Hi Jencks

[neufer]

The Northumberland MAN-uscript

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

The Snowy Owl, a pub just to the right of Northumberlandia, will
undoubtedly benefit from the development, but manager Gina
Ward is also looking forward to the opening for personal reasons:
"I suppose it will bring extra business to the area, and that's
magnificent, but I love the idea and I love that they will be
making it into a nature reserve. I think it is going to be brilliant."

Sid the Sexist's favourite picnic spot? Maybe, but Northumberlandia is a joy
Charles Jencks's playful sculpture celebrates the human habit of seeing figures in the landscape

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Monday 3 September 2012 15.07 EDT

<<I am standing on a woman's breast, looking up her nostrils. She lies immobile in the tough landscape, her soft curves criss-crossed by spiralling paths that resemble graphic lines as if Pablo Picasso had sketched a lolloping nude on a Gauloises packet and a team of guys with bulldozers copied out his drawing on a colossal scale.

Nowadays buildings and sculptures that aspire to fame come with nicknames predevised by publicists. Just as the Shard likes to be known as … the Shard, Charles Jencks' huge earthwork Northumberlandia wants to be nicknamed the Lady of the North. It is a sprawling hill-sized nude that lies, modestly screened from the road by woodland, just outside Newcastle. I can't help wondering if the city that spawned the adult comic Viz might come up with other names for this carnal fantasy. The Nude of the North, the Nymph of the North … Sid the Sexist's favourite picnic site. Anyone who has ever wanted to clamber on a vast female form will enjoy this work of art. It's rollicking fun. At first you see a curvaceous landscape, a bit like the remains of some ancient hill fort preserved by English Heritage. Then as you head up one of the white paths that navigate what will, when the grass is fully grown, be a completely green constellation of orotund features, views open up of a superabundant body. Stand on Northumberlandia's head and you look down on her spiralling breasts, her splayed arms, her mountainous hips.

Her nose is a massive earthen lump, her eyes and lips are made of stone. Her nipples are circular tiles. Yet unless you look from the air, these fragments of a picture can only be put together in the imagination as you walk around the dimpled eminence. This is why Northumberlandia works as art. The image of a colossal naked woman sketched out with blobby freedom on the landscape of south-eastern Northumberland may sound a bit tacky and crass, but it never resolves itself into a simple recognisable form when you are walking on and around it. Instead, the different vistas that open up of her head, her legs, her tummy form a mental picture that relates in a suggestive way to the curvaceous textures of heaped earth.

Jencks is one of the founding figures of postmodern architecture, a powerful critic of what he saw in his influential writings in the 1970s as the aridity of modernist design. In recent years he has created a series of extravagant earthworks, primitivist works of art that recreate in pampered parks the mounds and ramparts of ancient fortifications and sculptures such as the ancient Serpent Mound in the US. Yet in this work he takes a big risk. His previous earthworks have been abstract and elegant. This is a full-on nude. A nude you climb. Is that absurd?

It is terrific. This is no facile folly but a playful sculpture that celebrates the ancient human habit of seeing figures in the landscape. Jencks is not the first artist to equate the female form with rolling hills and meadows. In their collaborative 16th century painting Sleeping Venus, the Venetian artists Giorgione and Titian pictured a sensuous nude lying in a landscape whose rolling contours seem tailored to her anatomy. In the 20th century Max Ernst made a similar point when he revealed a woman's body in a landscape in his collage Le Jardin de France.

Hills as bosoms, valleys as vaginas – Jencks evokes a rich mythology of the feminised Earth that has haunted ancient fertility cults and modern surrealists alike. Surrounded by calm lakes that like Northumberlandia herself have been salvaged from the mining works that eviscerate the Blagdob Estate of Viscount Ridley, this will surely become a popular picnic spot, and not just with sexist Viz characters. There's a slumberous dreamlike delicacy to this work of art that dares to proclaim the wonder of the human body, that fertile marvel.
Charles Jencks

It is almost impossible to give Charles Jencks one job title. He is an artist, a landscape designer, a polemicist, a modernist and postmodernist theorist and a writer of important and bestselling books on architecture. If that were not enough he is also the co-founder, with his late wife, of Maggie's cancer caring centres. Jencks, 73, was born in Baltimore, studied at Harvard and moved to the UK in the mid-1960s. He now lives in Scotland and is the writer of numerous books and essays on architecture including The Language of Postmodern Architecture and The Iconic Building – the Power of Enigma and The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. That last title reveals some of his central thoughts: that art and architecture exist to make us think about the cosmos; that there is always a bigger picture. In an interview with the Guardian last year he said: "It's something people have done even before they built Stonehenge, so why not now?" He added: "I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational. But, yes, the lack of culture in so much new architecture is worrying." His belief in the ability of buildings to uplift helped drive the creation of the network of Maggie's centres, named after his late wife, Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died in 1995. Jencks is a leading figure in landscape architecture and his flair for reflecting science in the landscape led to Cern, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, asking him to work on its gardens. As well as Northumberlandia, Jencks has been busily working with the engineer Cecil Balmond on a landmark for Gretna on the England-Scotland border. The Star of Caledonia, an illuminated sculpture, is due to completed in 2014.>>