Speakers

Michel Conan, Introduction

Turning to the theme of our symposium I would like to point out some of its difficulties. Let me show you a description of a dance, the Passe-Pied, that was presented to the court in Paris by monsieur Pecour in the early years of the eighteenth century, as it was reported by Pierre Rameau. (1)

Pierre Rameau, after he went to the Spanish Court in the early eighteenth century to become the master of dance for the pages of the queen of Spain, published two books for people who wanted to learn how to dance the fashionable minuet, courante, gigs, and other courtly dance figures, such as the Passe-Pied, Bourrée, Allemande, Rigaudon, Gaillarde, and Courante. He developed a notation system that would enable anyone to know exactly which motions should be made and how to move about on the dance floor and relate to another dancer. His system highlights the different kinds of motion that should be considered for all of these dances: bodily motions that change the gait, motions of the feet from toe to heel, or from heel to toe, ways of bending the knee and extending the leg, and motions of the hands and the head. Each of these has to be indicated in relation to the space of the dance floor for any person to learn how to perform a given dance. As music is an art of the motion of sounds through time, dance is clearly an art of the motion of bodies through space.

Rameau stressed the importance of the dance space,(2) and it is very clear that each dance describes a balanced figure on the dance floor. Yet in order to enable dancers to learn how to maintain control over their bodily motions in space, he always shaped the dance floor into the same rectangular figure. Thus there seems to be little to be learned by a landscape architect in such a treatise since it assumes that a dancer can bracket out the experience of space when moving and concentrate on her bodily experience alone. Yet motion is necessary to experience most gardens and landscapes, in particular to make a tour of a picturesque landscape garden, park, or countryside, such as the river Wye in Wales, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, or the Parc du Roeux, with its high bridge, or the Catle at Prulay.

Unfortunately there is no system of notation that would allow us to know what the precise intentions of landscape designers might have been with respect to the changing experiences of a landscape when moving through it. Thus we have to try to engage in an interpretive study of garden and landscape design in order to retrieve the kinds of experience of motion that they considered, to discover to what effects they were concerned by motion, and to which design issues and propositions this led them.

A further difficulty springs out of the elusiveness of the idea of motion itself. At an Oxford conference in 1911 Henri Bergson remarked: “We think of motion as if it were made of stillness, and when we look at it, we reconstruct it with the help of moments of stillness. Motion for us comprises one position and then a new one, and so on indefinitely.”(3) This remark sheds light on a paradox of picturesque travel, and in a more pressing way on the paradoxes of contemporary touristic travels. Travels through a landscape are thought of as a series of stopovers, resting moments given to the contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment of landscapes in perfect stillness, and the more there is motion in the landscape — gushing waterfalls, sailing boats turning a buoy in regatta, or skiers running down a slope — the more aesthetic enjoyment seems to demand that we stand still in front of the landscape. As a consequence the motion of the traveler itself does not seem open to any aesthetic appreciation in the picturesque literature. Let me give an example and illustrate in passing the further difficulties of studying human experiences of time.

The Motionless Landscapes of Picturesque Travels

In 1819, Arsène Thiébaut de Berneaud published a description of his travels on foot from Paris to Ermenonville, in the company of his daughter Uranie, after the death of his beloved wife, Charlotte. They followed a road across the countryside, running from one small town to the next. Memories crowd the narrative, and landscape descriptions give way to a pageant of famous characters on a shadow theater.

The travel accounts are extremely interesting because the author attempts to describe his experience of travel by relating his thoughts and emotions to the places and views he discovered. They give rise to a stream of landscape sceneries that conjure up, each in its own way, eventful moments of recent history: Saint Gratien calls to mind the wise Catinat, Soisy the general Kellerman, Eaubonnethe poet Saint-Lambert and Benjamin Franklin, at Montmorency every place sings the memories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thiébaut de Berneaud might have readily subscribed, it seems, to Gaston Bachelard’s profound remark: “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. Time serves that purpose!”(4) He might have felt slightly at odds with it, however, because he knew and expressed that times can be experienced according to several different temporalities. In his narrative they belong either to everyday life, current or past, to political history, to family remembrances, to mythical narratives, to travel logs, or to the discourse of science.

The stillness of each landscape that these two travelers crossed contrasts strikingly, however, with the shifting horizons of temporality that the description of memories brought about by the sense of place experienced by the author presses upon the reader. One wonders whether landscape can only open to the imagination of motion when the traveler comes to a stop, and whether the same would apply to a visit to a landscape garden.

They arrived in Ermenonville on May 20, 1818, exactly thirty years after Jean-Jacques paid his first visit, and they spent three days there exploring the landscapes created by René Louis Gérardin. A ramble through the woods framing the four main, large landscape sceneries led visitors to the discovery of a stream of poetic landscape views of lesser dimensions. Gérardin had designed them to invite flights of imagination, and to allow the visitor’s mind to shuttle ceaselessly between present and past times. Places follow one another without any particular sense of order. Thiébaut de Berneaud discovered first, when entering through the south landscape facing the entrance of the house, the grotto of the Naiads, the bench to the memory of Gérardin, Rousseau’s tomb, the willow of the romance, Meyer’s tomb, the bench offered to family mothers, and the tomb of the young unknown lover. Each of these places stimulates a literary development that bears the marks of the sorrows and concerns of Thiébaut de Berneaud after the death of his wife. Picturesque sceneries bring about a fusion of some narrative that they imply and of personal memories, but there is no link between these successive narratives that would stem from the motion from one place to the other within this landscape garden. Thiébaut de Berneaud’s grief over the death of his wife and his sense of care for his daughter are solely responsible for the deep sense of unity that develops in the text, describing his reactions to the various landscape sceneries he discovered during these three days.

