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Borrowed Scenery and Ancillary Aesthetics
David Fenner
Abstract
‘Borrowed scenery’ is a concept of garden design where what lies outside a garden, but may be seen from within the garden, contributes to the aesthetic character of that garden. ‘Ancillary aesthetics’ refers to the use of aesthetic objects and elements that, while distinct from and secondary to the primary aesthetic object and events they support, nonetheless contribute to the aesthetic characters of those principal objects. After considering borrowed scenery and what counts as an object or element of ancillary aesthetics, I consider how the functions of borrowed scenery may illuminate the functions of ancillary aesthetic objects and elements.
Key Words
ancillary aesthetics; aesthetic event; aesthetic object; borrowed scenery; gardens
1. Introduction
‘Borrowed scenery’ is a concept of garden design where what lies outside a garden but which can be seen from within a garden—mountains, waterfalls, rivers, rocks, and so forth—contributes to the aesthetic character of that garden, augmenting the elemental and aesthetic aspects of that garden’s contents.[1] ‘Ancillary aesthetics’ refers first to the employment of aesthetic objects and elements to frame or act as a setting for aesthetic objects (or events) where these principal objects are meant to be the primary focus of attention, and second to the contribution to the aesthetic character and value of those principal aesthetic objects by the aesthetic characters and value of those setting and framing elements and objects.[2] The thesis of this paper is that we can learn something about how ancillary aesthetics works from considering how borrowed scenery functions in the context of The Garden. In other words, the question that this paper seeks to address is: how do ancillary aesthetic elements and objects enhance their primary aesthetic objects and events, and can the concept of borrowed scenery shed light on this relational function?
2. The evolution of the concept of borrowed scenery
‘Borrowed scenery’ (or ‘borrowing scenery’) is a concept nested in gardening thought particularly from East Asia. While the logographic characters, 借景, are the same in both Chinese and Japanese, in Chinese ‘borrowed/borrowing scenery,’ is jièjǐng (or jie jing), and in Japan it is shakkei. And while the concept has its origins in East Asia—first written about by Ji Cheng in China during the late Ming Dynasty, more on Ji in a moment—and was associated with the creation of gardens, the concept has since evolved to include more in garden thought than simply the inclusion of natural objects that lie outside a garden. The concept has become a staple in gardening thought nearly worldwide, and we can think about a garden’s borrowed scenery as including objects and aspects of the artifactual world. But we can think about borrowed scenery as broader still, in ways that speak to the inclusion of objects that are external to an art or an aesthetic object that significantly contribute to the aesthetic character of that focal object. This is ‘ancillary aesthetics.’
Aesthetic discourse that understands the form of an aesthetic object (or event), that is, its perceptually available features along with the interrelations of those features—the object’s form—as the central thing, the only thing, or nearly the only thing relevant to a full account of the aesthetic character of an object, or to the evidentiary data used to support an aesthetic claim about that object, is something that in the past has been popular, but is less so today. In the late twentieth and now in the twenty-first century we find more popular the view that external relations in which an art or aesthetic object is involved can be important and relevant to its character and to the evidence we muster as we make claims about that object. These external relations—concerning how the object is related to other objects, to facts about its coming to be, to events that happened (or are happening) during the object’s lifespan, to how it has been received (or is being received) by those engaged in attending to it, and so forth—we call ‘context.’ Borrowed scenery and ancillary aesthetics are all about context.
