Storming the Gates of Paradise (40 page)

In 1749, at the start of the golden age of landscape gardening, which would open the gates to wilder and wilder tastes in landscape and eventually beget romanticism, mountaineering, and the Sierra Club (if not exactly Sierra Club calendars), John Cleland’s novel
Fanny Hill
offers us this landscape: “that central furrow which nature had sunk there, between, the soft relieve of two pouting ridges, and which in this was in perfect symmetry of delicacy and miniature with the rest of her frame. No! nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut; then, the dark umbrage of the downy spring-moss that over-arched it bestowed, on the luxury of the landscape, a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words, or even the paint of thought.” A hundred and ten years later, Darwin wrote his famous passage about the tangled bank in
The Origin of Species
. His image of this moist, overgrown site that generates biological complexity is akin to Cleland’s description of an intricate reverie-provoking terrain.

What’s entertaining about Cleland’s language is that it’s not pornographic, because it pulls you away from the putative subject into the viscerality of its metaphor, asking us to feel not desire which moves closer but admiration which stands back for the fine view. It suggests the extent to which landscape was already a superlative, an ideal to which other things could be brought, so that
these genitalia are offered up, as it were, on the altar of landscape beauty and metaphoric adventure, back then when the geometrical lines of formal gardens were breaking up into an aesthetic of wilderness. It’s not very far removed from William Gilpin’s essay on the superlative gardens at Stowe, published a year earlier: “A Mile’s riding, perhaps, would have carried me to the Foot of a steep Precipice, down which thundered the whole Weight of some vast River, which was dashed into Foam at the Bottom, by the craggy points of several rising Rocks: A deep Gloom overhung the Prospect, occasioned by the close Wood that hung round it on every Side.”

I wonder if it’s that complex language makes it possible to appreciate complexity, or if the aesthetics of gardens extended to bodies back when Pope said “painting, poetry and landskip gardening” were sisters. Or brothers, because in that era, which cultivated the aesthetic experience of the sublime and the beautiful (which Edmund Burke in his treatise on the sublime carefully delineated as, respectively, masculine and feminine), Cleland could make men into landscape with equal felicity. Here’s the key portion of a tumescent guy “whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root through which the jetty springs of which the fair skin shewed as in a fine evening you may have remark’d the clear light aether through the branchework of distant trees overtopping the summit of a hill: then the broad and bluish-casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins.”

There is a huge body, so to speak, of literature and art that portrays nature and landscape as feminine, from the
Song of Songs
’s “A garden enclosed is my beloved” to Edward Weston’s blank nudes in blank dunes. This could simply be about the heterosexual male voice, since the beloved is always nature. Imogen Cunningham’s honeymoon pictures, from her soft pictorialist phase before she cofounded the sharp-focus-committed f/64 movement, not only portray the man as the spirit of the land but make the actual man do all that uncomfortable self-exhibition that female models have spent so much time doing. Cunningham’s groom stands in lakes a lot. They look cold, and so does he. In fact, it’s just as easy to cast the landscape as masculine, at least if that landscape is big, austere, and sublime. Saguaro cacti are also helpful.

I don’t believe women are more like nature, but I believe we often share a political fate, not least as the sites on which a dominant culture exercises its fears and desires. Did
Fanny Hill
prefigure the Lake District and the aesthetics of wildness? And if that is so, then what about these bodies that are as much the result of toil by waxers and surgeons as the happy result of genetic dice and exercise? Do they represent the mall, the space capsule, the superhighway, the laboratory, the gated community, the prefab home, drive-through fast food, virtual space, the security state? Is that also what the nature calendars represent, since in them there is, as in porn, life without death, bodies without functions, results without processes, access without roads? If the beloved is always nature, then what are these landscapes and bodies without biology, without threat, without mystery, without darkness?

Where did the complexity go? Landscape photography in what we might have to call the art world has for more than a quarter century been striving to embrace a more complex, compromised vision of the organic world, an organic world whose human traces are not necessarily scars or damage, a landscape of processes as well as spectacles, of beauty without perfection. This undoes the virgin-whore dichotomy calcified out of Porter’s and Ansel Adams’s vision, which cannot imagine the works of human beings as other than violation and therefore fetishizes nature as a place apart (it’s this that made nature photography seem more like girlie calendars—in which the subject is solitary but inviting—rather than like action porn). This is a nature whose existence is more dubious than ever before, as well as a kind of alienation environmental thought is getting over pretty nicely.

We might also ask where the hair went. To imagine the quantities of waxed women toiling on behalf of the Internet’s most successful business is to imagine a collective clear-cut that might, were some web nerd to do the calculations, amount to acres. The answer is also to be found in the art world, which at this point is beginning to seem like some sort of wilderness preserve for all kinds of tangled banks. Ann Hamilton, in a mid-1990s show at the Dia Foundation, covered a vast area of floor with swathes of horsehair that visitors had to come into contact with, if only with their feet. A plethora of women artists has affirmed a different
female body in art, one that might be beautiful, but not safe or simple, a body that is full of hair, organs, processes, fluids, consciousness, and will. They’ve represented, as I once said, “everything classical marble removes: the squishy, mobile, mutable stuff of and the traffic of appetites through bodies in process.” This work has had fun with hair, again and again, and if anything affirms that hair is political it’s this abundance, this tangle, this forest of it in the feminine avant-garde while the stuff is vanishing from the bodies of mainstream porn.