Furthermore, designers’ attention to the experience of motion in their gardens is open to interpretation. Gérardin took into account the physical experience of walking: he wanted visitors to walk along narrow paths that encouraged solitary meditation, and he set up many paths on sloped embankments, forcing visitors to go up and down and to keep changing directions, but he does not mention this among his poetic intentions. He only mentions motion of water and of merchants or folk people traveling across the landscape on a local road as a source of enjoyment for a visitor who admires the scenery from a fixed vantage point. He took great pains to inscribe well-framed views with poetic meaning, but the visitor’s motion is never imbued with signification. Even though the picturesque landscape at Ermenonville was designed to excite the imagination and aesthetic appreciation of visitors, motion in the landscape was not acknowledged as a meaningful part of the experience of place.

This may sound somewhat paradoxical. Yet even the celebrated path called the “Painters’ Walk” does not belie this remark. Thiébaut de Berneaud briefly alludes to his motion, and his impressions as he walks up and down along the path and treads on moss carpets, but his attention is driven to swiftly passing scenes that prevent any thought from developing: an exotic plant that he recognizes while walking, the song of a thrush overheard for a short moment, a rabbit and then a squirrel that cross the path in front of his eyes and disappear, nothing else.

The descriptions of his travels to Ermenonville by Thiébaut de Berneaud provide a typical account of the aesthetic of picturesque travel that was embraced by a large number of people in the nineteenth century. Even now, it heavily influences contemporary aesthetics of touristic travels, and its ceaseless quest for scenic views and unforgettable snapshots. Contemporary landscapes are scrutinized by tourists in search of cues about myth, history, present cultural concerns, or even objects of the natural sciences. All of these function as props for some personal fantasy that makes still views into poetic landscapes. Should we conclude that landscape design cannot be an art of motion, like the art of dance, despite the fact that one has to move in order to discover and appreciate landscapes?

During this symposium, interpretations of landscape design meant to trigger specific experiences when moving through a landscape will allow us to propose a critical re-examination of the picturesque aesthetic for landscape appreciation. They will also raise, either explicitly or in passing, questions about landscape design and the writing of garden or landscape history, because the picturesque aesthetic may be embodied both in designers' and historians' preconceptions in ways that have not been hitherto recognized. I do not want to further delay the pleasures of listening to the speakers, but I wanted to urge all of you to be ready to raise the most difficult questions.

1. Pierre Rameau, Abbregé de la nouvelle méthode dans l’Art d’ecrire ou de Tracer toutes sortes de Danses de Ville dédiée à son Altesse Sérénissime Mademoiselle de Baujaulais, et mise à jour par le Sr Rameau, Maître à Danser Ordinaire de la Maison de Sa Majesté Catholique, la Reine Seconde Douairière d’Espagne, Seconde partie contenant douze des plus belles Danses de Monsieur Pecour, compositeur de Ballets de l’Académie Royalle de Musique (Paris, 1725), Le passepied, pls. 18-25.

Pierre Rameau, Le Maitre a Danser, qui enseigne la maniere de faire tous les differens pas de Danse dans toute la regularite de l’Art, & de conduire les Bras à chaque pas. Enrichi de Figures en Taille-douce, servant de demonstration pour tous les differens mouvemens qu’il convient faire dans cet exercice. Par le Sieur Rameau, Maître à danser des Pages de Sa Majesté Catholique la Reine d’Espagne (Paris, 1725).

2. “Je commence par exposer trois principes généraux: sçavoir, la connoissance du terrain; l’usage que l’on doit faire des differentes lignes de la géometrie; et aussi du signe qui exprime la présence du corps.” He notes a little later, “La musique ne doit pas contenir plus de mesures qu’il n’y a de pas tracéz sur les differentes lignes.” Ramean, Le Maitre a Danser.

3. Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris, 1998), 161.

4.Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, with a new foreword by John Stilgoe (Boston, 1994; Paris, 1958), 8.

Linda Parshall, "Motion and Emotion in Hirschfeld's Theory of Garden Art (Theorie der Gartenkunst)"

C. C. L. Hirschfeld (1742-1792), an influential authority on the art of gardening in continental Europe, invested his philosophical career in the theoretical and historical investigation of gardens. His goal was to validate garden design as the superior art form, and in doing so he accentuated the problem of mimesis, a concept at the center of eighteenth-century discussions of the various arts. In his sustained defense of the landscape artist he often celebrated the central role of movement in imitation and the ways in which this sets the garden apart. For Hirschfeld the crux of the issue resides in the phenomenon of motion and its aesthetic correlative, emotion. Like a painting, a garden affects us through our appreciation of color, composition, and content; and like a poetic text, a garden gains meaning by engaging us through time and evolving in itself as it does so. Thus, a garden experience entails a particularly rich interplay of elements at once absolute in their nature and mutable in their affect; this experience is at base intertextual. The vitality of movement, both actual and perceived, requires a participation, a reciprocity between subject and object that heightens the emotional effect. Hirschfeld found the garden’s ultimate purpose in its capacity to move us more powerfully than nature does, by subsuming physical movement into emotional experience.