Ji Cheng wrote The Craft of Gardens (Yuanye 園冶) in 1631, published in 1634.[3] The book, likely the oldest Chinese text on The Garden, is about the construction of gardens, but plants are not its focus. Instead, Ji focuses on the siting of a garden and the location and placement, and character, of the buildings that are placed within the garden. Siting focuses on topography and geography. While both Confucian and Taoist influences are evident, a more Taoist spirit seems at play as Ji describes the placement and adornment of buildings. Symmetries and strong formal relationships are not as important as diversity of style and a slight randomness in how the buildings occupy the space. He writes:
In all building the most difficult aspect is that of the non-structural features or decorative elements; moreover, buildings in gardens are different from ordinary dwelling-houses, for they must have order in variety and yet their orderliness must not be too rigid: even this orderliness should have a pleasing unpredictability, and yet at their most diverse there should be an underlying consistency.[4]
One can imagine each of Ji’s garden buildings as a separate room—with a separate function, many of them social—in a single work of (metaphorical) architecture; only the architecture and what fills the space among the rooms is a garden. The sixth and final chapter of the book, called “Scenic Features” (obviously in translation), focuses on borrowed scenery, and here Ji focuses first on the role of mountains, then on rocks, and finally on other kinds of scenery. The chapter, and the book, ends with the following:
There is no definite way of making the most of scenery; you know it is right when it stirs your emotions. Making use of natural scenery is the most vital part of garden design. There are various aspects such as using scenery in the distance, near at hand, above you, below you, and at certain times of the year. But the attraction of natural objects, both the form perceptible to the eye and the essence which touches the heart, must be fully imagined in your mind before you put pen to paper, and only then do you have a possibility of expressing it completely.[5]
With a coauthor, I argue that it is borrowed scenery that transforms a Japanese Zen dry landscape garden (a karesansui, 枯山水), say, one composed exclusively of gravel and stones, one devoid of any plant, into a proper garden.[6] It is perhaps the only space where plant life is absent that may count as a bona fide garden, but we argue that it is a bona fide garden because the borrowed scenery that exists just beyond the karesansui’s walls contribute their character to the walled dry landscape area. An area exclusively of stones and gravel or sand, absent this sort of plant-rich context, can only be a garden in a metaphorical sense.
Karesansui are not the only Japanese garden styles that incorporate borrowed scenery into their defining and aesthetic characters. Most do. This is the case even with the tiny tsubo-niwa (坪庭) garden, a garden frequently found in urban settings, in small courtyards, or within buildings. Here, the (literal) architecture that surrounds the garden gives it its focus and makes it stand out. The function of the surrounding architecture is as borrowed scenery—a tsubo-niwa outside of an artifactual context is just a very small garden—and so even in this classic East Asian context we see the artifactual functioning as borrowed scenery.
Some of London’s great royal gardens (Green Park, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park) have huge open-space lawns, and some are large enough that one can almost escape evidence that one is in a bustling city. But this is not the case with St. James’s Park. While there is a large lawn, it is almost impossible to be anywhere in the park where one cannot hear at least faint street noises, and one typically, if looking to the west, can see Buckingham Palace, and to the east, Horse Guards, and further along, the London Eye. New York’s Central Park is more like the larger royal parks in the sense that one can be in various parts of the park and escape notice that one is in Manhattan. But in some areas of the park, one can hear the street noises, both from outside and from the streets that cross the park, and one can see the neighboring skyscrapers and even on occasion be caught in their shadows. While all these gardens, if we can agree that a park is a garden (see endnote 1), constitute urban oases, for some and in many artifactual elements such as noises, visible buildings, and urban smells provide a borrowed scenery that enhances the realization that one is both inside and metaphorically outside a vibrant urban center. So, not only can borrowed scenery include the artifactual as well as the natural, borrowed “scenery” can include (at least) the auditory and olfactory as well as the visual.[7] To say otherwise is to adopt a parochialism that seems at best artificial and at worse limiting in consideration of one’s lived experience.
2.1 How borrowed scenery works: continuity and contrast
Borrowed scenery functions first either by pointing to a continuity between the inside-garden space and the outside-garden space or by highlighting a contrast between the two. Continuity emphasizes the interconnectedness not only of the two spaces but of nature as a whole, and this can have the psychological or spiritual effect of emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things, including ourselves with our gardens and with nature in general. The employment of borrowed scenery signals the surrendering of some level of control by the garden designer. Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Archibald Alison points out that, conceived as a work of art, the garden’s artist is not working with a fully plastic medium, one they can mold to express the fullness of their artistic vision, but rather the garden designer must work in cooperation with a partner who rarely if ever compromises, is not open to negotiation, and is prone on occasion to some unpredictability (predation, disease, storms, sudden plant death).[8] Yet, in the case of borrowed scenery, the designer must surrender even more, as what control they have over their garden is not typically mirrored in control over the borrowed scenery.[9] This surrender emphasizes the continuity of the nature of the garden with the nature that lies outside gardens. It should come as no surprise that borrowed scenery as a concept originates in cultures that have rich Buddhist histories, and in this vein we can celebrate the fact that when the inside-garden space is primarily composed of natural objects and the outside-garden space is too, we can witness in both the growth of living things and the unfolding of natural processes in harmony with each other.