Which is to say, in sum, that if there’s anything to complain about in these mainstream photographic territories, it’s that they’re about sex and wilderness in which wildness is proscribed.

When I first started looking into gender and landscape, the questions seemed metaphysical—about which sex had what relationship to nature, or, rather, whether women really had a special relationship to nature. I was young and easily converted to the ecofeminist essentialist position that women are closer to nature or more like nature or one of those warm, fuzzy positions. That was the era of the book
When God Was a Woman
and a general sense that Near Eastern agricultural matriarchies were paradise lost—one thing about this culture, no matter how much it excoriates the Judeo-Christian tradition, it can’t resist retelling the tale of Eden and the fall from grace, even if Judeo-Christianity becomes that fall from grace. In this When-God-Was-a-Woman version, women were better than men in all kinds of ways you already know about, and when women ruled, everything was peachy.

Of course, there were critiques of this all along—the feminist art magazine
Heresies
put Mount Saint Helens on the cover of its nature issue as if to say that if we’re like nature, she’s not delicate, sweet, and passive. And later on, the notion came to prevail that hunter-gatherer life, with all its pantheistic anarchy and low levels of labor, was paradise, and that, in comparison, even matriarchal agriculture seemed like earning your bread by the sweat of your brow, and how fun was that? By that point in the late eighties/early nineties conversation, gender
was seen as constructed, so that male and female were only points on a social spectrum, like straight and queer, with a lot of range in between, rather than essential truths of human nature. And of course race entered the picture—which makes me think of environmental justice leader Carl Anthony’s great question, “Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of color?”

But I was looking through the lens of landscape photography mostly in those days, and what I saw was this, as I wrote in the mid-1990s:

Through the mid-1980s, it seemed possible to propose a relationship between gender and landscape ideology. While many of the men were taking pictures premised on an irreconcilable schism between nature and culture (or at least emphasizing the occasions where culture violated nature), a lot of women were making images of a bodily and spiritual communion with landscape/nature, one which didn’t respect nature and culture as useful categories (a radical departure in the West, whose federal land policies and conservation movements have both been based on belief in a pristine, uninhabited land distinct from civilization). Even compositionally, the genders seemed distinct, with the women’s work abandoning the sweeping prospect for more intimate and enclosed scenes.

I think that much of the critique of wilderness as the only nature, as a place apart, came from feminism; but postulating gender as an absolute category just erected another Berlin Wall, while so many were coming down. Since then, things have changed in photography—and, of course, once you broaden your gaze, a lot of other things sneak in.

Portraying landscape as masculine is, so to speak, just as natural as portraying it as feminine, as Jane Tompkins points out in her book
West of Everything:

Men may dominate or simply ignore women in Westerns, they may break horses and drive cattle, kill game and kick dogs and beat one another into a pulp, but they never lord it over nature. Nature is the one transcendent thing, the one thing larger than man (and it is constantly portrayed as immense), the ideal toward which human nature strives. Not imitateo Christi but imitatio naturae. What is imitated is a physical thing, not a spiritual ideal; a solid state of being, not a process of becoming; a material entity, not a person; a condition of object-hood, not a form of consciousness. The landscape’s final invitation—merger—promises complete materialization. Meanwhile, the qualities that nature implicitly possesses—power, endurance, rugged majesty—are the ones that men desire while they live. And so men imitate the land in Westerns.

So essentialist constructions of gender and nature are misleading maps. But there are some places in the territory of the imagination where feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and environmental critique overlap, and that is still valuable. As I wrote in “Elements of a New Landscape,”

Here the word landscape itself becomes problematic: landscape describes the natural world as an aesthetic phenomenon, a department of visual representation: a landscape is scenery, scenery is stage-decoration, and stage decorations are static backdrops for a drama that is human. The odalisque and the pleasure ground are acted upon rather than actors, sites for the imposition rather than generation of meaning, and both are positioned for consumption by the viewer within works of art that are themselves consumable properties. As a social movement with specific social goals, feminism sought to acquire rights and representation for women as other social justice movements before it had sought them for hitherto marginalized classes, religions, and races of men; as an analysis of entrenched structures of belief, feminism reached far deeper to disrupt the binary relationships around which the culture organized itself. The subject/object relations of modern art and science I’ve been trying to describe align a number of beliefs: the gap between subject and object, observer and observed, creator and creation; the
essential immateriality of mind and mindlessness of matter; and the association of men with energy, form, mind, and women with substance, nature and earth.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
and Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
appeared only a year apart, in 1962 and 1963—and we could easily switch the titles, to the
Silent Feminine
and
The Chemical Mystique
. Feminist, environmental, and postmodern theories have sometimes converged, at least in some basic ideas about the inadequacies of dualistic and binary descriptions of the world; the interdependences of a world better imagined as networks and webs of interconnected processes than as a collection of discrete objects; the value of diversity, whether cultural or biological; the intricate interpenetrations of mind and body, individual and environment. The worldview that emerges is less about discrete objects and more about interwoven processes.

Another way to put their commonality is in an emphasis on place: literal place for environmentalism, the location from which one can speak for feminism and postmodernism. By grounding voice, such thinking deconstructs authoritative versions, voices, histories; by denying the possibility of a voice that is nowhere, voices begin to arise everywhere, and the hitherto silenced speak. Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones—the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.