Linda Parshall is professor of german literature and language at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. She was a fellow in Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks in 1999-2000, working on the gardens and landscape theory of the Prince of Pückler-Muskau. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974 and has written on German literature--The Art of Narration in Wolfram’s “Parzival” and Albrecht’s “Jüngerer Titurel” (1981), Wernher der Gartenaere’s Helmbrecht (1987)--and Reformation-era art--Art and the Reformation: An Annotated Bibliography (1985). Her work in garden history includes “C.C.L. Hirschfeld’s Concept of the Garden in the German Enlightenment,” Journal of Garden History 13 (1993), and a forthcoming abridged edition and translation, C. C. L. Hirschfeld’s Theory of Garden Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2000).

Patricia Johanson, "Beyond Choreography: Shifting Experiences in Uncivilized Gardens"

Gardens have always been choreographed with paths that establish a pattern of movement through space, whereas my own sculpture is simply meant to lure people into the landscape, from the flow of nature, and bring them into contact with the profuse phenomena of the natural world. I want the visitor to pause and consider ecological minutiae, as well as the intricate and constantly changing networks of living relationships, and see himself as part of that process.

In Cyrus Field (1970), each person is left to his own devices within a landscape that has a life of its own. There are no paths, views, goals or arrival points in Cyrus Field. A continuous line of marble, redwood, and cement block creates patterns interwoven with forests that have continued to grow and evolve. People make their way through the landscape in whatever way they choose, often arriving at personal discoveries unrelated to the formal design.

At Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas (1981), Endangered Garden in San Francisco (1988), and Park for the Amazon Rainforest (1992), large-scale structures are modeled on life forms that actually inhabit each particular place, stimulating resonance in the landscape and the brain. These monumental constructions frame functioning ecosystems, leading visitors into direct engagement with wind, waves, weather, shifting color, light, seasons, and migratory cycles, and the individual lives of countless plants and animals. Visitors may follow the curves and rhythms of the biological forms or select their own route from among many interwoven choices, but the key is physical and mental exploration of uncharted territory. Eventually most visitors arrive at a pause and find personal meaning within landscapes that celebrate individual wanderings, and perpetuate the infinite detail and continuous fluctuations of ecological nature.

Patricia Johanson has, for more than thirty years, created multidisciplinary designs combining art, ecology, landscaping, and infrastructure. In 1969 she designed 150 gardens for House & Garden and worked as site planner for Mitchell-Giurgola Architects. She graduated from Bennington College (1962), Hunter College (M.A., 1964), and City College of New York, School of Architecture (B.Arch., 1977), and received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art (1995).

In 1981 Johanson designed Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas, one of the earliest ecological artworks. Endangered Garden, San Francisco (1988) incorporates tidal sculpture and habitat restoration into a one-third-mile bay walk that coincides with the roof of a sewer. Park for the Amazon Rainforest (1992) reveals forest stratification, and Nairobi River Park, Kenya (1995) features sculpture that filters polluted river water. Ulsan Dragon Park in Korea (1996) and The Rocky Marciano Trail in Massachusetts (1997) combine parks and playgrounds with flood control and restored wetlands. Johanson’s work has been seen in more than 150 exhibits worldwide.

Arnold Berleant, "Down the Garden Path"

Like Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths,” choices present themselves when we enter the garden, choices in experience. These lie between two alternative aesthetic meanings: contemplation and engagement. I call these the observational landscape and the landscape of engagement. Each encourages a different mode of experience, and each implies different kinds and degrees of motion. They also encourage different conceptions of design.

Of course, few gardens are exclusively observational. Most lie somewhere between these two models, and develop under the influence of politics, economics, social, cultural, and historical forces. Yet once we go down the garden path, we cannot help but engage with the garden. We can even think of the garden as the embodiment of motion. For the primary motion of the visitor is echoed in the reciprocal motion of the landscape.

Yet, however their design comes about, these two meanings of landscape lie before us. Examining their differences can help us decide which approach to garden design reflects the kind of experiences we want to encourage. Further, these differences enable us to realize how a garden aesthetic embodies an understanding of the human place in the world.

Arnold Berleant is professor of philosophy (emeritus) at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, where he taught from 1962 to 1992. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the New School for Social Research, Hofstra University, and San Diego State College, and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, including Finland for the past twelve years. He was
President of the International Association for Aesthetics/Association international d’esthétique from 1995-1998. From 1978-1988 he was Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Aesthetics, and from 1987-1995 Secretary-General of the International Association for Aesthetics. Since 1993 he has been President of the International Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Philosophy, based in Finland.

Berleant is the author of four major books, The Aesthetic Field, A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience; Art and Engagement; The Aesthetics of Environment; and Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment, as well as many articles and reviews. His work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic, French and Finnish. Berleant has also composed music for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations, and his compositions have been performed in the U.S. and abroad.

