Some places that are destination points also do other things. A person can visit the Empire State Building to look at the little ants on the street that they view from near the top, or they can, while on street level, look up to the not quite sheer towers that are above, there being setbacks from the broader base of the lower floors. That is majesty and artistry occurring while floors and offices are rented and occupied within the floors. A tourist has the same experience when visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral so as to see the spaces of the church during which a major or minor service is also taking place. You can look at the architecture of the George Washington Bridge while also watching the automobiles travel over the most heavily traveled bridge in the world. On the other hand, there are destination points that are only to be looked at. There is nothing else to do with them other than allow people to observe and tramp through them, which is the case with the national parks that I visited in the past few weeks in southern Utah, when my son and grandson and I visited Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park and Canyonlands, the Park Service having very artistically arranged for visitor centers to look on imposing edifices and also to create roadways that allowed access for astonishing sites to see. But the cliffs and canyons and rock formations were not meant to do anything but look, to be turned only into aesthetic objects, because nothing else could be done with that harsh terrain. You couldn’t farm or easily build houses in such remote terrain and there are or were no ores. There were just places to see and so it is worth thinking about what are the aesthetics to be drawn from people who are forced to consider something aesthetic because there is nothing else to do with them, as well as to consider these objects by people who, like myself, claim to have a disciplined take on the aesthetic.
The first thing to happen when confronting an aesthetic object, which is to say something to consider as an object of contemplation, is to evade it by associating with it an image that seems more familiar than accurate, as if that could seem pleased. So the things in Zion National Park were early on named by something that seemed majestic or powerful without capturing much about what the experiences were that these places conveyed. The high and closely packed bluffs that surrounded as if an enclosure (see, I am already evoking human created forms) were called things so as to evoke grandeur of a sort that was biblical or created rather than naturally formed, as if to rebel against the idea that such things were not artifacts of nature rather than of people. These included naming points at Zion as “The Grotto” or “The Temple of Sinawava” and naming rock formations as “The Three Patriarchs” and “The Great White Throne”. This is not just a late Nineteenth Century American fashion. We all describe natural features as “columns” and “walls” when they are not. Rather than this anthropomorphism, there is in fact an intriguing play back and forth in seeing a figure as both natural and as human and find pleasing to see each one in the other, imitating what is its opposite. Why is that experience so pleasant and satisfying? Perhaps because the viewer takes control of what the features are being observed, given how momentous are the natural figures, or perhaps what happens is just the reverse, that the people who look at the natural formations are so overwhelmed that they have to retreat from their perceptions of what they see so as to make it more familiar in that it is more human even if the names given are sufficiently grandiloquent so as to convey and impress with words the formations that people view.
It is therefore rather difficult to provide an accurate description of physical features without resorting to metaphors having to do with people creating artifacts or seeing these objects as somehow human. Let us try. Zion National Park contains a number of massive bluffs that are sufficiently close to one another so that even in broad daylight the bluffs create shadows for one another. These sandstone bluffs have unevenly sheared walls and below them are smaller rocks which have, over thousands of years, fallen off from the upper reaches and have landed below, close to them. The sheared upper parts create sharp angles and rounded edges of various shades of brown, and there are fir trees on the lower reaches and kinds of sagebrush I cannot identify. Between the bluffs, there are small streams and trees and fallen branches and loomy land to wander through, and there is a cleverly devised road that finds its way to wander between the bluffs, every turn providing a new vista of bluffs further or nearer away, some spaces opening up to see more remote ones or close enough to one another that they seem as if to be conjoined. What is apparent is that the weathering alone and the underlying geological structure are all that happen to the bluffs, and so the only presence there is of people who have come to look, much more recent than any other events that have happened.The eeriness and the stillness of the place make it therefore a remote place, however well the national parks have made their mark, and so the experience is that of otherness and also a very strange kind of beauty precisely because it does not have the balance that marks human created beauty, such as an urn or a painting. It follows its own natural laws and so very foreign to the roadside inns or the interstates that are not very far away.