The highlighting of contrast occurs when, for instance, the inside-garden space is dominated by plants and the outside-garden space is predominantly artifactual, as we discussed with Central Park. But this comes in degrees. Sometimes the contrast is stark, as we see at the edges of Central Park, where one can see skyscrapers and hear city noises. But sometimes where we may expect to see a contrast between the natural and the artifactual worlds we instead see something on the border of continuity and contrast. Many gardens include fountains, statuary, architectural follies, and small buildings like gazebos, which fit gracefully in a garden, elevating the aesthetic character and worth of that garden. When what is outside the garden has this character, we seem to have a choice as to whether to see that borrowed scenery as complementary or as contrasting. From the Blue Bridge in St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace is framed, at least in the growing seasons, by trees, including at least one giant weeping willow, and the vista appears seamless, as if the palace were created specifically as a garden-enhancing focal point. But, turning around, the sight of the London Eye might seem a bit alien to the naturalness of the park, and so we might appreciate it more as contrasting the oasis that is St. James’s Park from the more mechanized London world. We see the complementary function at work repeatedly in Capability Brown’s eighteenth-century aristocratic British estate designs, as he employed axial sightlines that ended with significant works of architecture that lay outside—sometimes well outside—the estate grounds. In all Brown cases, nature framed these clocktowers or church steeples (or what have you) in ways that enhanced the garden’s aesthetics. Still, in these borderline cases, it is a matter of perspective and/or subjective decision. There is no rule that requires borrowed scenery to be always one thing or another, say, always complementary and never contrasting, or always one thing for all perspectives at all times.
2.2 How borrowed scenery works: curation
While the garden designer typically has no control on the contours of the mountains, rivers, or buildings that form the outside-garden scenery to be borrowed, the garden designer is responsible for the curation of these vistas (or stimuli for other senses). This is clear in what Ji writes, quoted above. Haphazard borrowed scenery is not borrowed scenery. It is just intrusion. An interesting case in point is the discovery that Walt Disney made in Anaheim with Disneyland, which then led him to purchase 27,000 acres near Orlando and put the Magic Kingdom in the northerly center of it; and not only that, but to separate the parking lots from the Magic Kingdom with a huge lake. Walt Disney was a master of the reverse of borrowed scenery, but this was a lesson he had to learn from the 500-acre Anaheim property, which was rather quickly surrounded by businesses that were at odds with the escapism Disney prized.
In a garden where borrowed scenery is employed, the garden designer must be very conscious, as Ji points out, from the very start, of how the outside-garden scenery will contribute. And they must be conscious of this from every possible vantage point. If the garden is to be fully surrounded by borrowed scenery, then every direction should present an enhancing vista. If the borrowed scenery is high up, then it must be enhancing as high as one can see; and the same if the borrowed scenery is down. There is nothing, for instance, preventing a garden designer from specifically siting a garden so that interesting cloud formations might be a regular feature. And, in complement, there is nothing preventing a garden designer from creating within the garden berms or banks of tall trees with thick growth to shield the garden visitor from a vista the designer believes will not enhance it. This may take supreme mastery of planning skill, but the garden designer is the responsible party, and it is the garden designer who will get the credit if they can pull off such feats.
Now, it should be noted, given the character of unfolding nature and the character of human development, that the garden designer may not always know what scenery will eventually surround their garden. This is the case with Disney in Anaheim, and it is arguably the case with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as they designed Central Park in the mid-1800s. Olmsted’s prescience on this point is well documented—he expected the park to be in the midst of a bustling city—but it is unclear that his prescience could have extended so far as to understand the scale of skyscrapers.[10] It is the skill of the experienced garden designer to try to account for the future as well as they can.