John Dixon Hunt, "Lordship of the Feet: Toward a Poetics of Movement in the Garden"

My main title is taken from Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624), where he loosely links movement with sight. In pursuit of a more elaborate understanding of that connection, I first distinguish three kinds of movement — processional or ritual, strolls, rambles — and link them with the designed terrain that best promotes each of them. I then consider gardens that have been designed to accommodate more than one mode of movement, those that have been re-designed to facilitate different ones and those that have been hospitable to different modes at different periods. The principal sites treated are Versailles, Chiswick, Stowe, Rousham, Moulin-Joli, and Hafod, each of which has related texts, such as those by Mme de Scudéry, William Gilpin, Claude-Henri Watelet, or George Cumberland, as well as a corpus of visual evidence. The discussion of this taxonomy of movement in turn allows me both to consider the different contribution to these analyses of verbal and visual evidence and to propose a fresh garden historiography dictated by this discrimination of movements.

John Dixon Hunt is professor and chair of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks and academic advisor to the Oak Spring Garden Library. Author, most recently, of Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000), he is finishing a volume on the Picturesque Garden in Europe for the Thames & Hudson World of Art series and preparing with Emily Cooperman A Picturesque Primer. Series editor of the Penn Studies in Landscape Architescture and founding editor of Studies in the History of Gardens, he has published widely in the history and theory of garden making and garden use.

Anette Freytag, "Urban Parks and Velocity: When a Train Links Different Worlds"

Urban Parks and Velocity describes the impact that industrialization, new engineering, and especially the opening up of Europe through the railway has had on modern society, and in particular on urban parks, one important setting for modern city life. The designs of two parks serve to help analyze the aesthetics of the time: the park Buttes-Chaumont in Paris (1866-67) and the Türkenschanzpark in Vienna (1885-88). Both parks are open toward the city as well as toward the countryside, and a railway serves as a visual and physical link. In Paris as well as in Vienna, the parks mirror the landscapes of the new weekend destinations for city dwellers, which are then reached by the new railway lines. The design represents how the distances between city and countryside have been dissolved by new engineering, whereas the new experience of transition and a rapidly changing scenery during the ride has similarities to the perception of quickly changing attractions and vistas during movement in the park.

However, while the railways are usually linear and of high speed (similar to the new linear boulevards of Haussmann Paris), the actual movement of the promeneur is generally slowed down through the winding paths within the park. They become enclaves within the hectic city, while at the same time celebrating the city. The same set up of nineteenth-century city parks can be found in the language of the twentieth-century landscape design in the Jardin Atlantique, which was built above the new TGV railway station in Paris, at the beginning of the 1990s. The noise of the parting trains and the stench of the underground infiltrate the park, where several landscapes are combined in a very condensed form. Once again, the railway links the landscape of the park with the landscape of the destination of the parting train. The park design stimulates the visitors’ desire for distance and their memories of past voyages and discoveries, and shows how landscape is structured by technology and motion.

Anette Freytag is an art historian and has worked as a journalist since 1986. She studied art history in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris (1990-98), and macroeconomics in Vienna (1990-92). Through her interest in art theory, architecture, and the social parameters of art, she discovered garden history and landscape design. She wrote her master’s thesis on the contemporary urban parks of Paris and soon after became an assistant to F. T. Bach, professor of modern art at the University of Vienna. From 1998 to 1999, she realized a series of broadcasts on contemporary European landscape designers for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF and managed the international congress "Gardens of Today & History of Tomorrow." As of October 1999 she lives in Brussels, where she has deepened her interest in landscape and culture and worked for the European Union on agriculture and rural development.

Stephen Bann, "Sensing the Stones: Bernard Lassus and the Ground of Landscape Design"

In this paper I seek to illustrate the experience of motion in the work of a contemporary garden designer by comparison with a selection of early landscape paintings, in particular those of Goffredo Wals, dating from the early seventeenth century. It will be argued that works like those of Wals offer us a condensation of motifs suggesting the physical experience of motion through the landscape. In particular they imply an enhanced attention to the ground beneath the notional walker’s feet, and in this way conflict with the infinite prospects of sky and scenery that will later become the legacy of the Claudian landscape.

It will be argued that the gardens of Bernard Lassus devote a similar attention to the operations of the walker. In the “Garden of Returns” at Rochefort-sur-Mer, on the Charente River, he varies the experience of walking by constructing parallel paths, whose surfaces are adjusted to different perambulatory modes and directions. He also relates the cobbled areas around the central building to a lightly raised stretch of turf, implying a chronological relationship between the garden and its historic site. Instead of attempting a “classic” French solution, where the visibility of the Corderie royale from afar would have been the most prominent feature, Lassus has half hidden the monument, adjusting the garden’s dynamic axes to a walking pace.

In the second example of Lassus’ contemporary work, attention is given to the motorway rest area (Aire) at Crazannes, on the new Autoroute des Oiseaux between Rochefort and Saintes. Here the experience of motion is radically split between the experience of the speeding car passengers and the travelers who decide to turn off the motorway for a few minutes of relaxation. The transformed landscape reflects these two widely differing perspectives, offering a sharp visual contrast between the rocky escarpments carved out of the former quarry of Crazannes and the deep gullies crowded with rare ferns that the visitor is tempted to investigate. For the first time in landscape practice, perhaps, two such widely varying tempos have been united in the “double face” of a singular environment.

