Templates, Sampling, and Minimalism at Culture's End, Final Part

“Such a claim, that genius lies in the transformation, would thus account for the difference between, say, the new Lido, or Jason Straka’s and Dana Fry’s South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, and World Tour Golf Links, in Myrtle Beach, or Royal Links, in Las Vegas.”

“Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s inability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?”

Golf’s nearest equivalent to Youtube’s endless archive of footage is, obviously, GolfClubAtlas, where folks have spent hours and hours, days and days, exposing, exploring, comparing, and debating the minutiae, often the molecular minutiae, of golf architecture’s past, based upon black-and-white aerials from the first part of the 20th century and century old writings. Many of the practitioners of the second strand of postmodernism have either participated extensively or, in some cases, gotten their starts in the business thanks to their contributions to the board. And some of the recent template-laden golf courses, to varying extents, have either been directly borne, or strongly influenced by long-running threads on the website’s board, with The Lido being the most succinct example.

Personally, I have never contributed to it, but I have lurked steadily since the mid-2000s, and it was foundational in developing my love and appreciation for the practice. Yet, I must confess to having become slightly overwhelmed and, by now, exhausted by the seemingly endless archival material that is brought up, lots of which seems to be, pardon me, utterly pointless.

“an artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, what I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.” And “this is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures.

Reynolds claims that the “curator” has become the man-of-the-moment. This “curator”, then, reinvents, rewrites the past by “valorizing the disregarded and discarded.”

In 1995, Brian Eno, one of music’s great and legitimate sonic innovators during the 1970s and 80s, remarked that “an artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, what I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.” And “this is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together…”

Yet “at a certain point the sheer mass of past accumulating behind the music began to exert a kind of gravitational pull,” Reynolds asserts. “This kind of retromania has become the dominant force in our culture, to the point where it feels like we’ve reached some kind of tipping point. Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s inability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? What happens when we run out of past? Are we heading towards a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, when the seam of pop history is exhausted?”

One of the natural effects of this is the rise of sampling: music that is heavily laden with samples, looped, spliced, sliced, and manipulated pieces of the past that recur and linger, like ghosts, in today’s mainstream. Kanye West, M.I.A., Beyonce, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, N.W.A. The Strokes, and Rihanna, among others, have all extensively used and borrowed samples. Other artists, meanwhile, have heavily borrowed their sound and style from retro acts, to the point that it is effectively another form of sampling: The White Stripes, The Arctic Monkeys’ newer material, Oasis, and Blur.

In Fisher’s view, based upon Derrida’s notion of hauntology, these samples act as ghosts that serve to remind listeners of the futures that were promised but failed to materialize. That western culture is haunted by the futures that never transpired, is the thesis that forms the basis of hauntology, a label that came to connote the school of theorists inspired by Derrida’s work in this realm, as well as whole strain of mid-2000s British electronic music, primarily from The Ghost Box record label, the most noteworthy of these groups being Burial and The Caretaker. These acts extensively drew upon post-war British cultural memory, by including samples taken from the outside the usual canon of popular music: library music, film and television soundtracks, educational music, and the sonic experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as electronic and folk music sources.

Music seemingly tailor-made for walking through now abandoned warehouse districts on rainy, gray mornings.

Although it’s undoubtedly ludicrous to propose that playing the Redan at Old Macdonald or Charleston Municipal will invoke such haunted memories, the role of the architect in these projects is nevertheless very much akin to that which Eno describes as having become the musician’s primary role: that of a curator, editor, or anthologist, who must scan the field of possibilities (i.e. the U.K. or the works of C.B. Macdonald, most commonly), pick-and chose, and intersperse what he ultimately selects from culture’s past within his own work. Just as sampling usually serves to augment or to enhance the “original creation” of the author, a handful of original holes are nearly always included within these template-laden golf courses, so as to remind the golfer, it seems, that he still playing a golf course built by {insert architects’ name here}.

Don’t get me wrong, as Simon Reynolds notes in his article “Your Are Not a Switch”, there is a genius to such appropriation of materials, and I agree that not all genius is necessarily original. “If only it were so simple,” he claims, “the stealing and the storing is the easy part. The much harder—and forever mysterious—stage is the transformation of the borrowed materials. Recreativity has nothing to say about this stage of the process, the bit where, every so often, genius comes into play. It’s not the fact or the act of theft but what’s done with the stolen thing that counts: the spin added that “makes it new” (to twist slightly the modernist injunction of Ezra Pound, a major exponent of quotation and allusion himself). The hallmark, or proof, of genius, in fact, is not merely transmitting or remixing. It’s fashioning something that others will someday want to steal.”

