peter nesteruk
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Chinese
Gardens XI (Rhetoric & Features).
Gardens
should be ‘much more natural, though man-made’ (after Ji
Cheng in ‘Craftsmanship of Gardening’, 17th c, Ming Dynasty). A repetition of nature in the realm of the man-made… a reconjuring which will include all the tricks and
modalities of meiosis (the art of making small, opposite to the hyperbole of
the statue).
The issue of size (size matters). Hyperbole again for Imperial parklands
(or rather enclosure): meiosis for the garden and city parks. The operation of
a Meiotic Mimesis is balanced by a Hyperbolic Mimesis, parallel tropes for
(religious and secular) aggrandisement (giant Buddhas
and aristocrats painted at twice the size of mere mortals) and the evocation of
paradise (in miniature) in the gardens of the East.
The
large/small opposition in Chinese gardens maps neatly
onto the Imperial/Private opposition, although not tidily onto that of North
and South. Large gardens are parks, which often include gardens (more formal)
alongside wild (if largely artificial) park land - even extending to that
usable for hunting. An example of a Southern park may be found in the
Mood.
Spiritual. To be aided by relics and objects. Also by reconstructions in, or
into, ideal form. Nature’s (matter’s) impurities are to be lost in the process
of approximation to the perfect… the otherworldly form. We are offered a
compression of the best associations of certain landscape features. The
equivalent of our Western notion of genius
loci- the sense of space become place, in certain configurations of
mountains, lakes, and the clearings that permit the views over such, also
forest openings, and rivers – the sense of a ‘room’ within Nature, and of the
possessor of that ‘room’ as a personification of its effect (its affects), even
an anthropomorphism. But constructed rather than found.
Origins.
Hunting. And ‘approaching the spirits’. If the former straightforwardly
indicates the aristocratic imperial origin of parks, then so does the latter,
through perhaps less obviously. Owing to the central importance of the rituals
carried out by the emperor, which would be carried out in specially put aside
parkland, often on specially built platforms which also allowed one to survey
ones possessions. If the world of the park was the world in miniature, the very
image of the fiefdom, the part/whole relation that subsumes the nation, then
this was a mark of possession – the ‘view’ as self-extension (with ones
possessions on view). Such platforms were to have reached mythic proportions in
the orginary (mythic) period of Chinese history;
however an echo of these structures may have survived into the Qing period in
the sacrifical (sic) platforms that surrounded old
Beijing (and which were knocked down, along with the city walls outside of
which they stood, only later last century).
‘Three
mountains in a pond’. Meiosis (the rhetoric of size again). As a re-creation
and condensation of desired elements; quotations from a landscape, repetitions
of certain landscape features, repeating and representing the state and country
and nation. Repeating the the display of the State’s
possessions, in miniature, by means of miniaturisation (meiosis) as a
representation/presentation, as quoting/citing, as re-siting
(a re-siting of parts of landscape). So reciting, as
with a string of prayer beads, as if a litany, as canonical, the glories of the
State
Idyllic/pastoral.
The tradition of landscape and its representation as spiritual (in content and
effect) as a source of spiritual sustenance. Landscape as escape. The ideal
landscape as an implicit criticism of urban or worldly life. The Buddhist and Daoist expectations of landscape involve the presence of a
larger degree of spiritual value when compared to the Western fantasy of pastorality (of simplicity, honesty, authenticity) as
conceived in opposition to the sins of the urban, to the sins of the city.
Build your own mountain (mimetic meiosis again), then sit and watch… (Similar
values may be found in the contemplation of much landscape art, a yet smaller,
more portable version of its real or imaginary referents, in so many ways like
an icon, or mandala, a mini altar converting the gaze
into ritual).
Hunting
and Merry-making. (Comparative). Not too dissimilar then to the Roman
(Classical and Baroque) parks as forms of ‘pleasure garden’. Comparable in this
sense also the later English and French parks of the aristocracy with their
surrounding parks made up of pasture and hunting land, which may be opposed to
the tamed, formal layout of the gardens directly behind or cleaving to the
dwelling place.
Small-scale
gardens and the arts. (Size again). Official, ‘scholar’, or intelligensia
gardens as the development of the desire for sanctuary, of a life away from
court life with its factional struggles. An escape from the dangerous
distractions of power and war (reputedly these gardens were said to have
originated in 200-500 CE). Whence the clear visual link to the development of
poetry, art and calligraphy. The garden as a form of ‘scholar art’. The Tang
intelligentsia wished to be seen as devotees of a culture as once simple and
elegant, in contrast to the showy wealth of the emperor, his court and his high
officials.
Choice.
The best imaginable; because most sacred, most symbolic, most similar to, most
evocative of, the ideal… A concentration of scenery, chosen from Nature for its
intensity and symbol-bearing beauty. Yet really chosen from a repertoire set in
the imagination (and in previous history of these places as a genre). Nature
improved at the behest of the ideal. Conjured by… Miniaturisation. Meiosis. The
‘world in a teapot’ model. Further developed under the Song Dynasty. The birth
of a new kind of concentrated space.
‘The
view-finding gate.’ Instrument of optics. Aesthetic optics; an optics of the
spiritual. How to see, learning to see; this is the role of framed space, the
key to the placing of gates and apertures. Framed space, we quickly learn, is
more focused, more intense, more symbolic, gaining for itself a higher value
than unframed space – source of a private mood of sacrality.
A tool for seeing place (in a place already constructed out of space, the
garden itself).
Other
senses. Sound. Of water, in enclosed spaces, or of rain, falling upon leaves.
Of plants chosen for the production of this sound. Of the sense of smell.
Pavilions found next to flowerbeds so as to collect their scent. A certain
times of year the ‘Perfumed Pavilion’ is no longer a proper name or noun, nor
an expression of subjunctive hope, nor even only a citation from literary or
architectural history, but an apt description.
‘Watching
in Motion and Observing Fixedly’. Again we are faced with the contrast of large
and small spaces. Compactness invites detail and time to consume it, intensity
requiring time of apprehension. On the other hand, a longer, larger space, with
routes that can be veritable journeys through its unfolding expansiveness,
requires perpetual movement. Most particularly in a world with no straight
lines (in a European garden there would be long views, exploitations of quadrated perspective, an almost quantitative summary of
the size of the space, the open consumption of its entirety, its long avenues
and open spaces…). The eternal winding (or its climbing alternative, the zigzag
path) that constitutes the sight-lines and the relation of eye and body to
space in the Chinese garden is conducive to sudden surprises, to the appearance
of prepared viewpoints, to a rapid succession of tableau or a slow unveiling by
a succession of cumulative stages. The scene meets process. The ritual moment
meets ritual as motion, as narrative, as climax (the climax of a particularly
well-prepared view).
And
ruins. In the ruins of a destroyed marble boat in the remains of the
Copyright
2005 Peter Nesteruk