Be my guest
Why there is good cause to value the repetitive and understated.
Richard Champion finds beauty and necessity in repetition
The word monotony is almost always used negatively, as are its synonyms: tedious, boring, uneventful, featureless and mind numbing. They conjure up the dull repetitiveness from which the modern mind – taught to value variety and immediate reward – recoils from in disgust. But this pejorative usage is only one side of the coin, since there can be beauty in monotonous phenomena. I doubt anyone has described the flow of a river or waves on a beach in such a way, although it would be entirely accurate. Artists have always found ways to create beauty from monotony. The paintings of Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin and many others have explored extreme simplicity and expansiveness. Over the course of 18 months, Monet painted 30 works depicting the same haystacks near his house. The pattern of Māori tukutuku panels is sometimes highly repetitive, at times symbolising something innumerable or timeless, such as the night sky.
The first western musician to really explore monotony was composer Erik Satie. His furniture music (designed to blend with the room) inspired the minimalist movement, which continued to subvert the conventions of variety and development. In the 1970s this crossed over into avant-garde popular music such as German band NEU! and, famously, in Brian Eno’s ambient music. These artists eschewed chord changes and melody in favour of extreme repetition and simplicity, creating music devoid of memory or anticipation. Eno said it was “music as a place you go to… not a narrative, not a sequence that has some sort of teleological direction”.
When it comes to the natural world, the default reaction is one of amazement at the sheer multiplicity and variation of ecosystems. This is laudable, but nevertheless it’s not often acknowledged just how monotonous our experience of some landscapes can be. My first experience of this was in the Australian outback, with a 360-degree view composed entirely of dull-green eucalypts reaching past the horizon in a flat plane. There was something transcendental about being above a seemingly infinite, uniform landscape. Early British explorers of Australia reacted negatively to landscape monotony, with which Australia is particularly well endowed. Botanist Richard Schomburgk said of South Australian shrub lands that “the monstrous and dismal look of an extensive scrub is depressing. The equal height of the vegetation, the dull glaucous colour of the foliage, look in the distance like a rolling sea reaching the horizon.” I doubt he would have had as much contempt for an actual rolling sea, although it’s possible. And what did he think of the incessant rolling green fields of Britain, perhaps equally monotonous in their own way, and less biodiverse? Picturesque scenery, it seems, required intervention in the land by Europeans (or at least a landscape that resembled intervention).
In New Zealand, beech forest can often be a disorienting and endless minimalism of trees, moss and bare ground. And the spartan tussocklands that blanket central Otago high-country have a particular uniformity and impressive vastness without progression. Like a mantra or chant repeated ad infinitum, travel through these ecosystems can be initially interesting, then boring, and then hypnotically numinous.
I should note that monotony usually occurs in nature, not because there is no diversity, but because the diversity is hidden to the lay viewer. Natural plant communities can be dominated by a few plants in high abundance, with the other species being at the margins: subtle and uncommon. Landscape designers talk of ‘foliage contrast’, which has inspired coarse and garish combinations of diametrically opposed plants that would never be seen together in nature. This pronounced variation – the opposite of seamlessness – can cheapen each of the component elements, as it accentuates their crudest characteristics (for example red versus green, large leaf versus small leaf). Instead, a high degree of similarity makes you sensitised to the small, otherwise ignored subtleties, elevating these features above their typical status. Repetition can do the same. It can be a way to elaborate the true nature of plants, or even materials for that matter.
I’m certainly not arguing for monotony everywhere all of the time. Diversity and excitement are essential in all aesthetic fields. But we can forget the equal importance of repetition and continuity, and that diversity can be implied or revealed slowly, rather than showing one’s hand at first blush. Monotony can be a re-calibrator, a remedy to the hedonic treadmill of contemporary life, where colour, tone and texture are often used in all possible ways at once to gain attention and sell products.
Ninety years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote “we are less bored than our ancestors, but we are more afraid of boredom”. Perhaps, in our technological age of over-stimulation, we need a little monotony more than ever. New Zealander Robert Champion lives in Sydney, where he runs Tarn, a landscape design practice.