“the stealing and the storing is the easy part. The much harder—and forever mysterious—stage is the transformation of the borrowed materials. Recreativity has nothing to say about this stage of the process, the bit where, every so often, genius comes into play.

Such a claim, that genius lies in the transformation, would thus account for the difference between, say, the new Lido, or Dana Fry’s and Jason Straka’s South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, and World Tour Golf Links, in Myrtle Beach, or Royal Links, in Las Vegas. In theory, from afar, they’re very much the same project; however, what separates them, when you get on the ground and play them, comes down to “the spin added that makes them new.” Doak’s and Straka’s and Fry’s and Hanse’s and Staples’ visions of how to fit and mold and manipulate what they borrowed into the land.

Reynolds’ piece is, in part, a response to the rise of recreationists, who, in short, believe that nothing truly original is ever produced; instead, they claim that everything is, to some extent, an adaptation, or sampling, or reorganization of earlier forms. Like Reynolds, I don’t adhere to this view of art. Perhaps romantically, I do still believe, to this day, that original genius is possible. Against this, I’d posit the Arctic Monkey’s first record as a piece of truly, or nearly, original genius; I’d also propose both Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Don Delillo’s Underworld as literary examples.

Reynolds’ claims that he feels that recreationists use their beliefs as a balm against a pessimism born from the anxiety of overinfluence, the creeping fear that in the face of the oversaturation of the past in this age of retro gone loco, one might not have anything of one’s own to offer. That they feel like the struggling writer in Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of the Author” who, upon scanning the floor-to-ceiling book shelf in his study, wonders how he, a comparatively mediocre being, could ever possibly add anything of value to it and so he instead opts for an afternoon whiskey rather than continue to work on his story.

In my eyes, we’ve reached this point of oversaturation and sameness sometime recently, and Andy’s newsletter made this abundantly clear.

Where Fisher and Reynolds align themselves is in their detection that as the “retro” movement gained momentum and popularity, slowly but surely, the very force it originally sought to position itself against, to be an antidote to, crept in and hijacked it: that being, of course, the all-consuming force of the dollar bill. In perhaps his most succinct use of imagery, Fisher claims that capitalism is “very much like The Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.” And, in both music and golf architecture, any “alternative” or “retro movement” was absorbed and metabolized long ago now.

(Hasn’t this triumph of the dollar sign over “alternative culture” ever been so clearly embodied, in golf at least, than by the in-progress and significant re-modeling and privatization of High Pointe, the minimalist, lay-of-the-land, ragged and rugged course in Michigan that started it all back in the late 1980s?)

““Alternative” and “independent” don’t designate something outside mainstream culture now; rather they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream,” declares Fisher. In 2019, Andy Johnson compared golf architecture and craft beer culture: “Craft beer and golf course architecture have more parallels than you might think,” Johnson surmised.

““Alternative” and “independent” don’t designate something outside mainstream culture now; rather they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream,”

What Andy fails to mention, however, is anything pertaining to the “craft beer sellout,” as it was termed by David Infante in his piece “The Great Craft Beer Sellout”. In effect, that most of what passes for “craft beer” isn’t in fact craft at all, or perhaps never was. Infante notes that most all marginally successful craft breweries, either by force or by necessity, are eventually bought by one of the major conglomerates, usually Anheuser-Busch and MolsonCoors. Yet they are still packaged and promoted as “craft”, with Goose Island, originally of Chicago, being the most notable example in the U.S., and here, in Ottawa, Beau’s Brewery.

In fact, The Fried Egg website, itself, has followed a similar trajectory, with it now being funded in large part by the Keisers, Cisco, and Precision Pro, among others. Thus, is the Fried Egg, as it perhaps once would, now going to criticize Coore and Crenshaw’s Cabot Cliffs, a resort that was funded by Mr. Keiser too? Or Sheep Ranch? Or Mammoth Dunes?

