proposing disinterestedness as the heart of appreciating beauty, in his The Critique of Judgment Kant offers a means of navigating part of the ethical dilemma of an aesthetics of melancholy. As examined in Chapter 3, alongside the specific aesthetic conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque, a Kantian melancholy might be called a ‘spirited sadness’, one which draws strength and conviction from a grounding within moral ideas. This is the inverse of a ‘miserable’ sadness, and distinct from John Ruskin’s ‘heartless picturesque’. Ruskin echoed this position in what he called the ‘noble picturesque’, which he found in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner and Samuel Prout, where suffering, poverty and decay were ‘nobly endured’ (Ruskin, 1856, p.6). In the construction of an ethical melancholy, founded on a noble picturesque, could be added tristitia utilis, or ‘useful sorrow’, as advocated by Hugh of St. Victor in his Medicine of the Soul, which recognises melancholy’s association with humanitarian concerns, noble solitude, and the contemplation of nature (Agamben, 1993, p.13). Melancholy’s complex metaphysical dimensions rescue it from a nihilistic abandonment to voyeurism or sentimentality. At the very root of melancholy is a loving regard for what is lost, or for impending loss, of an object, a landscape, a moment. This love of loss, of longing, resonates with images of decay, with sites of ruin, but spurs a poignant compassion as opposed to vicarious consumption, or sense of dread. Roland Barthes captures how this association is found within images of people, known or unknown, where

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From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me … the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (Barthes, 1984, pp.80–81) It is this intangible sadness and collective melancholic presence that Pallasmaa finds in ‘an abandoned home or a demolished apartment house that reveals traces and scars of intimate lives to the public gaze on its crumbling walls’ (Pallasmaa, 1992, n.p.). An aesthetics of melancholy must therefore involve a sense of loss, and of the existential infinitude that this entails. Such a position is not that of mourning sickness, since that is finite, a process which finds completion. Freud distinguished clearly between mourning and melancholy, making the observation that with melancholy the subject wishes to enter the object of mourning. While melancholia might be perceived as a negative condition, through its abnormal relationship to loss, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, there is a ‘conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy’ that needs to be asserted. Žižek points out that mourning can be interpreted as a ‘kind of betrayal’ as it is the second killing of the lost object, but the more enduring relationship is found in the melancholic subject who ‘remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it’ (Žižek, 2001, p.141). Judith Butler also points to an alternative reading of Freud’s melancholia, where the relinquishment of the love object becomes ‘its internalization and, hence, preservation’ (in Brennan, 2008, p.4). This is reinforced by Mary O’Neill, who suggests that the use of the term ‘lost’ rather than ‘gone’ for the dead suggests a possibility of being ‘found’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.151). Mourning, O’Neill observes, can be continued as a form of fidelity to the loved one. This commitment to attending to loss can find form in landscape, even in the simplest of forms, as Maddrell observes of memorial benches, ‘the very form of the bench, as seat, implies not only resting, but also visiting and the maintenance of continuing bonds’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.46). For landscapes of melancholy, an ethical position on the loss of the object is located in Karen Till’s theory of wounded cities. Till’s work concerns cities who have experienced state-perpetrated violence, and the idea of the wound is part of a resistance to forgetting (Till, 2012). In Till’s words, open wounds in the cities of Kassel and Berlin create an irritation in everyday space through which the past collides with the present. These commemorative sites are ‘out of place’ in the contemporary urban setting, for they are defined by (re)surfacing and repressed memories of violent pasts. (Till, 2005, pp.102–103)

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This keeping open of the wound, this internalisation of the lost object, relates to faithfulness and preservation – and in the case of violence it becomes a means of preventing forgetting. Till describes how ‘the wound is kept open as an uncomfortable critical site of experience, interpretation, and meaning’ (Till, 2005, p.103). Melancholy brings a sense of unrequitedness. Of unrequited love, of wounds kept open. The critical position is one which maintains an ethics of practice, an understanding of the place of loss and absence, and even of violence. All of this requires a placement of the self in relation to that which has experienced loss, whether another individual, an idea, a place, a landscape. The placement of the self within this unrequitable situation engenders feelings of empathy.

References Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, Roland (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard; first published 1980). London: Flamingo. Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Schocken Books. Brennan, Mike (2008) ‘Mourning and loss: finding meaning in the mourning for Hillsborough’. Mortality, 13(1): 1–23. Buck-Morss, Susan (2002). Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dickens, Charles (1954). The Chimes, in the anthology Christmas Books (The Chimes first published 1844). London: Oxford University Press. Gansky, Andrew Emil (2014). ‘“Ruin porn” and the ambivalence of decline’. Photography & Culture, 7(2): 119–139. Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Kennedy, Liam (2000). Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories: reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48. Leach, Neil (1999). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Macauly, Rose (1977). The Pleasure of Ruins. London: Thames and Hudson Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Michasiw, Kim Ian (1992). ‘Nine revisionist theses on the picturesque’. Representations, 38(Spring): 76–100. Moore, Andrew (2010). Detroit Disassembled. Bologna: Damiani. O’Neill, Mary (2009). ‘Ephemeral art: the art of being lost’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Ethics 41 Pallasmaa, Juhani (1992). ‘Identity, intimacy and domicile: notes on the phenomenology of home’, in The Concept of Home: An Interdisciplinary View, symposium at the University of Trondheim, 21–23 August. www.uiah.fi/studies/ history2/e_ident.htm, 27 December 2015. Ruskin, John (1856). Modern Painters: Part IV. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Short, John Rennie (1991). Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment. London: Routledge. Sontag, Susan (2001). Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Sontag, Susan (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle edition. Till, Karen (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Till, Karen (2012). Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14. Tschumi, Bernard (1993). ‘Six concepts in contemporary architecture’, in Andreas Papadakis (ed.), Theory and Experimentation. London: Academy. Vergara, Camilo José (1995). The New American Ghetto. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Vergara, Camilo José (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2001). ‘Melancholy and the act’, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism. New York: Verso.

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Empathy

Sitting at the edge of a melancholy aesthetics is the troubling zone of an unethical delight in suffering, what might be called ‘heartless melancholy’. Efforts to define a morally sound melancholy include Kant’s ‘spirited sadness’, and the allied ideal of Ruskin’s ‘noble picturesque’. One of the checks and balances in the emotional repertoire which helps guard against a descent into predatory melancholy is the concept of empathy; ethical dilemmas can be attributed to a ‘failure of empathy’ (Marinelli and Dell Orto, 1999, p.51). Empathy is the forming of an emotional engagement with that which is encountered, the placement of the self into the other. This might be found in the dialogue between one’s self and the natural world, as in Henry David Thoreau’s observation that a ‘lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature’ (Thoreau, 1995, p.99). The exchange, the empathetic bond of looking at one another, is echoed in JeanMarie Morel’s ‘Water is to the landscape as the soul is to the body’ (in Bergdoll, 2000, p.81) and poet Paul Claudel’s ‘Water is the gaze of the earth’ (in Murphy et al., 2000, p.81). Importantly for an aesthetic of melancholy, although now widely associated with psychology, empathy was a term originally developed in the context of art, and was the seeking of a connection between subject and object. The word Einfühlung was coined by philosopher Robert Vischer in 1873, and translated as ‘empathy’ or ‘in feeling’ by psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909. Vischer’s concept of empathy captured the re-combination of the self with the world, conceiving of a reciprocal relationship with the other, as in his belief that: I entrust my individual life to the lifeless form, just as I do with another living person. Only ostensibly do I remain the same although the object remains an other. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this other. (In Koss, 2006, p.139)

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Empathy is sometimes elided with sympathy, but there is a difference in the nature and degree of engagement. While both terms relate to communing with an other, empathy goes deeper, and has the sense of ‘in feeling’ rather than sympathy’s ‘with feeling’. Escalas and Stern plot the distinction in this way: ‘whereas sympathy stems from the perspective of an observer who is conscious of another’s feelings, empathy stems from that of a participant who vicariously merges with another’s feelings’ (Escalas and Stern, 2003, p. 567). By means of an illustration, they suggest a sympathetic observer watching someone eat a lemon will think to themselves about the lemoneater’s perceptions, while an empathetic observer will become engaged in ‘involuntary puckering and watering of the … mouth’ (Escalas and Stern, 2003, p.567). Empathy therefore tends towards a fully phenomenological engagement. In phenomenology, empathy relates to the experience of another body as another subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, and is the ability to transfer one’s own bodily awareness to the other, which enables a recognition of feelings, emotions and intentions. One of the necessary dimensions of a genuine empathy is an awareness of context. Sontag’s critique of the aesthetic pleasure founded on images of suffering is in part attributable to the dehumanising effect of media saturation. The overwhelming volume of images experienced on a daily basis leads to a loss of the specificity and palpability of suffering, and the resulting erosion of empathy. Moreover, as E. Ann Kaplan suggests, the lack of context of such images means that responses are simply sentimental rather than genuinely empathetic. Kaplan calls this ‘empty empathy’, where the beholder is unable to grasp the gravity of the situation, and the engagement is only at the superficial level of the image (Kaplan, 2005, p.87). John Berger probed the difficulty of empathy and the attendant responses in his essay Photographs of Agony. Observing images of war in the newspaper, Berger says, brings either despair or indignation. But, Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action. We try to emerge from the moment of the photograph back into our lives. As we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption of our lives appears to be a hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen. (Berger, 2003, p.289) While empathy is often used to describe an interpersonal connection, it also relates to the ‘in feeling’ of animals or even landscapes. An empathy with the landscape embodies both an anthropomorphising of the environment – ascribing emotions to it – as well as the recognition of landscape as the very embodiment of humanity. In the first sense, empathy with a melancholy landscape resonates with the humoral tradition, where the qualities of twilight, emptiness and so on exist in landscapes: they are embodied by the landscape, just as they are in humans. Orhan Pamuk’s descriptions of his

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native Istanbul evoke such an embodied melancholy, where he depicts the city as possessing a collective poignancy, almost as though a person. Pamuk portrays Istanbul as an entity exhibiting hüzün, or Turkish melancholy, and that it is something that by paying our respects to [hüzün’s] manifestations in the city’s streets and views and people that we at last come to sense it everywhere: on cold winter mornings, when the sun suddenly falls on the Bosphorus and that faint vapour begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so dense that you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and landscapes. (Pamuk, 2005, p.89) In the second sense the empathetic response relates to the apprehension of landscape as a setting for daily life, and therefore of empathising indirectly with its occupants. In this case it could be argued that the ladies drawing Will Fern’s hovel in their picture books lacked empathy with the scene they were beholding, and were distanced from it by the disinterestedness of a Kantian aesthetics, a heartlessness. The so-called ‘New Spirit’ in architecture during the late 1980s and 1990s illustrates the consequences of a lack of empathy in design. Advocates of the New Spirit included the architects Peter Eisenman and Lebbeus Woods, driven by the idea of redefining architecture in the context of the dominance of media and commerce. While originally a provocative and intellectual exercise intended to explore possible interpretations of contemporary culture, the hypothetical musings became reality as designs were executed. Bruce Thomas warned of the implications of these ideas being realised: When Peter Eisenman boasts that he is able to make the average person physically ill through his new manipulation of space and Lebbeus Woods hypothesizes an urban landscape in which people are compelled to inhabit the bombed ruins of war-torn cities, the New Spirit in design should be questioned as to its intentions. (Thomas, 1997, p.254) The core issue, Thomas argued, was a break-down in the idea of empathy, as the humanity of the human presence in the built environment was removed. Instead, the idea of ‘empathy’ became distorted, and the recognition of a correspondence between the self and the other – in this case the built environment – simply became a ‘weary recognition of abuse’ (Thomas, 1997, p.261). The despair and indignation that Berger referred to become accepted, such that there is in the work of the New Spirit a ‘surrender of humanism’ (Thomas, 1997, p.262). There are echoes between this recapitulation and the experience of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999), the ‘waning of empathy’ (Kligerman, 2007a) and the ‘exhaustion of empathy’ (Kleinman and Kleinman,

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1996) experienced as a consequence of the overloading of individuals with trauma and tragedy. The danger is that such numbing, surrendering, becomes expressed in the form of the built environment – as with the New Spirit – thereby amplifying a de-humanised existence. The New Spirit exemplifies the significance of empathy in design, and the corollary of adopting principles which deny a human connection with place. Without ‘in-feeling’ – whether as a perception of a landscape’s embodied emotional content, or through the indirect connection with its occupants – designers run the risk of a ‘failure of empathy’, and the resultant ethical disasters. Inflicting inhuman environments on people can, in the worst case, be a form of torture, and in a lesser situation may simply be a trivialising of the other, for example in an approach such as ‘datascapes’ which mine data to produce designs, sometimes overlooking the intersubjectivity of a designer’s relationship with the landscape, and with others. MVRDV’s ‘Datatown’ project illustrates this method of conceptualising design, imagining a city which is ‘based only upon data. It is a city that wants to be described by information: a city that knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology, no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data’ (Maas, 1999, p.58). The distance from ‘in-feeling’ resonates in this description. Even the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, which was promisingly entitled ‘Città: Less Aesthetics More Ethics’, apparently overlooked empathetic considerations. Sanda Iliescu criticised curator Massimiliano Fuksas’ ‘heroic disregard for the past, along with what may be described as a nostalgia for an information-driven future’ (Iliescu, 2009, p. 17). This information-generated design was reflected in Fuksas’ preference for ‘constantly mutating urban magmas’ and ‘virtual architecture and its shapeless, liquid masses’ which Iliescu considers evinces the ‘buttressing of an aesthetic style with unrelated moral claims’ (Illiescu, 2009, p.17). Buildings which make visitors ill or aesthetics of war, and landscapes made from data or mutating urban magmas, might resonate with melancholy on some levels, but it is an abject melancholy rather than an empathetic one, and the consequences of such aesthetic agendas are profound: ‘Choices made in the making of the landscape are tangible and long lasting’ (Thomas, 1997, p.262). The humanistic tradition in design is the antithesis of objectified approaches like the New Spirit or datascaping. Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism is the core of an empathetic approach to architecture. First published in 1914, Scott’s work reflects the legacy of Vischer, traced through psychologist Theodor Lipps’s Aesthetik (1903–1906), and developed by British writer Vernon Lee,1 who is sometimes credited with introducing empathy into the English language. As part of a circle who resided in Italy, Lee shared her ideas on empathy with the American art historian Bernard Berenson, subsequently influencing Geoffrey Scott. In The Architecture of Humanism, Scott wrote that the ‘whole of architecture is, in fact, unconsciously invested by us with human movement and human moods….

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We translate architecture into terms of ourselves’ (Scott, 1980, p.213, emphasis in original). This resonance between self and architecture is not, Scott explains, ‘mere metaphors’ (Scott, 1980, p.214), not simply describing one thing in terms of another, but transcribing it – that ‘architectural art is the transcription of the body’s states into the forms of a building’ (Scott, 1980, p.216). This projection of the self into the world beyond is ‘ancient, common and profound’, and something of beauty (Scott, 1980, p.217). Scott’s humanism echoes with the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard in his detection of resonances between the house and the self. Bachelard finds, for example, in the poem ‘Melancholy’ by O.V. de Milosz a uniting of mental images of mother and house: ‘I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House. / House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood’ (in Bachelard, 1969, p.45). Further, in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix, Bachelard conveys how the house emanates virtues and offers protection beyond mere shelter; there is a feeling of reciprocity which parallels the idea of empathy. Art critic Adrian Stokes’ negotiation of his relationship with his childhood landscape of London’s Hyde Park illuminates ideas of empathy that resonate with Bachelard’s embodying of the self in site. Empathy and psychoanalysis are familiar companions, since the practice of psychoanalytical therapy is founded upon the building of an empathetic connection between therapist and analysand. For Stokes the psychoanalytical connection is, on one level, with the landscape itself. Stokes’ grappling with the melancholy of the park is founded in part on an empathetic relationship as an imbuing of emotion within the landscape. Building upon Stokes’ psychoanalytical explorations, in association with his own therapy under Freudian therapist Melanie Klein, the park takes on a type of sentience. Stephen Kite proposes that, for Stokes, Hyde Park is the broken ‘mother-object’ that he is driven to re-create, to restore, and this is the source of his angst. In Hyde Park, Stokes found a melancholy which is embedded within certain times of day – the ‘gardens at dusk when noises are so distinct and park keepers so noticeable’ – and in the monuments of the park, as in Sir Christopher Wren’s Marlborough Gate, in which he found a ‘kind of ethical ugliness in the use of a classical form, particularly the cruel denial of shadow or depth in the proportion of height’ (in Kite, 2009, p.19). Recalling his childhood perceptions of the park from the early twentieth century, Stokes labels these forms within the park as having a ‘blindness’, which is both an aesthetic commentary on their inability to make a connection, and an ethical commentary in the context of a landscape which is deeply divided in socioeconomic terms. The park railings form a focus for his critique, in their division of the ‘parkees’ – the homeless park-dwellers – from the well-to-do of the surrounding residential areas. This dimension of the empathetic connection echoes the ‘heartless picturesque’ of the conflicted struggle between the appreciation of an aesthetic scene and the reality of its occupants. Stokes’ relationship with Hyde Park illuminates the co-dependence of aesthetics, ethics, emotion, and empathy, and the circling of all of these

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around melancholy. In making a direct connection between Stokes and the legacy of empathy in architectural thinking that culminated in Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism, Kite emphasises the relationships between the psychoanalysis and empathy, and the intertwining of landscape experience, embodiment and the dream-theories of Freud. Kite draws a direct parallel between Freud’s theorising of the thematic significance of water and passages in dreams, of their association with ‘phantasies of intra-uterine life, of existence in the womb and of the act of birth’ and Stokes’ description of walking home through the darkening park, through the passage under the Serpentine Bridge, where the dirty echoing tunnel with its lingering airs was cold at all times of the year. It was as if the passage lay beneath the dark water, here at its deepest…. A dog would be barking like Cerberus…. I think to this obscene hole I attributed the home of the animus that tore the body of the park to shreds; the parkee spirit that made the park poor, hungry, desolate. (In Kite, 2009, pp.27–28) Through focusing on his relationship with early twentieth-century Hyde Park, Stokes explored the multiple dimensions of empathy, from the reading of landscape as body, to the concern over a landscape’s occupants. These threads of a humanistic affiliation with architecture and landscape provide a significant locus for an aesthetic of melancholy. According to Juliet Koss, empathy has waned as a concept over the last century, but is experiencing a revival in some areas (Koss, 2006). Mark Jarzombek suggests that the declining interest in empathy within philosophy in fact made it more available in other spheres, and ‘empathy could expand its horizons to become an essential formation of an advanced twentieth-century bourgeois culture trying to take control of its own modernity’ (Jarzombek, 2000, p.65). While Geoffrey Scott’s book dates from nearly a century ago, humanism retains a presence in architecture and landscape architecture as an expression of empathetic forms and protection against misanthropy. Jarzombek highlights the writings of Bruce Allsopp as a more recent empathetic position in architecture. Allsopp opens Towards a Humane Architecture (1974) with the passage: Modern civilization has loosened our contact with the earth, made us less aware of our dependence, which is still entire, and inflated our pride which can be seen as a corruption of the spirit, for pride has no substance: it is a spiritual condition. But the earth is still under our feet and it is upon the earth that we build architecture.… We first feel architecture with our feet. (In Jarzombek, 2000, p.248, n.157)

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Empathy is implicit in the conception of ‘weak architecture’ or ‘fragile architecture’, a perspective which eschews the muscular insistence of a dominating approach to design. Pallasmaa traces the idea of fragile architecture through Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s idea of ‘weak ontology’ and ‘fragile thought’, which echo Goethe’s ‘Delicate Empiricism’: ‘to understand a thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and understanding it grounded in direct experience’ (in Pallasmaa, 2000, p.81). A fragile architecture is one which is contextual and responsive, echoing Allsopp’s position of connecting to the place. Fragility, and even weakness – a term which could easily have negative connotations – are inherently humanistic approaches to design. Pallasmaa suggests that fragility embodies the practices of listening and dialogue, and where ‘Geometry and formal reduction serve the heroic and utopian line of architecture that rejects time … materiality and fragile form evoke a sense of humility and duration’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82). The empathetic dimension of fragile architecture extends from the city scale, such as the idea of ‘weak urbanism’ in the theories of Ignasi di SolaMorales, through to the intimate setting of the garden. It is the garden which embraces the idea of fragility, almost by default, because of the dimensions of time and change. Pallasmaa points to ‘the Japanese garden, with its multitude of parallel, intertwining themes fused with nature, and its subtle juxtaposition of natural and man-made morphologies’ as a key example of the aesthetic potential of ‘weak’ approaches (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82). Other exemplars of sensitivity include Dimitris Pikionis’ Acropolis footpaths and Lawrence Halprin’s Ira’s Fountain in Portland, Oregon. These works, Pallasmaa argues, transcend the domineering approach of a singular concept or image, and instead are grounded in place, and self-effacing in so far as they diminish the designer’s presence. Pikionis’ work is so intricately contextual, in spatial and temporal terms, that it appears anonymous, while Halprin presents a work which is a ‘man-made counterpoint to the geological and organic world.’ Further, in describing Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea, Pallasmaa writes how it demonstrates ‘An architecture of courtesy and attention, it invites us to be humble, receptive and patient observers. This philosophy of compliance aspires to fulfil the humane reconciliatory task of the art of architecture’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82). Anne Whiston Spirn’s contribution to the collection Landscape Theory amplifies the continued significance of empathy in landscape architecture. In words resonating with Vischer’s formulation of the term, as ‘the projection of one’s own consciousness into another living being and other life forms’, Spirn emphasises the necessity of reading and telling landscape, of understanding connections and responding appropriately. She states that ‘Such dwelling invokes a sense of empathy, prompts reflection on the continuity of human lives with other living things and with the places we inhabit’ (Spirn, 2008, p.62). Scott, Allsopp, Pallasmaa and Spirn share the imperative to maintain a connectivity with the landscape, with architecture, and not to objectify them into distant and inanimate others. Entwined

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within this humanistic approach is not simply an ‘architecture of happiness’, but an overarching ethos of wellbeing, which encapsulates the full spectrum of emotional colouring, both in the self and in the other. The resonances of emotion are perhaps nowhere more profound than in landscapes of memory, and of the melancholy which inheres within. However, what are the limits of empathy when we are faced with memorials that we cannot relate to? What happens when the events, the culture, the individuals are distant from us, and we struggle to make a connection? In his essay ‘Monuments and Melancholia’, Rico Franses raises this question of the meaningfulness of memorials to strangers, specifically memorials based upon lists of names, and what the names might mean if the beholder knows none of the dead. As with the iconic example of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the emotional effect is in part due to the sheer number of names, and the consequential summoning of the sublime, the realisation of the overwhelming dimension of the event. Franses argues that this is only half of the story, and with reference to the AIDS Quilt memorial, he illustrates how powerful emotions are brought forth by the depiction of the dead not only via their names, but also other symbolic elements. He observes that ‘The quilt makes manifest a desire for the elicitation of the core subjectivity of the dead, the desire to ‘touch’ them emotionally, to have access to something constituted as their individuality, their ‘humanity’, through a series of metonymies of objects and thoughts related to their lives’ (Franses, 2001, p.100). The intimacy of the symbols depicted on the AIDS Quilt contradicts the distance and detachment of a total stranger contemplating the deaths. Yet, it is not that straightforward; the beholder does not simply feel at one with the dead, but, Franses contends, there is an accentuation of the ‘sensation of non-acquaintanceship’ – an even stronger feeling of the sense of being a stranger, and a realisation that one has only ‘met’ them because they are dead. This ‘relationship’ between the self and an other is problematic; without getting to know the individual, ‘all that is left in circulation is the jolting sensation of unearned, unwarranted intimacy, carrying in its wake the empty places that should be occupied by its causes’ (Franses, 2001, p.100). Arguably, it is empathy which is at work here, which allows for the suspension of estrangement, the coming together with an unknown individual through their death. But that is not all. As Vischer wrote of empathy, there is an exchange which occurs, a ‘magical transformation into the other’, and this is true of an encounter of a ‘stranger memorial’. One cannot genuinely grieve someone one did not know, it is not the ‘normal’ mourning of Freudian theory. Franses suggests that what happens instead is that part of the ‘ego’, a portion of the self, becomes attached to the ‘object’ – the dead person. Through this the self is ‘tricked into believing that one has suffered a loss, and then provokes melancholia as the reaction to that event’ (Franses, 2001, p.101). There are therefore strong resonances with the hybridising of self and other that occur through empathy, and a genuine investment of one’s self in the landscape.

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Related to this is the tension between the collective and the individual in the practice of remembering, and the need to overcome not only the distance of the ‘stranger’ but the potentially dehumanising effect of a mass memorial. How can empathy be sustained in the face of a nameless multitude? Donohoe argues that both totalitarian memorials and ‘democratic’ memorials erase the individual, where war memorials or memorials to heroic events ‘[i]n their attempt to make us secure in our own society, and in their valorization of the war hero … create idols that provide the illusion that death is not individual’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.237). And within the totalitarian regime, Karsten Harries explains, monuments ‘promise to liberate the individual from the burden of his or her individuality, which means also from the fear of death, as it is in keeping generally with the appeal of totalitarianism’ (in Donohoe, 2002, p.237). Empathy is a vital corrective for a melancholy landscape architecture, providing an ethical safeguard in the design of the built environment. It provides a counter to the disinterestedness of conventional aesthetics, an antidote to the detachment of the ocularcentric tradition, and a resistance to non-humanistic design approaches. Empathy is also the conduit by which an authentic attachment might be formed with strangers and multitudes in the landscape of memory, of committing part of one’s self to the arc of tragic memories. The built environment as an art form differs from the fine arts in that it provides humanity’s habitat. While an individual can choose whether or not to view an image in an art gallery, or even to look at photographs of war on television or in a newspaper, architecture and landscape architecture are, in their most essential form, not optional. Empathy and ethics provide the moral compass for aesthetics, and while a reinvigoration of the emotional is an essential component of melancholy, it is imperative that the distinction between the artistic depiction of trauma and tragedy is sharply defined against the creation of an emotionally rich context for dwelling.

Note 1 Vernon Lee is the pseudonym of the eccentric writer Violet Paget.

References Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published 1958). Boston: Beacon Press. Bergdoll, Barry (2000). European Architecture, 1750–1890. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, John (2003). ‘Photographs of agony’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader. New York: Routledge. Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography, 5(2): 235–242.

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Escalas, Jennifer Edson and Stern, Barbara B. (2003). ‘Sympathy and empathy: emotional responses to advertising dramas’. The Journal of Consumer Research, 29(4): 566–578. Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104. Iliescu, Sanda (2009). ‘Introduction’, in Sanda Iliescu (ed.), The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Jarzombek, Mark (2000). The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann (2005). Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press. Kite, Stephen (2009). Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye, Critical Writings on Art and Architecture. London: Legenda. Kleinman, Arthur and Kleinman, Joan (1996). ‘The Appeal of Experience: The Dismay of Images – Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times’, Daedalus, 125(1): 1–24. Kligerman, Eric (2007a). Paul Celan: Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Koss, Juliet (2006). ‘On the limits of empathy’. The Art Bulletin, 88(1): 139–157. Maas, Winy (1999). Metacity Datatown. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Marinelli, Robert P. and Dell Orto, Arthur E. (1999). The Psychological and Social Impact of Disability. Dordrecht: Springer. Moeller, Susan (1999) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York: Routledge. Murphy, Alexander B., Johnson, Douglas L. and Haarmann, Viola (2000). Cultural Encounters with the Environment: Enduring and Evolving Geographic Themes. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Pallasmaa,  Juhani (2000). ‘Hapticity and time: notes on fragile architecture’. Architectural Review, 1239: 78–84. Pamuk, Orhan (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber. Scott, Geoffrey (1980). The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (first published 1914). London: The Architectural Press. Spirn, Anne Whiston (2008). ‘“One with nature”: landscape, language, empathy, and imagination’, in Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (eds), Landscape Theory. New York: Routledge. Thomas, Bruce (1997). ‘Culture, merchandise, or just light entertainment? New architecture at the millennium’. Journal of Architectural Education, 50(4): 254–264. Thoreau, Henry David (1995). Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Walden originally published 1854). New York: Dover Publications.

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Part II

The places of melancholy

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8

The places of melancholy

Attention is turned now from the arguments for a melancholy aesthetic towards the places in which it might be found. When considering possible routes for navigating the terrain of melancholy, several courses are possible. The first and perhaps the most obvious is typological, an exploration of types of melancholy landscapes – memorials, ruins, post-industrial landscapes. Yet, rather than be limited by the route governed by pre-existing categories of landscape, the approach here is to leave the beaten track, and locate the places of melancholy by means of suggesting an array of evocative qualities or conditions. The proposed qualities do not exist independently, and coalesce with each other like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram. There are many points of commonality and crossing, yet at the same time there are unique qualities which are brought forward, exhibited, offered. The places of melancholy is therefore a guide of sorts – in both senses of the word, as a source of recognition and of instruction – enhancing the beholder’s engagement with the landscape, and offering the possibility of amplifying the condition of melancholy in the design of landscapes. Through drawing attention to the range of conditions, the aspiration is towards creating a forum for melancholy, a shared understanding of melancholy as an aesthetic. The following chapters are presented as a means of ‘melancholising’, to resuscitate a now obsolete term used by seventeenthcentury melancholy theorist Robert Burton. To melancholise was to think in a melancholy way, including seeking out voluntary solitude and to muse on the imaginary. Landscape provides the ideal setting for melancholising. As John Dixon Hunt argued of melancholy’s ally, commemoration, ‘certain long-standing characteristics of landscape architecture afford special resources to the art of commemoration, whether in its deliberately elegiac mode or in lending it elegiac tonality’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). As well as sites of an elegiac beauty, places of melancholy are also the locus of slowness, countering the seeming urgency and relentlessness of the contemporary condition. In the same way that slow food imbues the everyday practice of eating with a greater sense of engagement, so too do landscapes which cannot be apprehended at a glance. Photographer Alfredo Jaar wrote of his approach to photography: ‘it is imperative to slow down,

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to contextualise and frame properly each image so it makes sense, so it cannot be dismissed’ (in Schweizer, 2007, p.11). Slow landscapes, too, demand of the beholder a certain commitment, and in return provide enduring repositories of emotion. Slowness embeds an awareness of space and time, and melancholic places are both retrospective and prospective. Milan Kundera observed that There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. (Kundera, 1997, p. 34) Contemplation of time in association with submersion, weathering, and fragmentation bring about reflection upon life’s fleetingness, but also a resistance of the nihilistic free-fall towards the end of things. The contemplation of mortality brings a vivid authenticity to existence, as expressed in Martin Heidegger’s statement that we should not ‘darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end’ or to make death the goal of living (in Donohoe, 2002, p.236). Donohoe explains that both options deny the ‘death of death’, instead of engaging with the unease of finality, and this anxiety draws us away from our constant concern with the mundane activities of everyday life. Our familiarity with things is interrupted, our reliance upon the common understanding of the world is disrupted and each of us must face our own death. (Donohoe, 2002, p.236) This melancholy inspection of existence finds a setting within the places and conditions outlined in the following chapters. Through attention to those sites and works which are attuned to the anxiety and authenticity of existence, there is the possibility of deepening an engagement with landscape. Becoming attuned to the sensing of space, and of melancholy in particular, is a way to ‘become better placed to appreciate the emotionally dynamic spatiality of contemporary social life’ (Davidson and Milligan, 2004, p.524). Within the void and in the uncanny, in a certain light or in shadow, attended by aura and liminality, the fragmentary and the left behind, the submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, and in the state of intimate

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immensity … these melancholic moments grace architecture and landscape. What is offered here is a compendium of places, images, buildings, landscapes, in which a suffusion of melancholy gathers – a melancholy terrain, a map of a landscape of affection, a ‘pays du tendre’.1

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Note 1 Pays du tendre is Madeleine du Scudéry’s phrase for a terrain of emotions. See Bruno (2002).

References Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies, 5(4): 523–532. Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography, 5(2): 235–242. Hunt, John Dixon (2005). ‘“Come into the garden, Maud”: garden art as a privileged mode of commemoration and identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Kundera, Milan (1997). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher; originally published 1995). New York: Harper Perennial.

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9

The void

Melancholy’s agency is in part derived from its resistance to closure. From the ache of unrequitable love to the open wound of Freudian melancholy, the holding of the end at bay establishes a condition of intense emotion. For landscapes of memory, the melancholy of the void is a conundrum. It is often presumed that landscapes designed for the commemoration of tragedy must be attentive to healing and closure. To re-frame memorials as sites for melancholy sets in place an entirely different attitude towards our relationship with memory. Melancholy is not directed towards the overcoming of grief, but rather the intensification of the contemplative and existential planes of memory. The void is both an absence of things and an absence of meaning. In the first, the void is vividly invoked in the presence of an empty chair. A chair, something which is at once so directly a sign of presence, a place for sitting, when empty becomes a vessel of loss. Charles Dickens’ empty chair epitomises the ways in which the void of absence carries an emotional cargo. When performed as a tableau, the ‘replica of Dickens’ library at Gad’s Hill, with an empty chair beside the study cabinet’ was described as ‘one of the most affecting of the many tableaux’ at the Coliseum in London when actors paid a tribute to the author after his death in 1870 (Wallace, 1912, p.117). Dickens’ illustrator, Luke Fildes, painted a watercolour of the empty chair, which was published in the magazine The Graphic, and captures the melancholy of the void. Fildes’ empty chair painting finds an uncanny echo in the paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent’s Chair and Gaugin’s Chair, both from 1888. The resemblance is not a coincidence, as Gilles Soubigou explains – Van Gogh was known to have owned a copy of the illustration of Dickens’ empty chair, and knew his work well. The pipe and tobacco on Vincent’s Chair emphasise the connection, as Van Gogh wrote in his letters about taking up smoking after reading Dickens. He had great empathy for Dickens’ work, even to the extent of following his ‘remedy against suicide’, as he described in a letter to his sister Willemien in 1889: ‘a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese and a pipe of tobacco. It isn’t complicated, you’ll tell me, and you don’t think my melancholy comes close to that place, however at moments – ah but …’ (in Soubigou, 2013, pp.164–165).

