from “Whistler’s Fog and the Aesthetics of Place”

Bruce B. Janz

University of Central Florida

At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them. (Oscar Wilde)

[T]here was no fog in London before Whistler painted it. (Ernst Gombrich)

Is place an aesthetic concept? In much of the vast writing on the nature of place3, the concept has largely been viewed as either ontological, epistemological, or ethical. Most phenomenologists (and a great deal of writing on place is phenomenological) view it as ontological, even giving it a kind of priority over the more metaphysical “space” in human experience. Those who think of place in symbolic or structural terms tend to make it epistemological. It is a kind of knowledge (or site of knowledge), and knowledge of place means knowledge of the symbolic structures in which shared meaning is encoded. And, its ethical status is pervasive - it stands as a kind of original good, a rough analogue of Rousseau’s “nature”, for many writers. Attending to place means attending to what is good, wholesome, life-affirming, or correct.

These are useful approaches. But what difference would it make if place was aesthetic, or if we aestheticized place? Primarily, it would mean that representation becomes the central issue for place. As with Whistler’s London fog, there is no fog without its representations. The metaphysical question of the existence of fog is beside the point; Wilde is arguing that fog did not “fit” into the mental canvas of London until someone put it into the literal canvas. Fog came to mean something in London, and as such is made available aesthetically rather than metaphysically. The same seems to be true of place, at

several levels. Places are made available inasmuch as they are included in meaningful discourse the way that the London fog was included. But also, the concept of place itself has become meaningful in recent years across a wide range of disciplines, and as such has been “painted” in to our intellectual canvas. It has become meaningful. I am interested in both senses.

I have been avoiding making the bald claim that “place is an aesthetic concept”. That claim itself is one of certitude and exclusion, metaphysical by nature. I am more interested in a way of painting the landscape of place-use. Like Whistler, I want to make certain aspects of place available, even as I believe the concept of place makes certain aspects of human experience available, and as some places themselves are made available in their representations. There is no point in speculating about place apart from its representations; yet, place is also not simply reducible to concepts. This is something

Henri Lefebvre understood in his discussion of space - place (to use a word he avoids) is not just perceived or physical space, nor is it the representations of space (conceptualized space); it is representational space, "space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols."1 But Lefebvre stopped short of considering the range of uses of place as generative.

What must be realized, to have an aesthetics of place, is that the idea of place is as much a

window on its intentions of use as it is a descriptor of an aspect of human experience. The concept does work, it accomplishes something, and that accomplishment is different for different people. Indeed, the term is so malleable, yet so fecund, that it is pressed into service for a wide variety of reasons, some of them contradictory to each other (or even internally contradictory). If our goal is to determine the meaning of place in some metaphysical manner, to nail down just what it is we are talking about before

we go out and ask what qualifies as a place, we will be frustrated. “Place” suffers not from too few meanings, but from far too many. Rather than sifting through those meanings to find the most relevant to a particular occasion, I am more interested in thinking about what this overdetermination might suggest for the pictures of place that scholars and writers are trying to paint. In short, I am more interested in the place of place, in the range of its uses, and in the ways that those uses, taken together, produce

interesting and unexpected results.

1.Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991: 39.