2.3 How borrowed scenery works: effectiveness
Following from this last point, the effectiveness of the borrowed scenery for a particular garden may be judged on two criteria (or apparently so). First, does it meet the goals the designer had in mind for it? If the idea is vastness, as it was in both the cases of André Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles and Capability Brown’s designs, then we can judge the borrowed scenery in those terms. If the idea is a sense of height or the feeling of being in a protected valley, we can judge the worth of the borrowed scenery in these terms. Second, does the employed borrowed scenery actually contribute to the aesthetic character and/or aesthetic worth of the garden? Sometimes it will not, with Disneyland being a case in point; other times it does so beautifully, as it does, no matter in what direction one looks, in the case of St. James’s Park (Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, the Mall, the Birdcage Walk). Aesthetic character/aesthetic worth does not always equate to beauty or even to beauty plus the sublime. On occasion, a garden may be designed to present a different sort of set of aesthetic virtues. One could imagine some version of a postmodern design that might be enhanced aesthetically by strongly industrialized borrowed scenery.[11] If the aesthetic character/aesthetic worth is fungible in this way, then the second criterion may collapse into the first, with the value of the employment of a particular borrowed scenery dependent solely on the designer’s goals and the overall coherence of the design—that is, the intentional as manifested in the formal—inclusive of what lies beyond the garden’s borders.
3. Ancillary aesthetic objects and elements
Borrowed scenery is a type of ancillary aesthetics, if we take ancillary aesthetics to refer to all secondary aesthetic elements and objects largely in service to the value and character of primary aesthetic objects to which they point. Despite borrowed scenery being a fairly well-developed concept, it is still a relatively recent addition to the set of all things ancillary aesthetics. While I credit Ji Cheng as the first to write about it (in the early seventeenth century), we can see scenery (mountains, clouds, woods) being borrowed in depictions of gardens in paintings going back at least to the Tang Dynasty (seventh to the tenth centuries, roughly.) This is still relatively recent, however, if we think about the terracotta warriors at Xi’an, the decorative adornments in Egyptian tombs (say, royal barges), and the aesthetic embellishments of architecture in ancient Greece (say, the statuary on the Parthenon’s frieze), all well before the common era. Today, examples of ancillary aesthetics would include at least the following, arranged in what seems appropriate categories.
First, we might class some as frames. This would include literal frames around such things as paintings, prints, photographs, collages, mosaics, and the like. But it might also include plinths and mobile hanging structures, which function very much like frames, only for three-dimensional artworks. I would include proscenium arches around stages here. In addition, we might include a section of a wall in a museum or gallery that is occupied by or creates a background for a single work of art. This wall might be set apart by being a different color from nearby walls. Book covers function as frames, too. Certain gardens would be included here too, especially when the plantings are arranged in shapes that are dictated by the building or field they surround, say, hedges and bedding plants that are sited against the building or as a field border, or trees, typically in symmetrical groupings, that draw attention to entrances and walkways. These are not all the gardens that are ancillary aesthetic objects, but they are some.
Second, we might class some as venues for art objects and events. This would include performance halls, amphitheaters and outdoor stages, cinemas, museums, and galleries. With a focus on aesthetic objects and events, we might also include restaurants, some (although in all cases here, it is some, not all) kitchens, bookshops, perfume shops, jewelry shops, fashion shops, furniture stores, the booths where we can listen to music at record stores (with recognition that such places exist in very few numbers today). I would not typically include record stores themselves in this list because a record is not a musical event; it is a mechanism for a musical event. Bookshops are included, however, because of the covers of the books, the arrangement of the books, and as principal venues for storytelling. But the category might also include “venue-relevant” elements and objects, such as (distinct) decorations, furnishings, and lighting. Yuriko Saito’s The Aesthetics of the Familiar has a full chapter devoted to the aesthetics of laundry.[12] One who has a dedicated linen closet or a set of shelves set by their laundry machines whose sole purpose is to accumulate the perfectly folded clean laundry knows the luxury of this. In this same vein, we might include a well-organized bookshelf, a well-organized China or display cabinet, or a well-organized pantry. We might not typically refer to these as venues, but they are relevantly like the other items mentioned here as they provide aesthetically appreciable places for the holding of items that may be appreciated aesthetically.
