Landscape in Frame

A Sense of the Stream of Time

A Sense of the Stream of Time from Shaun Huston on Vimeo.

My primary purpose in this film is to reframe Jackson’s discussion of restoration and preservation in terms of both culture and also nature, that is, to address these questions beyond the cultural landscape in a narrow sense and in terms of landscapes as hybrid geographies, or, as always more-than-human (Whatmore 2002).

“Nature” is a marginal concept in Jackson’s writings. This is not surprising, given that he defined landscape primarily in terms of human use, and his body of work can be more precisely understood as being about the cultural landscape in particular, rather than landscape in a broader sense (see, “The Word Itself” and “By Way of Conclusion: How to Study the Landscape”). While Jackson certainly recognized the value of natural features in the landscape, he was dismissive of “wilderness,” or nature independent of human use and access, as a cultural and political ideal (see “Beyond Wilderness” and “In Favor of Trees” in A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time). He also defended car culture against “disapproval from environmentalists and other right-thinking elements in the population” (“Looking into Automobiles,” A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, 167). At the same time, he could, as in “Abstract World of the Hot-rodder,” also write appreciatively and evocatively about nature, or, at least, the human experience of nature. In one short reflection from Landscape, he even approaches a hybrid understanding of culture and nature, noting that, “… nature is actually omnipresent in the city …” as “an impalpable or invisible landscape of spaces and color and light and sound and movement and temperature” ("Man and Nature," 339; emphasis in original). So, nature is present in the urban landscape, but only as background, unnoticed, or, even, un-sensed, in a conscious way.

In “’Sterile’ Restorations …” Jackson’s subject is clearly buildings and architecture, but after re-reading the essay for this project, I found myself applying his main argument, represented by the quote featured at the beginning of the film, to the practice of not only cultural-historical restoration and preservation, but also to environmental and ecological restoration and preservation. The last phrase in particular - “its beauty comes from having been part of the world, not from having been isolated and protected, but from having known various fortunes” - reflects not just why many people are compelled to restore and protect “historic” structures, but also natural areas and features. For example, the Pacific Northwest “timber wars,” which reached a climax in the 1994 Northwest Timber Plan, a few years before Jackson’s death, were sparked by scientists and environmentalists arguing for the value of old growth forests, an argument that runs parallel to the “affection” for “ancient” landscapes referenced in Jackson’s essay (see Nathan Rice, “Seeking Balance in Oregon’s Timber Country,” High Country News, 6 May 2013). People will argue for the “living function” of natural features and areas no less than Jackson does for buildings and architectural features.

If landscapes are hybrids, both cultural and also natural, the question to ask about preservation and restoration becomes what qualities are valued where and for what reasons, that is, in what contexts are cultural qualities elevated or centered and in what contexts are natural qualities elevated or centered (see Anderson 2015, 167).

In the film I juxtapose shots of a vacant lot and a park. Both places are striking for their similarities in look and feel, especially in terms of vegetation and wildlife, including insects and birds. I use dissolves to signify the “stream of time,” but also the continuity in natural processes between the two locations. Differences between the locations are shown, primarily in the chain link fence at the vacant lot, but also heard. The vacant lot is in downtown Corvallis, Oregon, and the park is located on a hill in a residential area in the same city. These differences in place are emphasized in the sound recording and editing (see Pink 2015, 124-126). Ultimately, the vacant lot was developed into a hotel, while the park, remains a park. The park in this case, “Woodland Meadow,” is explicitly kept in a more “natural” state, with minimal development, primarily for access. There are no play structures or sports fields.

In the normal course of urban planning and development the different outcomes for these landscapes are not surprising. The location of the vacant lot in the central business district made that particular landscape more valuable when further developed, while the park remains more valuable when less developed. However, it is also possible to see the vacant lot, prior to the hotel, as being more “wild” than the park. To preserve access and the look and feel of Woodland Meadow Park requires regular maintenance (the park had, in fact, been recently mowed at the time of my shoot). By comparison, I would point to Anna Tsing’s concept of “auto-rewilding” as a way of understanding the “naturalness” of the vacant lot (Interview at Allegra Lab, 17 November 2015). We could choose to value the work of the plants and animals that “re-wilded” that space as much as we choose to value the profit promised by the hotel, or the well-maintained open-space of the park. In that sense, Jackson’s provocation to ask, “what is worth saving and worth using” applies not just to landscapes in a cultural sense, but also to landscapes as hybrid geographies, where the more-than-human qualities of a landscape may also be valued for their “living function” and “having known various fortunes” no less than the features of a human-built environment.

Cited works from J.B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Yale University Press, 1997):

• "By way of Conclusion: How to Study Landscape" (1980).
• Notes and Comments: "Man and Nature" (1960).
• "'Sterile' Restorations Cannot Replace a Sense of the Stream of Time" (1994).
• "The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder" (1957-58).
• "The Word Itself" (1984).

Cited works from J.B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, (Yale University Press, 1994):

• “Beyond Wilderness.”
• “In Favor of Trees.”
• “Looking into Automobiles.”

Other cited works:

• Anderson, Jon. 2015. Understanding Cultural Geography, 2d edition (Routledge).
• Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2d edition (SAGE Publications).
• Whatmore, Sarah. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (SAGE Publications).

Odology

Odology from Shaun Huston on Vimeo.