Stephen Bann was educated at Winchester College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Double First in the History Tripos (1962-63) and subsequently took his Ph.D. with a thesis on the French historian Prosper De Barante. Appointed lecturer in history at the University of Kent in 1967, he became in 1988 professor of modern cultural studies and in 1990 director of the Centre of Modern Cultural Studies. Bann has also been chair of the Board of Studies in history and theory of art at Kent since 1985. In 2000 he will take up a new appointment as professor of history of art at Bristol University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and is currently chair of the Research Committee of the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Ann Kuttner, "Delight and Danger: Motion in the Roman Water Garden at Sperlonga and Tivoli"

Roman garden practice — public and private — emphasized water display of many kinds. These pools and channels that we can associate with the Roman terms piscina, stagnum, and natatio, and the modules called eurippus and canopus formalized the natural environments of ocean, river and marsh. Any inhabitation of water, that moving element, is itself essentially a state of motion, of distinctive sensation, and to move in and over water offers in equal measure danger and pleasure, risk and reward. Potentially, any water garden could configure the real water landscapes of the Roman Mediterranean and its land masses, risked or enjoyed for a broad range of human ends, important alike to history’s narratives and to social economy. The water garden could also embody the heroic past or present, in which the same waters of this world were inhabited or crossed by gods, heroes, and the souls of the dead. Elaborate water gardens recapitulated those iconographies of traversing through, over, and around water in two ways: first, by spatial contours that would suggest, permit, and invite motion; and second, by making sculptured beings inhabit these water worlds, to overtly denote ocean and river, immersion and navigation.

My paradigms here are the Augustan lagoon-grotto at Sperlonga (ca. 30 B.C.) and the so-called Canopus of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli (A.D. 130s), both special in their elaboration and in that we know their historical patrons. Both sites exemplify how, at the Roman water garden, the visitor was encouraged to enjoy the sensations of navigating these great decorated pools in order to will the imagined sensations of quite other voyages — into the seas and coasts of legendary history, between far-flung regions of the empire, out of city or house into a benign Dionysiac wilderness, from this mortal realm to an elysian marine archipelago. Most Latin words for physical movement, like motus, applied equally to the motions of the heart and the convulsions of the state. For Sperlonga and Tivoli, the biographies of their cultured patrons let us also understand how these — or any — water gardens could recapitulate personal or national history, celebrate its triumphs and cauterize its pains.

Ann Kuttner works in Hellenistic and Roman art and cultural history, with a specialization in politicized art and architecture, especially in the city of Rome. She also publishes on Roman villa culture and its arts, cultural exchange between Hellenistic Italy and Asia Minor, and Roman art and patronage texts; she has just co-edited a volume on Renaissance exploitation of “ancient” models. Her ongoing work in landscape issues includes garden painting, Roman landscape poetry, and the plantings and installed art of Rome’s sacred and politicized landscape monuments. She has a B.A. in classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr and a Ph.D. in ancient history and Mediterranean archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley. Formerly associate professor at the University of Toronto, she is now associate professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Graduate Groups in classical studies and art and archaeology of the Mediterranean world, and currently chairs the Graduate Group in ancient history. Penn’s principal representative to the American Academy in Rome, she is on the Advisory Board of the American Journal of Archaeology; her recent fellowships include the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Michael Charlesworth, "Movement and Mercantile Morality at Stourhead"

Rather more strongly than it does the theme of Aeneid, the garden at Stourhead provides iconography and a setting that is related to the myth of Hercules, and specifically the Herculean Judgement, or Choice, between vice and virtue. What is particularly interesting is that the garden uses inscriptions to engage the visitor in an intersubjective exchange in order to stage the mythic Herculean choice more effectively. The choice between vice and virtue was often refigured in bourgeois eighteenth-century England into a choice between industry and idleness. Epistolary evidence from the garden’s main maker, Henry Hoare II, shows him conceiving the visitor’s experience of the garden precisely in terms of the garden being a staging of the rewards of industry that cannot be possessed or made by the idle.

My paper also takes the opportunity to build on last year’s exceptionally interesting symposium, by examining the extent of the reliance on the Herculean Choice as an emblematic iconography by bourgeois Britain. While its use can be traced through Coleridge to George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), which is set during the Napoleonic emergency, the question of industry/idleness continues as a prime element of ideology in the perpetual debate in the West over the appropriate level of welfare that a nation should provide for its citizens. Hoare’s early contribution to this debate is remarkable for its staging of the debate within a setting that has until recently been the exclusive resort of the wealthy, but is now open to all on payment of a small fee.

Michael Charlesworth is associate professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The English Garden, 1550-1910: Literary sources and documents (1993) and of a forthcoming three-volume study, The Gothic Revival, 1720-1870. He has published essays on the garden of Alexander Pope, gardens of Jacobite conspirators, Uvedale Price and the Picturesque, photography by Gertrude Jekyll, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s and the film-maker Derek Jarman’s gardens. His published research interests range fairly broadly in cultural history, to embrace nineteenth-century photography, panoramic representation, mapping, and book illustration. He currently serves as reviews editor of Word & Image.

