peter nesteruk
(home page: contents and index)
Chinese
Gardens VIII (
The
Morning.
Misty, grey and green-blue, a contemplative mood. Few people, only slightly
more of the landscape; a lack of over-view, no long view, of the famous
landscape, desire of the visitor. Who must be consoled with their own inner
vision; the effect of interiority brought about by limited vision and in a
space known for its vision. A personal experience. Almost private (there are a
few other visitors occasionally lurching into vision out of the morning mists).
Spurred on by fleeting glimpses of gorges and pinnacles, rivers and pools.
Everything
in miniature. Trees, become shrubs; become floating gardens; become Bonsai in
pots. Mountains, on a park scale, a miniaturised landscape, right down to
models (reframed) in pots, themselves containing figures, houses, people.
Lakes, become pools, replete with miniature waterfalls and islands – and then
these are again repeated in large pots or as sculptures. Rocks surrounded by
water, complete with miniature trees... All reformed in miniature. And all
formalised in the process; all enacting, performing the transformation of
nature into culture, with nature itself tamed to human, yet also spiritual ends
and proportions (super nature as a cultural construct designed to support
itself, denying its cultural contingency). All reproduced... a representation
of nature, and therefore tamed... All enframed in a background of reduced mountains, tamed, which
form the park, which frame the park (like western statues). But which also are
framed by the park, by its borders - as if framed in pictures, those further
reproductions and stylisations of landscape, themselves framed by the
institutional space of the art gallery.
(Like a
field of pots the: mise en abime
effect of the final repetition that is the Bonsai tradition; miniature trees
and mountains. Often found within parks ((a park within a park)) a
miniaturisation within a miniaturisation...).
Everything
curves and winds. There are no straight lines. No grand alleys, no angles, no
avenues, nor climaxes, a culmination in a figure or statue... Long viewpoints
are all rising, therefore, no broad vistas, only a natural curving hypsosis (slow
rise of eyes to the sky). No tunnels (or tunnelled vision, although, at the
base of the 'mountains', there are plenty of caves....). Perspectival
lines of sight are not quadrated, not extended, not
mapping, then, but seeking, in a performance of enlightenment, of the path to
enlightenment, a ritual experience. Vision rises to site of geographic feature,
strong sense of place, to pavilion, to temple, site of beauty, site of
vision....
The
repeated trope of euphemism. Culture-making, taming, a reduction in scale, as
in terror, in awe-making, in the quality of the sublime... the sublime
borrowed, repeated by Beauty. Itself evoked by the trope of meiosis, where all
is reduced (opposite to hyperbole, the guiding trope of temples where giant Buddhas and other colossal Others lurk amid the smoke of
incense and the chanting of prayers). Everywhere there is the repeated trope of
making smaller, that is, of making tame (of making euphemistic) of making (sic)
culture (as making is culture). Again, the very opposite of the inflation that
is making the super nature of the temple Buddhas and
other deities of the Buddhist and Daoist pantheon as
of their representation in the art that these have produced. Making culture;
making new and extra meaning by these operations. Making bigger; meaning more…
evoking the (status of the) immortals. Making smaller: making mean more…
evoking paradise (bringing it down to earth) evoking paradise by building
paradise on earth.
In the
afternoon the sun breaks through... and someone turns on the fountains and
waterfalls! People accumulate; all sparkles. A playful public atmosphere now
predominates - but still one mindful of a certain degree of respect and
admiration.
Copyright 2005 Peter Nesteruk