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Empty chairs embody a sense of departure, abandonment. Like the residues explored in Chapter 16, they are remains, leavings. Helen Jaksch gathered together images of empty chairs left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She described how ‘The chairs have also witnessed. They have seen. The evacuation. The flood. The return’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.105). Referring to designer Akiko Busch, Jaksch writes about the empty chairs, that, ‘“we persuade inanimate objects to be our partners in experience,” and by doing so we transform the everyday object of the chair into an extraordinary place for the potentiality of memory, of memorialization, of haunting, of ghosts’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.105). A chair is unquestionably a human trace, bearing imprints from sitting, holding memories from its use. When captured in an image the chair is what Roland Barthes calls a punctum, that detail or element of a photograph which triggers a connection. Barthes describes the punctum as that which ‘pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’, expressing that emotional moment of connection with an image (Barthes, 1981, p.27). Images of empty chairs, like those of Dickens, Van Gogh and Gaugin, and the Hurricane Katrina chairs, invoke the void of absence. This palpability of memory has been expressed in physical form in empty chair memorials in Oklahoma (2000), Leipzig (2001), Krakow (2005), Santiago (2006), Christchurch (2011), and New York (2011). The Oklahoma memorial commemorates the loss of 168 lives in the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Building in 1995, and was designed by the Butzer Design Partnership. The memorial includes 168 empty chairs, in nine rows to represent the nine floors, with the chairs identical in form but with 19 smaller chairs to recognise the children lost in the bombing (Figure 9.1). Despite their similarity in form, the chairs are imbued with individuality through the inscription of the names of the dead, one on each chair. Hans Butzer described how the empty chairs were about ‘someone not being there’, so that ‘Like an empty chair at a dinner table, we are always aware of the presence of a loved one’s absence’ (in Linenthal, 2001, p.218). Harriet F. Senie points to the likely inspiration for the empty chair component of the memorial, the work by Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned Room’), Berlin, Germany (1988–1996) (Figure 9.2). The Butzers, she notes, were working in Berlin at the time of the Oklahoma bombing, and it is likely that they would have been aware of this piece, which features ‘a bronze table and two empty chairs, one overturned, it is situated in the middle of the Koppenplatz, a quarter where Eastern European immigrants once lived and Jewish institutions co-existed with their Christian counterparts’ (Senie, 2013, p.85). The Abandoned Room in Berlin was part of the memorialisation of Kristallnacht, and in Leipzig another memorial to this widespread attack on Jews on 9 November 1938, The Night of Broken Glass, also enlists empty chairs. The memorial, designed by Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, marks the spot where a synagogue was burnt to the ground by the Nazis.

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Figure 9.1 Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs, Oklahoma City National Memorial, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, 2001. Photo by Ken Lund, 2004.

Figure 9.2 Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned Room’), Berlin, Germany, 1988–1996. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2011.

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The ground plan of the synagogue forms the memorial’s base, and 140 bronze chairs stand in pew-like rows above it (Figure 9.3). The empty chairs in Krakow are not ordered into rows, but are distributed around the Plac Bohaterow Getta (‘Ghetto Heroes Square’). Seventy empty chairs, including 33 steel and cast-iron chairs (1.4 m high) and 37 smaller chairs (1.2  m high) stand on the edge of the square and at tram stops. Designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak, the memorial remembers Jews of the Jewish ghetto who had no choice but to live in this place, where they feared for their lives, living in overcrowded conditions, where people starved to death, were murdered or sent to concentration camps. The chairs represent loss and absence as the ghetto in Krakow was cleared and all the residents’ possessions were strewn across the streets. As a symbol of the domestic interior there is a strange disruption when the chairs are displayed in the public landscape. In Santiago, Chile, the three chairs represent three members of the Communist Party who were abducted and murdered in 1985, during the Pinochet regime. Santiago Nattino, Manuel Guerrero and Jose Manuel Parada were the victims of what was known as the Caso Degollados (‘Slit Throat Case’), a brutal murder which had widespread political repercussions with arrest of two colonels, a major, two captains and two police officers, and the resignation of the general director of the Carabineros (national police force). The memorial was designed by two architects, Rodrigo Mora and Angel Muñoz, and an artist, Jorge Lankin, and differs from the other empty chair memorials described here in terms of their larger-than-life scale, at 10 metres tall (Figure 9.4). Rather than a chair which has an immediate

Figure 9.3 Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, memorial at the site of the former Great Synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, 2001. Photo by Heinrich Stürzl, 2014.

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Figure 9.4 Rodrigo Mora, Angel Muñoz and Jorge Lankin, A Place for Memory, monument to the victims of the Caso Degollados (‘Slit-Throat Case’), Santiago, Chile, 2006. Photographer unknown, 2009.

sense of humanity through its scale, the chairs making up the ‘Place for Memory’ are enormous, perhaps to ensure their presence within the vast landscape where just three chairs might be overlooked. Christchurch’s work, by Peter Majendie, is a temporary memorial (Figure 9.5). The poignancy of this temporality is expressed in the text displayed next to the site: ‘this installation is temporary, as is life.’ The Christchurch empty chairs differ from those in Oklahoma, Leipzig, Krakow and Santiago in that every chair is distinctive. The chairs are not named, as they are at Oklahoma, but the poignancy of individual lives is apparent in the chairs’ variability. Throughout the memorial’s life, Majendie tended the chairs, painting them and in some cases replacing them, so there is an ethics of care and ongoing change that underpin the memorial’s melancholy. The melancholy of the void and temporality came together too at Bryant Park, New York. Marking ten years after the World Trade Center attacks, the lawn that is usually a place for having lunch and enjoying the sun became an ephemeral memorial, with 2,753 of the empty iconic Bryant Park chairs lined up to face south towards the fallen towers – one to honour each person who died in the attacks. While the empty chair memorials intentionally enlist the emptiness of the chairs as a melancholy trope, memorial benches have their own atmosphere of pathos. Not designed to be empty, memorial benches set up what Avril Maddrell calls a ‘Third Emotional Space’ – a space that is neither a funerary

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Figure 9.5 Peter Majendie, Empty Chairs Temporary Memorial for the Christchurch Earthquake, New Zealand. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2014.

landscape nor a domestic landscape, but is a mediation between (Maddrell, 2009, p.46). The melancholy of the void enlists the emotional potency of space itself, a space implied by that which indicates absence. Referring to the work of Hockey et al., Maddrell adds that ‘significant “objects and spaces have their own agency” and are capable of animating the presence of the

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deceased’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.46). This hovering between domesticity and the formality of the funerary space, and between presence and absence, imparts both the melancholy of the void, and of liminality, offering a kind of ‘passage landscape’ – a term coined by Carola Wingren for those spaces ‘which physically support “threshold rites” like the rites of passage … in which the ritual subject crosses over from one state to another’ (Petersson and Wingren, 2011, p.62). At Mullion Cove in Cornwall, John Wylie describes coming across the memorial benches, the many seats that have been placed there ‘in loving memory’. Looking, in their emptiness, at the view of the sea – literally at the ‘vanishing point’ as Wylie puts it – these benches embody ‘Absence at the heart of the point of view. Just as they are about landscape, the benches at Mullion Cove are about absence and love – and in this sense more widely about memory’ (Wylie, 2009, p.278). But the benches are not just places to look at the landscape from, their existence as seats in the landscape is complex as they are also something to be looked at. Were they simply to be benches in the landscape they would not invite this gaze, since they are in themselves unremarkable. It is because of their role as markers of absence that the benches are to be looked at – of staring at a void, at a loss. Wylie explains: The benches operate according to a logic of displacement and absence, at once unsettling and yet serene, as the precondition of their articulation of viewer and viewed, gaze and landscape. They displace self into landscape, landscape into self. They can only ever present, here and now, an absence. (Wylie, 2009, p.282) The empty chairs and empty benches lay bare absence, with the landscape becoming an expression of the void. Memorial landscapes which enlist the melancholy of the void are arguably more ethical and empathetic in their approach to grief than those sites which might be considered a form of denial. Writing about Rachel Whiteread’s project House, 1993, Doreen Massey contrasted the sculptural cast of a terraced house with a classic ‘heritage site’: [w]hile House is a prompt and a disturbance to the memory, the classic heritage site fills in those spaces and restricts the room for interpretation and imagination. Instead of questioning memory and pre-given understandings of the past, the classic heritage site will provide them readymade. Instead of defamiliarizing the supposedly familiar, it is meant as an aid to further familiarization. It is, by design, an understandable rather than an unsettling space, a comfortable rapprochement with another space-time. (Massey, 1995, p.43)

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In landscapes of memory the classic heritage site works against melancholy, through its attempts at resolution, familiarity and easy understanding. An event which is truly tragic requires not resolution or closure, but an opening towards the emotional, a fully present engagement. Through confronting the void there is a challenge to connect with the subjective, and confront the depth of existence. The void is constituted through a bypassing of the symbolic. As opposed to a landscape providing a ‘readable’ script, or what Kevin Robins calls a ‘protective illusion’, the melancholy of the void aspires towards providing the conditions for contemplation (in Massey, 1995, p.45). Opposing Curl’s ‘emotional anaemia’ (Curl, 1980, p.359), Keenan’s ‘automatic machinery of remembrance’ (Keenan, 2003) and Massey’s ‘restricted imagination’, the void aspires to the state of Agamben’s ‘unforgettable’ (Godfrey, 2007, p.243). Even in the context of a memorial as seemingly symbolic as the AIDS quilt, the irresolvability of coded elements means that the beholder is marooned within the void. Franses explains that the very unknowability of the victims – the ‘strangers’ – means that those who view the memorial cannot mourn them, and thus enter into the state of Freudian melancholy (Franses, 2001, p.102). Resisting symbolism and courting the void runs counter to an enduring desire to ‘understand’ art and design. Abstract art defies the tendency for interpretation, providing the challenge to the viewer to look within themselves for a reaction, rather than to seek an external explanation. Two examples serve to illustrate this tension, one a painter and one a filmmaker. The paintings of René Magritte are typified by an ostensibly emblematic quality, with animals, clouds, rocks, candles, figures and so on all suggestive of a ‘meaning’. However, Magritte vehemently opposed symbolic interpretations of his paintings, and writer Suzi Gablik, who carried out an ongoing dialogue with him, described how ‘People have always looked for symbolic meanings in Magritte’s pictures, and in some cases managed to find them. Nothing caused him greater displeasure’ (Gablik, 1985, p.11). Magritte himself declared that the search for explanations is an attempt to avoid the possibility that things cannot be explained, and that viewers hunt around for a meaning to get themselves out of a quandary, and because they don’t understand what they are supposed to think when they confront the painting ... they want something to lean on, so they can be comfortable…. They want something secure to hang onto, so they can save themselves from the void. (In Gablik, 1985, p.11) A further example of the aspiration to arrest definitive symbolic interpretations is found in the work of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Pallasmaa describes how Tarkovsky’s films are ‘saturated with certain repeated images, such as water, fire, earth, wind, fog, trees, horses, dogs, mirrors, candles and hair. These are all images that are densely charged with

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symbolic connotations deriving from mythological and religious iconography’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p. 67). These images, however, resist interpretation through a device of ‘short-circuiting’, which ‘pushes the viewer off the path of conventional reading and placid acceptance of meaning into a state of intense curiosity and yearning’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p.68). The ‘short-circuiting’ is a kind of poetics, which presents that which might seem familiar in ways which require a different apprehension, where what seems straightforward resists closure, and instead becomes a riddle. Rather than maintaining a distinct set of connotations and meanings, ‘Tarkovsky’s images keep opening and branching out to an expanding field of associations and possible meanings. Tarkovsky creates interacting clusters of poetic images which constitute an invisible rhizome of feeling and association’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p.68). Designed landscapes negotiate this same symbolic dilemma, where there is a seemingly inexorable pull towards finding meaning in memorial sites. As Davis noted in her work in Rwanda and Cambodia, the seductive power of information acts as a diversion from confronting the horrors of the sites visited by Western tourists (Davis, 2009). And for locals, the encoding of narratives within memorials offers a different kind of security, bound up with aspects of evidence, identity and place. Gillis describes how in this context ‘anti-monuments’ – those memorial designs which rebel against conventional expectations – are criticised for ‘manufacturing oblivion’ and eroding the content of the event. However, he claims that through the dematerialising of memory in anti-monuments, memory can be stripped of an assumed objectivity, ‘thereby forcing everyone to confront her or his own subjectivity, while at the same time acknowledging a civic responsibility to not let the past repeat itself’ (Gillis, 1994, p.17). Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC is an iconic exemplar of the melancholy of the void, eschewing pure representation and instead abstracting the task of memory into the simple form of black granite walls listing the names of the dead. The memorial provides a resistance to the potential for the loss of empathy that can occur with the dehumanising effect of mass memorials. Rather than erasing the individual, the memorial works to maintain their presence. Although the mass of names is, on one hand, beyond the comprehension of an individual, it is significant that the dead are not listed alphabetically like a ‘telephone directory’, as Maya Lin pointed out, but in chronological order of death, like an ‘epic poem’ (in Hagopian, 2005, p.351). The polished black granite surface draws the visitor into the memorial, placing them in a dialogue with the names, but without insisting on an interpretation. Lin aspired to create a memorial that viewers ‘could relate to as on a journey, or passage, that would bring each to his own conclusions’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.238). One of the most controversial aspects of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was the pressure to create a figurative statue, as a corrective to the perceived absence of recognisable figures or symbols. Donohoe highlights how the

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addition of the statue of the three soldiers to the wider setting of the memorial shifts it from something abstract, and therefore open, to an ideological reading. Through providing an image of the ‘war hero’ it transcends the possibility of individuals’ deaths, replaced by a universal generic image: ‘a mere representation in the form of nameless, ideal soldiers’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.238). The difference between the potential to leave tokens to an individual at the black granite walls, and the seeming impossibility of doing so at the feet of the statue of soldiers, is pointed out by Donohoe as a confounding of the possible connection with death as an individual, human dimension. The void of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial allows for the visitor to engage fully with their self as part of the experience, and Donohoe notes that silence comes naturally at the site, rather than having to be requested by means of a sign, as at other memorials like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in nearby Arlington Cemetery. She says that ‘Monuments that do not present idols, or unified totalizing meaning, challenge us to be mindful of our own mortality and do not allow us to become comfortable in the mundanity of our everyday existence’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.238). The presentation of a void rather than a representation of soldiers also allows for the melancholy of the stranger memorial. While it is possible to read the names on the wall, for many of the visitors it is impossible to know those individuals; they are strangers and always will be. What Franses called the ‘sensation of non-acquaintanceship’ is intensified, that feeling of only having become acquainted with these people because they are dead. Yet, the feeling of loss is irresolvable, normal grieving is foiled by not being able to fill in all the details. While the meaningfulness of these individuals is apparent in the tokens laid at the memorial and the sense of reverence emanating from the hush of visitors, there is also the impossibility of closure. In Freudian terms, then, melancholia results, as part of the self, part of the ego, becomes attached to these lost objects, these many individual deaths. Lin’s memorial reveals the melancholy of the void as both a spatial expression and an aesthetic one. The void is formed through the depression into the earth, as well as in the resisting of representation. The Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation on the Île de la Cité in Paris echoes this dual move, creating a negative space at the tip of the island as well as offering almost nothing by means of ‘readable’ elements (Figure 9.6). It is not surprising to learn that Maya Lin became familiar with this memorial during time spent in Paris (Young, 2015). Designed by GeorgesHenri Pingusson and constructed in 1953–1962, the memorial is essentially invisible from the surrounding context. The memorial performs an ‘edit’ of the Parisian landscape, where, after descending into the void space nothing is visible but the sky and the void itself. All of Paris disappears. The focus shifts to the individual and their own presence within the space, their heightened sense of self, the sky, and the water which is hinted at where the Seine passes below a metal grille. Inside a crypt which leads off the void is a passage lined with seemingly infinite small lights.

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Figure 9.6 Georges-Henri Pingusson, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (‘Memorial of the Deportation’), Paris, France, 1962. Photo by Groume, 2010.

Adrian Forty argues that the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation is a success partly due to its inversion of the conventional memorial form of the monument. Not a protrusion, but a declivity; not an object, but a void – and when you are in the void, there is nothing there to look at apart from yourself, the sky, the water, and the unbroken surface of the concrete wall. (Forty, 2005, p.92) The fragility of memory is maintained, Forty observes, as opposed to becoming bound up in the massiveness of the concrete structure. He cites the words of the designer, Pingusson, who expresses a deeply melancholy reflection on memory: ‘It is in the law of all living creatures, beings and things to one day disappear … everything will fade away, everything will pass, and to want anything to last is a big challenge’ (in Forty, 2005, p.92). Another aspect of the success of the memorial, in Forty’s critique, is the use of concrete, and its resistance to apparent ageing. In contrast to the indices of weathering and decay inducing a melancholy evocation of time’s passage (see Chapter 18), here it is the very antithesis of that which heightens the memorial’s emotional potential. Forty explains:

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The concrete surroundings do not invite any kind of reflection on history, or even on the passage of time; memory, if there can be such a thing, is of the moment, it cannot be captured or preserved, and this the permanent newness of the concrete seems to acknowledge. (Forty, 2005, p.93) Pingusson’s memorial has resonances with Whiteread’s House, both in the use of concrete as a monolithic material, and in the amplification of the complex nature of memory through resisting the temptation to explain everything. These monolithic resistances create melancholy voids through establishing a physical absence – Pingusson through creating a negative space set down into the earth, and Whiteread through making mass out of a void. These formal manoeuvres resonate too with the enigmatic landscape of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Defying the interminable efforts to ‘explain’ the memorial, to find the meaning behind it, the field of stelae offer a poignantly opaque mnemonic marker. Undeniably phenomenologically rich, with an undulating ground surface covered with the rippling terrain of vertical elements, the memorial remains abstract and open to interpretation. Through purely experiential means, free from any interpretative support, emotion is elicited from visitors. It is a landscape which appears to create an empathetic force field, a place where contemplation – that most melancholic of acts – is facilitated. Perhaps it is merely the knowledge that this is a memorial, and that it represents a loss that is beyond comprehension, that provokes reflection and a depth of feeling. Nothing more needs to be said. A further example pushes the nature of memorial design into an interior realm – of a monument constructed within a gallery setting. Photographer Alfredo Jaar’s works on the Rwandan tragedy echo the corresponding engagements with landscape ‘content’ as in the design of memorials, and subsequently shed further light on the nature of the void. After taking thousands of photographs of the atrocities in Rwanda, Jaar chose to place the images away from the public gaze in his exhibition ‘Real Pictures’. The photographs were instead contained within black, linen-covered, archival boxes, and the boxes in turn were aggregated into forms reminiscent of tombs; large, solid and immutable. Each of the archival boxes had a text in white lettering on the top, describing the photograph inside. In all, 550 prints of 60 images were contained within the archival tombs, installed within a low-lit gallery, a liminal atmosphere evocative of melancholy. These descriptions included: Ntarama church, Nyamata, Rwanda, Monday, August 29, 1994. This photographs shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out into the

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daylight. 400 Tutsi men, women, and children who had come here seeking refuge were slaughtered during the Sunday mass. Benjamin looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove to his friends in Kampala, Uganda that the atrocities were real and that he had seen the aftermath. (Jaar, no date) Ruzizi 2 Bridge Bukavu, Zaire – Cyangugu, Rwanda Border Sunday, August 28th, 1994 The Ruzizi 2 Bridge is one of two bridges across the Ruzizi River that separates Rwanda from Zaire on the Southwest border. At the peak of the violence, refugees fled Rwanda at the rate of 35,000 people per day. Now this bridge has been closed for six days, the banks of the river are swelling with people waiting to cross. (In van de Vall, 2008, p.1) The solidity of the boxes, and their monumental forms, paradoxically took on the quality of an absence. Forced to imagine rather than simply look, the ‘Real Pictures’ monuments amplified the beholders’ emotional engagement at the same time as promoting a sense of empathy. Far from the compassion fatigue of media saturation, or the apathy born of inundation with images of tragedy, the effect of Jaar’s monuments was to deny a passive response. The beholder needed to become actively engaged, through the seat of their own imagination, through locating the tragic within their very self. In contrast to Roland Barthes’ comments on how ‘shock photos’ tend to be ‘over-constructed’, Jaar’s monuments are under-constructed. Barthes observed that numerous images of horror results in the construction of an ‘intentional language of horror’, yet it is one which fails to touch us because ‘we are in each case dispossessed of our judgement; someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing – except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence’ (Barthes, 1997, p.71). Instead of giving everything, Jaar gives almost nothing, and this intensifies the melancholy of the void. As Jaar explained, ‘I wanted to work in reverse, I wanted to start with an absence in the hope of provoking a presence’ (Jaar, no date). The beholder is not able to find a resolution, as the images remain elusive; the void sets up a strongly melancholic situation that has resonances with the liminal, described in Chapter 14. As in liminality, the melancholy of the void is related to a condition of deferment, resistance and imprecision. Another photographic example illustrates this, as in Renée de Vall’s recollection of images of the 2004 tsunami, recalling how one in particular stood out, an ‘apparently peaceful scene of two children running to a sea line that was slowly retreating’. She explains that what made these pictures different was that ‘they mobilize the empathy of the spectator as they require

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an imaginative ‘filling in’. And that is also how they acquire their ‘slowness’: they entrench themselves in one’s memory, because they ask for the spectator’s active engagement’ (van de Vall, 2008, p.6). The void is a condition that promotes an empathetic and ethical melancholy. Rather than vicariously feasting upon the tragic, the void replaces the particular with the abstract, and therefore turns emotion back onto the beholder themselves, grounding it within their own subjectivity. Robert Ivy observes that: ‘Following the immediacy of loss, when grief has thinned or disappeared, we inevitably begin to appreciate the monument or the memorial for its more abstract qualities’ (Ivy, 2002, p.84). With time, the numbing saturation by images of violence, or the easy consumption of data, is replaced by an expression of the ineffable. With reference to abstract objects in the context of an architecture of the tragic, Robert Maxwell observes that they are enigmatic, and because of this ‘resist ... being emptied of meaning’ (Maxwell, 2000, p.11). Further, Pallasmaa explains, ‘Abstraction is not a synonym for the lack of meaning, but its opposite. Abstraction is a condensation of meaning or imagery, a pregnant symbol’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.80).

References Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard). New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1997). ‘Shock photos’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (trans. Richard Howard; originally published 1979). Berkeley: University of California Press. Curl, James Steven (1980). A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Davis, Shannon (2009). ‘Ma[r]king memory’. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, New Zealand. Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography, 5(2): 235–242. Forty, Adrian (2005). ‘Concrete and memory’, in Mark Crinson (ed.), Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Oxford: Routledge. Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104. Gablik, Suzi (1985). Magritte. London: Thames and Hudson. Gillis, John R. (1994). ‘Introduction’, in John R. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Godfrey, Mark (2007). Abstraction and the Holcaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hagopian, Patrick (2005). ‘The commemorative landscape of the Vietnam War’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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Ivy, Robert (2002). ‘Memorials, monuments and meaning’. Architectural Record, 190(7): 84. Jaar, Alfredo (n.d.). Lecture for the series La Generazione delle Immagini. www. undo.net/cgi-bin/openframe.pl?x=/Pinto/Eng/fjarr.htm, 27 December 2015. Jaksch, Helen (2013). ‘The empty chair is not so empty: ghosts and the performance of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115. Keenan, Thomas (2003). ‘Making the dead count, literally’. New York Times, 30 November, 2003. Linenthal, Edward T. (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. MacKeith, Peter (ed.) (2005). Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Essays. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Massey, Doreen (1995). ‘Space-time and the politics of location’, in James Lingwood (ed.), Rachel Whiteread: House. London: Phaidon/Arts Council England. Maxwell, Robert. (2000). ‘Approaching the void: can the tragic appear in architecture?’ Architectural Design (The Tragic in Architecture), 70(5): 8–14. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy. Petersson, Anna and Wingren, Carola (2011) ‘Designing a memorial place: continuing care, passage landscapes and future memories’, Mortality, 16(1): 54–69. Senie, Harriet F. (2013). Commemorating the Oklahoma City Bombing: reframing tragedy as triumph’, Public Art Dialogue, 3(1): 80–109. Soubigou, Gilles (2013). ‘Dickens illustrations: France and other countries’, in Michael Hollington (ed.), The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 154–166. van de Vall, Renée (2008). At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wallace, R.W. (1912). ‘Charles Dickens: brilliant British novelist’, The Journal of Education, 75(5): 117–118. Wylie, John (2009). ‘Landscape, absence and the geographies of love’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 34(3): 275–289. Young, James E. (2015). ‘Countermonuments as deep spaces for memory’, in Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult (eds), Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Kindle edition).

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10 The uncanny

The familiar made strange – the uncanny – is inherently melancholy. The distancing of the familiar loads it with an intangible poignancy, the sensation of something disturbing yet strangely appealing in an aesthetic sense. The uncanny is associated with a palpable unease and Freud places it in ‘the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread’ (Freud, 2003, p.123). So compelling is the strange pull of the uncanny that Freud notes it as one of the rare moments when a psychologist takes an interest in aesthetics. Defining the uncanny vexed Freud, and as he traced its etymology he observed that in many languages there was no word for this special type of the frightening, finding parallels in the eerie and the haunted. The most potent sense of the uncanny was located within two apparent antonyms – the German words heimlich and unheimlich – the homely and the unhomely. There are times, Freud notes, when these terms merge, with homely and unhomely occurring simultaneously, creating the strange sensation of the uncanny. From a Freudian perspective, the engine for both melancholy and the uncanny is repetition. Melancholy revolves around an eternal repeating or revisiting of loss, resisting the passage out of this loop via the pathway of mourning. The uncanny is also produced via repetition and return, particularly in the phenomena of doubling and mirroring. Déjà-vu is an instance of the uncanny, a strange sensation of repetition, yet an irresolvable one; as Freud puts it: ‘what is looked for is not remembered.’ Melancholy and the uncanny are aesthetic conundrums, where it is seemingly perverse to find aesthetic pleasure in something so troubling to the psyche. Anthony Vidler locates the uncanny emphatically within the architectural – both in the residential scale of the house, perhaps haunted, in which there is a vulnerability to terror, and also in the urban which has been cut through by the incursions of modernity. Vidler explains that in these two situations the ‘uncanny’ is not the property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the

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boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. (Vidler, 1992, p.11) Vidler draws attention to different species of the uncanny as exemplified in their cinematic expression, each one evoking melancholy landscapes in different ways. He shows how Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire draws upon Benjamin’s historical uncanny, a metropolitan melancholia infused with the poignancy of post-Second World War Europe. By contrast, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, for example, presents the uncanny of contemporary suburbia, a landscape of claustrophobia and darkness, amplified further in his television series Twin Peaks. Looking into the future, William Gibson’s Neuromancer expands the melancholy related to the loss of the sense of the body – one of the key qualities of the uncanny – into the field of science fiction. Cinematically, this aesthetic was seen in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, based on Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – a cinematic vision which exhibited not only the ‘peculiarly contemporary sense of haunting’ that Vidler saw in Neuromancer, but arguably also the Benjaminian historic uncanny, a melancholy of the temporal embedded with ruins and dereliction. The melancholy of uncanny architecture and landscapes lies in part within the resistance to closure, the wound kept open. Eric Kligerman writes of the ‘Holocaustal uncanny’, a quality he locates within Daniel Liebskind’s architecture, including his Jewish Museum in Berlin, works that incessantly attempt to sabotage any sense of comfort in relation to this past; the epitaphic spaces of his museums continually unwrite themselves in order to destabilize any position on behalf of the spectator to fulfil a work of mourning within its halls. (Kligerman, 2007, p.246, n.4) The same resistance to closure is found in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer and the landscapes of Alain Resnais’ films, where the blurring of the paint or the desolation of the cinematic scene is a subversion of the subject’s wish to empathise with what is seen – these works estrange the self, denying engagement and placing the beholder outside the work at a melancholy distance. This strange stranding between the real and the unreal – or the surreal – is supported by the aesthetic practice of ostranenie, or strangemaking, a key strategy of the Russian Formalists. Through making things strange via the uncanny, the Russian Formalists achieved a retardation of perception, therefore slowing down experience. Making something strange is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar, or defamiliarisation, a practice which echoes the strategy of repetition, of re-presenting something known in a way which makes us re-see it as unknown, or to use Freud’s term, ‘novel’.

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The uncanny 75 Frederic Jameson states that art is a renewer of perception and is ‘a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct, and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror’ (Jameson, 1972, p.52). Heidegger’s conception of the poetic view of dwelling reflects this position in the idea of revealing the things that are common in uncommon ways, and as Donohoe suggests, this is a ‘way of being mindful of the world around us in an open way’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.237). Uncanny landscapes revolve around repetition and making strange. Not only are the landscapes in themselves strange, but they reflect that strangeness back onto the beholder to induce melancholy feelings. Jonathan Flatley writes of a literary version of uncanny melancholy, where works might be seen as ‘machines of self-estrangement’. Flatley used this term to describe three novels at the centre of his investigation into melancholy, where he sought to illuminate the way in which the books were devices which ‘allow one to see oneself as if from the outside’ (Flatley, 2008, p.80). There are moments – aesthetic experiences – that place one outside of the world as we know it, beyond the conventions of the spatial and the temporal. While Flatley’s observations are grounded in literature, he also points to those moments where this estrangement takes place in the landscape, citing the examples of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Donald Judd’s polished aluminium boxes, where ‘one finds oneself in a world that does not exist, or that only exists in this space at this moment’ (Flatley, 2008, p.81). However, the experience of estrangement does not strand the beholder outside of place and time, but must occur alongside a datum of sorts – something that ‘brings one back from the work into the world’ (Flatley, 2008, p.82). Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, New York hovers within this space between the work and the world, of moving outside place and time and back to the quotidian space of the city (Figure 10.1). The melancholy of the Holocaustal uncanny is evoked in the work’s resistance to closure, and the estrangement of the self, all of which is complicated here by the tension between abstraction and symbolism. Goldsworthy’s Garden lies between these poles, with, on one hand, an overt narrative and script being offered, but on the other the possibility of succumbing to the strangeness of the site. And, in the context of the Holocaust, making strange is exactly what is needed, as a means of averting the possibility of an easy reading. An interpretation of the Garden of Stones via the frame of the uncanny is therefore a means of rescuing it from the automatised and numbing memorial language that invokes an orthodox set of symbols, and has recourse to attempting to explain or heal. A means of being mindful of the world is possible through finding the uncanniness of form, through the realisation of the strangeness of the form – as in the work of the Russian Formalists.

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Figure 10.1 Andy Goldsworthy, Garden of Stones, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, USA, 2003. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2008.

Boris Eichenbaum signalled formalism as a freedom from ‘the traditional idea of form as an envelope, a vessel into which one pours a liquid (the content)’ (Eichenbaum, 1965, p.112) and described the need, therefore, to show that ‘the perception of form results from special artistic techniques which force the reader to experience form’ (Eichenbaum, 1965, p.113). Victor Shklovsky’s essay Art as Technique described the way in which defamiliarisation in literature is a means of overcoming the automatism of perception that comes with habitualisation. Shklovksy refers to Tolstoy’s technique of ‘pricking of the conscience’, where something is made strange

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by being described but not named, or there is an unexpected narrator for a story, such as in the story ‘Kholstomer’ which is narrated by a horse. Such techniques produce an uncanny effect, adopted by the modernist avantgardes, as a way to deal with the sense of exile from reality that came with the trappings of modernity, ‘as if a world estranged and distanced from its own nature could only be recalled to itself by shock, by the effects of things deliberately “made strange”’ (Vidler, 1992, p.8). Georges Descombes alludes to the landscape parallel of this in his description of constructing a landscape intervention in such a way that it ‘jolts its context, scrapes the ordinariness of a situation, and imposes a shift on what seems the most obvious’ (Descombes, 1999, p.76). Working with the familiar elements of trees and stones, Goldsworthy makes them strange. The trees are taken out of context, and planted in the stones. The stones also are arrayed in a way which is almost formal in its structure, but also has a strange sense of being stranded, as though the earth has suddenly been moved away from them, leaving them standing in space. These visual effects are what the Russian Formalists called ‘baring the device’ – making apparent the construction and scaffolding of a work rather than obscuring it in effects. Mukarovský called it ‘foregrounding’, a pushing of the formal devices to the front of our perception, and through doing this, raising the consciousness of engaging with the work. This foregrounding impedes an ‘automatic’ reading of the work, it is not easy to engage, and this leads to a more profound experience. At the Garden of Stones there is no easy reading. The devices are foregrounded, bared, and it is in this retardation and this strangeness that ‘any sense of comfort in relation to this past’, to use Kligerman’s phrase, is not possible (Kligerman, 2007, p. 246, n. 4). The familiarity of trees and stones is unsettled by Goldsworthy’s work, intensifying the emotional weight of otherwise simple elements. They echo the strange familiarity of the empty chair, as Jaksch explained: ‘It is in that uncertain space between absence and presence, between empty chair and missing body, that ghosts appear’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.106). The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial designed by Rachel Whiteread, and unveiled in 2000, also uses seemingly familiar domestic elements in a way which makes them strange (Figure 10.2). Whiteread’s modus operandi evokes the melancholy of the uncanny, with her castings repeating and re-presenting entire rooms and houses, transforming voids into solids. The resonances with the melancholic ‘lost object’ are profound, as the works make visible the very absences themselves. At the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial a library is cast, from the inside out, so that the books themselves are evident only as an ‘impression’. The specific titles cannot be seen, and instead there is a caesura, an unclosable hole. On one hand it looks strangely familiar, it looks like a library. On contemplating the memorial, however, it becomes clear that here is something profoundly uncanny, a mirror, a double.

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Figure 10.2 Rachel Whiteread, Nameless Library: The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2000. Photo by Spencer Means, 2009.

