The Aesthetics of the VAST

Gary Dwyer

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The Aesthetics of the VAST

Ptolemy Model of an earth centered universe.

Vatican Museum

Copernicus Model of our sun centered solar system.

Vatican Museum

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When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.Freidrich Nietzsche

When you arrive in your sixties, as I have, large units of past time become compressed and feel much closer and nearer to the present. As long ago as twenty years now feels like a short

leap and I realize that in those years, my relationship with whatever I call the natural world has undergone substantial change.

In the late nineteen eighties I had become fatigued with American cities. They seemed both futile and feeble attempts at making the crowded become courteous. At best, they were showcases of culture, but mostly for the well heeled. While at worst, American cities appeared as collec-tions of poverty and misdirection, centered on confusion, calamity, and callousness.

A less harsh but not necessarily middling evaluation has revealed my deep-seated irritation that almost none of the idealistic sensibilities that surfaced in the late sixties had actually taken root and in their stead, a confused commercialism came creeping. It became a terrible wave and I found it muddy, opaque and turbulent.

In response to this circumstance I sought solace in what I thought was nature. In fact, it was not nature itself, but rather my own personal inter-pretation of nature.

Various forms of this appreciation had evidenced themselves earlier in my life. The Colorado Rockies had been central to my adolescence and this early exposure to high and open places eventually lead to a long list of experiences in regions known for being distant, empty and cold. It was there that I became concerned with the aesthetics of the vast.

This is not to say I was advocating a naïve return to nature or that I rejected all the values of contemporary society but that I had come to prefer being outside in many ways. Not only for the pleasure of being an iconoclast but because I preferred the outdoors. I was not against being in a building, as Thoreau seemed to be, it just wasn’t my preference. But my appreciation for nature had no depth. It was entirely superficial. I liked things like rocks and trees and fish, but real value and depth of meaning come only with the act of naming and I didn’t know the names.

College solved the naming problem by forcing me to memorize the beau-tiful tyranny of Linnaeus’s system of telling one thing from another. But the names were just names and I wasn’t interested in looking for depth or even any meaning. It was shallow and immature, but I just wanted to be happy and the wind in the trees made me smile.

So what all this came to mean is that I tried to respond to nature. As an adult, I gradually become a member of the Design Community, (design-ers and artists of all sorts) I paid close attention to the things I could learn form my tenuous attachment to the natural world. Nature’s patterns, structure and rhythms provided guidance that seemed to go beyond mere design fashion or architectural dogma. This was a minority position in a time of post-modernism, but I didn’t mind. What I was not ready for was the slow but inexorable societal tilt away from production. I was used to being a citizen, a building, making, doing citizen. I’m not sure of when I began to be considered a passive observer, a mere consumer, but I still despise the term.

As a design professional and teacher I spent a great deal of time and effort espousing the lessons and exemplars from nature that might be used to guide us; we designers, we supposed arbiters of taste. The trou-ble was that the public was not listening to their tastemakers. Instead, they were following their urges for instant gratification via retail therapy. The voices of design theory and environmental responsiveness were drowned out by the incessant chants of Esprit and Gap. Everyone simul-taneously forgot that BMW used to make Hitler’s motorcycles and that the fighter planes which attacked Pearl Harbor were made by Mitsubishi. And so, this collective, this unconscious amnesia, lead us to the place where we are being told we are what we like, forgetting the centuries proving that we are what we make, we are what we do, and we are what we leave behind.

In regard to my outside position, my desire to be watching the stars in the night sky rather than on television, I was neither self-righteous nor indignant. Instead, I was perceiving two interconnected transformations. Neither one took priority but seemed to occur with even handed simul-taneity. One was my increasing delight in simple distillations of experi-ence. The Sound of rain on a metal roof, the smell of fresh cut Douglas fir, my late afternoon shadow on a wall. The second was that I had to

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live in the larger world. A world where credit cards purchased gasoline and the miles earned meant a flight to New York for my kids. Where my supermarket decided to devote an entire aisle to chips and my neigh-bors began to believe that they were what they drove. I could see what had the dominant hand in these two transformations and what I thought about the Pleiades at night began to pale against the endless dawn of Starbucks and CNN.

Any grousing about this transformation is liable to place me in the camp of growling old geezers and I would rather address how these changes in myself and society have affected my perception of my relation to nature and to places vast.

First, is that the world of looking, lusting, buying and using is everywhere and inescapable. It is as much a part of me as I am of it. Just because I find it vapid and shallow does not mean it is going away.

Second, I must now make pilgrimages to nature, or whatever is left of it, as it now has seldom the capacity to present itself. Instead of living in open country, I now live in a small town, a small city actually, one with a rather benign climate and surprisingly most of the big city problems. Yes, I have sidewalks to walk on at night, and no, I can’t see the stars.

What this has come to mean is that I am, like most of us, a contradic-tion. We live in what passes for an automotive version of cities and fly to distant countries so we can see birds and hand woven fabrics and be delighted with what we so glibly call diversity.

At one time, not terribly long ago, Western civilization seemed to believe we humans were part of nature. Now, nature is other. More than ever before it is separate from us. Distinct. Nature has become something we pay attention to from a distance. Of course we surf its waves and suffer severe storms, but we always climb back in our SUV’s and plug the ipod in our ears. Disconnecting is what we have learned to do and we do it with a vengeance. Me too. That’s right, the distant stargazer, I do the same. Just because the singular, quiet, photographic image occupies more of my present world than video games does not make me either superior or right, but merely in the minority.

