BLACKTOP DOCUMENTS

"Happening: Paradigms of Light aBlaze (A Dialectic of the Sublime and the Picturesque)"

Written by Laura Haddad

Published in Landscape Journal (Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 1996)

Abstract: This essay responds to the fall of the Sublime as an aesthetic of landscape, in the midst of an ever-abounding Picturesque. It ties an over-emphasis on objective visual form and an eventual loss of subjective meaning to this fall. The history presented here is a sketch of how the Sublime has recast itself over the years, in terms of both its theory and its objects of representation, and in terms of its relationship with Picturesque theory and practice. Simultaneously, in an effort to restore meaning to worn-out forms of the designed visual landscape, the essay tries to reconstitute a sense of the Sublime in its own writing. Set amongst the history is a sequence of fictional descriptions which narrate the displacement of a Picturesque view by a Sublime experience. Thus, the format of the critique emulates its own thesis: it is in the guise of critical theory that a sense of the Sublime (and its subjective meaning) can be restored to a current aesthetic of landscape architecture overly pre-occupied with objective, visual form.

Excerpt:

"Is it happening?"

"What is landscape?"

"What is painting?"

Facing the "impossibility" of pictorial representation, the Modern avant-gardes called into question all assumptions. By Jean-Francois Lyotard's accounts, "they set about to revolutionize the supposed visual givens in order to reveal that the field of vision simultaneously conceals and needs the invisible, that it relates therefore not only to the eye, but to the spirit as well. Thus they introduced painting into the field open by the esthetics of the sublime." (1982, p. 67)

A similar line of inquiry is long overdue for practitioners and theorists of landscape architecture, a discipline whose method of design has in large part been mired in the safety and preservation of visual representation since the late eighteenth-century advent of the Picturesque. Symptomatic of this quandary is the condition that too many projects are designed to be seen, to be 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. In order to begin to restore Sublime meaning to the designed landscape, consider the question, "what is landscape?"

A quintessential San Francisco view, the tour book says, it has been photographed many times. Approaching Alamo Square Park you see a cluster of tourists standing in one spot looking downhill, cameras held to their faces, vision fixed upon no more than what their lenses allow them to see. You walk toward and then past them. (They for the most part stay planted on the sidewalk close to their bus their feet never touch the grass.) Your book has told you the optimal position from which to enjoy the view. That is where you stand, on grass, a small distance down from the crest of the grassy slope, closer to the sidewalk on your right than to the trees on your left...

The book tells you that the view from this location is famous for its juxtaposition of layers and forms. In the far background is the horizon of nature, a gentle organic line of hills. Jutting up in front of that line are rectilinear skyscrapers. The foreground creates the real illusion. The tour book calls them the Painted Ladies. They are a row of seven nearly identical Victorian houses across the street from the park. Because of the slope of the hill on which you stand, it appears that these Seven Sisters are directly in front of the skyscrapers. Framing the illusion are a large cypress tree to your left in the park and a white apartment building to the right of the Victorians. From your optimal position, front and center, the scene is a perfect composition. It could be a painting (but is usually a photograph).

Reintroducing the Sublime, with its glorious subjective meaning, into the debate effects something of a foil to the facility heretofore enjoyed by the Picturesque.

Because the Sublime happens in one's experience of the unforeseen, the form that prompts its emotional configuration must continually recast itself. Perception of the Sublime is possible at those moments when your thoughts move with the speed of light and then continue on to infinity. This happens rarely and lasts only instantaneously, like a flame. Light is the visual representation least easily objectified and most deeply experiential in its happening. It flickers. It seduces you. It is soon inescapable, but never permanent. The works considered most Sublime for their time convey an approach toward ineffable, intransitive illumination.

Today the light shifts rapidly across the view. Over the easternmost low-lying hills hang a mass of opaque dark clouds casting somber blues as a dramatic backdrop for the city in front of it, where skyscrapers then broadcast brief planes of reflected sunlight. But closest to you is brilliance. The Painted Ladies are lit up as spots of bright pastel against the eastern dark blues. The sky above you is transparent.

The first known essay on the Sublime is attributed to Longinus, who is thought to have lived during the third century A.D. Longinus renders the Sublime as an emotional transport enacted by rhetoric. He prefers the formal aspects of this rhetoric, though, to pass unnoticed. The greater content of Sublimity should conceal them. "Much as duller lights are extinguished in the encircling beams of the sun, so the artifices of rhetoric are obscured by the grandeur poured about them." (Longinus 1906, p. 41)

"Dieu dit: Que la lumiere se fasse, et la lumiere se fit." (". . . And there was light.") Centuries later, the Sublime comes to England from France, by way of Boileau's 1674 translation of Longinus. In his preface, Boileau uses this, God's creation of light, to illustrate his own take on the Sublime. The Sublimity of the phrase is in the instantaneity of the fulfillment of such a grand command. You nearly see the current of light happening. Samuel Monk surmises that the simple language of the phrase leaves rhetoric by the wayside and moves the Sublime toward redefinition.

You look up from the view through and into the sky but then the sun as it likes to do locates your eye then turns toward its dazzling. You stare into its resplendence, helpless as it blinds you to the view. You no longer see, just listen to get your bearings.....