For her work Ghost (1990), Whiteread described how her casting of a room would be a process of ‘mummifying the air in the room and making it solid’ (in Carley, 2008, p.26). Rachel Carley categorises Whiteread’s Ghost as a ‘fetch’, a particularly liminal species of ghost, of someone about to pass from life into death. Like Jorge Otero-Pailos’ Ethics of Dust (described in Chapter 16), Whiteread’s Ghost recorded the almost invisible traces of human dwelling, revealing the subtle palimpsest of the most ordinary of surfaces. Carley described how Whiteread’s casting ‘recovers the particular maculations left on the interior over time, such as the ash deposits embedded on the fire grate and the traces of yellowing wallpaper stained by nicotine’ (in Carley, 2008, p.29). Or, as Richard Noble poetically evokes the idea of traces, ‘[i]n imagining what has gone before in a space one has access to small bits of information, a sort of fossil record on the walls and floors and ceilings of the space’ (Noble, 2005, p.67). The uncanny of haunting is invoked, of the after-images of absences, of remanence.1 Making casts, or effigies, also underlies the uncanny monumental architecture of Etienne-Louis Boullée. A defining moment for Boullée was the revelation of seeing his shadow cast by moonlight, describing how his ‘effigy produced by its light excited my attention [and] by a particular disposition of the mind, the effect of this simulacrum seemed to me to be one of extreme sadness’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.169). Through finding the copy of himself within the landscape, and the realisation of ‘the mass of objects

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detached in black against a light of extreme pallor’, Boullée set about translating these impressions into architecture (in Vidler, 1992, p.170). This architecture would ‘express the extreme melancholy of mourning by means of its stripped and naked walls’, and draw on the effigy of the self to construct an architecture of shadows (Vidler, 1992, p.170). Vidler draws attention to the way in which the shadow of the self was about the body disappearing into darkness, but also an alternative view of the body as a model for architecture. Rather than the body’s perfect form as a proportional guide, here it was something of the self’s darker side, the shadowy silhouette, haunting. Boullée, Vidler observes, ‘prefigured the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the double as the harbinger of death, or as the shadow of the unburied dead’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.171). The architectural invention is therefore one of ‘experienced spatial uncertainty’, an echo of Caillois’ investigations into ‘legendary psycasthenia’, explored further in Chapter 20. The melancholy of the uncanny is evoked not only by particular physical elements of architecture or other spatial interventions, but also through the way in which the landscape is experienced. As Vidler observed above, the uncanny is a kind of projection, a mental state which creates ambiguity and slippage. Through mirroring, doubling and repetition, the pleasurable pain of the uncanny suffuses movement through the landscape. The sensation of being lost often brings with it a feeling of déjà-vu, of having been there before. Wandering through Venice, a city in which becoming lost is compulsory, one encounters similar scenes over and over again. There is an elusiveness at play, an ambiguity between that which is sought and that which is encountered. The weirdness of finding a seemingly parallel version of the city, or indeed of returning to the same spot again and again, is uncanny and melancholy in its sense of becoming distanced from the world, from the point of origin or destination. The French term dépaysement unites the uncanny precisely with the state of being disoriented in the landscape, as it literally means out of the country (pays). The aesthetic potency of this feeling of being lost or displaced was mined by the Situationists, creating intentional disorientation that oscillated between familiar landmarks and making them strange through defining random routes within the city based upon games of chance. The related practice of the dérive, or drift, was suffused with the melancholy of disorientation, based upon the dislocation and detachment made possible by being a ‘man of the crowd’. The strange poignancy of this drifting and the uncanny experiences it produced were woven through surrealist works, including André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938). Breton wanders through a mostly vacant Paris, the ordinary landscape made strange. Photographs are included within the book, including the scene of a dinner outside the City Hotel, which is poignantly deserted; the image which relates to a remembered walk through the Tuileries Gardens together is similarly desolate. Sartre’s character Roquentin evokes the ambiguous slipping between the real and

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the imagined, of wanting to disappear into the crowd, evoking the ennui of the twentieth-century urban experience. The melancholy uncanny of the landscape is also found in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe. The works of both authors offer modi operandi for landscape experience which invokes the poignancy of strangeness. In Borges the effect of copying and mirroring create a sense of unease. The Library of Babel contains everything ever written or said – i.e. an exact parallel of the world – and In Exactitude in Science describes a map of the world at one-to-one scale. These exact doublings of reality create a sense of the uncanny, undoing our certainty about the boundaries of existence and dissolving the assurance of what is real and what is just a version of the real. The unease rooted in the uncanniness of reflection was fundamental to Borges’ relationship with the world, describing how he was always afraid of mirrors. I had three large mirrors in my room when I was a boy and I felt very acutely afraid of them, because I saw myself in the dim light I saw myself thrice over, and I was very afraid of the thought that perhaps the three shapes would begin moving by themselves … I have always been afraid … of mahogany, of crystals, even of limpid water. (In Boulter, 2001, p.359) Borges’ evocation of the library, the map and the mirror as uncanny allude to potential perspectives on an experience of the landscape, suggesting the possibility of succumbing to the unnerving relationship between our selves and the world, and finding the aesthetic appeal of such disorientation. In Poe’s stories, extreme attention to detail in order to create atmosphere summons a sense of the strange in the familiar. In The Domain of Arnheim and The Fall of the House of Usher, the landscape and buildings are described in such exacting detail, an extreme verisimilitude, that they possess a sense of forensic documentation. The resonances with detective stories are not coincidental, as Poe is considered one of the inspirations for this genre, and with this comes a constant shuttling between certainty and ambiguity. Also, within the exactitude, the landscape so closely observed, there is the constant implication of something sinister which is at the same time seductive. The landscape becomes hermetic, claustrophobic. Hoffman describes Poe’s technique as one of creating ‘mood-invested space’, of ‘making the atmosphere visible’; in terms which might be drawn from a landscape architecture text, he points to how through change of close and distant perspective with the impact on the observer remaining constant, Poe derives one of his most important effects for building an uncanny atmosphere. On the objective side, form, color, magnitude, and situation of concrete objects are expressive by nature: they cause things to appear strange or normal, threatening or familiar,

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uncanny or idyllic. Tones and sounds, light and shadow, brightness and darkness are additional phenomena which create atmosphere. (Hoffman, 1979, p.3) One of the particular moments where melancholy and the uncanny coincide is when the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher views the scene reflected in a lake. The narrator has already recognised the pathos of the scene, as he ‘had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher’. Curious as to whether the effect of the scene was a product of ‘combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us’ or if this power ‘lies among considerations beyond our depth’, the narrator pulled his horse alongside a ‘black and lurid tarn’ to view the reflection. Here he experienced ‘a shudder even more thrilling than before – upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows’ (Poe, 1966, p.178). The uncanny repetition of the landscape in the reflection served to intensify the melancholy, emphasising the manner in which the mode of experiencing the landscape might be drawn into the amplification of emotion. And, if reflection is the visual evocation of an uncanny melancholy, then echoes resonate aurally. The repetition of sound is productive of poignancy, bringing to mind Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, invoked above as a site of the Holocaustal uncanny. Within the Memory Void, visitors walk across the surface of an artwork by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, 10,000 metal faces with screaming mouths (Figure 10.3). The installation, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), produces an eerie sound as the metal shapes knock together and echo within the abyss of the Memory Void, a sound of melancholy. The uncanniness of sounds that echo those of humans also produce a particular poignancy, as Henry David Thoreau noted of the call of the owl. In Walden, Thoreau described the hooting owl as ‘the most melancholy sound in nature’, drawing parallels with a human’s dying moans or sobs, a sound of ‘swamps and twilight woods’ (Thoreau, 1995, p.66). While echoes suggest an uncanny aural manifestation of melancholy, so too does the absence of sound. Freud concluded his seminal essay on the uncanny with a reminder that ‘solitude, silence and darkness’ are residues from infantile anxiety, dark presences that continue to haunt our apprehension of the world (Freud, 2003, p.159). It seems no coincidence that these three qualities are also quintessentially melancholy.

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Figure 10.3 Menashe Kadishman, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), at Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2001. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2014.

Note 1 In physics the term ‘remanence’ refers to the magnetic traces that remain in a material after the external source of magnetism is removed. In metaphysics it is a term used by dowsers to refer to psychic remains within ruins.

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References Boulter, Jonathan Stuart (2001). ‘Partial glimpses of the infinite: Borges and the simulacrum’. Hispanic Review, 69(3): 355–377. Carley, Rachel (2008). ‘Domestic afterlives: Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost’, Architectural Design, 78: 26–29. Descombes, Georges (1999). ‘The Swiss way’, in James Corner (ed.), Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography, 5(2): 235–242. Eichenbaum, Boris. (1965). ‘The theory of the “formal method”’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (trans.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (original essay published 1927). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Flatley, Jonathan (2008). Affective Mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, Sigmund (2003). ‘The uncanny’, in The Uncanny (trans. David McLintock; original essay published in 1919). New York: Penguin Books. Hoffmann, Gerhard (1979). ‘Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’ (trans. Elizabeth G. Lord). Poe Studies, 12(1). www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/ p1979101.htm, 27 December 2015. Jaksch, Helen (2013). ‘The empty chair is not so empty: ghosts and the performance of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115. Jameson, Fredric (1972). The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kligerman, Eric (2007). Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Noble, Richard (2005). ‘The meaning of what remains’, in Eckhard Schneider (ed.), Rachel Whiteread. Köln: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Poe, Edgar Allan (1966). ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (story first published 1839). New York: Doubleday. Thoreau, Henry David (1995). Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Walden originally published 1854). New York: Dover Publications. Vidler, Anthony (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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11 Silence

Silence is productive of contemplative melancholy, the removal of noise and distraction to carve out a restful zone. In his lecture on the love song, Nick Cave declared, ‘Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence’, aligning the sensation of slowing time with that of tranquillity and sadness (Cave, 2007, p.8). Silence and the contemplative potency of melancholy come together in the quiet spaces of monasteries, churches and cemeteries. At different times, and at different places, silence can take on an eerie quality, as though something is missing or affected by unseen presences. This, too, is melancholy, uncanny, the familiar made strange through the removal of sound. The falling of silence at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, according to Donohoe, as described in Chapter 9, comes naturally, as though part of the design itself. No signs are needed to enforce contemplation. The condition of silence is an aural dimension of the aesthetic of melancholy, reinforcing the interpretation of aesthetics as encompassing the full sensory domain. Rousseau, in searching for places of happiness, dismissed those which were either totally calm or had too much movement. Although in Rousseau’s eyes the opposite of what he was seeking, he advised that ‘Complete silence induces melancholy: it is an image of death’ (Rousseau, 2004, p.47). Silence creates an aural void, distinct from but often in parallel with the representational void outlined in Chapter 9. The coming of silence creates a temporal ‘space’, a palpable moment into which contemplation and sadness can pour unabated. There are moments in the aural landscape which are sculpted as explicit absences of sound, notably the tradition of two minutes of silence on Armistice Day, introduced on the first anniversary of the end of the First World War. The observation of silence at 11  a.m. on 11 November was held throughout the British Empire, with all activity coming to a standstill: trains were delayed, no telephone calls were made, and even court proceedings were suspended momentarily. A newspaper report from the time described how the effect was magical, with people pausing and bowing their heads, and The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was … a

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silence which was almost pain … And the spirit of memory brooded over it all. (Manchester Guardian, 12 November 1919 in Dyer, 1994, p.20) The silence of the Armistice Day observance was anchored at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London. The memorial was a marker which was seen to ‘record – to hold that silence – the silence that was gathered within it and which would, therefore, emanate from it’ (Dyer, 1994, p.24). With the annual observation of the two-minute silence, the monument was, as Dyer puts it, ‘recharged’. He notes also that over the ensuing years the silence has diminished, and the absoluteness of the arrested moment has been diluted by the clamour of the city, and the ‘silence is becoming inaudible, fading’ (Dyer, 1994, p.25). Yet, silence as a space for melancholy, remains a possibility. The loss of 29 miners in the Pike River coal mine on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island was marked by two minutes’ silence at 2 p.m. on the day of national mourning, 2 December 2010. Even within the noise of contemporary life, as alluded to by Dyer, the two minutes of silence was palpable, as people stopped in their tracks, buses pulled over to the side of the road, sports teams paused in the middle of their games and stood side by side with heads bowed, and urban squares were momentarily stilled. Against the angst that had followed first the waiting and then the loss of hope following the first mine blast on 19 November, the silence created an aural hole into which memories, grief and empathy could flow. The observation of silence was repeated in the memorials to the 185 victims of Christchurch’s 2011 earthquake, as it is for many commemorative events throughout the world. And through this, an awareness that some of the most powerful landscape gestures are not spatial but acoustic. With reference to the possibility of expressing tragedy following the Holocaust, Terry Eagleton searched for some means of expression. As with the numbing by numbers in the ‘automatic machinery of remembrance’ (Keenan, 2003) there is a need to transcend the noise of information, of attempts at quantification, of striving to understand something that exceeds our capacity for understanding. Eagleton lamented how, having ‘supped too full of horrors’ even the ‘tragic’ has become too shallow a signifier, and therefore there can be ‘no icons of such catastrophes, to which the only appropriate response would be screaming or silence’ (Eagleton, 2003, p.64). Silence is an acoustically sculpted space within sound, a hollowing out within the mass of sound. The silences within sound shape the works of Luigi Nono, a composer who inspired architect Carlo Scarpa. The composer and architect were friends, exchanging ideas about their two fields. Federica Goffi-Hamilton relates how in Nono’s compositions, ‘Silences become “visible” in the “voids” left in the score between sound blocks’ – a quality which is echoed in Scarpa’s architecture where silence/void becomes the spatial expression of gap/reveal (Goffi-Hamilton, 2006, pp.292–293). In Scarpa’s work the reveal was clearly articulated between his insertions into

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an existing structure and the pre-existing form, allowing for an emphasis of time’s passage. Like silence, the reveal heightens awareness, enhancing listening and observation, slowing time, and fostering a melancholy contemplative state. Pallasmaa infuses architecture with silence, creating a House of Silence on Siikajärvi Lake in Finland as a retreat for a musician. Robyn Beaver describes how the House of Silence gained its name during the process of construction, as ‘it became evident that the interplay of nature and architecture enabled the dweller to recover the precious silence of his/her soul’ (Beaver, 2006, p.167). Further, Pallasmaa made silence one of his six themes for the millennium, stating: The silence of art is not mere absence of sound, but an independent sensory and mental state, an observing, listening and knowing silence. It is a silence that evokes a sense of melancholy and a yearning for the absent ideal. Also great architecture evokes silence. Experiencing a building is not only a matter of looking at its space, forms and surfaces – it is also a matter of listening to its characteristic silence. And every great architectural work has its unique silence. Further, Pallasmaa ends his proffering of themes with a plea: ‘We need an ascetic, concentrative and contemplative architecture, an architecture of silence’ (Pallasmaa, 1994, p.79).

References Beaver, Robyn (2006). A Pocketful of Houses. Mulgrave, Australia: The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd. Cave, Nick (2007). ‘The secret life of the love song’. In The Complete Lyrics 1978– 2007. London: Penguin. Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press. Eagleton, Terry (2003). Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Goffi-Hamilton, Federica (2006). Carlo Scarpa and the eternal canvas of silence. Architectural Review Quarterly, 10(3/4): 291–300. Pallasmaa, Juhani (1994). ‘Six themes for the next millennium’. Architectural Review, 196(1169): 74–79. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2004). ‘Reveries of the solitary walker’ (originally published in 1782), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge.

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12 Shadows and darkness

Darkness and the play of shadows are saturated with melancholy. Time’s passage is written in the world of shadows, and resonates with the estranging sensations of the uncanny. To darken has a double meaning: optically it is the loss of light or increase in pigment; emotionally it refers to a mounting gloom or sadness. Both senses are at play in melancholy’s affinity with shadows. And, like silence, there is a pervasive sense of absence which defines the condition. The move from shadows into darkness, blackness, brings melancholy close to the edge of the sublime, the point at which an emotional regime of contemplation and sadness is overtaken by awe. Kant found the melancholy moment within the sublime, with the ‘deep ravines and torrents raging there, deep-shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy’ (in Casey, 2002, p.70). Edmund Burke, in his On the Sublime and the Beautiful, also plotted this shadowy domain, highlighting the delicate boundary between a pleasurable feeling of apprehension and an all-consuming fear. Blackness, he observed, could have painful effects to begin with, but we can become accustomed to them so that the initial terror abates. With this familiarity comes a softening of the ‘horror and sternness’ of the original impression, but the brooding blackness is indelible. Burke stated: ‘Black will always have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the change to it from other colours too violent; or if it occupy the whole compass of the sight, it will then be darkness’ (Burke, 1764, p.285). In darkness lies the constant possibility of encountering the unknown, of walking into dangerous obstructions or falling off precipices (Figure 12.1). The edge between melancholy and fear is a line that must be negotiated carefully. The effect of darkness is profound, as in the description by the psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski: Dark space envelopes me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space, the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role. (In Caillois, 1987, p.30)

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Figure 12.1 The shadowy melancholy of darkness, Monaco, France. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2008.

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Minkowski’s description of melting into darkness, of merging with it, echoes the uncanny’s unease in the loss of the body, something which is in turn related to the melancholy of camouflage (Chapter 20). Roger Caillois expands on Minkowski’s evocation of the power of darkness, adding that while light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is ‘filled,’ it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence ‘the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light’; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else. (In Caillois, 1987, p.30) The Burkean darkness and Caillois’ and Minkowski’s evocation of the enveloping spatial field find form in the project by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. As the tenth invited project for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Balka’s work, How It Is, invokes the weighty melancholy that descends with a depth of shadow, of darkness, ‘a space for contemplation’ (Brown, 2009). Kester Rattenbury described the experience of moving from the outside of the huge form into the interior as one of defamiliarisation, in that although you already know from the outside how large the form is, on the inside the darkness takes away this knowledge. He sees it as a ‘pure operation of spatial awareness, a realised absence’ and as much as the darkness is a ‘formal’ device, it is also weighted with content. There are evident references to ‘recent heavy Polish history, with the entrance ramp likened to the trucks which took Jews away to concentration camps in Treblinka and Auschwitz’ (Rattenbury, 2009, p.110). As with the echoing void in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, it is the poignancy of sound which adds to the association with a dark past, where walking beneath the container-like form visitors could hear the sound of disembodied footsteps echoing from above. Cultural darkness and optical darkness combine in Balka’s project, intensifying melancholy. The coincidence between darkness and sadness echoes with Robert Burton’s observation that ‘the night and darkness makes men sad; the like do all subterranean vaults, dark houses in caves and rocks; desart [sic] places cause melancholy in an instant, especially such as have not been used to it, or otherwise accustomed’ (Burton, 1838, p.158). In darkness the pupil dilates, and this provides a parallel effect to emotional stimulus, in particular sadness. Psychologists studying empathetic reactions found that images of faces with larger pupils were more likely to evoke an emotional response (Harrison et al., 2007). Further, sustained pupil dilation is associated with depression, and the tendency to ‘ruminate’, or consciously think about one’s depressive symptoms (Siegle et al., 2001). The blackened space brings to mind a camera obscura – literally meaning dark room. In Balka’s dark room no light enters, but in a camera obscura a pinhole allows light through in the same way as a lens. The inverted image is projected upon the floor or wall, opposite the aperture, almost like a

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‘real-time’ video link, but here it is unmediated by technology, it is real, or more precisely surreal, with its otherworldly quality and preternatural light. Camera obscuras were popular during Victorian and Edwardian times, as a spectacle, and can still be found in various places, including in the Observatory in Bristol, England, and on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. A contemporary camera obscura was created in the ‘Garden of Australian Dreams’ at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, designed by landscape architects Room 4.1.3. It is also an echo of darkness of a different kind, as it resembles the helmet of the outlaw Ned Kelly. Étienne-Louis Boullée, the visionary eighteenth-century French architect, sought the darkness of death in his designs. His ‘architecture of shadows’ was not so much a play of dark against light, but dark against darker; he aspired to ‘the black picture of an architecture of shadows depicted by the effect of even blacker shadows’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.170). As discussed in Chapter 10, this effect had occurred to him when walking in the woods, when he was struck by the sadness in nature, and he wanted to express the ‘extreme melancholy of mourning’ through the creation of a ‘buried architecture’. Boullée set out his ideas in his Architecture: Essay on Art, with a specific study of melancholy in architecture and how to achieve it. He declared: It does not appear to me to be possible to conceive anything more melancholy than a monument formed by a plane surface, plain and unornamented in a material which absorbs light and is absolutely devoid of all detail, whose sole decoration is the play of shadows against even blacker shadows. No, no other scene as sad as this exists, and, if we put aside the beauty created by art, it would be impossible not to see in such a construction a melancholy picture of architecture. (Boullée, 2004, p.474) Extending his experience of shadows in the forest, Boullée contemplated how he could work with light and darkness in design. He speculated that an architecture of melancholy would mean working with ‘nothing but the effects of darkness’ (Boullée, 2004, p.472). Through obscuring the source of any light entering the space, he felt he could inspire ‘tranquil meditation, penitence and even religious awe’.

References Boullée, Étienne-Louis (2004). ‘A treatise on architecture’ (originally published 1793–1799), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge. Brown, Mark (2009). ‘Tate Modern puts void in Turbine Hall’. Guardian, 12 October. www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/12/tate-modern-turbinehall-balka, 27 December 2015. Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley.

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Shadows and darkness 91 Burton, Robert (1838) The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It : In Three Partitions. With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up. London: B Blake. Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley; original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Casey, Edward S. (2002). Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harrison, Neil A., Wilson, C. Ellie and Critchley, Hugo D. (2007). ‘Processing of observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy’. Emotion, 7(4): 724–729. Rattenbury, Kester (2009). ‘A limited yet boundless sensory explosion in darkness’. Architectural Review, 226(1354): 110. Siegle, Greg J., Granholm, Eric, Ingram, Rick E. and Matt, Georg E. (2001). ‘Pupillary and reaction time measures of sustained processing of negative information in depression’. Biological Psychiatry, 49(7): 624–636. Vidler, Anthony (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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13 Aura

Aura is vulnerable and fragile, with an always imminent sense of fading that is suggestive of a melancholy aesthetic. As an intangible quality, aura is often described in terms of its absence, its impending loss, and it is inherently elusive and fugitive. Even the very definition of aura is mysterious. Walter Benjamin, the pre-eminent theorist of aura, wrote of it in a variety of ways, each suggestive of a distinctive emphasis. The pivotal point was aura’s association with authenticity and originality, something which was under threat from mass production. This in itself was a paradox, a conflict, as it meant at once the loss of the uniqueness of an object and at the same time the achievement of egalitarian access to art: ‘For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’ (Benjamin, 1969, p.226). Defining the nature of aura extended beyond debates over the politics of mass consumption and into the aesthetic quality of what is beheld. For Benjamin, aura is the perception of ‘distance’, however close something may be. And, it also relates to a phenomenon – a painting, a landscape, a tree, the sky – ‘looking back at us’, returning our gaze. These two core threads of Benjamin’s theory of aura are fundamental to our experience, our sensing of the world. The power of aura was invoked in his explanation in The Arcades Project, distinguishing between Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 447) The perception of distance, however close something may be, sets up an unrequitable relationship, an unbridgeable remoteness akin to loss. Auratic distance is inherently melancholy, within our sights yet unattainable. The sense of presence – of the gaze returned – and the feeling of distance rest upon the experience of an original or authentic image or place. Benjamin anchored aura in the coordinates of existence, stating that ‘[e]ven the most

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perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element, its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin, 1969, p.220). For the landscape this presents a potent resonance between melancholy and aura, appealing to heritage, sense of place, memory and identity. The fragility of these presences in the landscape invests them with a sense of poignancy, bound up with our fears of losing them – and it is their very aura which endows them with such significance. Like the massproduced artwork, the placeless landscape loses the unique presence of the self in that which is beheld; it becomes a manufactured experience. In the original lies the possibility of memory, identity, authenticity – the possibility of our communing with the landscape, of empathising with what we experience. Karsten Harries glosses Benjamin’s aura as ‘an experience of spirit incarnate in matter’ occurring at those times where something appears as ‘more than just mute matter’ (Harries, 2009, p.12). The loss of that aura therefore has profound consequences for our experience of the world. Benjamin identified the mass-production of art as the thief of aura, pointing to the collateral damage associated with the objectification of life. As Harries puts it, ‘The loss of an experience of aura threatens the loss of our humanity’ (Harries, 2009, p.18). For design, this becomes significant in the preservation of singularity, as opposed to mass-produced generic forms. The critical distinction is between artifice and ‘what is given’ – the original forms with their infinite complexity, as ‘the simplest thing say a rock or a leaf, is infinitely complex, a unique given that resists full comprehension and therefore reproduction’ (Harries, 2009, p.18). Harries concludes that: ‘A successful work of art should have something of the enigmatic presence we experience in the face of a person. That … is a test that architecture too must meet if it is to continue to provide us with spiritual shelter. At stake is nothing less than our humanity’ (Harries, 2009, p.18). Harries’ invocation of the auratic as fundamental to our humanity highlights the connection between aura and empathy. Aura resists the consigning of the other to a detached and objectified distance, and is instead grounded in a union of observer and observed. Recalling Vischer’s conception of empathy, where ‘I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this other’, aura reinforces this idea of a two-directional gaze (in Koss, 2006, p. 139). This rapport with that which is encountered is most intently felt in places with a depth of history, as in Peter Zumthor’s discerning of aura where there is a sense of time’s passage. Reflecting on how good architecture ‘must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness,’ Zumthor suggests that it is necessary to move beyond the physical associations. Through closing his eyes he finds a ‘different impression, a deeper feeling’, and at ‘these moments, architecture’s aesthetic and practical values, stylistic and historical significance are of secondary importance. What matters now is only this feeling of deep melancholy’ (Zumthor, 2006, pp 25–26).

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Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko finds aura in architecture, in the desire to commune with it. In his passage ‘The Aura’, Wodiczko narrates an experiential architectural encounter, where Crossing the monstrous shade of its elevation, we are halted by the blow of a cool wind which is cruising around the corners of its lofty massif. As we approach its body, we are confronted by an intimate protective warmth radiating through the walls, wings, and open doors, confused with the heavy breath of the air conditioning ventilators. (Wodiczko, 2003, p.1066) In emphatically empathetic terms, Wodiczko describes the desire to identify with the building, to become part of it, as we ‘recognize the familiarity of our body and that of the building…. We sense that there is something about us which is incomplete, and which can only be completed by a full integration with the building’ (Wodiczko, 2003, p.1066). For Wodiczko there is a need to address this innate longing to be subsumed by the building, as at the same time this might be perceived as a submission to authority. Proposing the use of projections at night – when the building is sleeping and thus unable to counter the effect – Wodiczko saw the possibility of undoing the mesmerising impact that architecture can have, countering the sedation of the self. At the same time as Wodiczko describes the desire to subvert the building’s dominion over the beholder, there is an intensely melancholy relationship with experienced space. Within all of this there is the possibility of succumbing to aura, which is bound up with feelings of imminent loss, in this case of the self through ‘collaboration’ with the building’s authoritarian identity. Benjamin’s study of aura was grounded in photography, an art which resonates with the potency of landscape experience. While photography might be argued to be a fundamentally visual art, rather than fulfilling the full sensory scope of aisthesis, it also offers insight into the non-visual intuiting of the world. Photographs can become spatial, as in Anne Noble’s conception of works being ‘sliced from blocks of sheer light’ (in Paton, 2001, p.9). And they can evoke the metaphysical, the world beyond the merely visual, like Michael Kenna’s images which ‘insist on the existence of a phantom presence within reality, a world we cannot see’ (Bennell, 2002, n.p.). Photographs are not simply something to be looked at, they are physical in themselves, a quality made clear in Hubert Damisch’s declaration, It is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is possibly the first image Nicephore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of the camera obscura – a fragile, threatened image, so close in organization, its granular texture, and its emergent aspect, to certain Seurats – an incomparable image which makes one dream of a photograph substance

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distinct from subject matter, and of an art in which light creates its own metaphor. (Damisch, 1978, p.72) Photographs are not simply pictures of things, but imprints of the invisible made visible. This resonates strongly with Jean-Luc Marion’s revelations regarding the painter of ‘authentic’ images: ‘He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible’ (Marion, 2004, p.25). As an analogue of landscape experience, the photographer shapes space phenomenologically, working with light, as in Noble’s photographs where: ‘black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness of suspicion, doubt, despair … white the overwhelming presence of light, announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss’, and that white is apprehended as a ‘spiritual value’ (Keith, 1983, p.24). As a parallel of landscape experience, photography manifests the qualities of becoming imbued with place, of being open to the auratic. Benjamin’s writing on photography is in part contradiction and in part paradox in its relation to aura. While photography is the very manifestation of massproduction and therefore the erasure of the original, it is also for Benjamin a significant site of auratic presence. Photography highlights how such qualities are embedded in the moment, allied to the idea of a photograph as an imprint, an impression. Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made Polaroid photographs of landscapes, a medium which is intensely auratic in that each image is an original, a unique impression of that moment. Actor Tonino Guerra remembers the moment when Tarkovsky photographed him on their travels through Italy, writing that he could remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the waterfilled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of distance to the landscape of ancient houses. The warm light that morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on faded decorations on a wall. He surprised me, sitting on a pew, as though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun beyond my dark body. These images leave with us a mysterious and poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time. (Guerra, 2004, p.9) The heightened experience of place and time brought about by the photograph draws in a number of melancholic qualities, evoking the liminal, the play of shadows, the partial presence of the fragment. Yet all of these things must come in their own terms rather than being manufactured. As Noble cautioned about photography, one should not ‘hurry an image into pathos’ (in Paton, 2001, p.15). This was the case with Jugendstil photographs, as Vidler explained, where photographers used ‘“penumbral” tones to try to

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simulate the aura of an earlier time’ (Vidler, 2001, p,12). In cinematic terms, filmmakers have turned to techniques which intentionally counter mechanical perfection. By working against the grain in terms of technique, the individuality of the film-as-artwork is re-achieved, in the same way that existed prior to mass-production, and certainly before digital imaging. As Marks explains, ‘as images decay they become unique again’ (Marks, 2002, p. 94). Like landscapes and architecture, photographs are physical as well as merely visual. The hapticity of photographs is so easily overlooked, just as our experience of landscape can neglect a full phenomenological engagement. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart aspire to the reinvesting of the ‘“aura” of thingness existing in the world’ to photographs, a desire which infuses an aesthetic of melancholy too, the striving for sensation, longing for feeling (Edwards and Hart, 2004, p.9). Kerry McCarthy describes the auratic quality of photographs of Antarctica in the Ernest Edwards Mills Joyce collection – a range of images from the ‘heroic’ era of exploration – noting how the hapticity of the lantern slides in particular imbues them with a sense of their maker’s presence. Many of the negatives and lantern slides would have been made in Antarctica – using the onboard facilities on the exploration ships, or in the huts on the ice. These acts of making emphasise aura through the confirmation of these artefacts as originals, carriers of the actual fingerprints of the photographers, and even the nuance of the Antarctic atmosphere. Some of the images rescued from the sinking vessel, the Endurance, were returned to London still hermetically sealed in cases, such that opening them released the Antarctic air trapped within (McCarthy, 2010). McCarthy suggests that if the photograph says ‘“I was here”, the fingerprint says “And I still am”’ (McCarthy, 2010, p.204). One of the most potent facets of an analogy between aura in photography and in landscape is that of memory. Photographs embed memory within, both as content in terms of what is represented, and as form, as an artefact in themselves. Landscapes do this too, exhibiting the same vulnerability and potency that arises from the magnitude of the task of memory. Aura reverberates within memory as content and as form. This auratic presence relates strongly to memory. Molodkina describes this manifestation within the domestic setting, in her evocation of the phenomenology of ‘home Aura’ – the ‘[s]eparate household items such as period furniture, crockery, clothes, paintings etc.’ are the ‘carriers of Home’s memory’ (Molodkina, 2009, p.213). As with photography, these things cannot be manufactured, a falseness of the memory of a place is soulless, unconvincing. Landscape and architecture cannot be ‘hurried into pathos’, aura can’t be extracted wilfully, as in Benjamin’s words, to ‘pry it from its shell’ is to destroy aura. Communing with photographs and landscapes brings about the empathetic exchange that Benjamin alluded to, the looking back of things. Feeling them, rather than merely seeing them, opens out the phenomenological presencing of aura, the invisible atmosphere which is associated with an artefact, a place. Aura, like aisthesis, has its origins in extravisual experience

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– in Greek and Latin aura meant breath or breeze, and is synonymous with zephyr. It is strongly related to smell, as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s defining the second sense of aura as ‘A subtle emanation or exhalation from any substance, e.g. the aroma of blood, the odour of flowers, etc.’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘aura,’ 2.a). Also, there is the notion of aura as a metaphysical manifestation, an emanation from the body, echoing the uncanny presence of haunting and remanence. The intuiting of presences, of sensing aura, ripples through those sites in which the ‘looking back’ can be experienced. At Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the gaze returned is our own. Staring into the polished black granite, the beholder becomes aware of their own reflection cast upon the liminal surface, the otherworldly domain of the names of the dead. The metaphysical connotations of this move us toward the ineffable, in the fleeting, ephemerality of the reflective surface. The aura that emanates from the wall precisely coincides with Benjamin’s ‘distance’, in that despite its physical proximity – the fact that the visitor can physically touch the wall – it retains at a strange distance, an enigmatic remoteness that emerges simultaneously from the overwhelming number of names, the reflection on the surface, and the sensation of being in the earth. At the nearby Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial, designed by Lawrence Halprin, aura inheres in the hapticity of the elements. Halprin aspired to a memorial which would have the ‘magic’ imbued in places like the Forbidden City in China, the Acropolis, the Sanctuary at Delphi and Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Crematorium in Stockholm (Rainey, 2005, p.396). Grounding the memorial design in the precedents from the past approaches the aura of melancholy in a distinctly different way to the ‘new’ language developed in Maya Lin’s memorial. The ancient precedents of stone, metal and water are not simply copied, however, and to do so is to succumb to the dilution through mass reproduction which Benjamin warned of. The green patina of the various sculptural elements throughout the memorial was also an allusion to age and arguably aura, aspiring to a ‘“dug up look” that works in concert with the rusticated stones to enhance the primordial effect of the memorial’ (Rainey, 2005, pp.404–405). Added to this is the hapticity of the elements, with the surfaces of the stones and metal components inviting touching, including Braille messages, and relief panels. Empathy is apparent in the nature of the sculptural expressions of Roosevelt, emphasising his humanity as opposed to a manufactured superhuman-ness. Shown in his wheelchair, with his dog, and also including a statue of his wife Eleanor, Roosevelt is portrayed throughout in a language which is in stark contrast to the scale and symbolism of the nearby Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments. There is a melancholy, a poignancy, in the depiction of life in this way, one which engages the emotions and transcends the shorthand of the generic gesture of an obelisk or temple.