Third, we might class some as accessory elements. These are ancillary aesthetic objects whose relevance to enhancing the principal aesthetic objects is not straightforward: snacks and reclining chairs at a cinema, the way audiences or diners are dressed and how they behave, restaurant tableware and kitchen tools, the smells and other sensory stimuli employed by hotels and Disney, cruise ship and shopping center gardens.
There are surely many more examples of aesthetic forms where the objects, despite having pronounced positive aesthetic features, recede as they highlight and enhance the aesthetic characters and worth of other aesthetic objects.
4. Borrowed scenery as illuminating of ancillary aesthetics
By considering the values that are served through the employment of borrowed scenery, we may develop insights about the value brought by ancillary aesthetic objects and elements to their principals.
First, the employment of borrowed scenery for a garden expands the garden designer’s aesthetic canvas. A small or medium-sized garden can become a large and expansive garden, turning acres into miles. While the notion that a garden must always be enclosed by walls or something that functions like a wall (the famed hortus conclusus) was somewhat discarded in seventeenth-century Europe, every garden nonetheless has a boundary. It must or it would not be conceivable as a place. But just as sightlines in Capability Brown’s designs extend well beyond the borders of the estate and André Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles have sightlines designed to have the eye travel either to the horizon or to woods that represent the horizon, each is a place with boundaries. Versailles is huge—today 2,000 acres, but apparently 37,000 acres during the Sun King’s life—so Versailles has never needed to employ borrowed scenery, but even Versailles, at 37,000 acres or 2,000, is (obviously) bounded. Borrowed scenery does not erase a garden’s literal boundaries, but it erases or at least blurs a garden’s aesthetic boundaries. It does not mean that the garden is expanded to include those “outside-garden” objects as within the boundaries of the garden; the boundaries of the garden proper are still intact and garden practices—watering, weeding, pruning, and so forth—remain within the boundaries of the garden proper.
The expansion of the aesthetic canvas is obviously what venues for art and aesthetic objects and events do. While it makes little sense to think of borrowed scenery as a venue for a garden—as if nature is subordinate to our finite arrangement of its objects—expanding the canvas is an apt way to express both what borrowed scenery and what art and aesthetic venues do.
Second, and following from the first point, borrowed scenery expands the aesthetic features of a garden. This can mean enhancing some existing features or introducing new ones. The colors of mountains can change a garden’s palette: introducing new rock colors, expanses of green, or the tones of fall foliage on trees covering the side of that mountain. In addition, borrowed scenery can change a garden’s formal elements, presenting visitors with an expanded sense of space, a grander atmosphere, the sound or sight of moving water in rivers or waterfalls, or light that is captured and held by the garden’s borrowed aesthetic boundaries, perhaps augmenting the dawn or the feeling of twilight. It can make the visitor feel small, as we do when we look up on a clear night, or the reverse—it can make the visitor feel majestic as the center of a huge canvas.
Some art and aesthetic venues such as standard museums and galleries, and even some restaurants and shops, are designed to never compete aesthetically with the objects or events they house. They provide a neutral backdrop. Their embellishments are kept to a minimum. This has the effect of drawing all attention to the principal objects and events. On the other hand, such neutrality can be interpreted as interfering with the proper contextualization of cultural objects that were originally designed for settings that were not neutral, but instead added to the significance of those objects. Objects taken from Egyptian tombs, Mayan cities, or medieval European churches, and the like may have had their aesthetic dimensions, if we conceive of meaning as an aesthetic dimension, curtailed through “venue decontextualization.” A film can be shown in a theater that is pitch black; it does not matter. An opera, on the other hand, is augmented by a richly appointed performance space and an audience who contributes to such aesthetic richness through their dress and comportment. A restaurant that is too plain can interfere with the experience of fine dining as strongly as a restaurant that is too ornately decorated. A weathered picnic table can be as off-putting as wildly decorated ceramic plates and the recent fad of having tiny animated cooks video-projected on one’s plate. When the balance is right and the additional aesthetic features are appropriate, the augmentation can add a great deal to the experience.