Michel Conan, "Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time"

This presentation will argue that memory is a prerequisite to any experience of motion, and that some features of garden design may lead visitors to establish a parallel between the memories of their discovery of a garden and the unfolding of a specific narrative strongly associated with the garden. These landscape design figures can be infinitely reinterpreted in different cultural contexts and design styles. I shall call these particular figures of landscape design landscape metaphors. They invite an interpretation by visitors to a garden that displaces the meaning of their own motion toward a new meaning. A study of several examples, culled from the Villa d'Este, the Labyrinth at Versailles, and Sacro-Monti, will show how the motion through these gardens leads the visitors to experience a transformation of their own selves, and of their horizon of temporality. This suggests that landscape metaphors provide garden designers with the extraordinary power to introduce visitors to an ontological transformation of time. The presentation of a contemporary French vernacular garden will allow us to move one step further in a discussion of the poetic use of a landscape metaphor to produce a metamorphosis of time.

Michel Conan is a sociologist. His research has focused on processes of architectural design, on evaluation of public programs, and on the cultural history of garden design. He was instrumental in stimulating a renewal of garden history in France, beginning in the mid-1970s with the publication of several reprints, with a postface, of works by Salomon de Caus, 1620; Andre Mollet, 1651; Charles Perrault, 1677; William Gilpin, 1799; and Rene Louis Girardin, 1777. He has been an active contributor to journals, edited volumes, and symposia and recently published the Dictionnaire Historique de L'Art des Jardins (1997) and L'Invention des Lieux (1997), edited Perspectives on Garden Histories (1999), and contributed to the catalogue for the exhibition The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe, 1600-1750 at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. (2000). He is presently director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks.

Norris Brock Johnson, "Mountain, Temple and the Design of Movement: 13th-Century Japanese Zen Buddhist Landscapes"

This paper is a comparative study of several medieval period Zen Buddhist temple landscapes in Kyoto and Kamakura, Japan: the Temple of the Abundant Flowing Spring (Zuisen-ji, 1327-1332) and the Temple of the Western Fragrance (Saiho-ji, 1339-1341). In each instance the “temple” is not simply a building but is the designed interrelationship of a building's nature and the movements of those experiencing the religious landscape.

The ascent of and descent from a mountain is the primary intent of the design, construction, and experience of these temple garden landscapes, attributed to Muso Kokushi (1275-1357). Muso’s design of Zuisen-ji and Saiho-ji forces the inclined, and often nearly vertical, movement of people within three-dimensional spaces. The character of the movement through the Temple of the Abundant Flowing Spring and the Temple of the Western Fragrance is determined by the inclusion of nature—mountains—as a vital aspect of each religious landscape.

The landscapes attributed to Muso Kokushi are the three-dimensional interrelationship of ponds, buildings, nature, and the experiential movements of people. As people move amid them, garden landscapes offer a reminder of the world as what Mircea Eliade termed a religious mode of being, and of contemplative movement through gardens of nature simply as a religious mode of being in the world.

Norris Brock Johnson is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From 1985 to 1986 he was a Fulbright fellow and faculty member at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University, Tokyo. Johnson is engaged in firsthand study of Japanese Zen Buddhist temple architecture and landscape gardening with priests and scholars in Kyoto and Kamakura. His writings on the temple gardens of Japan center on those in Kamakura and Kyoto associated with the venerated thirteenth-century priest Muso Kokushi, with representative publications on the Temple of the Abundantly Flowing Spring [Zuisen-ji], in Kamakura, such as “A Song of Secret Places,” Pilgrimage 25, nos. 3-4 (1999): 4-10; “Temple of the Abundant Flowing Spring,” Kyoto Diary 5, no. 2 (1999):1-6; “Muso Kokushi and the Cave in Zuisen Temple, Kamakura, Japan: Buddhist Ethics, Environment, and Behavior,” National Geographic Journal of India 39:161-78. During 1990-1991 Johnson was a fellow in Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks. He is completing a book on the history, landscape symbolism, and architectural semiotics of the thirteenth-century Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple of Tenryu in Kyoto, Japan. With recent funding, his study of the intersection of religion and nature has expanded to include research on the Christian garden of Gethsemane, East Jerusalem.

Stanislaus Fung, "Movement and Stillness in Ming Writings on Gardens"

In his Shuo yuan (On Chinese Gardens, 1984), the late Chen Congzhou distinguishes between “viewing in motion” (dongguan) and “viewing in repose” (jingguan) and highlights this distinction as the first and foremost consideration in the design of Chinese gardens. He points out that viewing in motion is predominant in large gardens, where one finds longer routes for touring, while viewing in repose is predominant in smaller gardens where one finds more fixed vantage points. Most readers have not found these remarks puzzling. In this paper, three strategies are deployed in exploring a series of Ming writings on gardens in order to disturb the apparent self-evidence of Chen’s remarks:

Articulating inappropriate assumptions and inferences. I shall argue against notions such as “physical movement in empty space” and “the visitor attends to the unfolding views of the garden whether in movement or in repose,” on which the self-evidence of Chen’s remarks might depend. Movement and repose are shown to be caught up in a reciprocal relationship between sentiment (inside) and scenery (outside).

Contextualizing Chinese key terms with Western sources. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea of play as an unending to-and-fro movement, Bernard Tschumi’s discussion of spatial and programmatic sequences (i.e., sequences of spaces and sequences of occurrences and events), and Michel de Certeau’s discussion of “pedestrian utterances” are introduced to articulate the specificity of “viewing in motion” and “viewing in repose.”