Although, as Keith Cutten writes, minimalist movement set out with intent to eschew visual trappings, excessive earth movement, manicured out of play areas, and such, eventually the blob of capitalism subsumed it, too. For example, having opened for pay in 2003, The Rawls Course in West Texas proudly notes on the website that Tom Doak moved 1.3 million during its construction. Two years later, Stone Eagle, in Palm Springs, opened for play on just about the least naturally suited place for golf on earth. Soon after, his partnership with Jack Nicklaus was unveiled to the world at Sebonack. Then he was off to the dead-middle of Florida at the behest of Bill Coore, who first flew over the property and called his old friend to join him.

Again, I don’t blame Mr. Doak, for he has a family to feed and a crew to pay. Nor do I blame The Fried Egg; in fact, I admire what they’ve built. The only reason I am free to make such claims, to write pieces like these, is precisely because I don’t make my living from golf. Fire me, okay, fine. I’ll actually do something (read: economically) productive with my time, instead!

It is what it is. It’s the way of the world, where the dollar sign is chief. Nirvana signed with DCG, a sublet of Geffen, after their first record, as did Sonic Youth. Matador Records, home of America’s most thriving indie collection of bands, sought a partnership with Atlantic in 1994, right at their peak. Creation Records, Britain’s foremost indie label, only saved themselves from bankruptcy because Oasis became, against all odds, the world’s biggest rock band. The Strokes, after the wild success of their Modern Age EP, were subject to the most fervent bidding war in decades and eventually signed RCA.

Returning to Andy Staples’ newsletter, U2, despite having been signed by Island prior to 1980’s Boy, always maintained an element, a tinge, of the then fresh sound of their debut record; yet it became increasingly filtered and polished, resulting in a decreasingly interesting discography, for their first is still their best. Essentially, they tailored their music towards the bigger stadiums on the world tours in which they found themselves playing, airbrushing and cleaning it for airplay, its once fervent political message increasingly becoming a background aspect.

The trajectory of U2 adhered quite closely to what Mark Fisher, no fan of Bono and The Edge, diagnoses in the sound of Arctic Monkeys, perhaps the 21st century’s closest equivalent to the Irish quartet, an “indie” band turned legitimate global superstars: “what makes The Arctic Monkeys typical of post-modern retro is the way in which they perform anachronism. While they are sufficiently “historical”—sounding to pass on first listen as belonging to the period which they ape (the early 1980s in the case Fisher is referring to)—there is something not quite right about them. Discrepancies in texture—the result of modern studio and recording techniques—mean that they belong neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied “timeless era”, an eternal 1960s or an eternal 1980s.”

As I surmised of my experience playing a number of the new renovations, including Sleepy Hollow and Baltusrol, an observation that is also relevant to nearly all of the golf courses I have played from the minimalists and their offsprings, “in these new renovations, the general aesthetics of the golden age are there, certainly, but filtered through a twenty-first century lens and, just as importantly I think, its expectations: perfect grasses and bunker faces, neat rough, pruned trees, 500 yard par 4s built to handle modern technology, etc. (see authorial interjection #1, here). As a result, the discrepancies in texture elicit in me a strange, discombobulating sense of time being “jumbled up”.”

“The blob of hegemony, then, which Jameson sees as overwhelming all culture, has, as I have attempted to show so far in this essay, brought about an ever-increasing encroachment, or overlap, between what Klein, in 1999, viewed as the two-distinct schools of postmodernist golf architecture.”

The blob of hegemony, then, which Jameson sees as overwhelming all culture, has, as I have attempted to show so far in this essay, brought about an ever-increasing encroachment, or overlap, between what Klein, in 1999, viewed as the two-distinct schools of postmodernist golf architecture. As exemplified at Gozzer Ranch and Congaree most forcefully, Fazio, seeing the success of Doak and Coore and Crenshaw and Hanse, has incorporated elements of their style and ethos into his works, as did Robert Trent Jones Jr. at Chambers Bay and Nicklaus in some of his.

Meanwhile, the minimalists, becoming motivated by the same enchantments that Fazio and Trent Jones once were, namely those of bigger budgets and larger crews and sites less naturally suited for golf, have in turn morphed their style into something less natural, less lay-of-the-land, with firms reaching wide and far across the globe thus necessitating them spread their focus more thinly than when they started (just look at the number of projects Hanse is currently working on). Hegemony rules the day, the blob gobbles all.

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Interesting piece. I have some quibbles but it’s nice to see golf design filtered through different lenses.

I think you should credit Dana Fry for Arcadia South at least as much in not more than Straka. That was his baby.

Noted and fixed and thank you for reading and commenting. I’d love to hear them – [email protected]