die dritte Kammer - geheime gaerten rolandswerth

The simultaneity of basically contradictory experiences is noticed by any attentive visitor to Rolandswerth in other respects as well. Thus, in the garden of the two artists, directed and diffuse time sequences coexist undisturbed. Vegetation cycles, tours, but also time standing still – for the contemplation of a particular landscape or preserved tree exotics – are perfectly compatible there with integrated time sequences and distant ages conjured up in historical quotation.

At various places in the park, the visitor encounters text. This is by no means unusual for a garden. In fact, garden art and art in the garden have been operating with texts on every conceivable level for centuries. This affinity between the work of art and the work of text can be documented in numerous ways; indeed, it is basically at the beginning of garden history, which traditionally sees itself as having grown out of the dream of Poliphilus 5. In the 18th century, an Abbé Delille6 was therefore able to spread unchallenged the advice that gardening should better be placed in the hands of poets and philosophers instead of commissioning architects.

As a result, the historical spectrum ranges from the rock garden Sanspareil in Upper Franconia, an installation of Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, which goes back to a concrete novel, to complex contexts of the history of ideas, as they can be reconstructed, for example, for the gardens in Gera to texts of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. One can thus say that at least until the classical landscape garden, that is, well into the 19th century, the premise held: neither form nor language are secondary features of a garden. Both have independent hermeneutic meanings and together achieve a density of meaning not possible elsewhere.

 



The extent to which the mutual interpenetration of literature and visual art can still be fruitful today in the medium of the garden can be experienced directly in Rolandswerth. Already upon entering the park through the main portal with two entrances of different sizes, the visitor encounters a formally enigmatic text. Here is the first part of a sentence that places this place with its long, eventful history in new contexts. It is the well-known dictum of the German poet Novalis, author of the romantic work par exellence, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, “[…] the  speculation completed leads back to nature”. In terms of content, this quotation refers to the Age of Enlightenment, which created aesthetic concepts of nature that are still influential today.

In 1995, the same sentence gave the title to an important book by the literary scholar Silvio Vietta on the modern relationship between nature and aesthetics. The artists, who had been involved with gardens for some time at that point, took the author’s accusation that there was no contemporary language of garden art, that it was rather at the level of a flattened late Romanticism, as a personal challenge.7 Bittermann and Duka explain the implantation of the text itself thus: “Just as ‘green’ can play a mediating (and not a primary) role in the classical color wheel, so the search for balance, for reconciliation of opposites, is historically the essence of an early Romantic trait. Thus we have chosen to make the Hentzenpark in Rolandswerth the projection surface for an essential statement against ‘the obscuration of the idea of wholeness’. With the sentence from Novalis’ Allgemeines Brouillon of 1798: ‘Die vollendete Speculation führt zur Natur zurück’ (The speculation completed leads back to nature), we seize a fragment that, as a figure of thought, assigns a superordinate principle to the park in addition to its historically multilayered categories of meaning. “8

This theoretical declaration of intent found its concrete counterpart in newly implanted, architectural set pieces with different aesthetic and content codes. Similar to most large history parks, each of these small-scale architectures has a practical function – sometimes more, sometimes less obvious – and serves, for example, as a place to sit or a breeding hole for bats. All of the individual works also possess distinct sculptural qualities. They are made of contemporary materials and avoid any mimetic adaptation to their surroundings. On the contrary, the new main gate, which bears the first words of Novalis’ quote, is made of white-painted aluminum and thus clearly stands out from its surroundings. As allegories from romantic myths and as quotations from Goya’s Capriccio Der Schlaf der Vernunft gebiert Ungeheuer (The Sleep of Reason Bears Monsters), there are also cut-out silhouettes of bats next to the text fragment, which, with a bit of luck, we will encounter again in the park in the flesh. A path that used to be next to the entrance has been closed by a so-called Benjes hedge. Here, as in no other part of the park, the outside is strictly separated from the inside. Like an initiation, one passes through the white gate and slips into the double role of observer and actor. 

After a short walk, you reach a place between a large redwood tree and a copper beech, where a concrete tower stands over ten meters high. It is composed of six segments, each of which bears the lettering “fuehrt” in a circle and which are mounted on top of each other, always twisted by one letter, from top to bottom, to make the word uniquely legible. The tower is a plant tower, which is designed in such a way that both planted and random plants can grow on it. In addition, this hortus conclusus provides nesting sites for bats and wild bees. This tower is the central artistic intervention. Bittermann and Duka understand it as a generator that can be experienced rather than read, since the words reveal their meaning only when slowly circled. It is the key link for understanding the garden text. One finds him also several times on pictures of the artists. He and his very similar brothers appear there like stone witnesses of a culture that seems to have withdrawn from the gardens long ago. The last part of the sentence is shown above a side exit that gives a view of an adjacent campsite. It was mounted in place of a dilapidated railing and consists of sturdy steel letters painted white. The fact that the inscription “back to nature” can only be seen in mirror writing that is difficult to decipher from the given course, but can be read normally from the towpath outside the park, appears as a further paradox of the “geheimen gärten rolandswerth”. In any case, these offer the visitor a multitude of possible directions of view and movement. For the specifications of the path system are by no means so exclusive that not everyone could discover new, own vistas and axes of escape during his visit, which may well be in contradiction to those of other viewers.