The art of cultivation (på kinesisk)

 All art forms have their own language. As music has its sound language, ballet has its step language and film has its film language, landscape architecture also has its specific language. As an art of cultivation it has two, which I call an agricultural and a pastoral language corresponding to two different ways of cultivating the earth - for plants or for animals, as a farmer or as a shepherd.

In its manmade form the language talks about initiative, growth, innovation, control and action. In its untouched, apparently natural form it talks about self-regulation, balance, ripeness and existence.

The significance in the first interpretation lies in what you do, in the construction and in the second in what you are or in the essence.

If we assume that the language of art can be used to understand and deal with ideas of a society, much can be taken from the language of the art of cultivation. It talks about a significance, that is not individual, but part of the culture of the society. It is bound up with existential interpretations and the formation of semantics in a process of social change. It is the subject of a continuous discussion.

In my continuous discussion, I have posed the question to modern landscape architecture, whether the beautiful and true lies in what people have added and created or in the apparently  naturally arisen. The answer has been that the preference of the inter-war period was apparently created by nature, formulated in a language that was the result of a pastoral form of cultivation and that the preference in the post-war years was the controlled, man made and that it was told in a language taken from an agricultural form of cultivation. The interpretation was that the need of the Inter War period was for a tolerant attitude as expressed in reform and democracy movements, modern education, dance and music and the admiration for the self-sown and natural.

After the end of the Second World War, one was left with the painful experience that human nature was unreliable and dangerous if it were let loose. After the Allies decision to build new welfare-democracies with people at the centre the solution had to be to educate and control human nature. In the early Cold War period it was decided that man should conquer his nature and instincts and keep a distance from nature.

The cultivated and manufactured became what was natural and thus true and beautiful. Whereas the ideal previously came from the pastoral landscape, it was now sought where the hand of man was most apparent, in the agricultural landscape and in the orange groves and terraced landscapes of the South.

If we stick to the war metaphors the question to the Cold War - and Terror War times is still whether the beautiful and true lies in what people have added or created, or in an inner order; whether this is assigned to nature or inherent forces. Does the beautiful and true, in the light of contemporary demands for experience and identity, lies in the abundant, pluralistic, complex and polychrome or in the small, minimal, monotone and monochrome, which can still be connected to the two ways of cultivating. By the agricultural way it is a matter of removing and by the pastoral way it is a matter of laizzes faire. These two approaches, less and more, seem to be in play today, whereas in the last century it was either/or.