Why Gartenkunst?
5/29/2019
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I like gardening. Yard work is great, if you can get it, but gardening proper involves hands-in-the-dirt, and, well, I just can’t stand worms. Besides, in a contest between art and nature, culture vs. the wild, I choose culture every time. I love Plato and Emerson, Beethoven and Nina Simone. I’m in it for the people.
But there’s something about gardens that I find deeply moving. Gardens are places where people and nature converge - spots where humans gather to attend to smaller, less consuming, kinds of being. They are sites of mindfulness and forgetting, of attention and forgetting, of cultivation and wilderness. They are places where we invite the messiness of the natural world to encroach on our messy lives.
In recent weeks I’ve been organizing the endless flood of photos that are part and parcel of any rich modern life - especially a life with kids. I’ve noticed that my own personal stream is full of moments where I’ve paused to capture a particular flower or leaf, or gone out of my way to visit some special natural spot. As I went through all this files, it came as a bit of a revelation: it appears that I love to visit gardens, to rest in gardens, and to think in gardens. And more often than not, I’m doing this with someone who means the world to me.
In the Anthropocene everywhere is a potential garden (thank you, Emma Marris). This part of the blog is about exploring and celebrating these natural, human spaces, where life can flourish. Gartenkunst - which means something like garden-art or garden-craft comes from my favourite aphorism from Nietzsche. It’s an aphorism about art, culture, nature, and Rousseau. It’s in Part V of Daybreak:
427.
The beautification of science. - As rococo horticulture arose from the feeling 'nature is ugly, savage, boring - come! let us beautify it!' (embellir la nature) - so there again and again arises from the feeling 'science is ugly, dry, cheerless, difficult, laborious - come! let us beautify it! ' something that calls itself philosophy. It wants, as all art and poetry want - above all to entertain: but, in accordance with its inherited pride, it wants to do this in a more sublime and exalted fashion and before a select audience. To create for these a horticulture whose principal charm is, as with the 'more common' kind, a deception of the eyes (with temples, distant prospects, grottos, mazes, waterfalls, to speak in metaphors) , to present science in extract and with all kinds of strange and unexpected illuminations and to involve it in so much indefiniteness, irrationality and reverie that one can wander in it 'as in wild nature' and yet without effort or boredom - that is no small ambition: he who has this ambition even dreams of thereby making superfluous religion, which with earlier mankind constituted the highest species of the art of entertainment. - This then takes its course and will one day attain the height of its achievement: and already voices begin to be raised against philosophy, crying 'back to science! To the nature and naturalness of science!' - and with that an age may perhaps begin which will discover the mightiest beauty in precisely the 'wild, ugly' sides of science, just as it was only from the time of Rousseau that one discovered a sense for the beauty of high mountains and the desert.