Correlating investigations of garden history and comparative philosophy. Drawing on the recent work of Wu Kuang-ming, I shall argue that “viewing in motion” and “viewing in repose” are ad hoc categories, “notions” rather than “concepts.” They have the sense of adverbs rather than nouns. They are not stable “modes” of experience that may be adopted at will, but are rather contingent undergoings and timely manners of engagement with a changing world.

Stanislaus Fung is director of the Centre for Asian Environments and a senior lecturer in architecture on the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has also taught at the University of Adelaide and the University of Pennsylvania. His main field of research is the history of Chinese gardens. He guest edited two recent special issues on this topic for Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. In these issues, he promoted new theoretical work that draws on recent developments in comparative philosophy and detailed historical studies that introduce a range of Chinese sources to English readers. Among his recent publications are essays in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (1999) and Perspectives on Garden Histories (1999).

Jan Birksted, "The Maeght Foundation: Mobility, Change and Process as Foundation"

To understand and to describe landscape, we need to develop a dynamic notion of experience, based on movement and including vision, that avoids reduction to a succession of static views, such as a collection of prospects and panoramas. But this seems to go against the very grain of everyday language: the concept of place, for example, implies stillness, immobility, and placidity. In order to explore this duality, this paper proposes a return to one source of the concepts of place and of movement: the ancient Greek myths of Hestia and Hermes. Associated with these mythical representations of the unity of place and of movement are two specific types of landscapes: the labyrinth and the chora. Labyrinth and chora, as paradigmatic landscapes that combine place and movement, would thus be privileged typologies to study in order to make empirical observations that resolve the duality of place and of movement. The proposed paper will describe and analyze a twentieth-century labyrinth, designed by Miró, and a twentieth-century chora, designed by Giacometti. These two are both found at La Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Jan Birksted was educated in France and the United Kingdom, initially studying philosophy and social anthropology before training as an architect. He is the UK corresponding member of the Réseau Architecture-Philosophie and the chair of the International Scientific Committee on Urbanism and Landscape of DoCoMoMo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement). His interest in landscape studies stems from the fact that a consideration of aspects of landscape (material, spatial, phenomenological) casts architectural history and theory in a new light: landscape studies can thus be viewed as a theoretical perspective, not only as a body of subject matter. Relating Architecture to Landscape (1999), which he edited, investigates those issues. He now leads the postgraduate history and theory program at the Canterbury School of Architecture in England, with study areas in architecture and landscape, architecture and film, architecture and the body and healthcare. This program also explores interactions between practice and theory, from the points of view of both areas. He is finishing a book on the Maeght Foundation.

Michel Conan, "Concluding Remarks"

This has been a wonderful meeting, and I would not like to spoil the pleasures of endless discussion by proposing any conclusion. So, in my closing remarks I shall only share with you a few thoughts that have been bubbling in my mind as I became more immersed in the discussions of garden design and the experience of motion. The topic of this symposium touches upon an elusive domain of reflection that has not been given much attention, and we have had to face the difficulty of treading almost uncharted grounds for contemporary discussions of garden and landscape design. Each author has had to take many initiatives in defining an approach to a set of questions that do not spring from a tradition of scholarly discussion. Thus the presentations have taken diverse approaches and have taken on highly different contexts. I want, however, to share with you a very personal reading of the whole of the debates and to suggest a deep unity below the diversity of our ways of approaching the experience of motion for landscape design.

I must say that I have been taken by surprise by the turn of the presentations and the debates. I had thought that this symposium would lead to a phenomenological study of the experience of motion, but instead it pointed toward a criticism of phenomenology, turning away from the cogito and the transcendental ego to make room for “takagata,” if I may re-use the words of Norris Brock Johnson. I was dismayed to discover that my own presentation stood awkwardly within this conceptual framework. You may, however, feel that my interpretation is too far-fetched.

I believe it was good fortune that so many papers stemmed from very different cultural traditions. It has revealed to me that a critical analysis of the duality of subject and object--which is such a deeply taken-for-granted assumption of modern Western thinking that it seems to be out of reach for critical examination--lies at the center of the discussion of the experience of motion in gardens. Let me try to make this apparent and clarify in very general terms the relationships between the critical examination of dualist assumptions and the approach of the experience of motion. Whenever this duality is taken for granted a subject or an object has to be either still or in motion, and we are presented with three types of relative mobility, whether subject, object, or both are moving. Motion then always implies displacement. Motion is an attribute of items in space.

But subject and object can be conceived of as components of an entity in reciprocal interaction so that both partake of the life world. Nature then is seen as a living world from which human beings are deriving their existence as well as contributing to it. Then motion may entail two different ideas: displacement and vitality. Motion is no longer necessarily relative to space. This affords a larger variety of garden experiences according to the cultural interpretations of vitality and of its relationships to displacement.

