While on holiday in Portugal last week, my boyfriend and I found ourselves seeking shelter from the baking heat and bustling crowds in Porto’s Crystal Palace Gardens. The sense of relief was immediate as we passed through the gates into the cool shade of the trees, as we walked alongside calming fountains and carefully laid flowerbeds. I thought about this impulse to escape the noise, confusion and tarmac-heat of the city. And how ‘natural’ spaces are invariably introduced to city plans as if to provide a respite from work/life/society.
While I was away I listened to some recordings of Tate’s 2008 conference ‘The New Conceptualist Garden’, in which landscape designers such as Monika Gora and Eelco Hooftman spoke about their practice. They discussed some of the tensions and paradoxes inherent in the idea of the garden, relationships between the man-made and the natural, between the artificial and the real. Here are some of the notes I made:
*Gardens are for people
*No man-made space can be natural
*Gardens are enclosures containing a protected ‘otherness’
*Gardens have defined boundaries
*Gardens are framed spaces
I’ve also been re-reading some Walter Benjamin essays, including ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. I love his words on close-ups and enlargements, and on what he describes as the optical unconscious:
“… just as enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse ‘anyway’ but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter, neither does the slow-motion technique simply bring out familiar movement motifs but reveals in them others that are quite unfamiliar …
Palpably then, this is a different nature that addresses the camera than the one that speaks to the eye …”
I think back to my slides – the ‘framed space’ of Culpeper being re-framed by the camera lens; close-up and time-lapse shots revealing a ‘different nature’ from an already ‘unnatural’ space.
I plan to shoot another roll on Friday, rain or no rain!