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References Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. (ed. Ralph Tiedemann; trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin). Boston: Harvard University Press. Bennell, Peter C. (2002). ‘Introduction’, in Michael Kenna, Peter C. Bunnell and Ruth Bernhard, Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective. Tuscon: Nazzraeli Press. Damisch, Hubert (1978). ‘Five notes for a phenomenology of the photographic image’. October, 5: 70–72. Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice (eds), (2004). Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. New York: Routledge. Harries, Karsten (2009). ‘The need for architecture’. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20(3): 11–18. Keith, Sheridan (1983). ‘Anne Noble’s Wanganui’. Art New Zealand, 27: 24–25. Koss, Juliet (2006). ‘On the limits of empathy’. The Art Bulletin, 88(1): 139–157. Marion, Jean-Luc (2004). The Crossing of the Visible. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Marks, Laura U. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCarthy, Kerry (2010). ‘Thinking with photographs at the margins of Antarctic exploration’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Molodkina, Ludmila (2009). ‘Utilitarian-aesthetic dynamics of nature’. Analecta Husserliana, CI: 213–229. Paton, Justin (ed.) (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace. Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press. Rainey, Ruben M. (2005). ‘The garden as narrative: Lawrence Halprin’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Vidler, Anthony (2001). ‘Staging lived space: James Casebere’s photographic unconscious’, in James Casebere, James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny. New York: Sean Kelly Gallery. Wodiczko, Krzysztof (2003). ‘Public projection’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Zumthor, Peter (2006). Thinking Architecture (second edition). Basel: Birkhauser.

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14 Liminality

Melancholy inhabits the liminal, the times and spaces of transition, threshold places. Anthropologist Victor Turner theorised liminality as core to developmental stages, especially in the context of rites of passage in tribal culture. Moving through each of the stages of life involves a period of transition – a liminal phase – when an individual is ‘betwixt and between’ the more definite phases either side. As a type of cultural limbo, liminality in time and space expresses an indefinite character, a suspension of certainty. Turner wrote: ‘Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon’ (Turner, 1969, p.95). The passage across thresholds, through indefinite zones, occurs in the landscape at places like the seashore, in shadows, on the horizon, and in the temporal interludes of dawn and twilight, spring and autumn. In the late afternoon, in the illumination of dust motes by a ray of glancing sunlight, or the long shadows cast across a square, there is the intangible, ephemeral melancholy moment. Or a winter’s day when the grey light falls through a rain-spattered window, time seems slowed almost to a standstill, a palpable poignancy hangs in the air. For Giorgio de Chirico it was the liminal seasonality and time of day that were particularly evocative, ‘the melancholy of beautiful autumn days, afternoons in Italian cities’ (de Chirico, 1994, p. 61). Martin Barnes links the gloaming, the twilight time, to feelings of transience, a time which facilitates the subverting of normality, and he says that the liminal time is the threshold when ‘hard facts become elusive, and an evocative obscurity begins’ (Barnes, 2006, p.10). At twilight there is an indistinct quality of the light, almost as though it is emitted from somewhere other than the sun, as Steven Connor describes, ‘an eerie kind of “earthlight”, as though objects themselves were giving out their own illumination, stored during the day and given off as day retreats’ (Connor, 2006, p.26). In one of the seminal texts of landscape architectural theory, Henry Vincent Hubbard’s An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design, melancholy is included among the catalogue of landscape effects. Hubbard describes the melancholy effect as ‘peaceful, restful, suave’ and links it in part to conditions of liminality, ‘atmospheric conditions, such as approaching

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darkness or drizzling rain’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). Temporal liminality is also invoked with reference to the melancholy which might arise from associations sparked by ‘a ruined building, a churchyard, an old and decaying tree, or anything which suggests the end or destruction of something once beautiful and prospering’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). The invocation of death in a beautiful landscape heightens feelings of liminality, of passages and thresholds. The artistic theme of Et in Arcadia Ego encapsulates the conflicted condition of the presence of death in paradise, and is often translated as ‘Even in Arcadia I (death) am.’ Ruins and old trees are part of this Et in Arcadia Ego tradition, transcending a scene which is simply beautiful to one which has that gravitas of death’s presence. Ruins and decay sit at the intersection of temporal and spatial liminality – the passage from one domain into another. The threshold condition where architecture bleeds into landscape was the foundation for Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus, The Arcades Project. The spaces of arcades were transitional zones between the interiors of shops and the wider city spaces – at once ‘landscapes’ and ‘rooms’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.10) – and those that strolled through them, the flâneurs, were also liminal in their place in society, inhabiting the edges of the new world of the metropolis, but pulled by the domain of the middle class. In his notes, Benjamin described the feeling of passage experienced at this point of threshold: ‘At the entrance to the arcade, a mailbox: the last chance to make some sign to the world that one is leaving’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.88). Divining the network of threshold spaces that weave through the city – ‘those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across private owned lots, within the park and along the river bank, function as limits’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.88) – Benjamin amplified their significance through his description of the arches such as that of Scipio that stood in isolation at the city limits. With a quotation from Ferdinand Noack, Benjamin highlighted how the arches were ‘for the … Romans a conception of the sacred as boundary or threshold’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.97). At the moment of threshold it is possible to look forwards and backwards simultaneously, and Hunt identifies this quality as underpinning the elements of landscape architecture that ‘augment its commemorative functions beyond the opportunities of the other arts’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). Noting the frequency with which gardens are used as places of burial, Hunt identifies the importance of gardens as intermediate zones, ‘liminal enclaves between outside and inside, town and country, social space and private space’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). As in the liminal passages of the Arcades, or the arches on the city limits, gardens as commemorative spaces place us in a transitional space. Gardens are temporally liminal too, in their backward-looking gaze towards the Arcadian and Edenic ideals as much as their prospective qualities. As Pallasmaa observes, ‘Melancholy is the recognition of the tragic dimension within the moment of bliss. This mental state combines happiness and sadness, understanding and bewilderment, into a heightened experience

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of being. Melancholy is the sorrow accompanying the comprehension of limits’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.316). The threshold qualities are not only confined to the horizontal realm, in the manner of a crossing over, but also in the boundary of the terrestrial and celestial, as Hunt explains: ‘The placement of memorials in open space is mediatory in one final way: sited on the earth, in human space, they are nevertheless under the open sky, in the eye of God’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). Liminality is a potent zone for the evocation of memory. The passing between life and death, between the real and the imaginary, between the immanent and the transcendental, are threshold terrains, lingering, obscure. Exploring this in a hypothetical memorial to road workers who died during the construction of improvements to an alpine pass, I drew upon both the horizontal liminality of passage and the vertical threshold of earth and sky (Figure 14.1). Two workers died during work to improve the safety of a treacherous stretch of road through the Southern Alps in New Zealand’s South Island. Being killed while making the road safer for others is a poignant paradox, worthy of a memorial gesture. The men were working on huge structures, including a viaduct and ramparts to protect motorists from rocks falling from cliffs above. The rampart is manifested in the landscape as a strong horizontal line, an emphatically ordered gesture in a landscape alive with geomorphological unease, a stone’s throw from the active seismic zone of the alpine fault line. The hypothetical memorial draws on the horizontal’s moment of order within chaos, enlisting it into a new form. Resonating with the sublimity of the landscape and the monumental scale of the road safety interventions, I proposed a huge steel I-beam, over 40 metres high, to be inserted beside the road, into the river bed below. This is the sole addition to the landscape, an economic gesture, but one that works on alchemical principles. Through the illusory powers of juxtaposition and parallax, this single vertical insertion becomes first a cross and then a gate, or vice versa depending on the motorist’s direction of travel. The vertical visually fuses with the existing horizontal of the rampart to form an enormous cross, echoing the small roadside crosses which are scattered along highways as memorials to accident victims. Through parallax the vertical and horizontal pull apart, as the road curves around the cliffside, plunging the motorist through a gate of sorts. The vertical is inscribed with the names of the two roadworkers, a simple and humble writing into the landscape, a statement of vulnerability and loss. The gate form echoes the brooding landscapes of Colin McCahon, where the haunting melancholy of his curious geometries sit within the sublime landscapes of New Zealand’s high country. McCahon saw his gates as ‘a way through’, a passage, a journey (Brown, 1984). His work is suffused with a sublime poignancy, in the use of dark and light, of emptiness, fragments and absences.

Figure 14.1 Jacky Bowring, Otira Roadworkers’ Memorial, 2000.

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The melancholy liminality of connection, of the way through, is found too in the memorial designed by Walther Grunwald on the site of Schloss Ettersburg in Weimar, Germany. The memorial is a spare gesture – the clearing of a hunting path – but the intervention speaks volumes. This landscape is one which Victor Burgin calls upon to reveal how ‘[e]mpathetic identification with others from within the flesh of the world may be felt not only through such fabricated things as photographs, buildings and garments, but also through the natural environment’ (Burgin, 2009, p.322). Burgin experienced an ‘uncanny sense of familiarity’ when visiting Schloss Ettersburg, recognising it as the setting for Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809). Goethe was the administrator for the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, and the ducal seat was at Schloss Ettersburg. At one point in the novel, Ottilie, one of the key characters, sketched a vision for a future addition to the landscape, a pavilion which would suggest ‘a new and different world’ (in Burgin, 2009, p.322). However, what eventuated on that site in 1937 was not Ottilie’s optimistic vision, but the Buchenwald concentration camp. The camp unwittingly referenced the previous history, including echoing Ottilie’s vision of a hilltop structure, and also overlaying a key axis of the camp over the former network of hunting paths which had been laid out in the traditional form of a star – where animals were driven down paths to be ambushed by hunters where the paths intersect. Grunwald’s spare gesture was the clearance of one of these paths, bringing form to an eerie ley line, connecting Goethe’s Court of the Muses to the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. As Burgin observes, the walk is physically arduous; no less difficult is the task of covering the emotional and intellectual ground between the two sites. The woods are now much as they were then: the space is the same, as one moves down the path the knowledge of where one is in time is subject to an irrational and dreadful doubt. Certainly this ‘empty’ space between provides more effective an occasion for remembrance than the inert monuments that border it. (Burgin, 2009, p.323) Some of the most potent exemplars of the melancholy of liminality are islands, geographical threshold spaces, zones where emotional cargo often exceeds physical capacity. As microcosmic mnemonic worlds, Hart Island (New York, USA) and Cockatoo Island (Sydney, Australia) represent the shadowy patches on the psyche that drift at the margins of existence. Hart Island’s melancholy is intensified by its almost mythological existence. Out of bounds to the public, it is the locus of some of the darkest dimensions of New York’s psyche. Although it is home to the United States’ largest cemetery, with some 800,000 interments, no visitors are allowed, apart from in exceptional circumstances. As in Franses’ analysis of the melancholy of the ‘stranger memorial’, landscapes commemorating the death of strangers

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promote an irresolvable form of grief, an empathetic engagement with place. Artist Melinda Hunt has made many visits to Hart Island as part of her ongoing project which seeks, in part, to reconnect family members to loved ones buried on the island. She expressed how ‘It is hard to describe the overwhelming sense of anonymity and timelessness that comes from standing next to an open burial trench twenty feet wide, seventy feet long and six feet deep’ (Hunt, 1998, p.26). As a cemetery without public access, Hart Island is perhaps one of the most melancholy places of all, a denial of the ‘normal’ processes of mourning and grief, it is the open wound made manifest. Very far removed from the image of the enigmatic gowned figure crossing the water by boat in Arnold Böcklin’s (1880) Isle of the Dead, or Venice’s San Michele, where special funeral barges are part of the watery ritual of an island burial, Hart Island resonates with death and water in other ways, invoking the crossing of the River Styx (Hunt, 1998). The water crossing takes place each day, with inmates from Riker’s Island prison travelling to Hart Island to bury the dead. The island has been home to a potter’s field since 1896,1 a place of burial for the destitute and the unknown. The liminal, marginal location of the potter’s field on Hart Island, removed from the city of New York, reflects a ‘deeper social pattern of hiding that which is socially undesirable in the undeveloped fringes of the city’ (Hunt, 1998, p.20). Hart Island’s dark history is explored in the ongoing project by Melinda Hunt. Beginning with a project with photographer Joel Sternfeld, Hunt has plumbed the depths of Hart Island, unearthing the range of institutions which have been housed on the island, including the burial ground and a range of penal institutions where ‘the punishment is mild but the backdrop is haunting’ (Hunt, 1998, p.22). Hunt and Sternfeld were intrigued by how the natural landscape of Hart Island ‘seems to completely mask almost 140 years of burials’ (Hunt, 1998, p.2). As though to reinforce the broader concern with hiding things in the margins, the island is complicit, and each of the vast mass graves takes only a season to disappear into the landscape, with the white concrete marker posts barely visible. Instead the island is almost mute, quietly brooding in the Long Island Sound, echoing the theme of Et in Arcadia Ego with its beautiful yet tragic landscape. Not only is a cemetery concealed in the out-of-bounds zone of Hart Island, but a number of other activities have also been based there, beyond the radar of daily life. Following the island’s purchase in 1869, ‘an extension of the House of Refuge, the prison workhouse for delinquent boys on Randalls Island, opened’; later, victims of the yellow fever epidemic were housed on the island, as well as a women’s insane asylum (Hunt, 1998, p.20). The procession of marginal activities continued, with a reformatory school for boys as well as institutions for the mentally ill, the tubercular, the homeless, criminals, drug addicts and alcoholics. By contrast, an amusement park was established in 1925, but was forced to close because of potential compromises to the security of the other institutions on the island. Later, a Nike missile base was built on the island in 1955, as part of the network of

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ground-to-air missile launchers developed to shoot down aircraft. The missile base, known as NY-15, housed 20 supersonic missiles; it was later abandoned and has succumbed to the forces of nature, slowly transforming from the pinnacle of military technology to another of the fragments of this island’s repository of shadowy memories. Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour also houses a sequence of marginal activities. The sandstone of the island has been sculpted and shaped to accommodate these uses, including the first jail, built in 1839, using prison gangs from nearby Goat Island, followed in 1841 by the sculpting of the stone to construct grain silos and water reservoirs, and docks and other naval facilities in the late 1850s. Even some of the prison cells themselves were excavated directly into the sandstone, a detention space which, it is suggested, ‘would not have been approved had it been submitted to the Inspectors of Prisons at the Home Office in London’ (Kerr, 1984, p.17). A prison continued on the island, alongside shipyards, until 1869, when the prisoners were re-located to the mainland jail in Darlinghurst, Sydney; in 1871 the facilities found a further use as an industrial school for girls, and a reformatory for girls who were convicted criminals. It was at this time that the name was changed to Biloela in an effort to remove the connotations of the previous prisons. One last prison phase began in 1888, housing petty criminals, such that ‘the evil [was] more seeming than real’ (Kerr, 1984, p.11). Shipbuilding continued on the site until 1992, with its name eventually reverting to Cockatoo Island. Heavily modified and burdened by its history, Cockatoo Island is a shadow within the bright, sparkling Sydney Harbour. An ideas competition held in 1996 yielded such visions as a return to incarceration,2 to maritime industry3 or a grid of fig trees which would slowly engulf the entire island and provide a habitat for bats.4 Instead of any of these dark possibilities, the island is undergoing a transformation which involves an ordered re-working of the site, a cleaving of the mess and complexity of history. Developed as an urban park, Cockatoo Island became described as ‘big, surprising, entertaining’ (Cockatoo Island, 2010) and additions include a camping ground, a café and a bar. The island’s melancholy, its place as a liminal refuge, is being replaced by a usage which in many ways overlooks the dark history. This is one of the conundrums of sites where the heritage is ‘difficult’ – like Cockatoo Island’s history of prisons and reform schools, or Christchurch’s Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum. These past uses, with their heavy baggage, make them challenges for the heritage ‘industry’. The legacy of danger and discomfort, sadness and isolation, can become suppressed as part of moves to create pleasant places. Islands like Hart and Cockatoo persist as liminal zones very close to major settlement areas. Rather than remote oceanic locations, these islands lurk near the land and resonate with other prison islands like Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, and Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town in South Africa. These islands are loaded with symbolic cargoes, heavy with the burdens of society. Despite Hart Island’s proximity to one of the world’s

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biggest cities, and its role as home to that country’s largest cemetery, it is, in effect, written out of the everyday consciousness. And Cockatoo Island, although within Sydney’s populous harbour, represented a remote location for undesirables, so that in many ways it might as well have been in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; the litany of problems included the non-arrival of the basics of bread, lighting oil, and, the lament that ‘Neither candles nor onions have come as expected’ (Parker, 1977, p.6). Their condition as an edge zone, a threshold state, casts islands as the ultimate terrains vagues. Found at the city edges, or on left over and abandoned sites, terrains vagues are spatially and socially marginalised landscapes. Their imprecision is both spatial and temporal, often existing at points of transition, where places which were previously assigned to a particular category of occupation – residential, industrial – have, with abandonment, drifted into a state of vagueness. These spaces become stranded in a different time, outside of the city’s normal activities. The ‘Zone’ of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker expresses the spirit of the terrain vague, a mysteriously imbricated space which seems to inhabit a different time frame. The marginal qualities of the terrain vagues landscape are also found in Bill Henson’s photographs, depicting what the New Yorker described as ‘battered landscapes and fragile, wispy youths’ (in Spens, 2005). The imagery of Tarkovsky and Henson makes the melancholy of terrains vagues palpable, and embodies the description of such places as conspicuous pauses amidst a landscape homogenized to the point of indiscernability. The voided, abandoned spaces resonate with what Solà-Morales refers to as ‘our strangeness in front of the world’; they empathize with our feelings of placelessness and dislocation within our cities. (Daskalakis and Perez, 2001, p.80) Liminality, or ‘in-betweeness’, in conditions such as these is also a conceptual indistinction. Falling outside of the clearly classifiable, terrains vagues resist the objectification of the world. Using terms from Richard Rorty, Daskalakis and Perez propose that the ‘terrain vague leaves a vital gap in “knowingness” that can be activated’, and that it has inspirational value; it has the capacity to produce ‘shudders of awe’, that strange mingling of dread and wonder that can move our intellect and our emotions…. Its sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and otherness forces us to recontextualise what we thought we already knew. (Daskalakis and Perez, 2001, p.84) The intervention in such places offers the opportunity to engage with the melancholy of liminality, one that might be intensified by visiting the site at only the liminal times of day or seasons. Such temporal bracketing is a

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means of designing with time, that as much as landscape architects shape space, they also have the possibility of structuring time, drawing visitors at times of emotional potency, and resisting them when the light is flat. Gardens, memorials, islands, arcades and terrains vagues emphasise the poignancy of passage, the melancholy of that which is near yet lingers on the edge of the unattainable. Vast lands such as Antarctica possess their own liminal melancholy. Undergoing sustained twilight during the spring and autumn of each year, and even the year through there are lingering periods of half-light, the Antarctic is also a threshold place that exists just over the horizon of the tangible world, a place of thwarted expeditions, death and longing. Beyond these terrestrial and even quotidian examples, the moon hovers as a further liminal location par excellence. The lunar landscape is particularly evocative of literally other-worldly beauty, the intangible sense of loneliness and desolation. Following the intense interest throughout the 1970s and even the 1980s, the moon has more recently receded from the radar. Yet the images remain in the mind’s eye. The photographs of the moon produced from the early voyages, the Apollo missions, had the frisson of aura, and also the yearning for discovery, for finding ourselves out there. Astronomy in general is a melancholy pursuit, such is the vastness of the endeavour, and this is made more so by the desire to make some kind of connection. If ‘landscape’ is conceptualised as extending beyond our familiar terrain on earth, to the moon, and even beyond, perhaps the most melancholy of objects might be the Voyager spacecraft. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft set out in search of life, departing our solar system in December 2004. On board Voyager is a Golden Record which contains a range of audio tracks, including what Ry Cooder has called ‘the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music’: Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’ (in Cresswell, 2006, p.73).

Notes 1 ‘Potter’s fields’ are cemeteries for the unknown or destitute. The origin of the term is as an area of land for the burial of strangers, as in Matthew 27: 7: ‘And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.’ A potter’s field would have been a place to dig for clay, with the terrain of ditches and excavations providing places for burials. 2 Jason McNamee’s commended entry (see Simpson 1996). 3 Ross Ramus and students from University of New South Wales, first prize (see Simpson, 1996). 4 Richard Weller’s commended scheme (see Simpson, 1996).

References Barnes, Martin (2006). ‘The gloaming’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best, Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour. London: Merrell Publishers in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. (ed. Ralph Tiedemann; trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin). Boston: Harvard University Press. Brown, Gordon (1984). Colin McCahon, Artist. Auckland: Reed. Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in 2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press. Cockatoo Island (2010). Promotional website. www.cockatooisland.gov.au/about/ index.html, 12 March 2010. Connor, Steven (2006). ‘A certain slant of light’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best, Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour. London: Merrell Publishers in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Cresswell, Toby (2006) 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists, Stories and Secrets Behind Them. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Daskalakis, Georgia and Perez, Omar (2001). ‘Projecting Detroit’, in Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young (eds), Stalking Detroit. Barcelona: Actar. de Chirico, Giorgio (1994). The Memoires of Giorgio de Chirico. New York: Da Capo Press. Hubbard, Henry Vincent (2010). An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (originally published 1917). Alcester: Read Books. Hunt, John Dixon (2005). ‘“Come into the garden, Maud”: garden art as a privileged mode of commemoration and identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Hunt, Melinda (1998). ‘The nature of Hart Island’, in Melinda Hunt and Joel Sternfield, Hart Island. Zurich: Scalo. Kerr, James Semple (1984). Cockatoo Island: Penal and Institutional Remains. Sydney: National Trust of Australia. MacKeith, Peter (ed.) (2005). Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Essays. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Parker, R.G. (1977) Cockatoo Island: A History. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson. Simpson, Rod (1996). ‘Edge conditions’. Architecture Australia, January/February. Spens, Michael (2005). ‘New work by Bill Henson’. Studio International, 24 March. www.studiointernational.com/index.php/new-work-by-bill-henson, 28 December 2015. Turner, Victor (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine.

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15 Fragments

Fragments tremble at the threshold between wholeness and partialness; the fragment engages the mind in imaginative reconstruction. Of ruins, which are a species of fragment, Tim Edensor writes how they ‘function like Rubin’s vase/profile illusion, allowing the viewer to see the intact object and its disappearance at the same time’ (Steinmetz, 2008, p.232). This liminal manifestation, lurking within a space of indefinability, lends fragments an aesthetic of fragility. Fragments exist not only at a spatial threshold, but also temporally. Delicate, yet persisting in time and space, fragments, ruins, as pieces of a whole, are suspended within the ambivalence of melancholy. As George Steinmetz observed in German Namibians’ apprehension of the ruins of their country, ‘The ruins’ intermediate location between culture and nature resonates with melancholia, which is analogously poised between life and death’ (Steinmetz, 2008, p.232). The fragment provokes melancholic contemplation, as the beholder mentally reconstructs that which is no longer whole. Images of New York’s World Trade Towers after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 evoked an avalanche of responses, from raw despair, to beholding the sublime. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath generated a vast discourse, from politics to structural engineering, from ideology (Leach, 2003) to trauma theories, and aesthetics, including a revisiting of the ‘heartless picturesque’, as questions of the morals of a fascination with the imagery of terror were raised. The reduction of the once monolithic, muscular, towers to mere fragments provoked a complex array of reactions, including a feeling of the incomprehensibility of the event, of it being beyond representation, literally awe-ful. Makeshift shrines of photographs, candles and mementos spread across Manhattan, as well as at sites such as the few spindly trees near the Pentagon which were laden with photo IDs, poems and toys. Both the beholding of the ruins of the buildings and the memories of the victims evoked the fragmentary at a vast scale. Imagery not just of the ruins, but of the pre-9/11 New York skyline became imbued with melancholy, fragments of the past which persisted beyond the event, the wound kept open. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, ‘What were once souvenirs or logos or useful maps have become mementos. They have acquired a strange aura, a

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penumbra of sadness. They seem to defy the loss’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2003, p.13). Phenomenologically, the fragmentary extended beyond the physical artefacts, the insistence of the visual traces of the event and the mementos of the time before, and into the sonic realm. The mobile phone calls from the flights and the crews’ voices on the black box flight recordings became the ruins of sound. The Sonic Memorial Project gathered together: tapes of weddings atop the World Trade Center, recordings of the buildings’ elevators and revolving doors, home videos made by a lawyer in his 42nd floor office, sounds of the Hudson riverfront, recordings of late night Spanish radio drifting through the halls as Latino workers clean the offices, an interview with the piano player at Windows on the World sharing his recollections, video e-mail greetings that tourists sent from the kiosks on the 110th floor, voicemail messages from people who worked in the World Trade Center. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2003, pp.29–30) The symbolic potency of the black box flight recordings as fragments of wholes informed the design I developed with Room 4.1.3 for the Pentagon Memorial Competition, one of the final six selected from over 1,100 international entries (Weller, 2005). Recognising the poignant resonance of the designation of the black boxes as the plane’s ‘flight memory’, we proposed one black box for each victim at the Pentagon site. Black boxes are, we discovered, orange, ‘to aid in their recovery’. This phrase was imbued with a double-meaning – both locational and therapeutic – and we therefore retained the orange colour for a small box which would be placed within the large black box for each individual as a container for mementoes. The surface of the black boxes held a shallow pool of water which was shaped to appear to defy perspective when looking directly into it. This water surface would act as what Steven Holl refers to as a ‘phenomenal lens’ (Holl, 2006, p.79), with water being a means of amplifying the movement of air and the passing of clouds and even the starry sky above. Within the melancholy aesthetic, the fragmentary hovers at the edge of the sublime, ‘largely because it also indicates or represents what eludes representation and conveys a sense of limitlessness that cannot be reduced to a concrete, finite or present object’ (Thomas, 2008, p.22). This threshold between melancholy and the sublime is alluded to by Harries in his discussion of ruins. The sublime appears at the moment of terror, where there is a feeling of ruins as a signal of things ‘sliding out into space’, at which point the hint of the familiar which is tethered to melancholy is lost, and there is ‘not so much a domestication as a liberation of space which means also of time. The terror, or rather the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of time, is awakened rather than banished’ (Harries, 1997).1

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The ruins of Rome are the quintessential fragmentary landscape, where the beholder floats within an indeterminate topography and an ambiguity of time, adrift from the certain datums of past and present, or the spatial absolutes of inside and outside, building and landscape. Byron’s Childe Harold described Rome as a skeleton of ‘Titanic form’, a place containing ‘Wrecks of another world, whose ashes are still warm.’ This lingering presence of a past time presents the ruins as a riddle, something unresolved, and the mental assembly of fragmentary evidence makes Rome a ‘long-explored but still exhaustless mine / Of contemplation’ (in Thomas, 2008 p. 71). So enticing is the melancholy cachet of the ruin that the building of ruins became very fashionable during the Picturesque period, and as Karsten Harries explains, ‘Artificial ruins speak of a desire to return to nature, to become part of it, not to master it’ (Harries, 1997, p.243). The Picturesque aspired to a blending of architecture and nature, and it was within the ambivalence of the fragmentary, and specifically the ruined, that this was most effectively realisable. Added to the perversity of building ruins was the planting of dead trees, intended to lend an aged feel to the landscape. William Kent, a ‘mere man of canvas’, was one of the ‘wrongheads’ criticised for the absurdity of planting dead trees, a practice which took to an extreme the translation of the paintings like those by Salvator Rosa into the actual landscape (Marshall, 1795, p.158). The invasion of the ruin by vegetation is part of the melancholy of submersion, moulded and mouldered architecture into landscape, a transformation explored further in Chapter 17. This aspiration towards an ambivalent relationship with nature amplifies melancholy’s love of longing, of always yearning, craving that which is just beyond the possible. The ambiguity of the fragmentary is further amplified when it is not clear whether what is beheld is a ruin or a building which is incomplete. The Magdalenenklause was one of the first built ruins, created as a hermitage in 1728 in the park of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. Elizabeth Wanning Harries describes how ‘the building can be seen either as emerging from or as receding into the ground; this ambiguity is part of its power’ (Harries, 1994, p.64). The potency of this paradox was also expressed decades later at Ermenonville, near Paris, where the Temple of Philosophy was constructed in a manner that suggests a ruin. Significantly, however, the temple was imagined by René de Girardin not simply as a ruin, but as an incomplete building. Within the temple is inscribed, in Latin, ‘Be this temple (Unfinished like the science [philosophy] whose name it bears)’ (in Girardin, 1982, p.80). This allegory of the imperfection of human understanding is further represented by the fact that although six whole pillars of the temple bear the names of philosophers (Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, William Penn and Rousseau), a further column lies in the grass, bearing the phrase which asks ‘Who will complete it?’ (in Girardin, 1982, p.81). A further three uninscribed columns lie on the ground, also evoking the sense of a temple under construction.

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The idea of the non-finito, or intentionally incomplete ruin, applied to

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a work which the artist intended to leave unfinished, like a torso or sketch…. Such a work is … recognized to be a particular form of expression in its own right, challenging and motivating its audience to creative co-operation – to fill in and find out by empathy and association. (Rothstein, 1976, p.308) It is a conundrum which persists as an unsolvable riddle in the landscape, as in the circular dance of fragment, ruin, and the incomplete in the observations of Robert Smithson, who in September 1967 undertook a field trip to Passaic, New Jersey. The ambiguity of the fragment is an idea which occurs within Smithson’s field trip; when looking at a highway being constructed in the distance he had become perplexed at the site of things being both bulldozed and constructed, of a ‘unitary chaos’, and then realised that it was not something under decay he was seeing, but ‘ruins in reverse’ (Smithson, 1967, p.50). This was the construction yet to be built, the opposite of a romantic ruin, he believed, as ‘the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built’ (Smithson, 1967, p.50). As a poised and uncertain state of being, Smithson’s highway lingers in time, like Girardin’s Temple. Louis Kahn’s project for the Capitol of Bangladesh is, arguably, a constructed ruin, a melancholy building–landscape hybrid, suspended in an immemorial time. Scully traces a thread which connects Kahn’s Capitol back to the ruins of Rome (Scully, 2003, p.313). One of Kahn’s sources of inspiration was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and he owned every book of his that he could find. In turn, Piranesi drew insights from his visits to the ruins of Rome. The fragmentary, liminal fusions of the built and the natural, filtered through the lens of Piranesi, found their expression in Kahn’s project in Bangladesh. This legacy of the ruin was borne out in the 1971 war of Bangladeshi (then East Pakistan) independence. Rather than it becoming a primary target, as a seat of government would be expected to be in such a conflict, the enemy pilots bypassed the Capitol, thinking it was an ancient ruin. Ambiguous states of completion or ruination present what Victor Burgin calls ‘monuments of melancholy’. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s description of the lieux de mémoire, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-lieu and Tristan Landry’s non-lieux de mémoire, Burgin clarifies the distinction between ‘monuments of mourning’ and ‘monuments of melancholia’. Monuments of mourning are Nora’s lieux de mémoire, official sites of remembrance, literally ‘places of memory’ or memorials. Nora distinguished these from the traditional milieu de mémoire, where collective memory was accumulated in a place, rather than being formally designed for the purpose of remembering. An extension of the shifting relationships between memory and place came with Augé’s non-lieu, or ‘non-place’, an expression which encompassed the anonymity of the environments of ‘supermodernity’ – the landscapes of highways, airports and

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shopping malls. The subsequent conception of non-lieux de mémoire is that which Burgin calls ‘monuments of melancholy’, as inconclusive and unresolved sites – ‘as a building site is virtually indistinguishable from a ruin’, ‘the enigmatic fragments of a rebus’ (Burgin, 2009, p.326). The idea of imagining a building’s future as a ruin appears in a range of architectural visualisations through the past few centuries, but the specific theory of ‘ruin value’ was developed by Adolf Hitler. Inspired by his visit to Rome in 1938, and impressed by the enduring forms of the Colosseum and other muscular ruins, Hitler directed that all German buildings would be made from marble, stone and brick – all materials which would ruin well – rather than concrete and steel. Nazi architect Albert Speer’s drawings of the marble colonnade at the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field showed it as an ivy-clad ruin. Beyond specific buildings is the fragmentary applied to a landscape scale, as in Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander, 1873. A Maori, the ‘New Zealander’, sits on a ruined arch of London Bridge drawing the remnants of St. Paul’s in his sketchbook (Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1 Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1873.

