One

 

This is the sound of Frankfurt, Germany. I’m walking to the Bethmannpark, to the Garden of Heavenly Peace, a modern construction fashioned after the Chinese scholar’s gardens of the Jiangnan region—a style of garden we term, in Chinese, yuanlin. Lying half-hidden in Frankfurt’s urban greenery, the garden is of modest size, of seemingly industrial construction; the space, ahistorically sterile, harbors few details. Like with most Chinese scholar gardens, which were private, this one is enclosed with a plain wall perforated with viewing portals. But the Frankfurt garden being from the beginning a public park, the wall does not delineate personal property but rather cultural-semiotic difference: outside the wall, Europe as is; inside the wall, Chinoiserie, a European imaginary of China.

            Or maybe this wall only appears solid, more membrane than barrier. Perhaps the garden secretly extends, through a dilated history, into every corner of this European metropole.

            The European imaginary of landscape architecture pivots on the opposition between formal culture and free nature—French baroque symmetry vying with English Romantic naturalism. This opposition—between mechanical and organic—forms one of the great dialectics of European art. Not far north of Frankfurt, the hydraulic-powered waterworks of a supreme European garden, the Kassel Wilhelmshöhe, cascade, in a series of engineered waterfalls clinging to the side of a hill, through a chain of both grandiose, symmetrical Baroque staircases and carefully deceptive simulacra of nature, cleverly constructed jumbles of rocks meant to resemble untouched wilderness. In Kassel, wild mountain whitewater can be turned on and off. This is the open contradiction of the Baroque, an aristocratic delighting in a strange medleying of ingenious and sublime, automaton and organism.

             A historical materialist narrative of art history may describe an internal and necessary transformation in landscape art following the Enlightenment’s bourgeois revolutions. Baroque gardens proclaimed human mastery during the infant stages of mechanization; Versailles prophetically declared a subjugation of nature to human order when wild forests full of game still surrounded its garden grounds. The subsequent Enlightenment, however, as the actual explosive birth of the industrial Anthropocene, necessitated the invention of the organic and natural in art. The English garden of the Enlightenment era, that mode of landscape architecture which reproduced, without visible artifice, the pastoral landscapes of the pre-Anthropocene, dominated park design in a society terrorized by mechanization.

             The transition from French baroque to English industrial could just as well, however, be labelled the Sinicization, the becoming-Chinese, of European green spaces. The English Garden was from its inception Chinoiserie. English writer William Temple, writing in 1685, critiques the then-dominant French Baroque style, citing the irregular paths of distant Cathay—then the Qing dynasty—as a superior imitation of nature, although he gave this Chinese aesthetic a puzzling, exoticist name: “sharawadgi.”[1] Before European industrialization it was China that was the great machine society—water machines, waste machines, but also family machines, bureaucratic machines. The artificial lake, the defining feature of the English garden, already played a leading role in the urban parks of dynastic Chinese cities. Surveying a map of Qing Beijing or earlier imperial capitals, the strictly vertical and horizontal boulevards perforated by green spaces and elliptical lakes resemble the industrial matrix and public greenery of a US city.

             So it is in fact a descendant of China, “sharawadgi,” which surrounds the Frankfurt Garden of Heavenly Peace, in the form of the largely English-garden-inspired Wallanlagen—the 19th century public parks established in the foundational remnants of Frankfurt’s old city walls which contain the contemporary Chinese garden. There is no internal, purely European history of landscape architecture in which China can appear as an exotic outsider; the green spaces of Frankfurt have more to do, in a sense, with Jiangnan than with Versailles.

 

Two

 

The style William Temple terms “sharawadgi” was not preceded in China by a formal baroque; no European-style opposition exists, in China, between technology and nature. The English garden’s fantasy of reproducing nature rests on the idea that nature itself exists as a distinct category, reifying the nature/culture divide. Perhaps we can go so far as to say this: within a Chinese cosmology, nature can never be reproduced, only extended. In the Chinese imagination, the cosmos is always already generating itself, including through human actors. To reproduce a real natural scene would be to go against the generative, fluctuating movement of nature itself. The act of reproduction would be a totally mechanical, stifling subjugation or appropriation of an organic process. The Chinese concept of nature is not an originary stasis but a tendency, a wind amid trees—a wind bending trunks, sculpting branches, and sending sonorous shivers everywhere.

