Geometry in the Garden Pt. 2
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (East Garden)
Peter Newman July 16, 2024
The Japanese archipelago consists of 14,125 islands and is home to 111 volcanoes, nearly a tenth of those active in the world. Most famous of all, Mount Fuji occupies the physical, cultural and spiritual landscape with a compelling symmetrical presence. For centuries pilgrims have climbed to the summit and performed a ritual walk around the crater.
The rock garden is an alternative proposition to ideas of abundance. Instead, it offers a kind of rich austerity. A metaphorical abstraction of nature, at once playful and meaningful. More akin to atmospheres of the mind and conceptually seductive. Geological time is set against the seasons or a day. Providing a space for reflection, often to be viewed from a slightly elevated Engawa platform, but not walked into. Scholars’ rocks as objects for contemplation, originated in China and aligned with an earlier Shinto veneration of stone, and the belief in its ability to attract Kami, or mythological spirits. A form of geomancy is present in the asymmetric placement of rocks and their relationship to one another. Within the confines of the garden imaginative projection and interpretation abound.
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939 (South Garden)
Mirei Shigemori (1897-1975) made two hundred and forty gardens across Japan. Although working exclusively in his home country, he collaborated with his friend Isamu Noguchi in choosing rocks for the UNESCO Garden in Paris (1958). His most famous work and his first major commission is the Zen garden at Tofuku-ji Temple in Kyoto. A fire had destroyed the main building and he was tasked with renovating the gardens. The temple couldn’t afford to pay him for his work, but he agreed on the condition of total creative freedom. “If I were to make a garden here, my work would live forever,” he said.
The garden is composed of four parts, one for each face of the central hall. As you enter, on the right are seven cylindrical rocks. The foundation stones from an earlier building, rearranged in a seemingly abstract way. As you walk further, the pattern reveals itself as the stars in the Plough or Big Dipper asterism, one of the most useful in celestial navigation. A line through the first two stars locates Polaris, the North Star.
On the left, the South Garden is inhabited by four dramatic rock clusters, representing Horai, the islands of immortals. The tallest is a dark monolith of rugged volcanic rock. These are set in an expansive sea of gravel, from which a green landscape rises in the distance, symbolizing five sacred mountains. Walking clockwise around the hall are two further gardens, more abstract still. First, a checkered pattern, in the form of clipped azalea hedges. And again, in a sweep of alternating squares of stone and moss. The pattern surfaces from a fluid green earth, before dissolving back into the ground away from you.
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (North Garden)
A grid is a rational mapping of space, but also invokes an idea of the infinite. A fragment cropped from a larger fabric, it suggests a world beyond the frame. An alternating grid is an interweaving of opposites, the stage on which the ancient games of Go and Chess are enacted. Grids appear in traditional craftwork, like the Ichimatsu pattern of dark and light squares, which represents prosperity and expansion. The same pattern can be found in the floors of black and white marble of grand houses in Europe. They also feature in the Renaissance perspective studies of Uccello and Leonardo. Yet the grid remains inherently modern.
‘In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction.’ For artists like Mondrian and Agnes Martin, the grid is ‘a staircase to the universal’¹. They exist outside of time. By expanding in all directions, a grid defies the linearity of a narrative. An abstraction of endless choice and possibilities. No direction home.
“It’s a great game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.” ²
¹ Grids. Rosalind Krauss 1979. October magazine. MIT Press
² Though the Looking Glass 1871. Lewis Carroll
Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.
