The Aesthetics of Environment

Five: Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology

Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology Chapter Five ~ While environment has become a popular topic in many circles-conservation, legislative, corporate, community, and international -it has not often provoked a reflective inquiry into its philosophical meaning and significance. Indeed, in the increasing regard for environment, a crucial aspect ofthe subject has often been either disregarded, circumscribed, or trivialized: the aesthetic. And when aesthetic interests do receive attention, they are usually judged as a belated and desperate effort to save the beauty of our natural world from the irrecoverable ravages of exploitation and from the disfigurement and loss that follow. Recognizing aesthetic values in environment should lead, however , to more than opposition to clearcutting and the desecration of pristine lakes by ringing them with cottages and resorts. An aesthetic interest in environment means more than neighborhood cleanup campaigns. It involves more than appreciating gardens, parks, or urban vistas. It requires even more than preserving the architectural heritage of our cities and rebuilding their wastelands of physical and social decay. Important as all these are, they are still restricted by a limited focus. For the aesthetic is crucial in our very perception of environment. It entails the form and quality ofhuman experience in 57 58 Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology general. The environment can be seen as the condition of all such experience, where the aesthetic becomes the qualitative center of our daily lives. If a concern for environmental quality is to result in more than a program for removing billboards, camouflaging junkyards, and replacing slums with the tenements of the future, it must go beyond mere palliatives in comforting images of prettiness, cleanliness, and order. A serious concern for environment must also articulate and develop the convictions and values that have aroused these efforts; it must encourage the support of goals that are both richer and more substantive. Doing this might seem to require an act of philosophical creation ex nihilo, for philosophers have never devoted much attention to such questions and, with the exception ofa few thinkers like Kant, Schelling, Ruskin, and Santayana, have tended to ignore the aesthetics of nature altogether. For the most part, philosophical aesthetics has turned to nature for illustration, only rarely recognizing experience there comparable in significance and profundity to the experience of art. While an aesthetics of nature may be a new problem for most philosophers, it involves a concern with the natural and ordinary in our surroundings that is not unusual for many contemporary artists. Some of the arts have moved in the last few decades toward a closer involvement with these interests by developing artistic forms such as assemblages, environments, Happenings, and earth sculpture that draw on ordinary objects, events, and surroundings. Yet many ofthe arts have always handled features that bear directly on the experience of nature and the ordinary world. Both painting and sculpture, for example, employ perceptual dimensions that work by enlarging and refining natural experience rather than by substituting a different mode of experience for it. Sculptural space and volume are continuous with natural space and volume, and sculpture's shapes, textures, and lighting often have a direct source in the forms, surfaces, and light ofnatural objects, materials , and places, often deliberately interacting with them. l Painting also opens a range of space, light, and color that often extends beyond the picture frame. There is a continuity between the pic- 59 torial landscape and the actual one, not a relation between original and copy but a shared aspect, as when distance depicted by means of perspective begins at the eye of the viewer, with both picture and perceiver inhabiting the same perceptual space.2 In the still life, too, a way of looking is opened to us that we can carry over to the common objects that surround us, and in the portrait we learn to see more truly the people we have always looked at. Even when these arts develop in the direction of greater abstraction, they continue to act as models for experiencing the world that lies outside the frame and the museum.3 Much the same kinds ofperceptual dimensions of space, color, line, form, composition, and texture persist as painting grows more abstract and outward appearances lose their resemblance to familiar objects.4 Unfortunately, however, we labor under a tradition that stresses the differences between the attitude we take toward art and the one we assume toward our "ordinary" human environment. Two...