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The city is in ruins and Doré’s image is an evocation of the words of Thomas Babbington Macaulay, poet, historian and politician, from 1840. Macaulay imagined this visitor, the ‘New Zealander’, sitting amidst the ‘vast solitude’ of the ruined city and making his sketch. Doré’s image resembles a vanitas, a symbolic image of life’s transience. The ruins of London take the place of the usual domestic scale vanitas, the more familiar décor of clocks, hourglasses and skulls. Time is marked among the ruins by the visitor’s presence, this apparition from far away, from an untrammelled paradise, from an Antipodean Arcadia. The fragmentation of what might be considered immutable subverts conceptions of the inevitably of progress, and instead highlights the vulnerability of even the great cities, captured in Susan Buck-Morss’ observation with reference to Benjamin’s Arcades Project: The debris of industrial culture teaches us not the necessity of submitting to historical catastrophe, but the fragility of the social order that tells us that this catastrophe is necessary. The crumbling of the monuments that were built to signify the immortality of civilisation becomes proof, rather, of its transiency. (Buck-Morss, 1991, p.170) The melancholy of the fragment is allied with the melancholy of the collector. The art of collecting is recognised as one of the most melancholy of tasks, profoundly contemplative, and filled with persistent longing. The collector is always searching for items, yet at the same time seeking to elude completion. Like a lover’s melancholy which rests upon unrequited love, collector’s melancholy is built upon an eternal infinity, the prospect of the collection never being complete, a perpetual non finito. In this context the partial nature of a fragment is everything, it is the core of melancholy, gesturing to the impossibility of completeness, to the passing of a prior entirety. For the time of modernity this can be conceptualised as a forever backwards contemplation, to that time before that was, perhaps, complete, and subsequently fell into ruin. The poignancy of these ruins derives from the unattainability of the past, that ‘[w]e may kneel to gather a fragment, but it stays a fragment and can speak to us only of a beauty which is lost forever’ (Rella, 1987, p. 35). The collector is a ‘pearl diver’, one who lowers themselves into ‘dizzying sea depths to gather pearls and coral in which even death has become something “rich and strange”’ (Rella, 1987, p.32). The pearl diver is, as Franco Rella explains, ‘saturnine, melancholic’, challenged by the ‘unreachable totality’ implied by collecting (Rella, 1987, p.33). The vastness and impossibility of completeness is such that In order for the collector’s gesture to truly impart salvation, he would have to collect the whole world. This is his secret dream. And this is the

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desperate aspiration of the race which accumulates things, objects, images, ideas, deliriums, and monsters. (Rella, 1987, p.33) The potency of the fragment is therefore bound up within the impossibility of completion, the partial element within the immensity, the remnant, which as poet Emil Cioran observed, ‘fascinate[s] with the illusion of touching the edge of darkness, the borders of our nocturnal destiny’ (in Rella, 1987, p.35). Rella relates this melancholy relationship with the world of things to the experience of the labyrinth, ‘a place without exits, or better yet, a place with thousands of exits, none of which lead outside’ (Rella, 1987, p.31), and draws parallels with Kafka’s description of the world as a collection, and Bellow’s perception of the world as the ‘province of the collector of ruins’ (Rella, 1987, p.34). The melancholy of exits, of departures, as well as the fragmentary, leads towards the dual losses bound up in the poignancy of leavings.

Note 1 The phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans is Latin for ‘fearful and fascinating mystery’, and is used by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy to name the awesome mystery common to all forms of religious experience.

References Buck-Morss, Susan (1991). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (illustrated edition). Boston: MIT Press. Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in 2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press. Girardin, R.L. (1982). An Essay on Landscape (trans. Daniel Malthus; originally published in French in 1783). New York: Garland Publishing. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (1994). The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Harries, Karsten (1997). The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holl, Steven (2006). ‘Water: a phenomenal lens’, in Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, San Francisco: William Stout. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories: reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48. Leach, Neil (2003). ‘9/11’, Diacritics, 33(3/4): 75–92. Marshall, William (1795). A Review of ‘The Landscape, a Didactic Poem’, also of ‘An Essay on the Picturesque’, Together with Practical Remarks on Rural Ornament. London: G. Nicol, G. G. and J. Robinson, and J. Debrett. Rella, Franco (1987). ‘Melancholy and the labyrinthine world of things’, Substance, 53: 29–36.

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Rothstein, Eric (1976). ‘“Ideal Presence”, and the “Non Finito”, in EighteenthCentury Aesthetics’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9(3): 307–332. Scully, Vincent (2003). Modern Architecture and Other Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51. Steinmetz, George (2008). ‘Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the cultivation of memory’. Visual Studies, 23(3): 211–237. Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Weller, Richard (2005). Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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16 Leavings

‘Leavings’ are melancholy doubled. First, leavings are poignant actions: departures, abandonments, desertions. And second, leavings are those things which are left, the remnants of something previously whole: detritus, residue. Each has their own sense of desolation, and in some cases both the action and the remainder are intertwined in a narrative of displacement. There is implied in the residue – whether it be a note, a trace, an object now lost – a tender violence. Ruptures and cleavings are the subplots of leavings. The departure of things, of wholes, of lives, of loves, leaves the pain of residual stains, of that which remains. The melancholy tracings of things inhere in dust, and in sediments. Like the ‘residues of the day’ which, according to Freud, infuse our dreams, leavings are fragmentary and incomplete. Yet within these debris inhere melancholic imaginings, or as Joseph Cornell wrote of the ‘sweepings’ that he gathered up from his studio floor, they contain those things that fly under the radar, ‘the rich crosscurrents ramifications etc that go into the boxes but which are not apparent (I feel at least) in the final result’ (in Schwenger, 2006, p.144). Complete absence, total emptiness, is an aesthetic other than melancholy. Daunting, desolate, inhumane, a complete absence may instead enter into the sublime. It is the hint of presence which moves a scene, an image, into a melancholy state. The intimation of things being left, or having departed, opens the door into the realm of melancholy. Like fragments and ruins, leavings is the state of things no longer whole. The leftovers that persist, the remnants which endure, hint at other realms beyond the place of the present. As triggers for involuntary memory, leavings can sabotage the most innocent of gazes. When the eye rests upon an element in a scene, something out of place, out of time, a reverie opens out, a recollection, a recall of departure and loss. As Trigg explains, ‘The phenomenology of involuntary memory resounds with melancholic fascination as we encounter an object that, while still persisting in space and time, is displaced from its narrative context and so points to an elsewhere that is no longer’ (Trigg, 2006, p.29). The condition of leavings as departures is bound up with nostalgia, the conflicted emotion associated with retrospection. Nostalgia was coined by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student in the late seventeenth century, a

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hybrid of the Greek words for returning home (nostos) and pain or longing (algos), to describe the condition experienced by Swiss mercenaries who spent long periods away from home, with the symptoms including ‘persistent thoughts about home, melancholy, insomnia, anorexia, weakness, anxiety, lack of breath, and palpitations of the heart’ (Wilson, 2005, p.21). Like melancholy, nostalgia is also characterised by paradox, where the anguish of being apart from one’s place in the world is at the same time a condition which is desirable. Bound up in nostalgia is the pathos and pothos1 of leavings, the sadness from being apart and the inexplicable pleasure of the pain of separation. The loss of landscape, the leavings from it (departures), and the leavings behind (residues), are a source of melancholic contemplation for refugees. Displaced from their homelands, refugees will sometimes carry with them small mementos of place, items which form armatures for mourning. Such extended, prolonged, even permanent, mourning becomes melancholy proper, in Freudian terms – the wound is kept open and the subject does not seek closure but instead longs for longing, pursuing the pain of loss. The fragments of a former existence are bearers of identity, of the seat of one’s self, for the nostalgic refugee. Landscapes are powerfully evocative of identity and connection, and for displaced Latvians the fragments were representations of the countryside, providing a portable means to tie them back to their homes. In paintings, songs and pastoral narratives, the landscape was the core of an emotional repertoire, even though that very same landscape was also the place of the darkest of memories. Soviet control from 1944 created a climate of fear, and the forests were a place of refuge for Latvians. The imposition of collective farming, heavy taxation, and the deportation of one-tenth of the rural population to Siberia, saw a dramatic change to the Latvian countryside. As Vieda Skultans laments: ‘Those who survived deportation and exile often had no homes to go to and their return to the homeland could also be painful’ (Skultans, 2001, p.30). For Latvians, landscape imagery was intensely melancholy. Skultans describes this irresolvable connection to place: ‘descriptions of the pastoral embody a contradiction: they hold out hope and yet they contain a fear lest the landscape will speak of the brutalities it has witnessed’ (Skultans, 2001, p.38). This conflicted relationship with memory is what Svetlana Boym terms ‘reflective nostalgia’, in distinction from ‘restorative nostalgia’ which tries to recreate the past. For the reflective nostalgic, the past cannot be recreated, it is irrevocable, unrequitable, and will remain as a wound that can’t be healed. This melancholy irresolution reflects on a past that is not as it was, but as a creative reinterpretation, ‘not a property of the object itself, but a result of an interaction between subjects and objects, between actual landscapes and landscapes of the mind’ (Boym, 2001, p.354). The melancholy of leavings is connected to the poignancy of the souvenir. As a trace of a memory the souvenir is the ultimate ‘stranded object’, isolated forever from its origin. Susan Stewart describes how the potency of souvenirs

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rests upon the fact that the event which they are connected to cannot be repeated. The connection between the object and its origin is lost, but the relationship remains as an ethereal trace. Stewart explains how souvenirs are the means by which nostalgics nurture their desire for the past. Although the souvenir exists in the present, the nostalgic wants to push it into the past, to find that distance between what is here now, and what was. This distance is something which must be maintained for the nostalgic’s desire to be able to continue, it must remain at an unattainable arm’s length, a fragment from the past, a wound that can’t heal. Distance also resonates with aura, and the cult value of objects, all that is tied up within elements persisting from the past. ‘The souvenir involves the displacement of attention into the past’, Stewart observes, adding that it is ‘not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present; rather, its function is to envelope the present within the past. Souvenirs are magical objects because of this transformation’ (Stewart, 2005, p.151). The abandoned fragment falls outside time and space – becoming a ‘stranded object’,2 a ‘melancholy object’ where ‘through death, the most mundane objects can rise in symbolic, emotional and mnemonic value sometimes outweighing all other measures of value’ (Gibson, 2004, p. 292). Inhering within remnants, these are the phantom presences that prevent closure. Strandings exhibit the familiar, making them strange, amplifying a melancholic out-of-placeness, where their awkwardness induces pangs of poignancy. The traces left by a prior inhabitation, abandoned belongings, a child’s swing which hangs forlornly, a shoe, the mark on a wall where a picture once hung – the leavings left by those who have departed magnify the presence of absence, desertion is palpable. Leavings are the intensification of loss. Leavings are also represented not by the fragments but the holes where they should be. Melancholy pours into the lacunae, gaps and holes in history. That which is missing somehow persists, a ghostly presence. The phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ is one well-documented within psychology, the ache that resides in an absent arm or leg after amputation. The phantom limbs of landscapes ache in all places of departures, of lands abandoned, of downfalls and aftermaths. It is what Jan Morris calls the ‘Trieste effect’, a sense of being ‘taken … out of time to nowhere’ (Morris, 2001, p.17). And, as Morris reflects, this feeling is founded upon ‘an unspecified yearning [that] steals narcotically over me – what the Welsh language, in a loved word, calls hiraeth’ (Morris, 2001, p. 16). The poignancy of leavings is amplified in the landscapes of exiles, departures, diasporas. As Edward Casey writes in paralleling Freudian mourning with a loss of landscape, ‘We mourn places as well as people’, and as such the same emotions may be extended to apply to the abandonment of places with which we have become bonded and which we have been forced to leave, often so

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abruptly that we have not been able to anticipate the consequences in any salutary way. (Casey, 1993, p.198, emphasis in original) The wrenching from place experienced in sudden departures is intensified by subsequent returns, where the losses, the absences, appear multiplied. François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who survived his family in the Revolution, but returning from exile to Paris in 1800 found the Place de la Concorde, dating from 1755, ‘had the decay, the melancholy and deserted look of an old amphitheatre’ (in Woodward, 2002, p.19). A sense of loss stems from eviction, exile and also from change beyond one’s control. The landscape historian W.G. Hoskins expresses such melancholy in his reflection on the marks of progress on the English landscape, creating – the ‘England of the Nissen hut, the “pre-fab”, and the electric fence ... England of the by-pass ... England of the bombing-range where there was once silence ... England of battle-training areas.... Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians’ (in Cloke et al., 1994, p.29). Hoskins’ lament evokes the observation of the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, that ‘The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more fugitive than the passing of flowers’ (in Eco, 1986, p.9). This recognition of the beauty of things about to disappear, of the intensification of beauty at the approach of death, is the melancholic species of ubi sunt, Latin for ‘where are?’. The beauty of the ubi sunt moment is a nostalgic yearning and backwards-looking wonder at the fragility of what comes to pass, and is usually presented as a list of what has been lost – something which Hoskins does in reverse in his ‘Nissen hut’ lament. Meditation upon the passage of things induces contemplation, the melancholy of reflection, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That time will come and take my love away’ (in Harries, 1994, p.97). Thoughts of loss are associated with the sense of transience, of the passage of all things. Reflection upon transience spans a polarity, with the ubi sunt contemplation of the beauty of passing at one extreme, and desolation and despondency at the other. Freud’s essay ‘On Transience’ described his walk through ‘smiling countryside’ with an aloof friend and a young poet. This young poet, while admiring the scene for its beauty, could take no joy in it, being ‘disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create’ (Freud, 1997, p.197). This seemingly perverse anti-joyful perspective in the face of beauty echoes what Žižek called the ‘old racist joke about Gypsies’, that ‘when it rains they are happy because they know that after rain there is always sunshine, and when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that after the sunshine it will at some point rain’ (Žižek, 2001, pp.661–662). For both the Gypsies and Freud’s young poet, the relationship with the transience

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of nature is one of melancholy, of a constant awareness of the fragility of things, of the inevitability of leavings. The Irish Diaspora of the potato famine underpins an affective topography of leavings. In 1845–1852 the devastation of the Irish potato crop, followed by an inhospitable political response, resulted in the mass abandonment of agricultural lands and a death toll of over 1.5 million. The Diaspora saw the Irish leave their homelands and head to new homes around the world, including New York and Sydney, both of which have sites which memorialise An Gorta Mór, the Irish Hunger. New York’s memorial was opened in July 2002, and is located in Battery Park City, towards the southern tip of Manhattan Island (Figure 16.1). Designer Brian Tolle recreated the countryside of County Mayo, including the local flora and a ruined cottage donated by his extended family. The slab of countryside is held aloft on a podium of fossilised Irish limestone, striated with lines of illuminated text, selected from accounts of the famine. Tolle describes how this is ‘a landscape supported by language’. Passing through the tunnel in the podium, written text is amplified by the sound of the spoken voice. Here, the references depart from the specific context of the Irish famine, and extend into a discourse on famine at large. These are tales of leavings, set against the affective scene of a deserted landscape. At the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, another memorial to the Irish Potato Famine effects a sense of abandonment and pathos, designed by Hossein and Angela Valamanesh (1999) (Figure 16.2). With a table and shelves with the most spare of possessions – a few books, a basket – there is a profoundly melancholy air. An empty plate sits on the table. These remainders hold within them small universes of loss. Inhering within these remnants are the phantom presences that prevent closure, with the paradox that it is absence which becomes palpable. The humble domestic elements left behind echo the ‘straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting … her blotting paper, her scissors, her thimble’ that Simone de Beauvoir described in the memoir of her mother’s death, observing: ‘Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its instants’ (de Beauvoir, 1985, p.98). Like the books, basket and empty plate in Sydney, the shoes on the bank of the Danube that form the memorial to Jews shot into the river in Budapest are achingly melancholy. The memorial, designed by Gyula Pauer and Janos Can Togay, is ‘To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by the Arrow Cross Militiamen in 1944–45. Erected 16th April 2005’ (in Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40). Taylor-Tudzin describes how the memorial came about through one of the designers’ ‘childhood memories of seeing people being marched at gunpoint’ and how the shoes could become a prompt for remembering (Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40).

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Figure 16.1 Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial, Manhattan, New York, USA, 2002. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2004.

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Figure 16.2 Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, Irish Famine Memorial, Sydney, Australia, 1999. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2006.

Leavings take on a further poignancy when they become petrified, fossilised, stranded in time. In the Cretto, a memorial on the former site of the town of Gibellina in Italy, the double poignancy of leavings is palpable. An earthquake of magnitude 6.4 struck the town in 1968, with a death toll of over 1,000 in the surrounding area of inland Sicily, and nearly 100,000 lost their homes. Twelve towns were lost, including Gibellina, a town of 6,000 in which the cemetery was the only thing not destroyed. Gibellina was not rebuilt on its original site as the other towns were; instead, it was relocated 20 kilometres away. The remaining rubble sat until 1981, when artist Alberto Burri visited the town and proposed the Cretto memorial, a ‘sudden solidification of a mass in fluid state: a large waving surface, cracked with passable fissures and rifts which roughly reproduced the layout of the old town’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.56). The memorial is the entire town set in concrete, where the departure, the leavings, of the residents is expressed as an absence that resonates with the eerie emptiness of a de Chirico painting (Figure 16.3). The haunted uncanniness is underscored in Virginia Maksymowicz’s evocation of the place, in ‘Walking through the stark whiteness, weeds poking through the seams, one can almost hear the voices of the dead in the wind that whips along these narrow corridors’ (Maksymowicz, 1997, p.25). Efré García Grinda and Cristina Díaz Moreno describe the experience of a

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Figure 16.3 Alberto Burri, Il Cretto (‘The Crack’), Earthquake Memorial, Gibellina, Italy, 1984–1989. Photo by Andrea Lodi, 2008.

nocturnal visit, when the ‘Cretto offers an eerie presence: its white surfaces dimly lit but clearly reflect the moonlight and stand out against the absolute darkness of its surroundings’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.55). There are 122 blocks around 1.5 metres high making up the concrete form, a ‘discontinuous archaeological landscape’ containing ‘the remains of walls, roofs, personal effects: the material possessions of a population which has moved its homes to a distance of some kilometres’ (Maksymowicz, 1997, p.25). Like Rachel Whiteread’s castings, the Cretto presents a death mask, a record of lives lost. The site is now held in stasis, petrified, and the concrete matrix holds the residue within it, the remnants entombed. Trigg’s commentary on the mourning of the loss of place resonates with the Cretto memorial: An explicitly uncanny border, located in the discrepancy between place and time, instils the creation of a new place from the ruins of the old one. In the return, we do not witness the death of place, now present as a dead zone of motionlessness. Instead, the old place morphs, often uneasily, into what it has since become. (Trigg, 2006, p.123)

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Leavings 125 Grinda and Moreno explain that the Cretto memorial ‘does not seek to understand forgetting by accumulating memories, by a nostalgic operation that challenges the passing of time, that evokes and perpetuates irretrievable images’, and instead it provides an alternative vision, one which ‘will manipulate time to give memory and place an abstract, unallusive image, thereby creating an artificial landscape of maximum intensity in this desolate spot’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.58). In eschewing the nostalgia and sentimentality that are implicated in efforts to sustain particular memories, il Cretto approaches the melancholy of the void. In its aspirations and its form, Burri’s memorial anticipates Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe two decades later, and both sites emphasise how melancholy is sustained by forms which are abstract, and suggestive of absence, departures, residues. The memorials to the war dead are also markers of absence. While memorials can be criticised as glorifications of war, a mind receptive to the affectivity of loss reads them as surrogate tombs. These are the places which intensify absence, the substitute graves for those who died on the battlefields far away. In places like New Zealand and Australia, the war memorials remember the losses on the battlefields of Europe, of the many who never returned home. To recognise the melancholy of the dead, rather than the adoration of heroism, in such sites is to appreciate the beauty of sorrow in the human condition. The memorials stand as metonymic markers, synecdoches of the hundreds of thousands. While the obelisks of the conventional language of memorials can become clichéd, the taken-for-granted forms are undone when they too become subjected to leavings. The spatial vacuum of an empty plinth quickly fills with emotions which can be more intense than the statue itself invoked. As Forty (1999) observes, the iconoclastic removal of 50 of the 60 Lenin statues in Moscow left empty plinths which were charged with more memories than the statues had ever been (Forty, 1999). The melancholy potency of an empty plinth is explored in Rachel Whiteread’s project for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The plinth in Trafalgar Square, designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, has always been empty. The original intention was to display an equestrian statue, but it was never completed due to issues with funding. The Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, under the auspices of the Greater London Authority, runs the programme of selecting temporary sculptures to be exhibited on the empty plinth. Whiteread’s sculpture, Untitled Monument (2001), was a cast of the empty plinth itself made in clear resin, and exhibited on top of it in the manner of a figurative sculpture. Here, though, the figure was a doubling of absence, creating a sense of leavings ‘squared’, a heightened melancholy This sense of absence is evoked through a very different materiality in Martha Schwartz’s Field Work installation for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Lines of white sheets flapped in the breeze,

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poignant ciphers of loss and departure. Pegged onto the steel wires with wooden pegs, the white sheets evoked domesticity, and also made connections within the landscape, between the lines of slave cottages and the fields beyond. John Beardsley remarked on how the project registered the natural phenomena on the site: it took on distinct attributes in different weather conditions and at various time of day. On a still morning it resembled sheets hung out to dry. On a windy day, the panels – which were tethered at one side – evoked a fleet of sailboats. In the mist, they suggested row upon row of canvas tents, like some abandoned Civil War encampment. (Beardsley, 2005, p.192) The combination of the sheets and white-painted grass created a series of smaller compounds within the broader setting, what Beardsley refers to as ‘ethereal spaces’ where visitors ‘experienced a sense of solitude … but also an awareness of a ghostly presence … [a] consciousness of the missing persons in plantation history’ (Beardsley, 2005, p.192). The memorial to Walter Benjamin at Portbou in Spain also keys into natural phenomena as a means of expressing the melancholy of leavings. Designed by Dani Karavan and completed in 1994, the Passages memorial is located high on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean. Leavings resonate strongly with Benjamin’s fate in this seaside village, the end point in a journey across Europe to escape Nazi Germany. Leaving his homeland and ultimately his life, Benjamin is alleged to have committed suicide in Portbou in September 1940, although even this final fact of death is not certain. The whereabouts of Benjamin’s body is not known. Although a cemetery niche was secured by one of his travelling companions, when Hannah Arendt visited Portbou some months after his death she could find no grave, no sign of where he was laid to rest. As is the case with cemetery niches, the period of occupancy is only five years, and after that remains are re-interred in a communal grave. In this case there appears to have been confusion over Benjamin’s identity, and his remains had already been moved to the communal grave by the time Arendt arrived. There is a ‘fake’ Walter Benjamin grave in the cemetery, with a rock serving as a tombstone, providing a locus for the rituals of visiting the dead in Jewish culture – leaving stones on the grave. The Passages memorial is often described in terms of only one of its three elements, a dramatic steel shaft which runs down from the area in front of the cemetery towards the sea below. Rather than a meditative, reflective view of the sea, the framed view is towards the swirling zone where the waves come close to the shore. This tumultuous view is heightened by the vertiginous plunge the visitor makes when walking down through the shaft. Affording only enough space for one person to enter at a time, the shaft is without handrails, and in the rain on my first visit, the feeling of plunging

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towards the sea was palpable as the wet steel steps were terrifyingly slippery. The sound of your own footsteps clang on the steel and echo eerily within the shaft, a form compared by Germain Viatte to a railroad tunnel (Viatte, 1997). The only barrier preventing a fall towards the sea is a thick glass panel, inscribed with Benjamin’s own words in German and English, and, unnervingly, cracked. The shaft is spatially tethered to the land by what appear to be two rails embedded into the cemetery forecourt, leading to a stone inlay in the bank. The rails continue a motif of Karavan’s, who has used railroad tracks in a number of preceding works. Here they gain a heightened significance through their reference to the leavings and passages of Walter Benjamin, and to the wider references of the Jewish Holocaust. One of Karavan’s sketches for the memorial shows a drawing of rails and a text in Hebrew which reads: The rails From far away I heard the noise of the station, the frontier, the railway clanking, and the sound of the cattle trucks on their way to the death camps. (In Omer, 1997, p.69) From the memorial site, the Portbou railway station is a constant presence, underscoring the references to travelling and departures. Although only a small village, Portbou is an important node on the rail network as it is the point at which the rail gauges change to those traditionally used in Spain. The activities associated with the gauge changes accentuate the presence of the railway, and obliquely infuse the Passages memorial with sounds and sensations. A second fragmentary element of the memorial is a set of steel steps that seemingly lead to nowhere. Gesturing, perhaps, towards the olive tree that stands outside the cemetery, the steps also allude to a feeling of senselessness and loss. One of the most poignantly powerful moments in Karavan’s memorial work is the plinth, high up and secreted away behind the cemetery. The steel platform is topped by a simple cube, immediately triggering thoughts of absence (Figure 16.4). This element is serenely melancholy in contrast to the sublime terror of walking down the steps leading to the sea. It is possible to enter this space of absence and sit upon the cube. As an experience it is a necessarily solitary one, and in my own encounters with this site it seems that this is quite possible – there are no queues or milling masses, one can simply ‘be’. Seated upon the cube, the view is out to the Mediterranean beyond, a prospect which is mediated by the chain link fence running along the top of the cemetery, preventing falls down the heavily banked sides. Mordechai Omer suggests the cube is both an empty chair and a memorial stone, and together with the presence of the fence ‘barring passage, the wanderings and hardships of Benjamin’s last days are conjured up with great poignancy’ (Omer, 1997, p.67).

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Figure 16.4 Dani Karavan, Passages, Memorial to Walter Benjamin, Portbou, Spain, 1994. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2009.

An ocean prospect is also the focus of another place of melancholy, Mullion Cove in Cornwall, England, part of the melancholy of the Void, introduced in Chapter 9. The natural topography is already productive of emotion, with John Wylie relating the phenomenological epiphany he felt on arriving at the cove: ‘The overall impression of the scene … transcended all particulars. The outlines and shadowed depths of the cliffs seemed archetypal: in all the transience of things, somehow this moment revealed the true and original textures of the landscape’ (Wylie, 2009, pp.275–276). Beyond the contemplative potency of the natural setting, the traces of human presence infused the scene with a poignant presence. Dotted around the cove were many memorial benches, each one with its own dedication, each one a memento, a manifestation of the melancholy of leavings. Wylie writes that he knew before even looking that each seat would be ‘in memorium’, that ‘They would be sites set aside for looking and remembering, and in so being they would vex together in complex fashion landscape and gaze, visible and invisible, presence and absence, blindness and flight, love and loss’ (Wylie, 2009, p.277). Each seat echoes the Walter Benjamin memorial’s visual trajectory to the sea, in opposition to the usual gesture of mourning, to look

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Leavings 129 downwards at the earth, at a grave. Of the benches, Wylie describes how their feeling of movement was centrifugal as opposed to the centripality of a cemetery; they spin the gaze out to the horizon, literally to the ‘vanishing point’. Resisting the orthodox approach of seeking to ‘know’ the individuals memorialised by the seats, Wylie instead engages with their ‘untethered quality’ suggested in part by their location perched high on the hillside. The seats suggest a phenomenology not of touching and feeling, but of absence and haunting, the sensation of leavings which persists, their ‘spectral gazes’ observing the landscape beyond. The melancholy leavings of Ground Zero extend beyond the amputated skyline, to the site to which the remains were taken: the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Carolyn Malcom’s critique of the Groundswell exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York identified the powerful resonance that operates between these two sites. Fresh Kills is currently being developed into a park and, Malcom argues, like many of the projects within the Groundswell exhibition this aspiration towards ‘recovering’ a site conscripts mourning as a means of reconfiguring collective identity. Therefore, sites such as Manchester City’s renewal following the IRA bombings and Beirut’s Garden of Forgiveness share a duplicitous relationship with memory, on one hand building on sites of trauma, but on the other enlisting the community’s desire to heal a wound along with the general aspirations towards ‘progress’ to rework, or even erase that history. These are perhaps ‘normal mourning’ responses, the wish to heal and ‘move on’. Yet, at the same time, there is a risk of forgetting. The relationship between Fresh Kills and Ground Zero presents something different, in the exhibition at least, since the images were not simply about reworking the ground into something new, as here on this site were both the remains from 9/11 (including the emotionally charged traces of victims), and the view towards the amputated skyline. Rather than the overlaying of a new park, new city centre, new garden, here is a focus directly on an open wound. The proposed memorial replicates the form of the twin towers, echoing their dimensions as horizontal earth mounds, absorbing the image of the lost object(s) into the landscape. And, Malcom adds, ‘that the affective resonance goes beyond local and national affiliation and attributes to the fact that viewers are forced to consider another space in dialogue with the landfill – that of Ground Zero itself’ (Malcom, 2006, p.238). The dilemmas of the Fresh Kills site and its tragic cargo of human remains are reminders of the ethical freight that is carried by even the smallest trace. Even a photograph is a trace, a small place of melancholy – not ‘in’ the landscape as such, but of it. Some of the most ethically burdened photographs in all of history are those taken by inmates in Auschwitz. Victor Burgin describes how these photographs are central to debates over whether the Holocaust can be represented in images … or should be. The arguments against looking at the photographs are grounded in the belief that they, like every other image, are seen as inadequate in the face of ‘the literally

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unrepresentable horror of the Shoah’ (Burgin, 2009, p.320). The counterargument is that not to look is to be complicit with the Nazi ideal that the machines of extermination should ‘leave no trace’ – these photographs are traces, the leavings, the fragile objects that endure. Burgin refers to the views of Georges Didi-Huberman, who wrote that these traces are miniscule samples, taken from an extremely complex reality, brief moments from a continuum that lasted at least five years. These moments nevertheless constitute – in relation to the view we have upon the facts today – the truth itself, that is to say a relic of this truth, a pitiful reminder of it: all that still remains of the visible of Auschwitz. (In Burgin, 2009, p.320) The melancholic meditation over loss is expressed in works which record states of absence. Leavings, abandonments, departures are intensified by that which is left behind. The traces of former presences appear magnified, their poignancy inflated. Dionne Brand, writing of immigrants living in Toronto in the book What We All Long For, describes the moment when Carla returns to the apartment where her mother Angie committed suicide, and reflects: Doesn’t a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events it witnesses; shouldn’t there be some sign of commemoration, some symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life there? (In Hua, 2009, p.142) The revealing of auratic traces is realised in Jorge Otero-Pailos’ project The Ethics of Dust: Doge’s Palace, Venice 2009. Latex was poured over an unrestored wall of the Palace, producing a cast which captures the palimpsest of the wall’s history. Like a print lifted from a lithographic stone, or a death mask, the cast is an impression, in all senses of the word, and brings to mind a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, of that which is embedded within an abandoned space: Most unforgettable of all … were the walls themselves. The stubborn life of those rooms had refused to be stamped out. It was still there; it clung to the nails that were left in the walls; it stood on the remaining hand’s-breadths of floor, it had crept under the corner joists where there was still a little of the interior. You could see it was in the paint, which had gradually changed, from year to year: blue into mouldy green, green into grey, and grey into an old, stale putrescent white. But it was also in the fresher spots that had survived behind mirrors, pictures and wardrobes; for it had traced the outlines of these things, over and over, and had been with its spiders and dust even in these hidden-away places,

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now exposed to view. It was in every flayed strip, it was in the damp blisters at the lower edges of wallpaper, it flapped in the torn-off shreds, and it sweated out of the nasty stains made long ago. (Rilke, 2009, pp.30–31) The slow metamorphosis of deserted buildings and abandoned landscapes reveals the index of time. Through the inevitable incursions of nature, culture slowly becomes submerged.

Notes 1 Pothos is a term used by E.B. Daniels in his discussion of nostalgia (Daniels, 1985). The term ‘pothos’ refers to the mythological character Pothos who was either the brother or son of Eros, and was associated with longing and the unattainable, and ultimately with death. 2 ‘Stranded objects’ is Eric Santner’s term, who in turn attributes it to a colleague who provided it unknowingly (Santner, 1990).

References Beardsley, John (2005). ‘Filling a void: creating contemporary spaces for contemplation’, in Rebecca Krinke (ed.), Contemporary Landscapes of Contemplation. Abingdon: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in 2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press. Casey, Edward S. (1993). Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cloke, Paul, Doel, Marcus, Matless, David, Phillips, Martin and Thrift, Nigel (1994). Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies. London: Paul Chapman. Daniels E.B. (1985). ‘Nostalgia: experiencing the elusive’, in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, Descriptions: Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 11. Albany: State University of New York Press. de Beauvoir, Simone (1985). A Very Easy Death. New York: Pantheon Books. Eco, Umberto (1986). Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press. Forty, Adrian (1999). ‘Introduction’, in Adrian Forty and Susanne Kulcher (eds), The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg. Freud, Sigmund (1997). ‘On transience’, in Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (essay first published 1915). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gibson, Margaret (2004). ‘Melancholy objects’. Mortality, 9(4): 285–299. Grinda, Efré García and Moreno, Cristina Díaz (1999). ‘White lava: Alberto Burri’s Certto in Gibellina’, Quaderns, 223: 54–59. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (1994). The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Hua, Anh (2009) ‘“What we all long for’: memory, trauma and emotional geographies’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Maksymowicz, Virginia (1997). ‘Art renews life – Gibellina: an uncommon collaboration’, Sculpture, 16(2): 22–27. Malcom, Carolyn (2006) ‘Melancholic MoMA: Groundswell’s missing histories’. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 11:232–238. Morris, Jan (2001). Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Omer, Mordechai (1997). ‘Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin’, in Mordechai Omer, Dani Karavan: Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Rilke, Rainer Maria (2009). The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (trans. Michael Hulse; originally published 1910). London: Penguin Books. Schwenger, Peter (2006). The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Skultans, Vieda (2001). ‘Narratives of landscape in Latvian history and memory’. Landscape Review, 7(2): 25–39. Stewart, Susan (2005). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor-Tudzin, Jessica (2011). ‘Holocaust memorials in Budapest, Hungary, 1987– 2010: through the words of the memorial artists’. Unpublished Master in Comparative History thesis, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Trigg, Dylan (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang. Viatte, Germain (1997). ‘Passages’, in Mordechai Omer, Dani Karavan: Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Wilson, Janelle L. (2005). Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Woodward, Christopher (2002). In Ruins. London: Vintage. Wylie, John (2009). ‘Landscape, absence and the geographies of love’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 34(3): 275–289. Žižek, Slavoj (2001). ‘Melancholy and the act’, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism. New York: Verso.