Third, borrowed scenery can frame a garden, drawing attention to the garden proper as the focal center. In doing so, borrowed scenery can function either positively or negatively, depending on the skill of a garden designer and their imagination as they envision all effects, present and future, of the scenery their garden borrows. If the borrowed scenery highlights the aesthetic virtues of the garden, or even softens some of the less positive aspects of the garden, the garden designer has done well. But if the borrowed scenery is so grand as to shadow the virtues of the garden or draw attention either away from the garden or to its less positive aspects, the garden designer may have made a mistake. But if the designer is careful and the borrowed scenery does as it should, its framing function is all to the good.
Clearly, the parallel here is to those ancillary aesthetic objects that function to frame artworks and aesthetic objects. Invoking Disney yet again, there is a Magic Kingdom show (“Mickey’s PhilharMagic”) that begins with an audience viewing a curtained stage adorned with a comically ornate proscenium arch. As the show begins, the vista widens and the arch is lifted up and away. While this is a Disney gimmick (and not an undelightful one), the truth is that in all stage shows, when the lights go down, whatever the proscenium arch looks like no longer matters. However, for that space of anticipatory time when an audience awaits the start of the show, the arch’s decoration may matter a great deal, as may the decoration of the curtain and the surrounding space (including audience dress). No decoration and the audience have nothing on which to focus their preparatory aesthetic attention. Of course, just as with borrowed scenery, the balance is important. If one places a gilded baroque frame on an Agnes Martin painting, this does neither the painting nor the frame any good. The same is true of framing gardens. A Gertrude Jekyll-style cottage garden can enhance a Tudor cottage or a Tudor castle, but if placed around a Bauhaus or Brutalist building, the effect can be jarring.
Fourth, borrowed scenery need not only function to complement a garden; occasionally borrowed scenery can present a contrast to the garden proper. Such a contrast can highlight the garden’s virtues. The value of urban oases like Central Park or St. James’s Park can be enhanced by being reminded that the oasis is in a busy metropolitan core—the aesthetic value, certainly, but more basically the value of the escape to a site of living things, fresh air (a chief consideration for Olmsted), and a venue for civilized social interaction (a chief consideration for Andrew Jackson Downing, one of Olmsted’s inspirations). Through appreciating the contrast, one can appreciate more deeply the value of the escape and its various purposive and aesthetic aspects.
Popcorn and soda pop at the movies is classic. But there are some film aficionados who will find the consuming of snacks inappropriate when the film is, say, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Which is to say, a contrast between the principal and the ancillary aesthetic objects must be carefully crafted. The situation where the dynamic is complementary seems generally safer when it comes to ancillary aesthetics when the case is not one of borrowed scenery (or borrowed scenery for urban parks). Perfumes can be delightful, but in confined public spaces and in restaurants, perfumes can be problems. Proper etiquette can aesthetically enhance all manner of event, but if one adopts a judgmental attitude about it, it is contrary to the point. Similarly, a well-appointed dining table can enhance a meal, but putting out all manner of glassware and a striking plurality of cutlery at a home dinner party can be obnoxious.
5. Normative considerations
Thus far I have considered elements of ancillary or secondary aesthetics as enhancing and highlighting positively the primary aesthetic objects or events they support. In all the cases I have mentioned, positive enhancement is the purpose of the ancillary element; they were all designed, or functionally employed, for the sake of support. But we may still ask questions about the relationship: (1) Is such an aesthetic relationship appropriate? Should there be a relationship or should the aesthetic objects (events, elements) be regarded separately? (2) What happens when the goal of support is not achieved? What happens when the support is negative? (3) What happens when the ancillary aesthetic object is aesthetically meritorious, but the primary aesthetic object is aesthetically not as good?