Western science and its correlative techniques applied to landscape design rest upon a dualism clearly discriminating between garden objects and visitors, between objects and subjects. Moreover, the colonization of the life world by the principles of empirical science have lent a performative force to the reduction of motion to displacement. I mean very simply that we, as members of an industrialized modern society, share the intuitive belief that motion is a purely spatial phenomenon, that it is a displacement, and that as a logical consequence objects and subjects are either still or in motion. The sense of vision enables us, as subjects, to observe and appreciate our own relative displacement with respect to other objects or subjects in a garden. Experiences of motion may thus be conceived--even if they need not be--as purely visual experiences that can be distinguished according to the sense of agency that commands the displacement. This description of motion in a garden holds sway upon contemporary minds and, for that reason, it deserves careful study. Yet, this is not the only possible description. Arnold Berleant notes that this description comes under an aesthetic of contemplation, and Stephen Bann and Jan Birksted propose to describe it more precisely as an aesthetic of perspectival vision. Each of these lecturers has pointed to an alternative description of the experience of motion, calling upon an acknowledgment of the polysensoriality of this experience in a garden, and of the reciprocal vitality of the visitor and the landscape that allows the development of an aesthetic of engagement of the subject with nature.

One may observe that this focus on the experience of motion in the garden has led almost all the speakers to contribute more or less pointedly to a criticism of the aesthetic of the picturesque, which is a dominant form of the aesthetics of contemplation of contemporary landscapes. This consensus is all the more remarkable since it develops a number of different arguments that I shall not repeat here. It brings to light a variety of forms of experience of gardens that rest upon an interplay between subjects and objects. It reveals that moving in a garden introduces a world of experience that is not totally ruled by the dualist assumptions of our technicized everyday life. Thus garden designers may, according to how they are attuned to a particular description of motion in terms of displacement and vitality, pursue, through the gardens they create, different effects of motion that allow new developments of the life world, as has been brilliantly demonstrated by Patricia Johanson.

These presentations reveal the importance of the aesthetics of engagement in accounting for garden experiences, and they invite an exploration of the variety of aesthetic approaches that can be adopted. The presentations may seem to be very different and little related to one another. If, however, we look at all of them as a whole, we see three dimensions of analysis that underlie all of the papers to a varying degree. Let me call them, in short, vitalism, culture, and inter-subjectivity, and examine briefly the domain of variations among experiences of motion in gardens that each of them covers.

Romans, like the Japanese Buddhists and the Chinese neo-Confucians, indulged in a form of vitalism, a conception of nature as inherently animated by living forces, or a living spirit--Eros for the Romans, Chi for the Chinese--but Western examples rest upon a view of nature that receives its life from the interplay with humans, past or present, or from the materialistic understanding of the great chain of living beings. The life of nature in Western cultures is always a cultural construct stemming from a dualism of subject and object. It may be transcendental, as in Emerson’s writings, or it may lead to a purely materialistic understanding of life in nature, as in ecological theories. Nevertheless the acknowledgment of life in nature by a visitor may heighten his emotions, as Linda Parshall has shown, or capture his imagination through a Pascalian meditation on the two infinities, the infinitely small and the infinitely large aspects of the cycles and changes of natural life that can be attended to in a garden. Thus one may experience gardens according to different forms of vitalist or materialist perspectives.

Culture plays a major role in choreographing motion or emotions in gardens--as shown by Linda Parshall and John Dixon Hunt--as well as in establishing the conditions of interpretation for garden motions--as shown by Ann Kuttner, Michael Charlesworth, myself, and Anette Freytag for instance--and it is even more obvious in the intertextual tradition of interpretation of narratives of place in Japan and China--as shown by Norris Brock Johnson and Stanislaus Fung. But culture also plays a major role in creating the models of vision with which we attend to natural scenery and that pattern our attention for different sensual experiences, as demonstrated by Stephen Bann. This makes way for artistic creations of new gardens or landscape experiences when artists attempt to introduce new modes of perception, as shown by Jan Birksted.

Lastly I should turn to intersubjectivity as a source of meaning and personal development. This demands attention be paid to the role of dwellers or visitors in constructing the meaning of their garden experiences, and to the reciprocal self-transformation into which this may lead them. This dimension has been touched upon in several papers. Ann Kuttner has shown how shared experiences of seavoyage, of swimming, and of visiting public waterscapes among Romans had created a shared sensibility to motion through water, and how, in return, the reciprocity among swimmers, spectators, and water garden sculptures created the possibility in water gardens for a cathartic experience and psychological reparation. In a different way Michael Charlesworth and Norris Brock Johnson have shown how the meaning of motion through the garden results from the interaction among designer, garden artefacts, and visitors rather than from signs to be discovered in the garden as in a text, and thus may contribute to an intersubjective process of self-development. Stanislaus Fung, calling to mind the role of the game of Fort /Da in child development, has illustrated the role of garden artefacts as symbols of an interworld that allows the playful repetition of intersubjective encounters among Heaven, Earth, and the Garden Master. Thus garden experiences of motion may derive much of their meaning from intersubjective encounters between designers and visitors that are mediated by the garden artefacts, symbolically in Western gardens, intrinsically in the Eastern ones. Thus gardens are shown to provide experiences of motion that contribute to the appropriation of new cultural meanings, correlative developments of self, and the reconfiguration of cultural communities.

Thus it is my general impression that our intuitive understanding, as members of industrial societies, of the experience of motion in a garden has been deeply challenged and replaced by a conceptual frame that enables us to analyze the experience of motion, to conduct comparative study among different cultural contexts, and to see how these experiences, and garden creation, may contribute to cultural production.