Siftings
One default is that a good aesthetic experience is a broth made up of the proportional combination of more or less palatable things, prepared with love and time. You are sipping it, or you aren’t. It is simple and self-evident.
But then, in this fallen world, we find most of our aesthetic encounters are messy. We are sifting through excess, lapses, the indigestible; pushing meat away from bone and gristle. In such cases, our role in aesthetic experience is to seek out and highlight what is worthy; at the perennial risk of feeling as though we are missing the right thing. For years I diligently marked up every doorstop in the Western canon, from The Faerie Queene to Remembrance of Things Past, underlining anything just or juicy or wild as though I was trying to launch my own Bartlett’s. Taking this attitude means seeing an experience of the arts as a bus tour through an unfamiliar city, where you chat between points of interest, letting your eyes blur in the meanwhile. You assign your aesthetic awareness to the same faculty that pulls you out of sleep at a meaningful sound; when something trips your sensibility you note it down, and then pass out again.
If this is your attitude, eventually you will be tempted to reduce it all into the miniature-golf version, the condensed highlights. You will even wonder why all the tedious in-betweens are there; couldn’t we get it all down into a Little Red Book?
Ideally, of course, the shining moments are a first way in to the worth of the whole; and even when some elements keep standing forward from the rest, it is understood that they are set jewels, mounted for best effect. But I keep thinking it’s interesting to plumb the cases where there is an intimate relationship between the remarkable and the flux it is embedded in. This seems particularly true of a landscape architecture that can go forward past the pictorial and into the ecological, not dictated by a series of showpieces. I was struck recently, looking closely at Rosetta Elkin’s work, how she relays the aesthetic worth of a practice-based landscape through images of close-up experience – hands in earth, tiny plants, plain things in a field, a minimum of bokeh. While not not composed, the images say that the worth is not to be found in the composition.
What strikes me in many aesthetic fields is the insufficient nature of the ostensible works of art in of themselves; the way that they depend upon a milieu. Most of the music of my youth is not worth much when isolated from packaging, from flyers, from concerts, from practice sessions, from scenes, from catalog copy; which is not to say that the worth found in the conjunction of all of those things was an illusion. The music, the ostensible reason for it all, was only the flower of a larger aesthetic organism bent on reproducing itself. The antiquarians turning up the material culture of the time again do something that the nth relisten cannot do.
Likewise, sport is nonsense if reduced to a list of achievements, what appears at first as the point the rest of it points to. That is similarly down to the interest of sport being spread out through an entire media ecosystem; but here I’m struck at how you miss the profoundest parts if never physically present. That could be the fact of physical presence in the sublimes of a crowd, but I think it’s actually more grand in the everyday. Going to children’s soccer games for the first time, I soon got struck by how the difference between kindergarteners and professionals establishes a space of understanding. Children playing soccer do not just present a travesty of soccer done properly; in their struggles we can see the whole activity of soccer in another light. We can see them bunch at the sides and around the goal, for instance, and begin to understand why players specialize, why rules are drawn the way they are; but equally we can feel the experience of players, child or adult, in navigating the sport’s system. And so we can see the possibilities of soccer more clearly, not only the menu of possibilities we see executed by those at the highest level, with a hair’s breadth of focus or luck to decide the results, but the sheer breadth of the possible field.
From the vantage point of landscape, I can see that this as the ecological field that the remarkable shares with all of its neighbors. I can intuit from further back the set of inhabitants, the space they negotiate together, the set of possibilities they incarnate. That is true in a literal way; that, say, the humble and impossibly rare monkshood at the base of the cliff is and can only be a creature of the talus, breathed to life by a puff of air welling out from a crack. But it is also true in any perceptual ecology; that a neatly made bridge, put without fanfare on a side trail, fairly glows when surrounded by twenty minutes’ worth of simple beeches and leaf litter.