Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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a permanent vision of nature, rather than as ‘nouns’, which can be surveyed, owned or possessed. This theorisation attempted to address the way power functions in and through landscape, moving away from the notion that landscape represents power towards the idea that landscape is part of the operation of power. Drawing on Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, Mitchell suggests that the landscape is ‘not an object to be seen or text to be read, but … a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’ (1994b: 1). The landscape interpellates us, he argues; that is to say, the landscape is presumed to have the power to call out to us, to hail us, as Althusser put it, and in so doing it forms us as its subjects. This counterintuitive explanation of power shifts attention away from the presumed agency of individual selfhood to a structural reading of ideology.
Since the 1994 edition of Landscape and Power there has been something of a re-evaluation of the verb thesis. Historian Jill Casid (2011) has argued that while Mitchell’s ‘verb thesis’ contributed to a shift in thinking about landscapes as productive and active (especially with regard to imperialism and colonisation), it did not sufficiently consider performative accounts of power, nor did it account for the production of women, queers and disabled subjects.
In the preface to the second edition of Landscape and Power (2002: vii) Mitchell writes that given the chance to retitle the book he would now call it Space, Place, and Landscape. ‘If one wanted to continue to insist,’ says Mitchell, ‘on power as the key to the significance of landscape’,
one would have to acknowledge that it is a relatively weak power compared to that of armies, police forces, governments, and corporations. Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have. As the background within which a figure, form, or narrative act emerges, landscape exerts a passive force of setting, scene, and sight. (2002: vii)
To understand this ‘weakness’, Mitchell suggests that it is necessary to take up the notion of desire: the Freudian/psychoanalytic picture of desire as lack or longing (2005: 61) and the image of desire as a process, an ‘experimental, productive force’ (Ross 2010: 66–67). It is the ambiguous formulation of desire as want that appears most productive in unsettling the power base of landscape. To ask what landscapes want ‘is not just to attribute to them life and power and desire, but also to raise the question of what it is they lack, what they do not possess, what cannot be attributed to them’ (Mitchell 2005: 10).
Casid’s response to Mitchell is evocative because she pulls in an entirely different direction, insisting on what she calls the ‘isness’ – the presence – of landscape by foregrounding its recalcitrance, its refusal to recede: ‘from landscape as a settled place or fixed point we instead encounter landscape in the performative, landscaping the relations of ground to figure, the potentials of bodies, and the interrelations of humans, animals, plants, and what we call the “environment” ’ (Casid 2011: 98).
The lawn is boring, it matters and we must say so
Casid’s response is an attempt to put landscape into action ‘under the performative’. She describes her project as ‘landscape trouble’ (2008), signalling a move to inflect landscape with the qualities of a verb to account for landscape as an ‘ongoing process of materialization’ (2011: 98–99). In response to Mitchell’s aphorism that ‘Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so’ (1994a: 5), Casid retorts that, in fact, ‘landscape matters (and is volatile, fascinating, and queer in the ways it matters and performs); we must say so’ (2011: 100).3 The queering of the landscape is a theoretical manoeuvre that not only seeks to highlight the work of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) landscapers, gardeners, writers and artists but, further, seeks a critique of the very paradigm of heteronormativity, which dominates our ideas of ‘nature’. Queer theory suggests that so-called natural environments and processes of growth are not apolitical; they are caught up in a unidirectional narrative of progress and flourishing, which does not sufficiently account for the volatile, fascinating and queer in the ways humans and non-humans matter themselves. Casid’s performative conception also makes an aesthetic methodological stand against the primacy of landscape painting as the proper object of landscape studies and to include installation, performance art, sound, video and sculpture in the conversation. This is to reaffirm, in a different way, Mitchell’s refusal of landscape as a genre of painting in favour of landscape as ‘medium’ (1994a: 5). It is also to insist that landscape’s ‘performance’ is ‘not just taking place, making place, or decaying or even destroying place … but also and importantly its being and changing in and over time without final outcome despite the illusion of “isness” and the effects of naturalization’ (Casid 2011: 103). The ‘isness’ of landscape – its presumed presence as stable, as finished – requires the appearance of being outside of time, or after time.
Casid’s formulation suggests that landscape’s symbolic consolidation of power exists in an abiding paradox because landscape does not actually have a ‘final outcome’. The vitality of action, labour, process, movement in, on, through, by, in front of landscape is deeply threatening to the operation of the landscape idea, which is aimed at creating the illusion of permanence and stability. Landscape is always the attempt at transforming nature or land and the open-endedness of our relationship to these, into a space of ownership, possession, belonging; a stabilisation of the present and desired future formations of power into something seemingly permanent. In this sense, landscape must fail.
Scholarship should thus be far more interested in the disproportionate tendency to record, monumentalise and remember moments of success. Is it possible to claim that the imperial garden or, even more boldly, the imperial landscape (seen as processes and movements that are multidirectional and happening over time and space) is at its core already failing? Part of the ‘strategic instrumentality’ (Corner 1999: 4) of imperialist landscape is to arrest decay linguistically, aesthetically and materially, to present transient victories as evidence of permanence. The strategies of postcolonial, peripheral, queer landscape art and theory are to record the always failing garden/landscape as the norm, not the aberration, and to use failure as a tool of liberation. These minoritarian positions, the post-colonial and the queer, are concerned with life on the margins, and have seldom been under the illusion that ‘success’ belonged equally to (white) heterosexuals and (black) queers. Embracing failure as a liberatory approach, as proposed by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), means reframing failure as ‘alternative ways of knowing’ and modes of ‘unbeing and unbecoming’ (2011: 23–24). These modes of flourishing and growing can potentially be outside of the time and space of productive, capitalist heteronormativity.
The lawn in South Africa
Six old white ladies with perms, in obligatory white bowling gear, cardigans and regulation flat-soled shoes, play bowls on a Saturday afternoon. It is winter, June 1980; some of the trees around the green have lost their leaves and it is likely that the East Rand Proprietary Mines (ERPM) bowling green is less than green – brown and dormant because of the cold, rainless winters that characterise the South African highveld. The highveld is a high-altitude plateau, especially in the north-east of South Africa, between 1 500 and 2 100 metres above sea level, which includes the Free State and Gauteng provinces, and portions of the surrounding areas: the western rim of Lesotho and portions of the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces. David Goldblatt’s Saturday afternoon: bowls on the East Rand Proprietary Mines green. June 1980 (1982; see Plate 1) is shot facing east; in the background is a double-storey terrace married quarters built by architect Herbert Baker in 1910 for the mines. If we look carefully, between the trees we see a distinctive Baker chimney, brick with a subtle flourish on the crown (Van der Walt & Birkholtz 2012). Opened in 1915 – just after Johannesburg’s oldest green, Kensington Bowls Club (1914) – the ERPM bowling green, like the gardens, fields and parks of Goldblatt’s photographic work In Boksburg (1982), appears both flat and ordinary, unremarkable.4 This banality is not incidental; neither