            The garden was never an act of tracing but one of making—making as a stream or wind makes. In all the Chinese arts of landscape—from landscape painting to poetry to gardening—representation was always secondary. When Wen Zhengming, one of the major literatus painters of his time, partook in designing Suzhou’s renowned Zhuo Zheng Garden, he was merely extending the creative act of painting to a more three-dimensional discipline. Little differentiates, functionally, Wen’s painted work and his landscape architecture. Neither was about recreating an original nature. Indeed, Chinese landscape painting never replicated true scenery; perspective and realism did not interest the literatus painter, at least in terms of the total composition of a work, as did the vertical accumulation of rocky mounds and calligraphic brush strokes. In both landscape architecture and painting, the scholar artist engaged in making—and really making, constructing—a world, a harmonious paradise. Indeed, these were acts we might, today, retrospectively term worldbuilding. In this sense of world-making, paradise-imagining, there was a unity of arts from Chinese architecture to Chinese music.

            In the late Ming dynasty, the scholar poet Liu Shilong writes his “Record of the Garden That is Not Around,” describing a vast imaginary garden paradise with all its landscape features, flora, and views; in it, “mists and vapors appear and disappear…a hundred transformations occur between dawn and dusk” while in the flower garden “the five colors intermingle…splendid as an elegant city”; but there are also more concrete descriptions of specific architecture, with “a court divided into three parts, storing the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian canons” and another “divided into two parts, one storing famous paintings and calligraphy, and the other antique tripods and ritual vases.”[2] In the Song dynasty, the court painter Wang Ximeng, in a typical long landscape scroll, unfolds a scene of a thousand miles of rivers and mountains. The serpentine, layered blue and green landscapes of Wang Ximeng’s scroll are neither images of reality nor of a divine realm, but an imaginary world fully inhabitable by humans—a created world in which you and I could enter and take a stroll.

            In the case of landscape painting, the absence of reality does not mean the absence of realism. What gives the European painting its aspect of reality is above all the question of a unified perspective. Even before the Renaissance invention of linear perspective, the European painting was always a window onto the world—a framed vision aligning with what a single pair of eyes could see at once; even the architectural frescoes of Giotto, spread across a three-dimensional surface, are broken into independent, optically-consistent compositions. The Chinese landscape scroll, by design, exceeds what could possibly be seen with static eyes. A landscape scroll must be unfurled or perused by walking along its length; you might decide to spend your time with a single section while the rest of the scroll remains invisible. As with landscapes, so also with gardens: the great baroque gardens of Versailles or Caserta are single compositions, geometric designs surveyed with a single glance, whereas the gardens of Suzhou are full of obscurations, bends, and hidden corners.

 

Three

 

In Versailles and Caserta, this unity of seeing—the possibility of viewing the totality with a single pair of eyes—also means a unity of design. The Baroque Garden, as with the European painting, has a formal integrity—that is, symmetry, sense of composition and proportion—easily encroached upon by additions. If a subsequent artist is to do anything to a European painting it is under the guise of a restoration, not an addition. On the other hand, addition, as a kind of gradual sedimentation of history, defines the experience of Chinese landscape. Walk the stairways of the famous Chinese mountains, of Mount Huang or Mount Tai, and your path will be commentated upon by calligraphic inscriptions carved directly into the mountain face, memorializing the poetic thoughts of countless ancient literati; everything is dated, and old inscriptions are commentated on by new ones. View the landscape painting Dwelling amidst Water and Bamboo from the Yuan dynasty master Ni Zan and you will find his small landscape surrounded by an assortment of historical commentaries, some pasted on as appendages, others executed carefully onto the original paper. And so too are gardens accumulations of history, where new constructions append onto old ones, and new calligraphic inscriptions hang on old pavilions. A late Qing dynasty calligraphic couplet might be added to a door frame several hundred years older, and the door itself framing a path from the early Song.

