Space Saturday April 30, 2005
There’s an academic book titled The Poetics of Space that I surveyed a few years ago, and a book called The Third Space that I found more useful. Both of them consider the notion of space in relation to culture, and the latter rests on a geographic analysis of different locations or social spaces, and the significance they have. The internet has also been construed in these spatial terms, as a non-corporeal and imaginative environment which spans the world and is easily accessible. Its non-physical foundation gives it an abstract value, as a field of distributed cognition and a cultural playground – or space – where people can express themselves freely within the parameters of the VDU and bandwidth. The same logic could be applied to television or radio – thus we have radio-space or television-space comparable to cyberspace – but the difference is the ubiquity, accessibility and interactive power of the internet, making it a more imaginatively suggestive medium.
Alfred Wainwright is a famous writer in certain circles, responsible for producing a series of hand drawn guidebooks of the Lake District, his “labour of love�? over a period of about twelve years. He was born into impoverished conditions in working class Blackburn, and when he had his first walking holiday in Lakeland he experienced the beauty in relation to his preceding urban life. In the mountains he could walk freely up, down and across the slopes, with more or less full access and no one barring his way. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed bounteous fresh air and complete freedom; he didn’t make a physical comparison i.e. with narrow streets and back to back housing, but this was the comparative basis for his exultation. It was the beginning of an enduring love affair, and a characteristic experience for those who enjoy Lakeland. And over the following years, especially when he relocated to Kendal, his fell walking became the constant background to his life. Psychologically speaking, the mountains were both a tantalising geographic fact, and a comforting imaginative space.
There’s only one person working in digital or new media art who has the stature and depth I look for in aesthetic thinking, and that’s Bill Viola. I’ve seen many kinds of work and have forgotten most of it, as an ephemeral pixel driven blur amidst a greater panorama of coded noise. Yet I return to Viola periodically, as I do with other conventional artists, because there is always something more to see and something more to consider. I wouldn’t want a book full of pictures of dead sharks and unmade beds, and a text discussing some postmodern silliness about ephemeral and relative living. What is the point of that? I am interested in art that derives more from the centre of a person than his scrappy and disaffected edges, like old letters stored in a drawer that you will eventually throw away. I have two of Viola’s books with pictures of his beautiful work, and his extensive philosophising. He once stayed in a desert for several weeks, making video footage for a subsequent project. His art is more classically allusive than shamanistic, but it does sometimes acknowledge the psychological power of landscape which, he argues, corresponds to the unconscious mind. Our lives are mostly conducted in asphalt-covered cities, but our less developed history peeps through when we notice a seam of earth between the concrete slabs – or when we vacate the city and spend some time fully immersed in nature. Viola thus works with geographically based psychological space.
I don’t revere the American writer Henry David Thoreau as some people do; I mostly find his ideas and expression completely old fashioned and redundant. As with Wainwright, or even Wordsworth, he is more of a romantic curiosity than a reliable reference. However he spent a large part of his life wandering around his surrounding North American wilderness, and in his essay entitled Walking said the following:
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
Thoreau’s writings are an interesting part of North American culture, because he was intellectually positioned between his advocacy of the huge areas of natural wilderness, and the spreading New America. Like the Chinese sage Lao Tsu, the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, he used the experience and symbolism of natural wild places as part of his psychological philosophy: wilderness has a long-term ecological function, comparable to the unknown and hidden places of the mind. Had psychoanalysis existed at that time Thoreau would probably have disagreed with it, viewing that inner world as a farmer regards a fallow field or the neighboring woodland, and its beneficial ecological value. Unlike novelist Joseph Conrad who used the jungle, for example, to represent the ‘heart of darkness’ inside the human soul. But perhaps a jungle or the Congo itself is a special aspect of wild nature, and certainly unlike autumnal Oregon or pristine Lakeland.
You can understand why mountains have been associated with spiritual aspiration: not only the salutary symbolism of climbing up to greater heights and the impressive aesthetic beauty, but also because of their beneficial psychological effect. Thus for some people mountains are spiritual, i.e. holy terrain you have to respect. I don’t agree with this – think it’s silly, in fact – because spirit is by definition not matter, and a mountain is 100% matter. The geological configuration etc makes it beautiful and inspiring, but that’s as far as it goes: mountain experience is explicable in psychological terms. However what I do agree with is their undeniable symbolic power and in that sense they can be regarded as an imaginative space that antidotes the concerns of complex modern living. Mountains are often used in symbolic spiritual cosmologies that define other and non-corporeal spaces. Buddhism uses the term ‘loka’ which means ‘world’, and these are represented in the complex Buddhist mandalas, their multi-dimensional art-work showing the different worlds and the beings that live in them. The mandalas sometimes contain mountains. The ‘theosophical’ teachings of mystic HP Blavatsky or of her successor Alice Bailey would describe these worlds as mostly ‘astral’, which is, they argue, a non-physical plane that both precedes and interpenetrates physical manifestation. Those teachings are reputedly derived from disincarnate beings and places of learning that correspond to the physical locations of the Himalayas.
Mountains are another discrete subset of the more general category of wilderness itself, i.e. the untamed geographic locations that exist outside the perimeter of the city. The wilderness is a natural space where there is little or no human intervention, and while famous areas like Everest or parts of Scotland are the pre-eminent examples, the Lake District and similar places are sufficiently grand and wild to ensure a satisfying taste of wilderness. And ultimately, the experience of mountain walking refers to psychological or internal space.