Disinterest as an adopted aesthetic perspective was central to aesthetic discourse from the time of Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) through the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and it was arguably still alive and well for the twentieth-century formalists and its last great proponent, Jerome Stolnitz (1925-). Adoption of disinterest would disallow ancillary aesthetics as a legitimate category. In its most robust version, arguably from Kant, disinterest holds the aesthetic object in phenomenal isolation, separate from contextual and external relations, separate from categories, and separate from other objects and events, aesthetic or otherwise. So, a painting should be regarded in terms of its perceptually available properties and on no other grounds. If surrounded by a frame, the frame may be regarded in terms of its aesthetic properties, but the two objects are distinct from one another and must be, either for the purpose of legitimate judgment (for the eighteenth-century conception of disinterest) or the purpose of legitimate aesthetic focus (for the twentieth-century conception). For those objects where the framing, and so on, cannot be regarded as a separate object, then conceptual distinction from the principal would be inappropriate, as their aesthetic properties form a single set. My use of ‘ancillary aesthetic object’ is for reference to aesthetic objects separable from their principals, and so for disinterestedness theorists the two cannot appropriately be considered in relationship to one another. As I mentioned in section 2, disinterestedness theory and strict formalism are not very popular today. To the extent to which my examples of ancillary aesthetic objects are intuitively comfortable, we likely do not need to worry about the inappropriateness of the relationship of these secondary objects to their principals. That is, the burden of proof for that inappropriateness would need to be shouldered by the one who did not share these intuitions or advocated for a theory, such as disinterestedness or formalism, that underwrote the inappropriateness. Absent such a challenge, the intuition would seem to win.
There must surely be cases of (2), when the secondary object fails to positively support the primary one, yet none come to mind. The reason is perhaps obvious. These secondary aesthetic objects are designed (or deliberately employed) to be positively supportive of their primary objects. When they fail to do so, when their purpose is not met, there is no reason for their continued existence. In many cases, they do not merit aesthetic consideration on their own, separate from their supportive functions. And in those cases where they do, they can be conceptually separated from their principals and evaluated on their own aesthetic merits. Nondiegetic film music may be a case in point. Occasionally, a film score will be so good that while its primary role is to enhance the aesthetic quality of the film it supports—and here we may be on thin ice to say that the music, even though nondiegetic, is not a part of the object that is the film—conceptual separation of that music can lead to literal separation, where we may purchase a film’s soundtrack and listen to it on its own. Yet, in those cases where the conceptual separation does not result in an aesthetically meritorious “once-secondary, now-primary” aesthetic object, that separated object is usually discarded. It has no purpose and no value in itself—that is, unless it takes up a new life in successful support of a new principal.
The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ comes to mind when I think of cases where the ancillary aesthetic object is aesthetically better than the primary one it is meant to support. The case mentioned directly above about a film’s soundtrack may again be a good example, that is, in those cases where the soundtrack is better than the film (again, if they can be conceptually separated). An exquisite frame on a lackluster painting, a so-so opera set in a wonderful hall, a bad film in a good cinema. The temptation is to say that this is not my problem, that my focus is on the ancillary object and the supporting work it does, regardless of the quality of the principal object. But this is a temptation that should be overcome, because a high-quality ancillary object can have the effect of raising the quality of an aesthetically wanting principal, and when this happens it may skew a correct aesthetic assessment of that principal. This in turn can lead to a number of other unfortunate outcomes, such as encouragement of an investment of aesthetic focus when reward for such an investment may not manifest, a reduction, in the case of venues, of reputation, and resources spent in support of that aesthetically wanting principal object when those resources could be spent on more aesthetically worthy projects. In cases where (3) occurs, we who can make the distinction in quality have an obligation to point out the imbalance and the effects that might result to those who own or have control over the objects. In turn, they then have the obligation to attend to the matter, either balancing the quality of the objects or undoing the relationship between the objects. The obligation here either is or borders on an ethical one, given the potential effects.
6. Conclusion
Balance is everything. When it comes to borrowed scenery and ancillary aesthetics, appropriateness and balance of, in the first case, the garden with its borrowed scenery and, in the second, the principal aesthetic object (or event) with the ancillary one is key. To take a page from Immanuel Kant’s playbook, none of this is reducible to formula or logic. Appropriateness and balance in themselves are aesthetic qualities, and the attribution of an aesthetic property to an arrangement of perceptible properties or events is dependent not only on the particulars of the case but also on the subject’s taste and perspective.