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17 Submersion

The intensification of melancholy in the landscape inheres in the eternal dialogue between nature and culture. Weathering, patina, ruination, are all traces of this conversation, transcripts of the exchange. A further dimension to these traces is the profoundly poignant submersion of culture by nature. Inundation is an ephemeral condition, where culture and nature melt together, not necessarily ruined, nor complete. Submersion confounds boundaries, inverting, eroding, removing the datum. The condition of submersion is ambivalent and poignant. Volcanic eruptions, sand, silt, water, colonisation by plants – all of these incursions erode the edges, blurring thresholds of containment. The drowning of culture by nature disturbs the certainty of existence. Inundation can occur suddenly, as with Pompeii, marooned in a matrix of volcanic matter when Mount Vesuvius erupted in ad 79. Suspended in time, frozen at the moment of the eruption, the city was petrified as an enormous diorama. The eighteenth-century description of Pompeii by Mr Kelsall captures the impression of the scene arrested by volcanic eruption: It should seem that at the time of the dreadful shower of ashes which overwhelmed the City, the family took refuge in the cellars, and there perished from suffocation, for here were found 24 skeletons, which remain to this time. In another house we were conducted into the cookroom, where there are several vessels and the skeleton of a woman in the very posture in which she died. In the prisons were found skeletons with fetters on their leg bones. In short, it was pleasing, and at the same time melancholy, to view this monument of antiquity and to reflect on the devastation of a volcano! (In Nicholls, 1822, p.628) The melancholy spectacle of Pompeii confounded the tidy division of life into domestic space and the landscape beyond. The volcano did not discriminate between buildings and landscape, and lava engulfed everything, erasing spatial boundaries. Over time the dissolution of thresholds has become even more apparent, as the site continues to succumb to nature. A

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recent series of collapses at Pompeii, including the House of the Chaste Lovers, the Schola Armaturarum and a segment of the tufa garden wall which gave way after torrential rain, continue the ongoing melting of architecture into landscape through submersion. The Schola Armaturarum was a frescoed house which gladiators used for their combat preparations. Frescoes and murals which had shown exterior scenes, as though windows looking out on a landscape, have now become part of that external world, a seamless composition. Nature and culture have melded together, and the scene is appreciated aesthetically, with the violence of the eruption replaced by melancholic reflection and curiosity. As Jean Starobinksi put it, ‘for a ruin to appear beautiful, the act of destruction must be remote enough for its precise circumstances to have been forgotten: it can then be imputed to an anonymous power, to a featureless transcendent force – History, Destiny’ (Starobinski, 1964, p.180). While Pompeii’s inundation was sudden and tragic, there is also submersion by stealth. More slowly dust and sediment accumulates, bringing a subtle sense of submersion. The layering of small particles provides an index of time’s passage, poignantly evoked in Dickens’ Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. In denial of the passing of time after being abandoned at the altar on her wedding day, Miss Havisham had all the clocks in the house stopped at that exact moment, and everything left as it was. The otherwise civilised domestic space became organic, external, taking on the character of a garden more than a dining room: Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community. I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests. (Dickens, 2006, p.83) Submerged beneath dust and mould, the wedding scene is a poignant prospect. Everything that interiority connotes – hygiene, civilisation, order, control – has melted and mouldered away. The interior becomes uncannily exterior, strange and melancholy. The prospect of an absolute transformation

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to an organic static is intimated by Georges Bataille in his essay ‘Poussière’ or dust, where he wrote of how the sad blankets of dust endlessly invade earthly dwellings and soil them uniformly: as if attics and old rooms were being arranged for the imminent entrance of obsessions, of ghosts, of larvae fed and inebriated by the worm-eaten smell of old dust. When the big servant girls arm themselves, each morning, with big feather dusters, or even with vacuum cleaners, they are perhaps not entirely unaware that they are contributing as much as the most positive scientists to keeping off the evil ghosts who are sickened by cleanliness and logic. One day or another, it is true, dust, if it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over the servants, overrunning with vast quantities of rubble abandoned buildings, deserted docks: and in this distant epoch there will be nothing more to save us from nocturnal terrors. (In Vidler, 2003, p.4) Signalling abandonment, dust tugs at the liminal landscape, at the marginal and unkempt. The tension with ‘cleanliness and logic’ adds to feelings of melancholy, destabilising the sense of certainty, confounding and unsettling the conditions of existence. The temporary erasure of the datum places the experience of the world outside the normal shape of existence. That which is familiar becomes reconfigured, obscured, poignantly adrift. The intrusion of water, sand, ash, or the burying by earth, or the slow accretion over the years, alters the fixed point of the plane upon which we exist. The layers of cities like Bath or Rome reveal the sedimentary submersion, through processes which are both natural and cultural. Standing in the Roman baths in Bath, the surrounding city is some five metres above, and there is a feeling of being in a hole through time, dislocated from the familiar, quotidian horizon above. The interior is pushed down into the landscape, implanted, its datum undone. In Rome the beholder floats within an indeterminate topography and an ambiguity of time, adrift from the certain datums of past and present, or the spatial absolutes of inside and outside, building and landscape. Nature and culture become intertwined, drawing into question the boundaries between landscape and building, the weathering of the built form begins to parallel geomorphological processes. When Charles Dickens visited the ruins of the Roman Colosseum in 1846, he was captivated by the ‘walls and arches overgrown with green … the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit; chance products of the seeds dropped there by birds’ (Dickens, 2009, p.152). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wanderings in the ruins of the Roman baths of Caracalla bring forth the assimilation of culture by nature; in a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock he describes the ‘sublime and lovely’ desolation as a hybrid of building and landscape,

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The places of melancholy The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain. The perpendicular walls resemble nothing more than that cliff of Bisham wood, that is overgrown with wood, and yet is stony and precipitous.… These walls surround green and level spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin, overtwined with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. (Shelley, 1845, p.125)

At Ravenna the landscape slowly changed, from a coastal edge to a marshy and lagoon-like condition, as the water filled with sediment. All along the Romagna Coast, coastal advance – the pushing out of the beachline into the sea – had been common up until about 1915. Shelley also wrote about his observations of Ravenna, describing its desolate submersion in a letter to Mary Shelley in 1845: This city was once of vast extent, and the traces of its remains are to be found more than four miles from the gate of the modern town. The sea, which once came close to it, has now retired to the distance of four miles, leaving a melancholy extent of marshes, interspersed with patches of cultivation, and towards the seashore with pine forests, which have followed the retrocession of the Adriatic, and the roots of which are actually washed by its waves. The level of the sea and of this tract of country correspond so nearly, that a ditch dug to a few feet in depth, is immediately filled up with sea water. All the ancient buildings have been choked up to the height of from five to twenty feet by the deposit of the sea, and of the inundations, which are frequent in the winter. (Shelley, 1845, p.151) Slow inundation of architecture by landscape produced the very strange beauty of Kolmanskop, Namibia, a diamond town from the early twentieth century, made in a vision of Germany. And then the diamonds dried up. In the late 1950s the town was abandoned and the surrounding sand lands slowly invaded the settlement (Figure 17.1). The painted walls had somehow anticipated their fate, providing ethereal backgrounds to the interior deserts, echoes of the murals of Pompeii. Like an architectural Ozymandias, ‘Nothing beside remains: round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away’ (Shelley, 2008, p.552). There is a silent, poetic yielding of culture to nature. Yet, it is not an erasure, not a usurping of culture by nature. Rather, it is a slow dance, a melting, a merging.

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Figure 17.1 Kolmanskop, Namibia. Photo by Damien du Toit, 2006.

The vision of architecture engulfed by flowing sand or water is mysterious, evocative, melancholy. Squint Opera’s recent project, Flooded London, was included in the 2008 London Festival of Architecture. Throughout the flooded city the datum dissolves, thresholds are eroded. A figure is about to dive off the ledge of St. Paul’s Whispering Gallery into an interior which is filled with the rising flood water. Another image shows people fishing from within the ruins of Canary Wharf, with the side of the building completely open to the landscape beyond; a further image is at St. Mary Woolnoth, where the view is shown from below the water, looking up to the church above. Squint Opera’s imagery provides a strange echo of Gustave Doré’s engraving of The New Zealander from 1872 (see Chapter 15). Another vision of a submerged London is found in one of the projects from the Bartlett’s Unit 15 explorations, and also exhibits this strange postapocalyptic melancholy. In an echo of Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain, Ben Marzys’ short film London after the Rain shows the submerging of the city, and is described by course leader Nic Clear as ‘melancholy yet intensely beautiful, and consciously references the Arcadian paintings of Claude Lorrain and the compositional ideas and techniques of “picturesque” landscape design’ (Clear, 2009, p.63). Squint Opera’s scenarios for a flooded London and Ben Marzys’ oneiric scenery find echoes too in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Ballard’s London is also flooded, swamp-like, and invaded by peculiar flora and fauna that exhibit various chilling mutations. Scientist Kerans, involved in mapping

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and monitoring the mutating environment, had taken over the state-rooms of the deserted Ritz hotel, and in the decaying decadence found himself ‘savouring the subtle atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded these last vestiges of a level of civilisation now virtually vanished forever’ (Ballard, 2008, p.10). Beyond the hotel, the city was a network of creeks and lagoons, with a ‘strange dream-like beauty’ that was interrupted only by the unsettling presence of wolf spiders and iguanas preying on bats and other creatures. The buildings were covered in moss and loomed like ghosts in the city, and overwhelming heat had created almost unbearable living conditions. Fantasies of submersion infuse the imagery of James Casebere, an artist who creates haunting architectural models, often floods them, and photographs them. Vidler describes how Casebere’s photographs ‘present us with the image of the “just abandoned,” or perhaps also the “about to be inhabited,” that is so characteristic a moment in the Caseberian uncanny’ (Vidler, 2001, p.11). The desolate interiors, the flooded horizons, create microcosmic melancholy mise-en-scènes. Abelardo Morrel inverts interiors too, submerging them not in water but in light. Using a camera obscura he floods rooms with views from the exterior, where the low light creates otherworldly spaces of contemplation and reflection. Submersion is attended by feelings of dissolution, of the impending melting of substance, with the self becoming suspended in time and space. Scenes of landscapes under water in films also exhibit the melancholy atmosphere of inundation – for example, Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987), Theo Angelopolous’ The Weeping Meadow (2002) and the dripping and flooded scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Inundation undoes the orthodox relationship of things with the world. As water makes its way through homes and landscapes, everything is made strange, stilled. George-Louis Le Rouge’s 1785 drawing of the Broken Column at the Désert de Retz near Paris and Sir William Chambers’ design for a mausoleum for Prince Charles, who died in 1751, both showed the practice of depicting seemingly immutable structures covered by vegetation. Chambers’ drawings resulted from his visit to Italy in 1750–1755, where he was inspired by Piranesi and Clérisseau, and their visions of architecture in ruins. David Watkin suggests this illustrates the Picturesque’s desire to overthrow architecture (Watkin, 2005, p.382). Hubert Robert’s 1796 pair of drawings showing a proposal for reconstructing the Grande Galerie of the Louvre depicted an ‘after’ image of the gallery in ruins, open to the sky, taking on the appearance of a landscape complete with plants. Joseph Gandy’s 1798 portrayal of John Soane’s design for the Bank of England also showed it in ruins, invaded by vegetation. There are resonances with Dylan Trigg’s recent recounting of exploring an abandoned mental asylum in North Wales, and finding an incursion of vegetation where a roof has caved in. He was momentarily unsure about whether he was viewing an interior or exterior scene: ‘You are still inside. It is not that you have made your way outside but that the outside has made its way in’ (Trigg, 2006, p.249).

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Submersion 139 The colonisation of ruderal vegetation invading abandoned structures is one of melancholy’s traces, a revelation of time, a type of submersion. The structure might not, necessarily, be in a state of ruin per se, but merely relieved of its utilitarian function. The transformation from architecture into landscape is part of the melancholy aesthetic, and Christopher Woodward laments the spraying of weeds at the Colosseum, creating a ‘bald, dead and bare circle of stones’. He also regrets the removal of vegetation at the Baths of Caracalla, suggesting that if the archaeologists intent on sterilising the scene had arrived at the site before Shelley, there would have been no Prometheus Unbound, as it was the scene of the baths becoming assimilated into nature that was the source of his inspiration. Woodward continues: Archaeologists will argue that flowers and ivy on a ruin are just Picturesque fluff, curlicues to amuse an artist’s pencil. What Shelley’s experience shows is that the vegetation that grows on ruins appeals to the depths of our consciousness, for it represents the hand of Time, and the contest between the individual and the universe. (Woodward, 2002, p.69) At Nature Park Schöneberger Südgelände in Berlin (front cover) the slow incursions of vegetation have colonised a former railway yard. After its closure following the Second World War, the Tempelhof railway yard became submerged under a melancholic mantle of plants, a poetic image of nature and culture in a gentle battle. Careful editing of the site to amplify remnant railway tracks as walking routes and preserve some of the infrastructural elements evokes a temporal landscape of transition, a place to become immersed, submerged. Abandonment of a site to nature was anticipated as a possible future for the ruins of Detroit by Camilo José Vergara, imagining that We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley…. Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines and wild flowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals – squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects – would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings. (In Trigg, 2006, pp.145–146) In his book American Ruins (1999), Vergara describes how he is drawn to ‘themes of exile, lost wars, sickness, failure, decay, and death. These works move me sometimes to tears and fill my mind with images of great power and terrible loss; yet for all their sadness they also give me pleasure’ (Vergara, 1999, p.23). Tracing the spread of decay in cities, Vergara saw vegetation as

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Figure 17.2 James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The High Line, Manhattan, New York, 2009 (showing graffiti before being painted over, and the replaced ballast and railway tracks). Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2009.

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the index of neglect, where submersion by nature signals the shifting condition. His time sequence photography over a number of years shows the slow dissolution of the forms of buildings and infrastructure, becoming replaced by semi-wilderness. Another photographer documented the submersion of the High Line in Manhattan beneath a mantle of vegetation. Originally an elevated railroad serving the industrial area of Lower Manhattan, it had gone wild, deserted, and was in a state of decay; it was the epitome of the aesthetic of melancholy. The ruderal vegetation, the graffiti, the rust, the decay, formed an impression of a place outside of time, like Tarkovsky’s mysterious ‘Zone’ in his film Stalker. Joel Sternfield’s compelling photographs showing the High Line across the seasons contributed to interest in the abandoned railroad, and helped inspire the formation of the Friends of the High Line, who set about saving it. A competition was held, and the winners, Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, developed the design of the High Line as an elevated park. But with its transformation into an urban park, the melancholy of submersion was eroded. While Vergara embraced the incursions of nature in his vision of an ‘urban Monument Valley’ for Detroit, at the High Line decay was arrested. The High Line was tidied up, the graffiti was painted over; the infrastructure of rails and ballast was replaced, and the vegetation was ‘corrected’ to represent those plants which should grow in this setting, rather than those which had (Figure 17.2). It became something cadaverous – like landscape taxidermy – the wild landscape hunted, killed, stuffed and then given the semblance of life, but with glassy eyes and groomed fur. This silences the aura at the heart of melancholy, the authentic, original and vulnerable version of reality. The transformation of the High Line from a wild and unkempt plateau into a smart urban plaza prompts reflection on the place of melancholy within the landscape. A billboard adjacent to the site depicted the High Line as part of the reinvented, chic and trendy vision for this part of Manhattan. The imagery was bathed in the glow of conspicuous consumption, and seemed a universe away from the poignant photography of the High Line’s prior state of abandoned beauty.

References Ballard, J.G. (2008). The Drowned World (originally published 1962). London: Harper Perennial. Clear, N. (2009). ‘London after the rain’. Architectural Design, 79(5): 62–65. Dickens, Charles (2006). Great Expectations (originally published 1861). Clayton, DE: Prestwick House Inc. Dickens, Charles (2009). Pictures from Italy (originally published 1846). Sydney: ReadHowYouWant.com. Nicholls, John (1822). Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century: Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and Intended as a Sequel to the Literary Anecdotes, Volume 4. London: Nichols.

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2008). Poems of Shelley (Ozymandias originally published 1818). Alcester: Read Books. Starobinski, Jean (1964). ‘Melancholy among the ruins’, in The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789. Cleveland: Sikra. Trigg, Dylan (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang. Vergara, Camilo José (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press. Vidler, Anthony (2001). ‘Staging lived space: James Casebere’s photographic unconscious’, in James Casebere, James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny. New York: Sean Kelly Gallery. Vidler, Anthony (2003) ‘Fantasy, the uncanny and surrealist theories of architecture’, Papers of Surrealism, 1(Winter): 1–12. Watkin, David (2005) A History of Western Architecture. London: Laurence King. Woodward, Christopher (2002). In Ruins. London: Vintage.

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18 Weathering and patina

Patina and weathering are analogues for memory, traces of time’s passage, and are important facets of a melancholy aesthetics. One step removed from the dilapidation of ruins and fragments, weathering and patination register on surfaces as a cumulative process, like Ruskin’s ‘golden stains of time’. Weathering is an index of age, evocative of a sentimental, affective connection, and a manifestation of aura. As Ma˘da˘lina Diaconu explains, ‘because the patina materialises, i.e., makes visible, a repeated touch over a long interval of time, it encodes an own story of the object and therefore implies temporality and narrativity’ (Diaconu, 2003, p.8). Patina resonates with melancholy’s inherently paradoxical quality. At once individual and universal, the markings show the patterns of a person’s hands, their passing, but we do not know exactly who: ‘the patina – designating the traces on the surface of a repeatedly touched object – is both anonymous yet utterly personal insofar as it involves fingerprints, which are unique’ (Diaconu, 2003, p.3). The phenomenologicality of patina charges it with tactility, the intimacy of touch, even its own anthropomorphic sensibility, in Georg Simmel’s words, like a ‘growth of skin’ (in Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, 1993, p.69). Allen S. Weiss traces the connections between patination and the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the ‘melancholic sense of things lost and time passed’ (Weiss, 2010, p.91). Central to the idea of mono no aware is serenity in the face of impermanence. Rather than time’s passage inducing existential anguish, it is embodied as an aesthetic pleasure, a Japanese version of lacrimae rerum, the classical conception of the ‘tears of things’. Patina develops at the very intimate scale of the tea ceremony, where, as Murielle Hladik explains, ‘[t]he traces left by the passage of time, signs of wear and use and the traces of finger marks (teaka) offer so much micro-information, mini-histories for us to reinterpret’ (in Weiss, 2010, p.91). The resonances between the intimacy of the touch and the immensity of temporality inform this dimension of the melancholy aesthetic, and Hladik observes that ‘these traces of time and use confer a superior degree of beauty upon things, one which transcends quotidian beauty within an aesthetic of contemplation’ (in Weiss, 2010, p.91). Within the landscape weathering introduces this

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reflective, melancholic quality, reducing contrast and bringing a sense of continuity between surfaces. Lowenthal and Prince observe how ‘[o]ld things are apt to be wrinkled, variegated, accidented; above all, weathering has harmonized them with the rest of the landscape’ (Lowenthal and Prince, 1965, p.196). This is appreciated as part of the picturesque aesthetic, and the romantic melancholy that underlies it. While patination relates to the cumulative effect of surface marking, time can also register through more substantive changes such as cracking and decay. The appearance of a crack in a surface induces a polarisation of aesthetic responses. At one extreme, echoing the embracing of the patina within the tea ceremony, a crack in a pottery vessel is valorised within the melancholy sensibility, through the convention of wabi sabi. Andrew Juniper describes how wabi sabi ‘is an expression of the beauty that lies in the brief transition between the coming and going of life, both the joy and that make up our life as humans’ (Juniper, 2003, p.1). In the context of the aesthetics of wabi sabi and mono no aware the crack is considered in itself as a thing of beauty. Weiss describes how this is emphasised through the ways in which repairs are made to Japanese pottery, where rather than attempting to obscure the imperfection, the crack is highlighted through mixing the urushi lacquer with 23-carat gold dust. In a traditional Japanese garden or niwa, the gradual shifting of texture and tone that develops with patina is embraced as a significant aesthetic. The use of natural elements allows for the process of gently melting together with weathering. Davey conveys how the weathering of moss and stone and other natural materials leads to a sense of dissolution, ‘and this too is incorporated into the niwa, hence the melancholy appeal of sabi’ (Davey, 2003, p.48). The polar opposite to an aesthetic appreciation of the marks of time is the perception of weathering as a tragic fate for modernist buildings. Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow explain how the manifestation of weathering on modernist buildings was a contradiction of the aspirations of the age. Against the purity, the objectivity, the whiteness, was the constant threat of dirt, staining and patination. While weathering as a revelation of age enhanced traditional buildings and elements made of stone, the negative perception of weathering as deterioration is a lament of modern architecture. Modernist buildings are affected by ‘functional deterioration’ in terms of the breaking down of their components, as well as being afflicted with ‘aesthetic deterioration’ – the ‘modification of surfaces through the accumulation of dirt from weathering – staining – which is a physical fact that carries ethical implications’ (Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, 1993, pp.31–32). This negative sense of weathering was a subtext in Le Corbusier’s When the Cathedrals were White, whereas Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow explain, ‘For Le Corbusier whiteness was a matter of health, beauty, morality’ (Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, 1993). The aesthetic which develops in the weathering of modernist landscapes and architecture has its own melancholy sensibility. At the same time as

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such incursions might register as a failure within the strict manifestoes of modernism, compromising the aesthetic of purity and efficiency, they are also intensely poignant. Recalling a visit to Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands in the early 1990s, the most enduring impression I have is not of the pure geometries and solid colours of the De Stijl movement, but of the traces and signs of human habitation, the lives which had been lived within the house, the marks from cutting on the kitchen bench, the dents and scratches on the wooden surfaces. While these subtle signs are barely apparent in photographs of the building, in reality they presence themselves through the hapticity of engagement. This same melancholy of a surface patinated and distressed by the small violences of domestic life is revealed in Whiteread’s casts of mortuary slabs. Eschewing the pure, smooth finish that would emphasise a machinic aesthetic and reference Minimalist sculpture, Whiteread’s surfaces instead ‘carried the indexical signs of the knife and surgical instruments that carved the body on the slab’ (Bird, 1995, p.123). Tacita Dean’s films of decayed structures illuminate the affective aesthetic of weathering, especially of modernist structures. Focusing on modern and seemingly durable buildings, Dean probes the shift which occurs as their mutability becomes apparent. Large concrete discs on England’s south coast were the subject of her film Sound Mirrors (1999), the decaying infrastructure of wartime surveillance. Sitting forlornly within fields, the sound mirrors like those at Denge (Figure 18.1) were abandoned, their usefulness having been suddenly superseded with the invention of radar. Prior to the technological leap to radar in the 1930s, the acoustic mirrors had performed the task of ‘listening’ for approaching enemy planes, the massive concave forms concentrating the incoming sound waves to allow for monitoring, like concrete ears. No longer of any use, the sound mirrors slowly fell into ruin. Dean’s film captures both the visual spectacle of decay and the aural emanations of the eerie ears. Another abandoned and superseded structure was explored in her film Delft Hydraulics (1996), documenting an obsolete machine for measuring wave impact. In Bubble House (1999), Dean filmed the weathered shell of a futuristic-looking house that she came across in the course of working on another project. The flying saucer-like house was abandoned, and only the shell remained, exposed to the weather and with its elliptical windows offering views out to the ocean beyond. Attracted to the ‘space-age, Barbarella-style, utopian-model architecture’, Dean reflected on how the structures she seeks out are often from the decade of her birth – ‘the 1960s was a time of great optimism and innovation and the failure of that within my own lifespan is quite interesting’ (in Trodd, 2008, p.384). Further emphasising the tension between the modern and the past is Dean’s use of 16 mm film as opposed to digital media. The film itself becomes an object, it has aura, and its own vulnerability to the vicissitudes of time resonates with the processes of weathering and patina at work on the sites she films.

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Figure 18.1 Abandoned sound mirror, Denge, England. Photo by Paul Horsefield, 2015.

Enigmatic weathered fragments instilled a sense of the sacred for W.G. Sebald on his long walk through the south-east of England. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald relates his encounter with a landscape that resonated with time immemorial, invoking suggestions of burial mounds and sacred temples. What Sebald had encountered was not an ancient religious site, but the bunkers and infrastructure associated with military research at Orfordness, including the ‘Pagodas’, which served as testing labs for secret research into developing the atomic bomb (Figure 18.2). From a distance the pagodas resemble the ‘tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold’ (Sebald, 1999, p.236). For Sebald the number of buildings which resembled temples or pagodas (but were in fact testing facilities) gave him the sense of being on sacred ground. In the same way that the weathered and battered acoustic ears take on an air of antiquity, suggestive of the enigmatically attentive Easter Island figures, the infrastructure of Orfordness appears as something from a much more ancient past than the early twentieth century. The descent from visions of a perfect future utopia to one of ruin provides the armature upon which a melancholy aesthetic can become attached. The machinic aesthetics of modernism and military installations, and the rational impulses of De Stijl, inevitably yield to the traces of humanity. That they were originally designed as timeless, or even futuristic, further enhances this poignant denouement. Pallasmaa’s conception of ‘fragile’ architecture, an empathetic approach to design, rests in part upon this inexorable slippage:

Figure 18.2 Orford Ness – Landscape with Pagoda. Photo by Amanda Slater, 2014.

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The places of melancholy The strength of architectural impact derives from its unavoidable presence as the perpetual unconscious pre-understanding of our existential condition. A distinct ‘weakening’ of the architectural image takes place through the processes of weathering and ruination. Erosion wipes away the layers of utility, rational logic and detail articulation, and pushes the structure into the realm of uselessness, nostalgia and melancholy. The language of matter takes over from the visual and formal effect, and the structure attains a heightened intimacy. The arrogance of perfection is replaced by a humanizing vulnerability. (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82)

References Bird, Jon (1995) ‘Dolce Domum’, in James Lingwood (ed.), Rachel Whiteread’s House. London: Phaidon Press. Davey, H.E. (2003). Living the Japanese Arts & Ways: 45 Paths to Meditation & Beauty. Berkeley: Stonebridge Press. Diaconu, Ma˘da˘lina (2003). ‘The rebellion of the “lower” senses: a phenomenological aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste’, in Chan-Fai Cheung, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne and Hans Rainer Sepp (eds), Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Published online: www.o-p-o.net. Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston: Tuttle Publishing. Lowenthal, David and Prince, Hugh C. (1965). ‘English landscape tastes’. Geography, 55(2): 187–224. Mostafavi, Mohsen and Leatherbarrow, David (1993). On Weathering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pallasmaa,  Juhani (2000). ‘Hapticity and time: notes on fragile architecture’. Architectural Review, 1239: 78–84. Sebald, W.G. (1999). The Rings of Saturn (originally published in 1995). New York: New Directions Paperbacks. Trodd, Tamara (2008). ‘Lack of fit: Tacita Dean, modernism and the sculptural film’. Art History, 31(3): 368–386. Weiss, Allen S. (2010) ‘On the circulation of metaphors in the Zen garden’. AA Files, 60: 89–93.

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19 Ephemerality and transience

Weathering and patina are an aesthetics of accumulation, the slow transformation of places and things by the passage of time. Ephemerality and transience present a complementary facet of melancholy aesthetics, which is not about accretion but about the transitory. Hovering at the liminal passage between states are poignant, fleeting moments. The conditions of ephemerality and transience have a bittersweetness, where a momentary presence can intensify emotions. Wabi sabi, the Japanese sense of time’s passage mentioned in Chapter 18, enlists the beauty of impermanence. Juniper describes how wabi sabi ‘can be found in the arrangement of a single flower, the expression of a profound emotion in three lines of poetry, or in the perception of a mountain landscape in a single rock’, and ‘suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection’ (Juniper, 2003, p.2). As with many dimensions of a melancholy aesthetic, ephemerality and transience can be paradoxical in the context of landscape architecture. For many designers and artists the permanence of a work is an unquestioned aspiration, and the Western art tradition is characterised by enduring works. Perhaps this is nowhere more pronounced than in the design of memorials, where permanence embodies the marking of lives lost. In recent decades ephemeral and transient memorials have become familiar responses to tragedy. While the fugitive nature of these memorials is contrary to the conventions of Western memorial design, there are precedents in the memorials of, for example, the Malagan carvings in Papua New Guinea, which are made only to be burnt, or left to rot. Or the burning of paper effigies at funerals in many Asian countries, with the fleeting presence of the effigy given over to the vastness of time. The melancholy nature of ephemeral art draws on a tension with mortality. Mary O’Neill describes ephemeral memorials which use ‘decay as part of their communication of the extreme grief associated with untimely death’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.149). O’Neill suggests that creating and accumulating durable objects is a denial of mortality, and underscores the role permanence has in the Western art tradition. She asks, ‘Why would an artist make ephemeral art when there is considerable cultural and economic

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pressure to make permanent art?’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.152). The same question could be asked of landscape architecture, where often massive investment is required in the realisation of a design. What is the place of the ephemeral in this context? But in the face of contemporary culture’s predilection for the instantaneous, for the immediate, there is a paradoxical retardation of time with the ephemeral. Although it is a fleeting moment, The slowed time of ephemerality offers the time of grief and gives permission to mourn in a time when we are encouraged to ‘move on’. These [ephemeral] works do not ask us to forget or to ‘get over’ pain but to accept it and find a way of living with it. (O’Neill, 2009, p.157) Resonating with the ethic of wabi sabi, O’Neill concludes: ‘Our lives, and the lives of those we love, are chancy and short. This is the lesson of these works of art – the knowledge of what it is to be lost’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.158). Spontaneous shrines and temporary memorials enlist the melancholy of transience. Never intended to be permanent, these momentary memorials tend to be very quickly created in response to trauma, at the sites of disasters, road crashes, killings. Slowly giving way to time’s influence, the memorials wilt, fade and eventually disappear. There are parallels to life itself, in their appearance, endurance and ultimately disappearance. Writing on roadside memorials, Robert M. Bednar shares how one experience in particular filled him with melancholy (Bednar, 2015). He realised that one memorial he had studied for his research was transforming. The memorial to four young children was ‘growing up’, with the mementos left at the site being updated from time to time to reflect time’s passing, moving from baby dolls to grown-up girl dolls, for example. The transformation of this roadside shrine is like a constantly deferred ephemerality, where rather than fading and disappearing, each of the phases of items becomes newly transient. Drawing attention to the palpability of time’s passage echoes the ancient melancholy idea of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. When Aenid was reflecting on the murals of battles in Virgil’s Aenid, he was struck by how much had passed, and said ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent,’ – there are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart (Virgil, 1986, p.273). There are echoes, too, of another melancholy concept, ubi sunt, or the ‘where are?’ lament. Ubi sunt is usually expressed as a listing of the things that have passed, and in this memorial to four young children there is a sense of the lamenting of where they are, and through constantly renewing the toys and childhood items this question is asked over and over as they ‘grow up’. Ephemeral memorials, like roadside shrines, are counter to Western convention not only in their transience, but also in the public display of grief. Erica Doss’ research on ephemeral memorials challenged the traditional Western distinction between grief as a private behaviour, and mourning as

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Ephemerality and transience 151 the public face of death. She suggests that the rise in ephemeral memorials sees a shift in this way of thinking, and further that these memorials foster an ongoing link between the living and the dead. Doss points to how Freud’s own experiences of grief challenged his ideas on melancholia, and echo broader ideas on the continuing bonds with those who have passed on. As in O’Neill’s work, Doss highlights how the ephemeral memorial emphasises the importance of this continuity and that mourning is part of a changed but ongoing relationship with the deceased, and ‘mourning is … often endless, although it need not be endlessly obsessive or pathological’ (Doss, 2008, p.21).

References Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 50–66. Doss, Erica Lee (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston: Tuttle Publishing. O’Neill, Mary (2009). ‘Ephemeral art: the art of being lost’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Virgil (1986). Virgil: Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid 1–6 (trans. H. Rushton Fairclough; Aeneid written first century bc). Boston: Harvard University Press.