            A Chinese garden is not a total, unified composition but a multiplicity of views. It does not, by breaking out of the European window, reject visuality, but rather proliferates possible windows, producing a network of overlapping views; a bamboo grove framed by a window from one side might itself frame a pond. We can imagine a generative garden, where views recursively spawn each other. And views also extend beyond the garden in what the well-known garden design manual Yuan Ye describes as jie jing: “borrowing views.” Quoting from Stanislaus Fung’s translation, we read:

“Borrowing” means: even though every garden distinguishes between inside and outside, in obtaining views it matters not whether they are far or near. A clear mountain peak rising up with elegance, a purple-green abode soaring into the sky—everything within one’s limit of vision…”[3]

            Distant pagodas, temple bells or visiting birds could enter a garden’s visual and acoustic design. But as Fung notes, the concept of jie jing, of borrowed views, can never be reduced to the simple geometrical alignment of garden design and exterior environment. Fung cites the absence of “spatial analys[es] of gardens using orthogonal plans and sections to indicate the determinate relation of vantage point and scenic element or view.”[4] The garden does not contain preordained borrowed views—fixed compositions where a garden element aligns cleverly with a distant mountain peak—but is permeable to the creativity of the viewer who wishes to chance upon them. Wen Zhengming’s paintings of the Humble Administrator’s Garden, committed to paper not long after the garden’s construction, are not representations of composed garden views—they eschew symmetry and order—but fragments of poetic inspiration, of possible views the receptive eye might create amid its winding paths.

 

Four

 

The garden is worldmaking; it attracts not because of its visual order and totality but because of the possibilities it offers for habitation, its viability as a utopia of the imagination. The garden is modular; it accepts and invites additions and accumulates them as a historical stratigraphy. The garden is permeable; it may be combined with its own outside and thereby invites the viewer’s imagination to find, within and beyond it, new potentialities. Abstracting these three differentiating functions, we find modulations of the Chinese garden in a whole gamut of contemporary media. Algorithmic entertainment, machine-curated feeds: these are utopian worlds we inhabit, infinitely extendable worlds requiring our activation as consumers. The tendency of contemporary media is toward generative landscapes and soundscapes.

            Why connect the historical garden, culturally-specific symbol of high literatus art and elite cultivation, with the seemingly banal generative media of our late-modern capitalism? The Chinese landscape offers an alternative art history—indeed an alternate art cosmology—in which generative media are only a further evolution of an art-historical practice, not a technological threat to “human” creativity (that is, insofar as creativity ever came from the imaginary human interior). The art of Europe, from the Baroque garden to the Romantic symphony, is a monoculture of communication. European art communicates on behalf of the speaking subject, the perceptive, enlightened artist, or on behalf of the state and monarch: a predicament which avant-gardism has sought to remedy with only limited success. The idea of an automatic, generative art which expresses and communicates nothing to the human viewer looms as utterly alien, incompatible with European art’s historical forms; this new generative medium can only seem lifeless and mechanical, a replication in culture of mass-production industry, at most related to a history of automata and other curiosa outside the tradition of so-called high art. In the traditions of Chinese gardens and landscape painting, generative media can be understood as only the newest possibility in making spaces for imaginary living.

            What is at stake here is the opening-up of art to a plurality of cosmologies and lineages. Sidestepping any discussion of art having an overarching, unchanging sociopolitical function, Niklas Luhmann suggests, in his social systems theory of art, that we can differentiate art from other social systems by its particular relationship with time and perception. Whereas other social systems—symbolic systems like language, economy, mass media—function via speed and disposability, art performs a slowing-down, what Merleau-Ponty might term a breakdown of habit, in which the efficiency of communication falls apart.[5] And it is important to note that for Luhmann, we define communication not as the deliverance of information but the self-reproduction of any given social system. Typically, symbolic social systems, which rely on human perception as much as art does, actually function under the radar of perception and move on with maximum speed to the next transaction—a symbol only works if we forget it is not actually the thing it refers to; money only works if we abstract it from the labor it supposedly represents. “Language wants to be overlooked.”[6] As such, we could term art the “other side” of symbolic communication. For every form of symbolic communication, we could imagine an artistic analogue, where symbols freeze and become stuck in the process of perception—in a word, art is the deterritorialization, the desiring-production, of the materials of communication. As Deleuze and Guattari write:

“Desiring-machines, on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly: the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run. Art often takes advantage of this property of desiring-machines by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring-production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.”[7]

            European art has largely been a deterritorialization of expression and rhetoric, of the spoken or written annunciation. Painting is a deterritorialization of the reading eye, but the eye does not only read. Seeing and hearing have social functions beyond oral and written language: surveillance cameras, ambient sound as therapy or stimulant, audiovisual content algorithms, generative graphics, infographics, storage. Any social system geared toward efficiency can be deterritorialized into a system geared toward perceptive retention. A decolonization of art history, its opening up to other spaces, unleashes entire lineages of existing strategies.