Yet doing the dance of the disconnected does not mean I am pleased with my circumstance. Mere recognition has never been a solution and of course I think there is value in reducing the distance between our selves and the wisdom of the clouds, but I am alive now and like almost everyone else today, I get weather predictions by looking at the web and not by being able to tell the difference between mare’s tales clouds and a mackerel sky.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if systems worked? Instead, systems appear as fragments, uncommunicative individual chunks of beliefs, with no pos-sibility of ever being universal. Modernism (as a design philosophy) was going to use the principles of industry to produce more vital, more re-sponsive cities and it failed miserably. Architects used to be considered the ultimate diviners or wizards but today, they have declared themselves to be part of the solution by now being green. The term ‘environmental architect’ is like the partnership between the pimp and the prostitute and the result is the same. In fairness, architects did not create a society of consumer greed, we did. And I think it was because we got lazy. We discovered it was easier to buy something than it was to make it and we didn’t find any particular virtue in making. What we forgot about along the way was the joy that comes from making, the satisfaction of seeing tactile results of our actions; finding glee in leaving something behind. A drawing lasts differently than a video game score and I think what I am trying to see, through my haze of two decades of locking backward, is to discover a more rewarding melding of culture and nature. I guess what it comes down to is I want something that lasts.

My interest in the aesthetics of the vast may have germinated in high, cold and distant places but the places themselves were only a vehicle for what I was after. More than twenty years ago, I spent some time in the remote mountains of Asia and I did not hear the sound of a motor for more than three weeks. Not the whine of a battery operated camera, or the roar of an overhead jet. Nothing. Only a handful of people in my gen-eration can remember such a time and almost no one in the present. Part of The aesthetics of the vast has to do with the place and the obvious sparseness of the setting and the small number of elements vying for my attention. The biggest thing in all these places is always space itself. Emptiness. Nothing. The Void, and in the end it is only thing that lasts.

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We make maps of the heavens to try to understand where we are, and perhaps even who we are. Galileo made this star chart in the upper hallway of la Trinità dei Monti church in Rome. It is almost always the sky that makes the aesthetic vast. The sea and moun-tains can make perceptions profound. Canyons are where we find awe, but it is in the sky where vast has always lived.

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We might use maps and a compass to navigate, we might use GPS, we might navigate with our own memory by remember-ing things that stood out. Contrast is the most prominent com-

ponent of sight, but also memory and when you are in really open spaces you attempt to find something to hang onto. Orientation is the process of locating yourself in relation something else. But even if the time of day and the angle of the sun help us, we can’t orient with space very well, so we cling to some contrasting element on the land - a landmark.

The first image in this book is ‘The Lighthouse at the End of the World.’It marks and punctuates the end of human influence and the beginning of the influence of two gigantic oceans that are truly un-fathomable.

We want to measure everything in relation to us.

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The BUMP in the Distance

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The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

Tierra del Fuego Archipelago

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Cone peak

Carrizo Plain, California

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Storm on the way and a solo bird

Lake Taupo, New Zealand

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Island reflection

Nova Scotia, Canada

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Palm Island, inside the atoll

Rarotonga, Cook Islands

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Dawn

Nipomo Hill, California

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Mt. Saint Elias

Wrangell - St. Elias National Park, Alaska

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Full moon

Nipomo Hill, California

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Sliver moon

Whitney Portal, Californias

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Solo butte

Capital Reef, Utah

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Gravity is one of the most valuable tools for orientation. We use it all the time and hardly ever think about it. The Horizon is not always available. But those two together are the best things we

have for positioning our selves. The horizon, as it stands between earth and space, is the biggest edge we have and yet we tend to think of it as a gauge for distance rather than an edge. When I look out to sea from a beach I can see almost five kilometers to the horizon.

The Pawnee believe a wolf can see ‘two looks’ away. The true distance from anyone to the horizon is exactly that far.

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Reference the Horizontal

FLAT LINE

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Found object(When I woke up, I realized I had made camp in a desert dump site.)

Back road, southern Nevada

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Elkhorn scarp

California

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Marigolds

Los Osos Valley, California

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The Olgas (Kata Tjuta)

from Uluru (Ayers Rock) Australia

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Soda Lake

California

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Temple of Apollo

Naxos, Greece

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Oak forest at the shoreline

Southern Argentina

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Arizona

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Arizona

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The mouth of the Elba River

Cuxhaven. Germany

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Flowers grown for seed

Lompoc, California

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Gilroy, California

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Gilroy, California (Now all vineyards)

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Barley fields

Painted Rock, California

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Joshua Tree

California

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The vast is not limited to what we so loosely call the Natural World.It can, and does, include our big ideas, our big plans and our in-tention to grant importance. Power is always at the root of these

efforts even though they might be couched in other terms like glory or remembrance or honor. Monuments always have to do with someone being in charge.

This is mine, that is yours. My god is the best because we have the big-gest temple. Our engineers are smarter, more efficient that yours. If you think it is an accident that you have to go up step to enter your city hall, think again.

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Monument (al)

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Greek temple

Selinunte, Sicily

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Built to keep the barbarian Scots (Picts) out of Roman Britain (It didn’t work.)

Hadrian’s Wall, Scotland

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7.8 Km. from Malmo, Sweden to Copenhagen, Denmark

(almost the) Øresund Bridge, North Sea

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Some hotel

Las Vegas, Nevada

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The Sphinx

Giza, Egypt

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The Church seen through a beer

near Martel, France

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