Charles Jencks’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Via Matt Webb I learned about Charles Jencks and his remarkable garden. There’s a book about it. I listened to a short interview (RealAudio stream) with him, and transcribed some interesting portions:

It’s a very 18th century project, when gardens were full of ideas, and were meant to be, and so, in Britain particularly, using the landscape to investigate what you’re beliefs are was an art form, a high art form, and then with the 19th and 20th centuries, gardening, I think, retreated into horticulture. and now it’s reemerging. […]

[Art today has] no content worth signifying, it’s a crisis of meaning, which has been with us for a long time, since the death of God in the 19th century, and since the death of socialism […[ It’s very hard in the public arts to find social content that is both shared and worth signifying […] So, yes, part of the idea behind the garden is a polemic to see if there is a set of ideas worth spending money on and spending art on, and I think my work is a critique of, let’s say, the triviality of contemporary art. […] The scientists and philosophers and others are bringing to us this extraordinary, liberating world view, and yet there isn’t a Michaelangelo, who can signify it to us. I wouldn’t claim that my work goes very far in that direction—it’s a first step, I would say.

I don’t try to just illustrate. Say, Damien Hirst, takes—remember that famous model, a foot-high model, which he blew up to 25 feet high and bronzed, the model of the human body with all the parts, called Hymn—a hymn to the human body. Well, that’s illustration blown up. And there’s no imaginative or artistic transformation, or interpretation. And what I’m doing is not illustrating DNA, so much as interpreting certain aspects of it.

So I work with scientists, but it’s not illustrations from a text book, at all, it’s a kind of overcoming of the inherent metaphor that we’re given by scientists. For instance, the black hole. Martin Reese, who visited, understands black holes better than anyone. He, you know, can give you many ideas on it. […] Okay, what is a black hole? Metaphor—is it a good one? Black—yes, you don’t see it. Okay, hole—it’s a rip in space-time. Fine, but that isn’t enough. That metaphor was around for forty years. If you really get yourself into what is a black hole—it holds together galaxies; we know that from the last ten years. It’s a very dynamic, creative element, which pulls together not only those stars which whip around it, but it explodes them into existence, and therefore creates stars, it creates therefore planets, it creates this energy. Of course it sucks in things, it’s black, but it’s really—I’ve renamed it Invisibilia, after a woman, because it’s so creative, and pro-creative. And I think that’s the kind of investigation that interests me, taking the insights of recent physics, or science—the most important ones, and questioning them, overcoming them, and going beyond them. And yet being constrained by them.

So I work with scientists, but they themselves realize that these metaphors they’ve given us are superficial […]

I consider the bones [of the garden] partly finished. That is the structure. And I hope my son, when I’ve shuffled on, takes it up, and other people. So it’s a game, it’s open, and I hope it’s attitude — no, it’s not finished. But I think the broad outlines are there.

One thing that has happened is that part of the garden has failed, a lot of moles and voles ? got into one of the hills, and all of a sudden it collapsed. Now, others said we must get it back to normal and get it right, the way it was, and I thought a long time and said no, no, no, we must work with nature. And this is a very good illustration of catastrophe theory, in action. So, if I may put it this way, it’s a co-creation with nature. And nature makes a move, we make a move, nature makes a move, we make a move, and we’re in dialog.