My production of “Odology” was guided by two quotes from Jackson’s “Roads Belong in the Landscape”:

We do not always give credit to how the motorized American - commuter, tourist, truck driver - has accepted the new odology, how docile we have been in complying with the scientific definition of the highway as a managed authoritarian system of steady, uninterrupted flow for economic benefits (252).

And

But odologists seem to forget - and we ourselves sometimes forget - that the road serves other needs. For untold thousands of years we traveled on foot over rough paths and dangerously unpredictable roads, not simply as peddlers or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape (253).

These passages articulate a two-sided thesis: on the one hand, modern roads are heavily controlled and regulated to ensure capitalist efficiencies. On the other hand, “the road,” historically, has also been a space of freedom and transformation.

This thesis is clearly reflected in the commentary volunteered by the film’s subject, who, like Jackson, associates streets/roads with both capitalistic social controls and humanistic freedoms. His comments - “I can go wherever the hell I want” even if  “they” don’t want me to - also draw out the implicit promise of agency in the second passage I took from Jackson’s essay; simply, what we “sometimes forget” about roads, we can also remember.

While Jackson mentions both men and women when arguing for the transformative possibilities of roads, he does not explore how such experiences are, in practice, unevenly available. Ultimately, my film, like Jackson’s essay, leaves open this question of difference. Specifically, how does the intersection of who, when, and where affect how different people experience “the road,” both as a site of social control and a space of freedom?

In her critical history of American road narratives, Ann Brigham notes that the popular image of hitting the open road as a way to free oneself became prominent after World War II and this image centers “men on the move,” especially white, heterosexual men (2015, 53, 67-68). At the same time, different other people at different times - people of color, recent immigrants, women, Native peoples - have produced stories that challenge and complicate the equation of roads with liberation:

The so-called freedom often associated with mobility always occurs in relation to conflict around the introduction of spatial and social otherness. We must consider how a traveler’s liberation occurs through a process of incorporating otherness or consolidating identity through the shoring up of sameness and exclusion of  difference. And we must see how other travelers critique such processes by making them visible with their own movements (2015, 9-10).

Notably, such critiques do not reduce to a simplistic inequality where white, straight, cis-gendered men are free to go where they want, while everyone else has their mobility circumscribed. Rather, the stories of “other travelers” point to a more nuanced series of differences that depend on the particular intersections of identity with the landscape. Brigham’s book offers a wealth of texts that center a variety of figures, from Jack Kerouac to Thelma and Louise, but her text does not tell a straight linear history of inclusion. For example, before World War II, and the centering of men, many prominent road stories centered on women, and women return as central figures starting in the 1980s. 

Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust (2000), provides a broader field of references for the dualistic and complicated nature of the road. For example, in recounting Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s walking trips, Solnit notes that William is credited with innovating the pursuit of walking, on public roads, cross-country, “as part of an aesthetic experience” (82). In contrast, Dorothy was subjected to veiled opprobrium for being “un-ladylike” (84). In this case, her social class, and relationship to her brother, affords her license to be “un-ladylike,” but not without also being judged for taking that license. 

Katherine McKittrick, writing about The Underground Railroad in Demonic Grounds (2006), provides another example of the dualistic nature of the road. Like the Wordsworths, this example predates Brigham’s 20^th century history, but also brings the discussion back to the U.S. 

Following McKittrick, for enslaved black people, The Underground was, “an emancipatory lifeline if untold/unwritten, and site of violence/death if told/written” (18). Here, the road was a space of freedom so long as the route, and the use of it for emancipatory ends, remained “secret knowledge.” This contingency meant that the road was also a space of grave risk for those seeking, and needing, to use it for refuge and escape. In both of these additional examples, the road promises varying degrees of both liberation and oppression.

The subject of my film demonstrates a further paradox in narratives of the road and freedom. My informant is white and male, but also self-identifies as homeless. This is important because, following Cresswell (2006), Brigham argues that the freedom gained via the road is temporary. The ultimate purpose of the journey is to find, or re-find, one’s place in the world, and in America in particular. Brigham refers to this as a process of “incorporation” (2015, 8). Those who don’t “incorporate,” by failing to (re)find their place, unsettle the social order of modern nation-states, which, in Cresswell’s terms, is dominated by a “sedentarist metaphysics” (2006, 26). In a cultural world defined by such a metaphysics, it is possible to be too free, or too mobile. A road trip is one thing. Living on the road is another (see Brigham 2015, 7, and Cresswell 2006, 27). 

This paradox underlies the sense that while I can, in principle, go where I want, I am also always aware that I shouldn’t. The images I selected for the film are meant, in part, to show this paradox - roads in the landscape as simultaneously ordered by lines and signs that direct and channel traffic, but are also subverted by how people actually use them (“We were created to meander”) and by how people may choose to ignore roads altogether by cutting their own pathways (desire lines, following railroad tracks).

This tension, between the ideal of freedom and the realities of control and regulation, both formal and informal, both social and individual, is, I think, embedded in the two sides of Jackson’s thesis. Like the cultural landscape more broadly, roads are contested spaces. “Roads Belong in the Landscape” is an intervention in that contest. Jackson is not simply analyzing the state of roads, but wants to persuade readers to encounter roads not simply in their roles as workers and consumers, but as free subjects.

Cited work from J.B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Yale University Press, 1997):

• "Roads Belong in the Landscape" (1994).

Other cited works:

• Brigham, Ann. 2015. American Road Narratives: Re-imagning Mobility in Literature and Film (University of Virginia Press).
• Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge).
• McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press).
• Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books).