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20 Camouflage

Weathering, submersion and fragmentation undo the tidy containers that separate the constructed from the natural. As the boundaries break down there is a gradual contamination, a marking of one by the other. Over time it may be impossible to discern the blurred edges between the built and the natural. In this way a kind of camouflage is achieved, as one realm takes on the qualities of the other, and two entities meld together. Camouflage sets up a spatial relationship between an object and its context that resonates with the melancholy of the uncanny. Implied within camouflage is a doubling, a mirroring of one by the other. Melting into its milieu an object, a person, one’s self, sacrifices the status of being an entity. Self-effacement resonates with the ideas of ‘weak’ architecture or ‘fragile’ landscape, where the muscularity of the formal gesture is traded for a more empathetic engagement, and an emotional tie is formed. While at once uncanny and strange in the effects of mirroring, camouflage is also an assumption of intimacy. Camouflage was related to psychasthenia – a psychological disorder characterised by phobias and obsession – by sociologist Roger Caillois, who drew attention to the lack of a rational connection between camouflage and survival. Caillois pointed out that the adaptation hypothesis of camouflage is flawed in numerous ways. For example, insects which are unpalatable anyway are still camouflaged, as are insects which are hunted by smell, which makes any efforts at visual disguise redundant. Some insects are so well camouflaged that they are pruned by gardeners, or the ‘even sadder’ case of the Phyllia, who ‘browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves’ (Caillois, 1987, p.67) or cannot find each other when it comes time to mate. The enigma of disguise as display is evident in the Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who ‘haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live … deck[ing] themselves in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous elements’ (Caillois, 1987, p.70). Surrealism’s explorations of camouflage exhibit the exchange and absorption that takes place between things and their milieu. Rosalind Krauss drew on Caillois’ writings in her analysis of Man Ray’s photographs, noting how in the image Return to Reason (1923) the ‘nude torso of a woman is

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shown as if submitting to possession by space’ (Krauss, 1985, p.74). Man Ray’s explorations of the dissolution of the body into space are echoed in René Magritte’s paintings, such as Discovery (1927), where the shadows cast on the nude form are transfigured into patches of wood-grain veneer. These images from Man Ray and Magritte evoke ideas of camouflage through the surface patterning of the female form, the sense of what happens when an ‘object fuses with another object’ (in Meuris, 2004, p.51). The fusing of object with object, or self with environment, is apparent in the surrealistically inflected works of Huysmans, Flaubert and Sartre. Huysmans’ character des Esseintes, Flaubert’s ‘I’, and Sartre’s Roquentin, all want to disappear, to become camouflaged, and exhibit the melancholy ploy of not wanting to be seen (Blackman, 2003). Roquentin’s nausea ‘grabs you from behind and then you drift in a tepid sea of time’, and wandering the streets of Paris brings on the conundrums of existence, of presence and the desire for absence. Flaubert’s narrator struggled with the ‘restless surge of wicked, cowardly, idiotic and ugly men’, and being part of this crowd brought him anguish, the feeling of being ‘like a piece of seaweed swept along by the ocean, lost in the midst of the numberless waves that rolled and roared on every side of me’ (Flaubert, 2005, pp.24–25). This tension of being part of the masses, yet not wanting to be there, or being like seaweed, echoes Caillois’ psychasthenia, with particular resonance with his observation of the ‘the fish Phyllopteryx, from the Sargasso Sea, [which] is simply “torn seaweed in the shape of floating strands”’ (Caillois, 1987, p.20). The absorption of the self into one’s environs haunts camouflage’s melancholy conception of space. When Rachel Whiteread made her sculpture Ghost she described a sensation of transmutation, a shift in state, realising that through casting the interior of a room as a solid, she had in fact become the surrounding form – ‘I’m the wall. That’s what I have done. I’ve become the wall’ (in Schneider, 2005, p.9). Whiteread’s sense of derealisation, or state-shifting, is seen too in the work of Francesca Woodman, whose photographic explorations of the self in space show her at times ‘becoming the wall’. In her photographs, which are often self-portraits, Woodman often appears to be merging into the house itself, as though camouflaging herself. Neil Leach’s book Camouflage is illustrated solely with Woodman’s photographs, and he describes how many of these depict her seemingly absorbed by her environment. These capture precisely the main theme of the book – the desire in human beings to identify with and become part of their surroundings. But they also convey very delicately the way in which this desire might be met through a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment. (Leach, 2006, p.x) At New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ken Smith’s roof garden is an ironic commentary on landscape architecture’s predilection for hiding

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things. The profession’s involvement in mitigating infrastructure, often through vegetative screens and veils, suggests that landscape architecture is founded on the practice of camouflage. Smith’s camouflage garden ‘outs’ this practice of disguise, and puts it on display. Peter Reed suggests that the garden is a ‘subversion of camouflage’s function to hide or conceal’ (Reed, 2005, pp.21–22). Adding to the play of mimicry is the construction of the garden in materials which are fake versions of nature – mock rocks and faux foliage. Using a caricature of camouflage derived from iconic camouflage patterning used on fabrics, the garden is, in fact, incredibly obvious when seen against the background of the surrounding rooftops. It as though in having the camouflage garden on its roof, MoMA has become like Caillois’ Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who made themselves more conspicuous in their gathering of materials from their environment and displaying them on their shells. The paradoxical use of camouflage as display is inherent in the theories used by the ‘camoufleurs’ – the artists, designers and architects who developed the various ‘disruptive patterns’ for military use, including Franz Marc, Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ellsworth Kelly. Norman Wilkinson developed the unlikely ‘dazzle’ camouflage to be used at sea, creating a series of patterns based on Cubist principles. Rather than attempting to disguise the ship by means of blending in, the dazzle approach breaks up the surface through the use of line and colour, accepting that within the constantly changing conditions of sea and sky, to attempt a perfect colour match was not possible. Instead, patches of bright or contrasting colours and lines were used to counter the actual shape and size of the craft, for example taking a dark colour around the bow, from port to starboard, to create a sense of ambiguity about the length of the ship. While the ships were made to appear quite visible in an absolute sense, they were deceptive in terms of their form, scale, speed and direction, and thus the dazzle scheme underscores the paradoxical relationships between self and other that underlie any philosophy of camouflage. Bernard Lassus echoes these observations on the apparent incongruity of camouflage. Recalling a 1969 stroll along a quay in Stockholm, he says how he was suddenly pulled up short. Emerging from the vegetable mass of building sections I thought I saw in the distance, on the port’s horizon, there materialized before me the shape of a long and powerful warship. It had remained hidden thanks to its camouflage. Until then I had thought that camouflage was reserved for the land army. But here the pattern of a paratrooper’s battledress, mainly green but also strewn with maroon and streaked with some black, represented a design that had grown to envelop the whole of the boat. (Lassus, 1998, p.24)

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The absurdity of a sea-going ship painted in the colours of the land is perplexing, and not unlike the vision of a camouflage garden marooned on the roof of MoMA. But the garden is even more uncanny than making itself obvious through the practice of camouflage, since it is not even visible from the gallery itself. Because it is on the roof, and out of bounds, it is only visible from the surrounding high-rise buildings. Within MoMA itself, the camouflage garden is a haunting, an absent presence, a telltale heart in the art gallery. There are curious traces of the garden in the gallery as MoMA holds some of Andy Warhol’s Camouflage series, which also present an ironic interpretation of camouflage patterning. The garden therefore becomes doubly melancholy, and much more than a simple statement about artifice in landscape architecture. Curiously, Julia Kristeva, a key theorist of melancholia, uncannily anticipated the camouflage garden a decade earlier, writing: I am picturing a sprawling metropolis with glass and steel buildings that reach to the sky, reflect it, reflect each other, and reflect you – a city filled with people steeped in their own image who rush about with overdone make-up on and who are cloaked in gold, pearls, and fine leather, while in the next street over, heaps of filth abound and drugs accompany the sleep or the fury of the social outcasts. This city could be New York; it could be any future metropolis, even your own. What might one do in such a city? Nothing but buy and sell goods and images, which amounts to the same thing, since they both are dull shallow symbols. Those who can or wish to preserve a lifestyle that downplays opulence as well as misery will need to create a space for an ‘inner zone’ – a secret garden, an intimate quarter, or more simply and ambitiously, a psychic life. (Kristeva, 1995, p.27)

References Blackman, Melissa Rowell (2003). ‘Elitist differentiation: melancholia as identity in Flaubert’s November and Huysmans’ A Rebours’. Journal of European Studies, 33(3–4): 255–261. Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley; original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flaubert, Gustave (2005). November (trans. Andrew Brown; first published as Novembre in Oeuvre de jeunesse, 1910). London: Hesperus Press Limited. Krauss, Rosalind (1985). ‘Corpus delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain. Kristeva, Julia (1995). New Maladies of the Soul (trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman). New York: Columbia University Press.

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Lassus, Bernard (1998). The Landscape Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leach, Neil (2006). Camouflage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meuris, Jacques (2004) René Magritte: 1898–1967. Köln: Taschen. Reed, Peter (2005). ‘Beyond before and after: designing contemporary landscape’, in Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Schneider, Eckhard (2005). ‘Constructing the ephemeral’, in Eckhard Schneider (ed.), Rachel Whiteread. Köln: Kunsthaus Bregenz.

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21 Monochrome

A subdued scene, a narrow range of colours, twilight, dawn, dark passages, shady bowers. The minimal palettes of monochrome landscapes are evocative of melancholy, with their gentle tonality and restful monotony. There are echoes of the condition of camouflage, allowing for elements to fuse into the background. It seems no coincidence that the term grisaille, which refers to a painting in grey monochrome, is also a French word for melancholy, tethering together the sense of a muted, uniform scene and a pervasive sadness. Aestheticians Emily Brady and Arto Haapala recognise the melancholy qualities of a landscape’s muted colours, directing the reader to Imagine that you are walking across a desolate moor. The land that stretches out into the distance is empty and spacious, coloured by subdued shades of brown and green against the grey backdrop of the sky. The air is still and mild with a refreshing mist. A reflective mood descends as you settle into the rhythm of a quiet pace. A feeling of longing forever to be in the pleasurable solitude of the moor combines with pangs of loneliness. Specific memories and thoughts may come into play; perhaps memories of living near that place long ago. There is some pleasure felt in recollecting the good times, but along with it, almost in equal measure, comes sadness from missing the place itself. The desire to prolong the emotion is strong, and you indulge in the rich feelings by cultivating the mood and lingering in it. (Brady and Haapala, 2003) This call to become immersed in subdued shades, dissolved into a reduced palette, resonates with melancholy, a quality shared with Picturesque landscapes. While a joyous landscape is a brightly and variously coloured scene, a melancholy landscape is often one of quiet colours, a monochromatic and restrained composition. For the aesthetic convention of the picturesque, the use of muted colours drew upon the varnished and darkened images of artists like Claude Lorrain, whose work was appropriated as a template to be realised in the landscape. The desire to perceive the landscape as a

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composition of muted tones is intriguingly illustrated by the use of a Claude Glass, a dark-coloured, convex-shaped glass that could be held in the hand. As Porteous explains, ‘this tinned convex mirror performed two functions. First, it put a frame around the landscape, and second, it tinted the view to resemble the golden-brown monochrome of a Claude painting’ (Porteous, 1996, p.66). The Claude Glass is therefore a device which vividly expresses an aesthetic desire to reduce bright colours in the landscape and subdue the scene, and has strong parallels with the evolution of photography. The relevance to landscapes of melancholy is amplified when one of the alternative terms1 for the device is used – a ‘dark glass’ – reverberating with themes of shadow and introspection. The translation of the aesthetics of the picturesque into the landscape meant finding means of transferring the effects of the varnished Claudes into reality. In his 1801 Observations on Modern Gardening, Thomas Whatley’s passage on the architecture of ruins draws on the intersection of the picturesque and melancholy, and how a monochromatic colour scheme is critical for the desired effect. He advises that the architecture of ruins should be Grecian, and that while entire there is nothing more cheerful, but ‘so scarce any thing strikes with a more pleasing melancholy, than such a building in ruins: its once gay condition making its present state much more mournful’ (Whately, 1801, p.149). Whatley focuses his advice on how to achieve this mournfulness on the use of colour, and how it needs to be very different from their original ‘dazzling white’, and needs to be of a darker colour or concealed by ivy or moss growing over them. He further suggested that the planting around it should be very close together to produce a ‘melancholy whistling of the wind’, while the river needs a solemn silence and should be made to run smoothly. Whatley also describes the creation of a melancholy scene through the ‘exclusion of all gaiety’ and at least ‘through a tinge of gloom upon the scene’ (Whatley, 1801, p.62). This is achieved through the use of objects ‘whose colour is obscure’ and those which are too bright may be thrown into shadow; the wood may be thickened, and the dark greens abound in it; if it is necessarily thin, yews and shabby firs should be scattered about it; and sometimes, to shew a withering or a dead tree, it may for a space be cleared entirely away. (Whatley, 1801, p.62) Whatley’s observations on reducing the colour palette to create solemnity are extended by filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman. In his meditation on colour, as he looked towards the Dungeness power station in the twilight, he reflected on the advice of Wittgenstein: Look at your room in the late evening when you can hardly distinguish the colours any longer – turn on the light and paint what you saw in the twilight. There are pictures of landscapes or rooms in semi-darkness,

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but how do you compare the colours in such pictures with those you saw in the semi-darkness? A colour shines in its surroundings. Just as eyes only smile in a face. (Jarman, 2000, p. 1) Jarman connected this comment to Alberti’s observation that ‘shade makes a colour dimmer…. Colour is swallowed by the dark’ (Jarman, 2000, p.2). Transmuting the landscape into a monochrome palette is a process which, as the Picturesque theorists emphasised, happens naturally over time. Weathering and patina, as in Chapter 18, show the index of time, and from a Picturesque perspective, patina was seen as having a ‘harmonising’ influence (Lowenthal, 1985, p.160). As a parallel in photography, Susan Sontag describes how black-and-white photographs age in a different way to colour photographs. This quality of the ageing of black-and-white photographs resonates with the landscape, the ways in which things melt into time and weather. As Sontag observes, ‘the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from the patina’ (Sontag, 2014, p.140). Paul Grainge suggests that monochrome photographs – in particular black-andwhite – have a particular power because of their ‘capacity to arrest a sense of meaning, historical and otherwise: to stimulate slowness in a climate of speed, to evoke time in a culture of space, to suggest authenticity in a world of simulation and pastiche’ (Grainge, 1999, p.384). The monochrome of landscape and photographs is acutely conveyed in Orhan Pamuk’s evocation of the city of Istanbul. Through his novels, and especially in his mammoth work on the city itself, the melancholy or hüzün is evoked in ways which are like an always-present nostalgia. In Istanbul he writes to see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire melancholy, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like incurable disease; it is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. (Pamuk, 2005, p.51) Landscape compositions with a reduced and subdued colour palette can impart a sense of melancholy. For Jenny Holzer’s Black Garden in Nordhorn, on the German–Dutch border, the planting scheme of black plants resonates with its memorial function. Commemorating war losses of 1870–1871 and 1914–1918, the garden layers symbolise a monastic garden and a target in its formal concentric arrangement. There are plaques relaying war’s horror in vivid terms, and stone benches, but it is the planting which is most infused with sombreness. Udo Weilacher describes how

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the garden in the shade of the old park trees gets its name and its strangely melancholy atmosphere from the fact that the whole of the slightly sunken site is filled with plants with dark to black foliage and dark blossoms. (Weilacher, 2005, p.56) Black- and copper-leaved plants, dark pink blossoms and a mass planting of black tulips all contribute to this monochromatic colour scheme. Whereas landscape is so often shades of green, this uniformly dark garden is emphatically solemn.

Note 1 A Claude Glass is also known as a Claude Mirror, Landscape Glass or Mirror, or Convex Mirror (see, for example, Bertelsen (2004).

References Bertelsen, Lars Kiel (2004). ‘The Claude Glass: a modern metaphor between word and image’. Word and Image, 20(3): 182–190. Brady, Emily and Haapala, Arto (2003). ‘Melancholy as an aesthetic emotion’. Contemporary Aesthetics. http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ journal.php?search=true, 18 December 2015. Grainge, Paul (1999). ‘TIME’s past in the present: nostalgia and the black and white image’. Journal of American Studies, 33(3): 383–392. Jarman, Derek (2000). Chroma: A Book of Colour: June ’93 (originally published 1994). London: Vintage. Lowenthal, David (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pamuk, Orhan (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber. Porteous, Douglas J. (1996). Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics, and Planning. Routledge: London. Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle edition. Weilacher, Udo (2005). In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser. Whately, Thomas (1801). Observations on Modern Gardening, and Laying Out Pleasure-Grounds ... &c. To Which is Added, an Essay on the Different Natural Situations of Gardens. London: West and Hughes.

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22 Intimate immensity

The final place of melancholy simultaneously evokes the vulnerability of that which is delicate and near with the vast incomprehensibility of the beyond. Just as camouflage represents that paradoxical condition of being visible yet invisible, the idea of an intimate immensity circles around the irresolvable poles of nearness and distance. ‘Intimate immensity’ and ‘immediate immensity’ are Gatston Bachelard’s terms, and he positions the immense within the intimacy and immediacy of the imagination. He states that ‘Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.184). Bachelard relates this condition to the temporal domain too, quoting a passage from Milosz which concludes: ‘Is this instant really eternity? Is eternity really this instant?’ (in Bachelard, 1969, p.190). There are echoes of Kant’s placing of melancholy within the Sublime, of the position of the individual within the vastness of the landscape, and the significance of solitude. Intimate immensity has the quality of melancholy which the Spanish call duende, poetically observed by Federico García Lorca: Each art has, by nature, its distinctive Duende of style and form, but all roots join at the point where the black sounds of [Flamenco singer] Manuel Torres issue forth—the ultimate stuff and the common basis, uncontrollable and tremulous, of wood and sound and canvas and word. Black sounds: behind which there abide, in tenderest intimacy, the volcanoes, the ants, the zephyrs, and the enormous night straining its waist against the Milky Way. (In Gibbons, 1989, p.39) The delicate and the vast are bound up in duende, and resonate with Milosz’s ‘concordance of world immensity with intimate depth of being’, where he writes of standing in ‘contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space’ (in Bachelard, 1969, p.189). Like Lorca, Milosz reflects upon the night as the bearer of intimate immensity: ‘When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in

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the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!’ (in Bachelard, 1969, p.189). These evocations of the small vessel of the self adrift in the vast oceans of the cosmos call to mind Pascal’s lament: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (in Chrétien, 2003, p.52). For Pascal, the dread expresses the existential crisis that such an imagining can provoke, and the solitary contemplation of the vast and the eternal resonates with the contemplative qualities of melancholy. Pascal’s melancholic reflection on the silence of the intangible otherness of nature resonates, Jean-Louis Chrétien argues, with Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, a painting in which the diminutive figure of a capuchin monk is shown on the beach, against a dark ribbon of the sea and the swirling clouds and sky above. The scene embodies the melancholy of the liminal, and also of camouflage, as the monk appears to be absorbed into the sea itself. Chrétien links Pascal’s phrase and Friedrich’s painting through describing how ‘[in] the deictic “these” a human body makes itself present, in front of these spaces, showing them, perceiving them, listening to and bearing their silence…. It is the “these” that gives the scale of the silence’ (Chrétien, 2003, p.52). A scale which is the intimate against the immense, the eternity in the instant. In Geoff Dyer’s reading of the landscapes of the Great War he found a vast poignancy in infinity, in places that lay unbounded, endless. Looking at a photograph by William Rider-Rider of a lone soldier on the battlefields of Passchendale, Dyer finds the same melancholy infinity as in Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, that image of what Robert Rosenblum called the ‘hypnotic simplicity of a completely unbroken horizon line, and above it a no less primal and potentially infinite extension of gloomy, hazy sky’ (in Dyer, 1994, p.118). In Rider-Rider’s photograph, the scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud, which, as in The Monk by the Sea, reaches to the horizon. Instead of receding into the distance, these trees disappear beyond the edges of the frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing point is no longer a more or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste. (Dyer, 1994, p.119) In Friedrich’s painting and Rider-Rider’s photograph, infinity is weighted by an individual figure – a capuchin monk in the former and a soldier smoking in the latter. These counterweights pull infinity back from nihilism, drawing it towards the intimate immensity that is founded upon the datum of the human form. The monk and the soldier create empathetic wells which absorb the beholder, ciphers for our selves, for humanity. The presence of the self in the image brings ripples of uncanny recognition, of a rent in the infinite. The contemplative quality of melancholy suffuses both images, for the figures are not merely there, but are evidently buried in reflection, heads

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bowed, paused within the vastness, silent. The seats at Mullion Cove that captivated John Wylie with their ghostly presence echo the intimate immensity that is set up between the self and the infinite. Each seat standing for an absence, offering somewhere to place oneself to view the landscape, to become acquainted with the intimacy of the loss of a loved one set against the vast prospect of the ocean beyond. E.M. Cioran’s meditation on melancholy encapsulates this sensation, reflecting upon the sense of loneliness and its interior and exterior feelings of infinity, describing how the interior infinitude and vagueness of melancholy, not to be confused with the fecund infinity of love, demands a space whose borders are ungraspable.... Melancholy detachment removes man from his natural surroundings. His outlook on infinity shows him to be lonely and forsaken. The  sharper our consciousness of the world’s infinity, the more acute our awareness of our own finitude. (Cioran, 1992, p.30) Immensity and intimacy correspond in the arc from the vastness of space or the depth of the ocean to the detail of the individual, and across the scales from cities to molecules. The intimate and the immense are yoked together in the landscape visions of Patrick Keiller’s London (Keiller, 1994) and Robert Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic (Smithson, 1967). The first of these is a film, set in early 1990s London, a bleak and poignant study of Thatcherite Britain. In the second, environmental artist Robert Smithson takes a field trip to his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, and presents it as an illustrated article in an art magazine in the late 1960s. The two pieces offer parallel visions of landscapes wrought by the processes of modernity, bearing the scars of progress, with the two artists re-casting their chosen landscapes into altered states, part fact and part fiction. Both artists re-invent elements of the ordinary landscapes they encounter as ‘monuments’. In Smithson’s ‘suburban Odyssey’, the monuments are brought into focus with his Instamatic camera.  The stark monochromes document the banal landscape, with their monumental decree coming from the text and captions: the ‘Monument of Dislocated Directions’ (a bridge); the ‘Sand-box Monument (also called The Desert)’ (a children’s sand-box); ‘The Fountain Monument’ (six large pipes disgorging water into the Passaic River); and ‘The Great Pipes Monument’ (a long section of steel pile).1 In London, the static shots linger over the various points in the landscape and the narrator enumerates the invented monuments within his voice-over, where Leicester Square is declared a monument to Laurence Sterne; Canary Wharf ‘adopted’ as a monument to Rimbaud; Cannon Street designated a ‘sacred site’ – with the Number 15 a ‘sacred bus route’; and Telecom Tower is imagined as a monument to the tempestuous relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine (Keiller, no date, line 5.45). Through bestowing upon these ordinary elements the gravitas of age, Smithson and Keiller re-tune the landscapes of

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modernity, inflecting the otherwise impersonal and unfathomable scenes with the familiar infrastructure of memorialisation. Bound up in the poignancy of these two visions of the quotidian landscapes of modernity is the reverberations that are set up between the minute and the vast, between the individual and the great sweep of time and space into which we are placed. Keiller’s central character, Robinson, ‘sometimes sees[s] the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’ (Keiller, no date, line 2.26) and Smithson identifies the voids of the city of Passaic as monumental in themselves: ‘Passaic does seem full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid ... those holes in a sense are the monumental values that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures’ (Smithson, 1967, p.50). At the other extreme, Smithson also sees the monumental in the molecular, writing of the Desert Monument that ‘This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – no longer were there green forests and high mountains – all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust’ (Smithson, 1967, p.51). Echoing this microscopic monumentality, Keiller’s Robinson ‘believed that if he looked hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of his own sorrowful events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future’ (Keiller, no date, line 2.31, emphasis in original). The individual within the swirling mass of the modern city is a motif imbued with melancholy. The intimate world of the self is nested within the vastness of the urban sphere, a quality that emerges in Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Installing himself at a café at the Place Saint-Sulpice for three days in 1974, Perec observed the minutiae of the city, recording every detail, the events, the non-events, the ‘infraordinary’ (Perec, 2010). Perec’s hyper-empirical observations are productive of an aesthetic of melancholy, of being almost completely fused with the surrounding setting, of the world staring back. Suffused with ennui, Perec’s recounting of the events is hypnotic, mesmerising in its observation of the details swirling within the city beyond: ‘A man goes by wearing a surgical collar / A woman goes by; she is eating a slice of tart / A couple approaches their Autobianchi Abarth parked along the sidewalk. The woman bites into a tartlet. / There are lots of children. A man who has just parked his car (in the Autobianchi’s spot) looks at it as if he doesn’t recognize it’ (Perec, 2010, p.34). There are echoes of the self drifting within the city, both visible and invisible, as part of the milieu, as with the camouflaged melancholy of Sartre, Huysmans, and Flaubert. At times Perec focuses particularly on individuals, describing their demeanour, what they are eating, carrying, wearing. And at other times he recounts the movements of buses through the Place SaintSulpice, almost as though a liturgy, ‘A 70 goes by full / A 63 goes by, much less so / The motorcycles and the mopeds turn on their headlights / Car signals become visible, as do the taxi lights, brighter when they’re free / An

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Intimate immensity 165 86 goes by, almost full / A 63 goes by, almost empty / A 96 goes by, nearly full / An 87 goes by, nearly full’ (Perec, 2010, p.23). Although verging on the absurd, Perec’s close observation of the Place Saint-Sulpice limns the aesthetic of melancholy, in both the sense of the ennui of the modern city and also in the contemplative capacity that such a setting offers. While meditative potential might be more often aligned with natural places – mountains, streams – Perec finds in the detail of the city a seemingly infinite and immense ocean of pensive detail. Even the most subtle shifts cause him to pause and prompt reflection: ‘I’m drinking a Vittel water, whereas yesterday I was drinking a coffee (how does that transform the square?)’ (Perec, 2010, p.30). As Perec’s translator, Marc Lowenthal, observes, even despite the efforts to ‘exhaust’ place, to describe every detail, there is so much that escapes the written account, falling outside the process of documentation. In as much as the focus on detail provides a locus for pensive contemplation, so too does that which falls outside this study of minutiae. Lowenthal remarks that ‘[i]t is almost in what it doesn’t say that this short text, this noble exercise in futility, conveys such a sense of melancholy’ (in Perec, 2010, p.50). The ordinariness of intimate life within immensity can be seen too in memorial design. Set in opposition to architecture which is about excess and display, Liu Jiakun’s memorial to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is a place of humility. Alex Pasternack describes the memorial, with how its pitched roof and redbrick terrace mimic the makeshift tents and paving material ubiquitous throughout Sichuan’s recovery. The gray plaster that coats the brick walls gives the building a universality and solidity, transforming the survivors’ tent into an earthquake-ready structure. Its austerity sets off the vital color and beauty within. Warm and rosy, with Huishan’s ephemera pinned to the walls, the interior is exquisite. (Pasternack, 2010) The power of the memorial comes not through an accounting of victims – which could be a temptation with a death toll of over 58,000 – but to remembering just one victim, Hu Huishan, a schoolgirl. The memorial doesn’t narrate the muscularity of heroism, or present a didactic lesson about disaster preparedness, but is a reflection on the value of every person. Liu Jiakun explained: ‘Treasuring the value of ordinary lives will be the foundation of our nation’s revival’ (in Pasternack, 2010). The intimacy of this one life, a young girl, reverberates against immensity – against the massive death toll from an earthquake in a vast country. The pink interior of the memorial, against the grey exterior, embodies this fragility, and is imbued with a beautiful sadness. The everyday world of the schoolgirl Hu Huishan is part of the affective landscape. There are echoes with what Bednar calls the ‘ordinary trauma’ of road accidents, and their memorialising with roadside shrines (Bednar,

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2015). These shrines and roadside crosses evoke the everyday rather than the spectacular, and their placement within the vastness of the landscape is profoundly melancholy. Bednar describes how these are places where Kathleen Stewart’s ‘little world comes into view’ (Bednar, 2015, p.60). The ‘little worlds’ are those places we all occupy, our own familiar constellations of things, amid the fluxes and flows of life. ‘Little worlds proliferate around everything and anything at all: mall culture, car culture, subway culture, TV culture, shopping culture’, Stewart explains, going on to give a litany of the ordinary dimensions of our lives (Stewart, 2007, n.p.). The little world of a schoolgirl, or the life of someone suffering the ‘ordinary trauma’ of a road accident, can become an articulation of intimate immensity, the smallness of the individual within the vastness of time and place. Here, in this final condition of melancholy – intimate immensity – is one of the most profound of paradoxes. In the oscillations between the vast and the detailed, the far and the near, is the melancholic aesthetic, suffused with poignancy and contemplation. In Bachelard’s daydreams, Friedrich’s monk adrift in oceanic space, Dyer’s reflections on the depiction of war, Keiller and Smithson’s monuments and molecules, and Perec’s Place Saint-Sulpice, the individual is pitted against the vast milieu of which they are a part. Yet rather than a nihilistic abandonment, a desolation, intimate immensity brings forth the depth of being rooted in the very conundrum that it presents. To end with a paradox is fitting, since the impossibility of resolution is the knot at melancholy’s core. Melancholy’s complex twists and turns are filled with contradictions and polarities. This irresolvability presents an enduring tension of impossible longings, of things eternally delayed. Freud distinguished mourning from melancholia through this very condition, the resistance of resolution. ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound’, Freud observed, in distinction from normal mourning, which reaches closure (in Ramazani, 1994, p.79). While Freud’s diagnosis defined a pathological condition, there is a poetry in this abstention from solace, as evoked by Lorca: ‘With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the healing of a wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and invented in a man’s work has its origins’ (Gibbons, 1989, p. 36). Space for private contemplation has a precedent in the Dark Ages, where the monks who were stationed in the deserts of Egypt lived as hermits. They were required to rise at 4 a.m. for prayers, and to spend their days in solitude. The regime of the Desert Fathers was one which both promoted melancholy in a contemplative sense, and produced it in a depressive sense, as it resulted in a feeling of psychic exhaustion, or even acedia – the melancholy of sloth. The place for melancholic contemplation requires a balance, and the provision of a space into which to retire, rather than be condemned to, was realised in eighteenth-century gardens, reviving the idea of a hermitage. However, as Hunt points out, these hermitages ‘bore little resemblance to

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Intimate immensity 167 either the physical or metaphysical rigours of the early fathers’ (Hunt, 1976, pp.1–2). While the presence of a hermitage in the landscape might evince the ideal of a place designated for ‘philosophical contemplation’, and act as a magnet for melancholy, their purpose was not always realised, and in fact the landowners sometimes employed a hermit in order to achieve melancholy by proxy. The insertion of such vehicles for contemplation into the landscape is echoed also in theologian and counsellor Thomas Moore’s advice to provide places for Saturn, the planet of melancholy. Such places would echo the bowers of Renaissance gardens dedicated to Saturn, ‘a dark, shaded, remote place where a person could retire and enter the persona of depression without fear of being disturbed’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). And, as Kant put it, ‘Melancholy separation from the bustle of the world due to a legitimate weariness is noble’ (Kant, 1960, p.56), there is nothing shameful about the need for silence and reflection, for a slower pace. Moore suggests a need to acknowledge Saturn within buildings, where ‘A house or commercial building could have a room or an actual garden where a person could go to withdraw in order to meditate, think, or just be alone and sit’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). These places would not be ‘centres’, or places for gathering, Moore cautions. More likely they would be peripheral rather than central, and, he avers, just as ‘Hospitals and schools often have “common rooms” … they could just as easily have “uncommon rooms,” places for withdrawal and solitude’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). Such a facilitation of what is often seen as something to be avoided – solitude, introspection, aloneness, even depression – creates an enhanced capacity for the landscape to be melancholy in a meaningful way, and reiterates Julia Kristeva’s recognition of the need to create space for an ‘inner zone’ in a garden or intimate quarter. As an added dimension of existential being there is potential for an enhanced connectivity with the affective dimensions of life – that compass of emotion which Shelley regretted turning away from because of the ‘cold maxims of the world’ – and this is related to the condition of an intimate immensity. As Moore writes, ‘Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy’ (Moore, 1992, p.148). Even the most functional room – the toilet – can offer a place for melancholy contemplation, an intimate space within the vastness beyond. Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki writes poetically of Japanese toilets, ‘surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, [where] one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4). The introspective space of the Japanese toilet is evoked further by Tanizaki: I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet from the Kantoˉ region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the

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earth as they wash over the base of the stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4) As noted in Chapter 1, Bachelard described the house as an ‘instrument to confront the cosmos’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.46) and this image of the building within the vastness of existence is echoed in Tanizaki’s toilet, ‘the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4).

Note 1 Smithson also designated a number of other monuments besides those included in his short Art Forum article, such as the ‘cube monument’ and ‘small fountain monument’ (a drinking fountain). See, for example, Roberts (2004).

References Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published 1958). Boston: Beacon Press. Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 50–66. Chrétien, Jean-Louis (2003). Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. New York: Fordham University Press. Cioran, E.M. (1992). On the Heights of Despair (trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston; first published in Romanian in 1934). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press. Gibbons, Reginald (1989). The Poet’s Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hunt, John Dixon (1976). The Figure in the Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of California Press. Keiller, Patrick (n.d.). ‘London’, unpublished script. Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins. Pasternack, Alex (2010). ‘Forget me not’. Metropolis Magazine, February. www. metropolismag.com/February-2010/Forget-Me-Not, 24 December 2015. Perec, Georges (2010) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (trans. Mark Lowenthal, originally written in 1974). Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press. Ramazani, Jahan (1994). The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Roberts, Jennifer L. (2004). Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51.

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Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle edition). Tanizaki, Jun’chiroˉ (1977). In Praise of Shadows. Stony Creek: Leete’s Island Books.