Photos do not do justice to the three dimensionality of these bluffs, even if they do betray stratifications of color and texture that could be dealt as two dimensional except for the fact that whatever are the geological features that give rise to the striation is encountered in its massive, separate blocks that convey depth and a permanence that is indeed miraculously changed only in very considerable lengths of time. The trees in fall foliage are not an apron for what is behind and above, because the trees are just there, living where they may, and only the people seeing that the trees only adorn the variety of colors of the stratification behind them. The colors seem unlikely, except perhaps to a geologist, because they seem to be made of the same matter, but are instead black and brown and red and light slate, very clearly divided from one another, and so again following its rules of its own rather than of human composition of contrasting colors. And behind is what is called Zion’ “Great White Throne”, which seems to me a less spectacular object, is a giant stone of gray with tints of red and brown, that emerge somewhat alone from the near distance, ever to make people musing about what is far and what is near.
There are disparities or contradictions in everything you see in Zion. For example, there are repeated horizontal scratchy lines that are pretty much parallel to one another, one element, I suppose, of striation. On the other hand, there are shoulder like verticals built into what I assume is the way massive formations need so as to hold themselves together and are very different in their presentations of the horizontals, these horizontals seen as delicate fillegrees while the verticals seem internal to the structure of the various monoliths, and so each very distinct and yet overlapping the two experiences so that the viewer has multiple experiences at once of the space to be seen.
The atmosphere of Zion continues even after having left the national park in that so multiple are the curvatures of space to be seen from the road. We wandered northwest from Southern Utah to Salt Lake City through a two lane highway which went through desolate territory, very few farmers or cattle to interrupt the multi angled curves from the sand and sagebrush right up to the road and up through undulating hills that are very different from the sharp angles of the granite mountains in the East, the hills in Utah crossed by a long thin lake and occasional fences, falling into dusk and then a very deep darkness because there were no stars or lights, only the ever developing curves of the hills and the relative flatlands. The scene provided an enormity of space, of what an existentialist might call “spacelessness” that was gripping and I hope to retain that sense rather than resign the place to being just empty. The place has shape rather than just emptiness in that trivial sense of something not worth noticing.
Taken by H. Grünberger; February 2020
Arches National Park, for its part, presents a different existential question. Where Zion is unhuman and remote, monumental only as a metaphor, Arches cannot be understood as otherwise than its double play as human and natural. That is because its objects are quaint, presenting themselves precisely because they are plays on what people had done rather than what nature made, ever reminded of objects that look as if they were human. One of the objects found among the geological features is called “Balanced Rock”. It shows an egg-like thing poised as if on a point so that it is about to fall off, and so does evoke something as if humanly placed as an optical illusion or else a trump d’oeil fashioned by some Dadaist sculpture. It is amusing in that you wait for it to fall off and have not done so for thousands and thousands of years. But go beyond the humor that any park visitor can comprehend.
One of those configurations of rock in Arches,as best as I could find, does not even have a name. A part of it is like a bridge across an empty expanse, and so can be clearly identified as an arch in that it connects one place to another even though there is not much behind or ahead of it. This upper arch has a rock underhang which clearly shows that it is not nicely finished but is a natural rather than a man made artifact. The flat bottom of the lower arch, however, emphasizes the way as if it were man made, because it has a lighter texture, as if it were a road well travelled, and so different from the various browns that color the upper arch. Put together, the experience is not of a hole between rocks, as is in so many of the arches in the park, but a place that looks rectilinear, a double set of pathways, one above and one below.
Let us suppose that a miniature version of this one of the arches were put on a pedestal, only one point at which the modelled double arches is connected to the floor, and made in copper, and placed in the Whitney Museum, or some other museum of contemporary art, or else made a bit larger so as to take up a floor, or made, perhaps, out of skeens of a purple wool, or maybe even a Madeleine Albright decorative metal broach. Any one of them would have that distinctive shape, an equivalent of the Nike swoosh, and so part of everyone’s familiar and intriguing shape. That would make its figure to be for itself, purely just its shape, and so a contemporary art for appreciation, even if the original arches can be appreciated only within its rough and wild context, and that allows it to be seen and appreciated. You don’t have to be a student of the arts to know what it is even if people distance themselves from it by seeing it as an eccentric geological artifact rather than a matter of pure art, but such a setting in a museum would make it artful if they cared to use this adjective.
A note: The pictures used in this article are intended for educational use only. No credit or commerical use is intended or implied.