When the balance is right, however, borrowed scenery can enhance a garden in a more substantive and more impactful way than almost any other single thing one can do within the confines of the garden proper. And while there are likely a range of aesthetic objects and events that are best experienced in isolation from any other material contextualities, I can think of few. In most cases, the addition of ancillary aesthetic objects and elements, when employed well, raises the quality of the principal object or event as well as the experience of it. In this paper, I have suggested that both borrowed scenery and other sorts of ancillary aesthetic objects and elements (1) expand the aesthetic canvas of the principal object (or event), (2) expand and/or augment the aesthetic features of the principal, (3) draw attention, through framing, to the aesthetic qualities and quality of the principal, and (4) through presenting either a complement or a contrast to the principle, borrowed scenery and other ancillary aesthetic objects and elements can highlight the principal and give it increased depth.
David Fenner
dfenner@unf.edu
David Fenner is Professor of Philosophy and Art at the University of North Florida. He is the author of Plain Aesthetics (Broadview Press, 2024) and, with Ethan Fenner, co-author of The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Acknowledgement
The author thanks the two referees for this journal who made excellent suggestions to improve this paper.
Published on April 25, 2026.
Cite this paper: David Fenner, “Borrowed Scenery and Ancillary Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] By ‘garden,’ I mean an object that is a real, dynamic, human-scaled place, one typically tied to its location, that is an indissoluble amalgam of (1) natural objects, endemically or contextually inclusive of living plants, typically augmented with artifactual objects, and (2) a design that results in a form that is aesthetically engaging and purpose-meeting. Because of a garden’s natural dynamism, to maintain its form a garden must be subject to common gardening practices. David Fenner and Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
[2] It may be important to note that, in my use, ‘ancillary aesthetics’ does not refer to context/external relations, atmospheres, backgrounds, functionalities, or any other aesthetic aspects that refer to the aesthetic object in question but are not perceptually based or formal. In my use, ancillary aesthetics refers to aesthetic objects, events, and elements that are distinct (as objects) from the primary aesthetic items they accompany and/or relate to.
[3] Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens: The Classical Chinese Text on Garden Design, Alison Hardie, translator (Shanghai: Shanghai Press, 2012). Leading scholar of Japanese gardens Kuitert Wybe speaks to the importance of Ji’s work in (1) his 2016 34th World Congress of Art History Beijing conference presentation, “Borrowing Scenery in China and Japan: Theory and Practice in Seventeenth Century Garden Art”; (2) “Borrowed Scenery as Part of the Garden Scenery,” in his Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 176-182; and (3) “Borrowing Scenery and the Landscape that Lends – the Final Chapter of Yuanye,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 10:2 (2015), 32-43.
[4] Ji, 75.
[5] Ji, 120.
[6] Fenner and Fenner, chapter two.
[7] Michael Fowler writes about how sounds can count as borrowed scenery. Michael Fowler, “Hearing a Shakkei: The Semiotics of the Audible in a Japanese Stroll Garden,” Semiotica 197 (2013): 101-117, and ”Itoh’s Mikiri as Acoustic Frame: Hearing the Sōzu at the Garden of Shisen-dō,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 44:4 (2024): 302-319.
[8] Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, volume one, fourth edition (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company, 1790), 122-131.
[9] Of course, a garden designer may have control of the land surrounding a garden. Capability Brown is known for eliminating buildings, including residential dwellings and a church, and moving roads in the redesign of Croome Court. Presumably, these structures were under the control of the Coventry family.
[10] Frederick Law Olmsted, Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society, Charles Beveridge, editor (New York: Library of America, 2015).
[11] I do not know of such a garden, and I am unconvinced that, in a final analysis, my assertion here is correct, but we can take this as a thought experiment in aid of the main point.
[12] Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). While there is overlap between everyday aesthetics and ancillary aesthetics, the two are distinct areas of inquiry.