 

Five

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Six

 

The opening of art to such non-representational, non-expressive functions of sight and sound aligns with what Harun Farocki has termed the operational image—the image as a form of machine-to-machine communication, sidestepping human perception. As artist Trevor Paglen describes, “instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images were starting to ‘do’ things in the world. In fields from marketing to warfare, human eyes were becoming anachronistic.”[8] Like old art deterritorialized lexical vision and old music deterritorialized phonetic sound, new art and new music deterritorialize machine vision and machine sound. 

            In 1977, Nam June Paik presents TV-Garden at documenta 6 by spreading active TV screens on the floor amid low-lying and dense tropical foliage. The human viewer is decentered; the CRT machines, like the fauna of an uncolonized jungle, communicate between themselves with looped videos. Their content only coincidentally reaches a voyeuristic human observer, much like the bird and amphibian choruses of a rainforest only unintentionally reach the trekking tourist.

            Importantly, Paik’s garden, like the minimalist sculpture of the 60s and 70s, is walking art: that is, art for the moving viewer. Full of obscurations, the garden requires a changing perspective. The TV ceases to be an immaterial window and becomes an angled light source, invisible from certain vantages. The walker is a discoverer, creating new views through movement and through observing the fleeting and incidental. Walking and the Chinese garden share the aesthetic of jie jing: the walker is not the recipient of a completed composition but actively composes scenery by finding poetic angles. In his 1958 introduction to the socialist revolutionary practice of psychogeography, Guy Debord writes about free urban walks, dérive, as a way of moving beyond the utilitarianism of architecture to imagining a built environment which could fulfill authentic human desires. Later, the soundwalk becomes canonized within sound art history as a form of dérive. During the last two decades, for instance, artist Christina Kubisch has presented Electrical Walks in several cities: participants wear custom-engineered headphones, capable of converting electromagnetic waves into audible sound, and freely roam signal-rich streets to listen to whistling, buzzing, and pulsing tram lines, ATMs, and LEDs. The headphones deterritorialize functional signals into pure perceptual patterns; on the other hand, locomotion—walking—too is deterritorialized from functional movement. The act of composition is undertaken in part by the performer, who, by walking through urban space, partakes in a kind of generative composition—a generative composition whose algorithm is a collage of the complex needs of urban design and the personal inclinations of the walker. 

             Paik’s garden, however, is not only an invitation to walk but also performs, itself, a radically posthumanist artistic intervention. It answers, by way of the garden, the question of the artist’s role in an art that lies beyond anthropocentric communication. The screens have not been orchestrated, so to speak, to communicate as an ensemble but are, instead, grouped as an ecosystem: the artistic act is not expression but rather connection—not the tailoring of media to human ends but the nurturing of an autonomous technical ecosystem or network (indeed of a media ecology). This is the artist as gardener—not as the master artist but as the ad hoc ecologist responsible for grafting trees, diverting water, managing soil health and regulating symbioses. The deterritorialization here is not the deterritorialization of a familiar linguistic symbol into a new one but the connecting and consequent deterritorialization of familiar technical machines into new machine assemblages.

              Extending the Chinese cosmology of nature as a universally generative process to machines, machines too are always generating, always connecting—artistic intervention does not impose connections between static objects but short circuits established connections and introduces strange jumps. Breeding, gardening, geoengineering—these are all historical precedents for a machinic art. This is also not to say that short circuiting and jumping are distinguishing aspects of the artistic act: all environmental factors impose their own forms of short circuiting and jumping on growth and evolution. A consistent ocean wind sweeps tree branches into pointing fingers, just as the same wind deposits unknown pathogens into a susceptible population, bringing about a sudden novel connection between virus and host. The artistic act, on the other hand, is one specific kind of machine in a universe of machines, able to bring about its own kinds of short circuits and jumps. 

 

[1] See Ciaran Murray, “Sharawadgi Resolved,” Garden History 26, no. 2 (1998), 208-213.

[2] Stanislaus Fung, “The Imaginary Garden of Liu Shilong,” Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 2, no. 4 (1997), 15-21.

[3] Stanislaus Fung, “Here and There in Yuan Ye,” Design Philosophy 1, no. 6 (2003), 306.

[4] Fung, “Here and There,” 307.

[5] See Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

[6] Berthe Siertsema, A Study of Glossematics, 2nd edition (Dodrecht: Springer, 2013), 31.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 31.

[8] Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” e-flux no. 59 (2014).