Conclusion

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A landscape of melancholy

In the void and the uncanny, in silence and shadows, in the auratic and the liminal, the fragmentary and the abandoned, in the monochromatic and the submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, an aesthetics of melancholy emerges. These marginal conditions carve out space on the edge, an emotional terrain vague, where meaning drifts and contemplation intensifies. It is in these zones where the intimate and the immense are fused, the self within oceanic space. For landscape architecture there are challenges and opportunities, from resisting the temptation to develop any site which appears vacant and abandoned, to providing spaces for solitude and reflection. Melancholy landscapes are often ordinary places, everyday landscapes, Kathleen Stewart’s ‘little worlds’ (Stewart, 2007). Melancholy infuses places which have been affected by trauma, and places which are the containers of memory. For post-disaster landscapes there is a melancholy of all that has been lost, the people, the things, the places. The images of empty chairs from New Orleans compiled by Helen Jaksch were a vivid ubi sunt litany, invoking the poignancy of the ordinary, a lament for all of the absences they represent (Jaksch, 2013). While the inevitable narratives of resilience and rebuilding are played out in post-disaster landscapes, making space for sadness is part of attending to wellbeing. The pressure to recover, get over it, move on, is symptomatic of the broader insistence on happiness in Western culture. The counter to this is the recognition, as Karen Till has written, that wounds sometimes need to remain open (Till, 2005; 2012). Following the emotional turn in allied disciplines like geography, landscape architecture is ripe for a deepening of emotions. Drawing on the ancient legacy of the humours, and the emotional colourings of conventions like the Picturesque, the landscape is a potent setting for memory and melancholy. Emotion is both personal and collective; it is a means of finding connections, and expanding the meaningfulness of existence. For a designer, emotional potential in the landscape is to be carefully navigated, and not overdetermined. As Peter Zumthor explains, ‘An emotive content is crucial in architecture as in all arts, but I have the attitude that no one else should be forced to live my emotions. So, I try to create sensual, emotive and responsive images – in matter and words – which can receive and reflect

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Conclusion 171 anyone’s personal feelings or emotional tendencies. I attempt to make resonant things’ (in Stott, 2015). So often references to emotions in design are only about ‘positive’ emotions, about being happy. Wellbeing necessitates not just happiness, though, there is also the need to design for sadness, and to engage with a spectrum of emotions. Melancholy also challenges a superficial and onedimensional emotional range through its qualities of unrequitedness and irresolvability. An ‘easy’ emotional landscape might be one which is about happiness and immediate understanding. Because of its easiness, such a landscape could be superficial and forgettable. An easy landscape fails to extend and expand our relationship with the world, to challenge us, to make us think, and through this to be memorable and thought provoking. As Bednar concluded in his research on roadside shrines, I am still looking to find a way that [the melancholia] could be mobilized – not to settle the questions I have raised here, but to continue to unsettle them – to demand that we as individuals and as members of collectives pay attention to the landscapes of automotive trauma long enough and intentionally enough to begin the slow and confusing work of figuring out what it means to live through the cars that take us where we want to go, but also where we don’t. (Bednar, 2015, p.65) Franses also pointed to the social role of melancholy, explaining one of the ways in which stranger memorials function is in creating an irresolvable melancholia that becomes an agent of social binding (Franses, 2001, p.102). Melancholy’s irresolvability and unrequitedness can be troubling, but this very conundrum is critical in keeping alive the human condition. Instead of quickly papering over the cracks of landscapes of sadness and disaster, an enhanced appreciation of their place in the landscape deepens connections. Caution against landscapes which aren’t happy, resolved and easy is echoed in a fear that places of melancholy might be ugly. But the very core of the melancholy aesthetic is a beautiful sadness. Some of the most vivid expressions of the beauty of melancholy landscapes are seen in films and photography, where the alchemy of the image is a process of strangemaking, of allowing us to see something familiar with new eyes. Susan Sontag observes that ‘Bleak factory buildings and bill-board cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes’ (Sontag, 2014, p.78). Sadness and pain in the landscape can be most palpable in the face of disaster and trauma. Places which have experienced violence, death and damage are redolent in melancholy. It is not ethical to enjoy the suffering of others, but nor is it ethical to overlook what has taken place, to want to quickly cover it over and replace it with a benign design. James E. Young reminds us that places like Auschwitz and Falstad are vexing in aesthetic

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terms, in the cohabitation of beauty and death. At Falstad, the former SS camp in Norway, murders took place in the forest, because the forest could hide the events. But now there is a tension with the forest’s beauty, even a sense that it is somehow complicit in the deaths. In the memoirs of prisoners at Falstad, there were references to how incongruous their suffering was with the beauty of the place. Even Auschwitz had its physical beauty and as hard as that is for us to accept now, for the prisoners it was very important because this was a theological question: how could Nature and God be so indifferent to our suffering? I’m suffering but the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the blossoms are blooming. (Young, 2010) Young goes on to say that the coincidence of suffering and beauty at Falstad is the thing that makes it such a powerful memorial site, and casts it as a ‘pastoral lament’. Even in the most simple of landscapes the incongruity of beauty and sadness evoke melancholy, and heighten emotions. Hart Island’s potters field cemetery is a place of sadness, where the homeless and destitute are buried. The beauty of the Long Island Sound setting balances this bleakness, with new graves taking only a season for the landscape to transmute them into a place of melancholy beauty. The placement of memorial benches illustrates how a humble gesture can bring together sadness and beauty, as Maddrell observes: ‘In many ways benches and other memorials in beauty spots echo this discursive location of a loved one in an ideal setting that they previously accessed periodically and temporarily, but was nonetheless highly significant’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.49). Melancholy offers a means of finding emotional balance, as in the ancient idea of the humours, where it was recognised that to be solely sanguine was not healthy. And with this comes the potential for reflection and embracing a different pace of engagement with the world, a counter to the predilection for instant gratification. In drawing together this exploration of the conditions of melancholy, Melancholy and the Landscape does not seek to be definitive and exclusive – this book is not about closure. Rather, it points to possibilities, offers a language for melancholy landscapes, and perhaps even provides some legitimation for the emotional self. This legitimation comes not from any presumption of authority, but through a camaraderie, a collective – the recognition that feeling sad is a critical part of being in the landscape.

References Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds),

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Conclusion 173 Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 50–66. Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104. Jaksch, Helen (2013). ‘The empty chair is not so empty: ghosts and the performance of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115. Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle edition. Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle edition). Stott, Rory (2015). ‘Juhani Pallasmaa on Writing, Teaching and Becoming a Phenomenologist’. ArchDaily, 7 November. www.archdaily.com/776761/juhanipallasmaa-on-writing-teaching-and-becoming-a-phenomenologist, 2 December. Till, Karen (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Till, Karen (2012). Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14. Young, James E. (2010). Interview during his visit to Falstad, Norway in September 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=66O4fd6hob0, 25 June 2011.

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Index

Aalto, A. 48 abstract art 7, 19, 65–7, 69, 71, 75, 125 acedia 3, 6, 166 acoustics 85, 145–6 Adorno, T. 26 aesthetics 5, 8, 13–16, 18, 20–1; aura 92–3, 96; emotion 30–3; empathy 42–51; ephemerality 149; ethics 34–41; fragments 109–10; intimate immensity 164–6; leavings 117; monochrome 157–8; patina 143–4; role 23–9; sadness 170–1; silence 84; submersion 139, 141; uncanny 73–5, 79; weathering 143, 145–6 affect 3–4, 7, 21, 30–3, 57; aesthetics 26; intimate immensity 165, 167; leavings 121, 125, 129; sadness 170; silence 84; uncanny 81; void 58; weathering 143, 145 Agamben, G. 5, 7, 13, 16, 65 AIDS Quilt 49, 65 aisthesis 27–8, 94, 96 Alberti, L.B. 159 Alcatraz 105 alienation 15, 31 Allsopp, B. 47–8 anaesthetics 34, 36–7 Angelopolous, T. 138 anomie 6 Antarctica 96, 107 anthropology 99 appearance 23 architecture 3–4, 8 Arendt, H. 126 Aristotle 25 arts/artworks 3, 12, 16, 18–19, 25–6; abstract 7, 19, 65–7, 69, 71, 75, 125; aura 92–5; darkness 90; empathy 42, 46, 50; ephemerality 149–50;

intimate immensity 163; liminality 100; silence 86; submersion 138; uncanny 76; void 65 asceticism 19, 86 Asia 149 Asplund, G. 97 astronomy 107 Augé, M. 112 aura 16, 56, 92–8, 107, 109; leavings 119, 130; sadness 170; submersion 141; weathering 143, 145 Auschwitz 89, 129–30, 171–2 Australia 90, 103, 121, 125 avant-garde 77 Bachelard, G. 6, 46, 161, 166, 168 Balka, M. 89 Ballard, J.G. 137–8 Bangladesh 112 Barcelona 31 Barnes, M. 99 Barry, C. 125 Barthes, R. 38–9, 59, 70 Bataille, G. 135 Baudelaire, C. 15, 31 Beardsley, J. 126 beauty 3, 8, 12–13, 16, 18–22; aesthetics 23, 25, 28; aura 94; empathy 42, 46; ephemerality 149; ethics 34–8; fragments 114; intimate immensity 165; leavings 120, 125; liminality 99–100, 104, 107; sadness 55, 171–2; shadows 87, 90; submersion 134, 136–8, 141; weathering 143–4 Beauvoir, S. de 121 Beaver, R. 86 Bednar, R.M. 150, 165–6, 171 Benjamin, W. 15–16, 74, 92–7, 100, 114, 126–8

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Index Berenson, B. 45 Berger, J. 43 Berleant, A. 25 Biederman, K. 59 black bile 13 blood 13 Böcklin, A. 104 body 13, 26–7, 30, 34, 39; aura 94–5, 97; camouflage 153; empathy 42–4, 46–7; intimate immensity 162; leavings 126; shadows 89; uncanny 74, 77, 79; weathering 145 Boethius 120 Bois, Y.-A. 28 Borges, J.L. 80 Bosco, H. 46 Boullée, E.-L. 78–9, 90 bourgeoisie 47 Boym, S. 118 Brady, E. 157 Brand, D. 130 Breton, A. 79 Britain 163 British Empire 36, 84 Brown, C. 36 Bruno, G. 8 Buck-Morss, S. 36, 114 Burgin, V. 103, 112–13, 129–30 Burke, E. 28, 87, 89 Burri, A. 123, 125 Burton, R. 12, 14, 55, 89 Busch, A. 59 Butzer Design Partnership 59 Butzer, H. 59 Byron, G. 111 Caillois, R. 79, 87, 89, 152–4 Cambodia 7, 66 camera obscura 89–90, 94, 138 camouflage 56, 89, 152–7, 161–2, 164, 170 camoufleurs 154 Carley, R. 78 Cartesianism 25 Casebere, J. 138 Casey, E. 119–20 Cave, N. 3, 84 Chambers, W. 138 Cheyne, G. 14 chiaroscuro 20 Chile 61 China 97 Chipperfield, D. 31 Chirico, G. de 31, 99, 123

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choleric 13, 18, 30 Chrétien, J.-L. 162 Christians 59 cinema 5, 12, 32, 65, 74; aura 95–6; liminality 106; monochrome 158; sadness 171; submersion 137, 141; weathering 145 Cioran, E. 115, 163 Clare, S. 30 Clarke, H.G. 27 class 37, 100 Classen, C. 27 Claude Glass 19, 24–5, 158 Claude Lorrain 19, 24, 137, 157 Claudel, P. 42 Clear, N. 137 Clérisseau, C.-L. 138 Cockatoo Island 103, 105–6 Coleridge, S.T. 3 colonialism 36 commemoration 39, 55, 58–9, 85, 100, 103, 130, 159 commodification 4 compassion fatigue 44, 70 composition 24, 36, 157–8 Connor, S. 99 constellations 13, 16, 166 contemplation 4, 6–7, 19, 30, 56; empathy 49; ethics 38; fragments 109, 111, 114; intimate immensity 161–2, 165–7; leavings 118, 120, 128; sadness 170; shadows 87, 89–90; silence 84, 86; submersion 138; uncanny 77; void 58, 65, 69; weathering 143 context 4–5, 7, 13, 20–1, 56; aesthetics 28; camouflage 152; emotion 31; empathy 42–6, 48, 50; ephemerality 149–50; ethics 37; fragments 114; leavings 117, 119, 121; liminality 99, 106; uncanny 75, 77; void 65–7, 71; weathering 144 Cooder, R. 107 Le Corbusier 144 Cornell, J. 117 Corner, J. 19 Critical Regionalism 8 Crouch, D. 4 Cubists 154 culture 3–5, 7, 12, 15, 19–20; empathy 44, 47, 49; ephemerality 149–50; ethics 34; fragments 109, 114; liminality 99; sadness 170 Curl, J.S. 7, 65

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176

Index

Damer, J. 36 Damisch, H. 94 Dark Ages 3, 166 darkness 21, 32, 74, 79, 81; aura 95; fragments 115; intimate immensity 167; leavings 124; liminality 99–101, 103–5; monochrome 157–60; shadows 87–91; submersion 134 Daskalakis, G. 106 datascaping 45 Datatown 45 Davey, H.E. 144 Davidson, J. 31 Davis, S. 7, 66 dead trees 19–20, 100, 111, 158 Dean, T. 145 decay 20, 35, 37–8, 68, 96, 100, 112, 120, 136–9, 141, 144–5, 149 defamiliarisation 64, 74, 76, 89 dehumanisation 43, 45, 50, 66 déjà-vu 73, 79 Democritus 27 depression 5, 12–13, 37–8, 89, 166–7 Descartes, R. 111 Descombes, G. 77 Desert Fathers 166 Diaconu, M. 143 diasporas 119, 121 Dick, P.K. 74 Dickens, C. 34–5, 58–9, 134–5 Diderot, D. 20–1 Didi-Huberman, G. 130 Dilengite, A. 59 Diller Scofidio + Renfro 141 dimensionality 5, 7, 18, 24, 67, 171 discourse 14, 26, 36–7, 109, 121 disinterest 25–6, 34, 37–8, 44, 50 Donohoe, J. 50, 56, 66–7, 75, 84 Doré, G. 113–14, 137 Doss, E. 150–1 dream theory 47 Dürer, A. 3 Dyer, G. 85, 162, 166

Eisenman, P. 7, 44, 69, 125 emotion 8, 26–34, 37–8, 42–3, 46; aura 97; camouflage 152; darkness 87; emotional turn 8; empathy 42–51; ephemerality 149; ethics 34–41; monochrome 157; sadness 170–2; uncanny 77, 81; void 58, 62–3, 65, 68–71 empathy 8, 33, 40, 42–51, 58; aura 93–4, 96–7; camouflage z152; darkness 89; fragments 112; intimate immensity 162; liminality 103–4, 106; silence 85; void 64, 66, 69–71; weathering 146 empiricism 48 empty chair memorials 58–62, 64 England 3, 19, 90, 120, 128, 138, 145–6 Enlightenment 25 ennui 6, 15, 80, 164–5 entertainment industry 5–6 environment 3, 8, 24, 43, 112; built 31, 44–5, 50; camouflage 153–4; designed 4, 37–8; intimate immensity 163; natural 103; submersion 138 ephemerality 8, 62, 97, 99, 133, 149–51 Ernst, M. 137 Escalas, J.E. 43 ethics 8, 20, 33–42, 45, 50, 62–4, 71, 129, 150, 171 etymology 3, 24, 73 Europe 7, 12, 19, 69, 74, 125–6, 159 experience 5, 7, 18, 24–5, 56; aesthetics 27–9; aura 92–7; emotion 31–2; empathy 43–5, 47–8; ephemerality 150–1; ethics 35, 38–40; fragments 115; leavings 118, 120, 123, 125–6; liminality 100, 103; sadness 171; shadows 89–90; submersion 135, 139; uncanny 74–7, 79–81; void 59, 67

Eagleton, T. 26, 85 East Europe 59 Easter Island 146 Edensor, T. 6, 109 Edwards, E. 96 effigies 78–9, 149 ego 15, 49, 67, 89, 100, 104 Egypt 166 Eichenbaum, B. 76

Falstad 171–2 famine 121 Ferguson, H. 15 Fern, W. 37, 44 fetishisation 36 Field Operations 141 Fildes, L. 58 films 5, 12, 32, 65, 74; aura 95–6; liminality 106; monochrome 158;

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Index sadness 171; submersion 137, 141; weathering 145 Finland 86 First World War 84, 162 Flatley, J. 31–2, 75 Flaubert, G. 153, 164 foregrounding 77 Formalists 74–7 Forsyth, B. 138 Forty, A. 68–9, 125 fragments 56, 95, 101, 105, 109–19, 127, 143, 152, 170 Frampton, K. 8, 24–5 France 32 Franses, R. 7, 49, 65, 67, 103, 171 French Revolution 120 Fresh Kills 129 Freud, S. 12–13, 15, 39, 46–9, 58, 65, 67, 73–4, 81, 117–20, 151, 166 Friedrich, C.D. 162, 166 Fuksas, M. 45 Futurists 36, 145 Gablik, S. 65 Gandy, J. 138 Gansky, A.E. 35, 37 Gauguin, P. 58–9 gaze 26, 39, 42, 64, 69, 92–3, 97, 100, 117, 128–9, 159 genocide 7 geography 8, 30–1 geometry 36, 48, 101, 145 German Autumn 15 Germany 103, 113, 126, 136, 159 ghosts 59, 77–8, 119, 126, 135, 138, 153, 163 Gibson, W. 74 Gillis, J.R. 66 Girardin, R. de 111 Goat Island 105 Goethe, J.W. 48, 103 Goffi-Hamilton, F. 85 Goldsworthy, A. 75, 77 Gorky, A. 154 Gothicism 14 graffiti 35, 141 Grainge, P. 159 Grand Tour 19 gravitas 32, 100, 163 Greece 23, 97 Green, M. 14 grief 15–16, 49, 58, 64, 67, 71, 85, 104, 149–51 Grinda, E.G. 123–5

177

grotesque 19–20, 28 Ground Zero 37, 129 Grunwald, W. 103 Guerra, T. 95 Guerrero, M. 61 Gulf War 36–7 Gypsies 120 Haapala, A. 157 Haddad, L. 23–4 Halprin, L. 48, 97 happiness 5, 7, 30–3, 49, 84, 120, 170–1 hapticity 8, 96–7, 145 Harcourt, Lord 36 Harries, E.W. 111 Harries, K. 6, 50, 93, 110–11 Hart Island 103–6, 172 Hart, J. 96 Harvey, D. 35 Heidegger, M. 24, 56, 75 Helm, S. 59 Henson, B. 106 heritage 64–5, 75, 93, 105 hermitages 6, 111, 166–7 Herrington, S. 19, 28 Hildegard of Bingen 3 Hitler, A. 113 Hladik, M. 143 Hofer, J. 117 Hoffman, G. 80–1 Holl, S. 8, 110 Holocaust 74–5, 77, 81, 85, 127, 129 Holzer, J. 159 homelessness 35, 46, 104, 172 Horkheimer, M. 26 Hoskins, W.G. 120 Howett, C. 24 Hubbard, V. 99 Huishan, H. 165 humanism 44–50 humours 13, 16, 18, 30, 43, 170, 172 Hunt, J.D. 28, 55, 100–1, 166–7 Hunt, M. 104 Hurricane Katrina 59 Huysmans, J.K. 153, 164 identity 3, 31, 66, 93–4, 118, 126, 129 ideology 35, 45, 67, 109 Iliescu, S. 45 imperialism 37 infrastructure 23, 141, 145–6, 154, 164 intellect 15, 25–6, 44, 70, 103, 106 internet 6

178

Index

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intimate immensity 8, 56–7, 143, 148, 161–70 introspection 6 Ireland 121 Israel 81 Italy 24, 45, 95, 99, 123 Ivy, R. 71 Jaar, A. 55, 69–70 Jaksch, H. 59, 77, 170 James, H. 37 James, L. 25–6 Jameson, F. 75 Japan 48, 143–4, 149, 167 Jarman, D. 158–9 Jarzombek, M. 47 Jay, M. 5, 23 Jefferson, T. 97 Jews 59, 61, 69, 74–5, 77, 81, 89, 121, 125–7 Jiakun, L. 165 Judd, D. 75 Jugendstil 95, 145–6 Juniper, A. 144, 149 Kadishman, M. 81 Kafka, F. 115 Kahn, L. 112 Kant, I. 18–21, 25–6, 34, 38, 42, 44, 87, 161, 167 Kaplan, E.A. 43 Karavan, D. 126–7 Keats, J. 3 Keenan, T. 7, 65 Keiller, P. 163–4, 166 Keller, H. 27 Kelly, E. 154 Kelly, N. 90 Kenna, M. 94 Kennedy, L. 35 Kent, W. 111 Kiefer, A. 3, 74 Kierkegaard, S. 15 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 109–10 Kite, S. 46–7 Klein, M. 46 Klibansky, R. 13 Kligerman, E. 74, 77 Knight, R.P. 20, 28 Koss, J. 47 Krauss, R. 152–3 Kristallnacht 59 Kristeva, J. 13, 155, 167 Kundera, M. 56

Kurasmaki, A. 32 Landry, T. 112 landscape architecture 3–11, 18–22, 55–7, 99, 170–3; aesthetics 23–9; aura 92–8; camouflage 152–6; darkness 87–91; definitions 12–17, 23–4; emotion 30–3; empathy 42–51; ephemerality 149–51; ethics 34–41; etymology 3–4; fragments 109–16; intimate immensity 161–9; leavings 117–32; monochrome 157–60; shadows 87–91; silence 84–6; submersion 133–42; transience 149–51; uncanny 73–83; void 58–72; weathering 143–8 Lankin, J. 61 Lassus, B. 154 Latak, K. 61 Latvia 118 Le Rouge, G.-L. 138 Leach, N. 36, 153 Leatherbarrow, D. 144 leavings 56, 115, 117–32, 170 Lee, V. 45 Lefaivre, L. 8 Lenin, V.I. 125 Levin, D.M. 23 Lewicki, P. 61 Libeskind, D. 74, 81, 89 liminality 56, 64, 69–70, 78, 95, 97, 99–109, 149, 162, 170 Lin, M. 49, 66, 75, 97 Lincoln, A. 97 Lipps, T. 45 literature 3, 12–13, 26, 31, 75–6, 79–80 Long Island 104, 172 Lorca, F.G. 161, 166 Lowenthal, D. 144 Lowenthal, M. 165 Lynch, D. 74 Macaulay, T.B. 114 McCahon, C. 101 McCarthy, K. 96 MacLean, A. 19 Maddrell, A. 30, 62–3, 172 Magritte, R. 65, 153 Majendie, P. 62 Maksymowicz, V. 123 Malcolm, C. 129 Manhattan Island 121, 141 Marc, F. 154

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Index Marinetti, F.T. 36 Marion, J.-L. 95 Marks, L.U. 96 Marzys, B. 137 Massey, D. 65 Massumi, B. 30 Mather, C. 14 Maxwell, R. 71 media 4, 7, 36, 43–4, 70 medicine 13 Mediterranean 126–7 melancholy 3–11, 18–22, 53, 55–7, 170–2; aesthetics 23–9; aura 92–8; camouflage 152–6; darkness 87–91; definitions 12–17; emotion 30–3; empathy 42–9; ephemerality 149–51; ethics 34–41; fragments 109–16; intimate immensity 161–9; leaving 117–32; liminality 99–108; melancholising 55; monochrome 157–60; patina 143–8; shadows 87–91; silence 84–6; submersion 133–42; transience 149–51; uncanny 73–83; void 58–72; weathering 143–8 memorials 7–8, 32, 39, 55, 58–9; empathy 49–50; ephemerality 149–51; fragments 110, 112; intimate immensity 164–5; leavings 121, 123–9; liminality 101, 103, 107; monochrome 159; sadness 171–2; silence 84–5; uncanny 75, 77; void 61–2, 64–9, 71 memory 4, 7, 16, 32, 56; aura 93, 96; empathy 49–50; fragments 110, 112; intimate immensity 164; leavings 117–18, 121, 125, 129; liminality 101; sadness 170; silence 85; uncanny 81; void 58–9, 62, 64–6, 68–9, 71; weathering 143 mental illness 5 metaphysics 6, 18, 32, 38, 94, 97, 167 Metz, C. 26 Michasiw, K. 36 middle class 100 military 105, 120, 146, 154 Milligan, C. 31 Milosz, O.V. de 46, 161 Milton, J. 3 Minimalism 145 Minkowski, E. 87, 89 mirroring 4, 73, 77, 79–80, 152 modernity 5, 15, 27, 36, 47, 73, 77, 112, 114, 144–6, 163–4

179

Moholy-Nagy, L. 154 Molodkina, L. 96 monochrome 157–60, 163, 170 Montesquieu 111 Moore, A. 35 Moore, R. 31 Moore, T. 31, 167 Mora, R. 61 Morel, J.-M. 42 Moreno, C.D. 123–5 Morrel, A. 138 Morris, J. 119 Mostafavi, M. 144 mourning 1, 15, 39, 65, 90; empathy 49; ephemerality 150–1; fragments 112; intimate immensity 166; leavings 118–19, 124, 128–9; liminality 104; silence 85; uncanny 73–4, 79 Mukarovský, J. 77 Mullion Cove 64, 128, 163 Muñoz, A. 61 Museum of Jewish Heritage 74–5, 81, 89 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 129, 153–5 music 3, 28 Musisi, B. 69–70 MVRDV 45 Namibia 109, 136 narcissism 15 National Museum of Australia 90 Nattino, S. 61 nature 4, 18, 20, 24, 32; camouflage 152, 154; empathy 42, 48; ethics 38; fragments 109, 111–12; intimate immensity 162–3, 165; leavings 121, 126, 128, 131; liminality 103–5; monochrome 159; sadness 172; shadows 90; silence 86; submersion 133–6, 139, 141; uncanny 77, 81; weathering 144 Nazis 59, 113, 126, 130 Netherlands 145, 159 New Spirit 44–5 New Zealand 85, 101, 125 Newton, I. 111 Niepce, N. 94 Nietzsche, F.W. 25 nihilism 32, 38, 56, 162, 166 Noack, N. 100 Noble, A. 94–5 Noble, R. 78

180

Index

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Nono, L. 85 Nora, P. 112 Norway 172 nostalgia 4, 31, 38, 45, 117–20, 125, 148, 159 objectification 5, 13, 25, 27, 45, 48, 93, 106 ocularcentrism 23, 50 Omer, M. 127 O’Neill, M. 39, 149–51 ontology 5, 48 Otero-Pailos, J. 78, 130 Other 19, 42–5, 48–9, 93, 162 Ottoman Empire 159 paintings 3, 20–1, 24, 27, 74; aura 92, 96; camouflage 153; emotion 31; fragments 111; intimate immensity 162; leavings 118, 123; monochrome 157–8; submersion 137; void 58, 62, 65 palimpsests 78, 130 Pallasmaa, J. 4, 6, 8, 31–2, 39, 48, 65–6, 71, 86, 100, 146 Pamuk, O. 43–4, 159 Panofsky, E. 13 Papua New Guinea 149 Parada, J.M. 61 Pascal, B. 162 Pasternack, A. 165 patina 97, 133, 143–9, 159 Pauer, G. 121 Peacock, T. 32, 135 Penn, W. 111 Pentagon 109–10 perception 26, 43, 45–6, 74–7, 87, 92, 115, 144, 149 Perec, G. 164–6 Perez, O. 106 Pérez-Gómez, A. 8 perspective 23–4, 162 perversity 37 pharmaceutical industry 5 phenomenology 4, 8, 27–8, 43, 46, 69, 96, 110, 117, 128–9, 143 philosophy 6, 12, 15, 19, 25, 42, 47–8, 111, 120, 154, 167 phlegm 13, 18, 30 photography 7, 16, 19, 24, 27–8; aura 94–6; camouflage 152–3; empathy 43, 50; ethics 34–5, 37, 39; fragments 109; intimate immensity 162; leavings 129–30; liminality

103–4, 106–7; monochrome 158–9; sadness 171; submersion 138, 141; uncanny 79; void 59, 69–70; weathering 145 physics 16 Picturesque 6, 8, 14, 18–23, 34–8; empathy 42, 46; fragments 109, 111; monochrome 157–9; patina 144; sadness 170; submersion 137–8 Pikionis, D. 48 Pingusson, H. 67–9 Pinochet, A. 61 Piranesi, G.B. 112, 138 Plato 25 Poe, E.A. 80–1 poetry 3, 12–16, 31, 42, 66, 75, 115, 120, 149, 161, 166 Poland 89 politics 15–16, 35, 61, 92, 109, 114, 120–1 pornography 34–5 Porteous, D.J. 158 postmodernism 35 Poussin, N. 19 poverty 32, 35, 38, 159 Price, U. 20 Prince, H.C. 144 privilege 25–6 projection 46, 48, 73, 79, 94 Prout, S. 38 psychasthenia 152–3 psychiatry 12–13, 18, 87 psychoanalysis 13, 46–7 psychology 5, 13, 42, 45, 73, 89, 119, 152 punctum 59 Puritans 14 Randalls Island 104 Rattenbury, K. 89 Ray, M. 152–3 reality TV 4–5 reciprocity 42, 46 Reed, P. 154 reflection 6, 24, 48, 68–9, 80–1, 97, 120, 162, 166, 170, 172 refugees 70, 118 Rella, F. 114–15 Renaissance 12, 14, 24 Resnais, A. 74 Rider-Rider, W. 162 Rietveld, G. 145 Riker’s Island 104 Rilke, R.M. 130–1

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Index Rimbaud, A. 163–4 rites of passage 64, 99 Robben Island 105 Robert, H. 20–1 Robins, K. 65 Robinson, S.K. 23 Roman Empire 37, 100, 111–13, 135 Romanticism 3, 12, 14, 32 Room 4.1.3 110 Roosevelt, E. 97 Roosevelt, F.D. 97 Rorty, R. 106 Rosa, S. 19, 111 Rosenblum, R. 162 Rouault, G. 27 Rousseau, J.-J. 84, 111 ruins 14, 19–21, 35, 37, 100, 109–12, 117, 133, 158 Ruskin, J. 32–5, 38, 42, 143 Russia 74–5, 77 Rwanda 7, 66, 69–70 sadness 4–6, 8, 19, 30, 32; empathy 42; ethics 34, 37–9; fragments 110; intimate immensity 165; leavings 118; liminality 100, 105; monochrome 157; shadows 87, 89–90; silence 84; submersion 139; uncanny 78 St Augustine 38 sanguine 13, 18, 30, 172 Sartre, J.-P. 79, 153, 164 Saturn 13–14, 31, 146, 167 Saudi Arabia 36 Saxl, F. 13 Scarpa, C. 85 scenography 25, 28 Schwartz, M. 125 sciences 12–13, 16 Scotland 90 Scott, G. 45–8 Scott, R. 74 sculpture 125, 145, 153 Seamon, D. 8 Sebald, W.G. 3, 146 Second World War 74, 139 Senie, H.F. 59 senses 24–8, 34, 56, 74, 84, 86–7 September 11 2001 37 Seurat, G. 94 shadows 56, 78–9, 81, 87–91, 170; camouflage 153; intimate immensity 167; leavings 128; liminality 99, 103, 105; monochrome 158–9

181

Shakespeare, W. 3, 120 Shelley, M. 136 Shelley, P.B. 32–3, 136, 139, 167 Shenston, W. 20 Shklovsky, V. 76 shrines 109, 150, 165–6, 171 Sicily 123 silence 21, 67, 81, 84–7, 120, 136, 141, 158, 162–3, 167, 170 Simmel, G. 143 Situationists 79 Skultans, V. 118 smell 24, 26, 97, 135, 139, 152 Smith, K. 153 Smithson, R. 112, 163–4, 166 Soane, J. 138 social networking 6 social stratification 26 sociology 35, 152 Sola-Morales, I. di 48, 106 solitude 6–7, 19–21, 38, 55, 81; fragments 114; intimate immensity 161–2, 166–7; leavings 126; monochrome 157; sadness 170; shadows 87 Sontag, S. 34, 37–9, 43, 159, 171 Soubigou, G. 58 South Africa 105 souvenirs 109, 118–19 Soviet Union 118 Spain 126–7, 161 spectatorship 4–5, 25, 34, 70–1, 74 Speer, A. 113 Spirn, A.W. 48 spleen 13–15 Starobinski, J. 134 Staten Island 129 Steinmetz, G. 109 Stern, B. 43 Sterne, L. 163 Sternfeld, J. 104, 141 Stewart, K. 166, 170 Stewart, S. 118–19 Stokes, A. 46–7 strangemaking 6, 15, 49, 61, 73–7; camouflage 152; fragments 109, 114; leavings 119; liminality 106; sadness 171; silence 84; submersion 134, 136–8; uncanny 79–81 Sublime 8, 14, 18–23, 38, 87, 109–10, 127 submersion 35, 56, 111, 131, 133–42, 152, 170

182

Index

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suffering 6–7, 12, 33–4, 37–8, 42–3, 49, 166, 171–2 supermodernity 112 surrealists 74, 79, 90, 152–3 Switzerland 32, 117–18 symbolism 49, 61, 65–6, 71, 75; aura 97; camouflage 155; fragments 110, 114; leavings 119, 130; liminality 105; monochrome 159 Tanizaki, J. 167–8 Tarkovsky, A. 65–6, 95, 106, 138, 141 Taylor-Tudzin, J. 121 technology 6 terrains vagues 106–7, 170 Thatcher, M. 163 theology 167, 172 Third Emotional Space 62 Thomas, B. 44 Thomas, J. 24 Thoreau, H.D. 42, 81 thresholds 64, 99–101, 103, 106–7, 109–10, 133, 137 Till, K. 39–40, 170 Titchener, E. 42 Togan, J.C. 121 Tolle, B. 121 Tolstoy, L. 76 Torres, M. 161 tourism 7, 23, 37, 66, 110 tragedy 4, 7, 32, 37, 58; empathy 45, 50; ephemerality 149; leavings 129; liminality 100, 104; silence 85; submersion 134; void 65, 69–71; weathering 144 transience 8, 99, 114, 120, 128, 149–51 transition 99–100, 106, 139, 144 trauma 34, 45, 50, 109, 129, 150, 165–6, 170–1 Trigg, D. 19, 117, 124, 138 Tschumi, B. 36 Tuan, Y.-F. 8 Turner, J.M.W. 38 Turner, V. 99 Tzonis, A. 8 ubi sunt 120, 170 Uganda 70 uncanny 8, 73–83, 124, 134, 152, 162, 170 United States (US) 36, 103 Valamanesh, A. 121 Valamanesh, H. 121

Vall, R. de 70 values 3–4, 25, 95, 119 Van Gogh, V. 58–9 vanishing point 64, 129, 162 Vattimo, G. 48 Venice Architecture Biennale 45 Vergara, C.J. 35, 139, 141 Verlaine, P. 163 Viatte, G. 127 Vidler, A. 73–4, 79, 95, 138 Vietnam War 36, 49, 66–7, 75, 84, 97 violence 36–7, 39–40, 70–1, 87, 117, 134, 145, 171 Virgil 150 Vischer, R. 42, 45, 48–9, 93 visuality 4, 6, 8, 15, 23–8; aura 94, 96; camouflage 152, 155; ethics 36; fragments 110, 113; impact assessment 23; intimate immensity 163–4; leavings 125, 128; liminality 101, 103, 105; shadows 90; submersion 136–8, 141; uncanny 74, 77, 81; weathering 145–6, 148 void 7–8, 58–72, 77, 81, 84–5, 128, 170 Voltaire 111 voyeurism 5, 34, 38 wabi sabi 144, 149–50 Wales 138 warfare 36–7, 43–5, 49–50, 66–7, 84, 125, 139, 145, 159, 162 Warhol, A. 155 Washington, G. 97 Watkin, D. 138 weathering 56, 68, 133, 135, 143–9, 152, 159, 170 Weilacher, U. 159–60 Weiss, A.S. 143 Wenders, W. 74 West 25, 32, 66, 149–50, 170 Whatley, T. 158 Whiteread, R. 64, 69, 77–8, 124–5, 145, 153 wilderness 6, 99 Wilkinson, N. 154 Wingren, C. 64 witchcraft 12, 14, 16 Wittgenstein, L. 158 Wodiczko, K. 94 Woodman, F. 153 Woods, L. 36, 44 Woodward, C. 139

Index Wordsworth, W. 14 World Trade Center 62, 109–10 Wren, C. 46 Wylie, J. 8, 64, 128–9

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Yates, F. 13

yellow bile 13 Young, J.E. 171 Zaire 70 Žižek, S. 39, 120 Zumthor, P. 93, 170–1

183

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