Part I
I’d been wanting to pen this article for some months, perhaps longer. However, other subjects, other annoyances, and other, more pressing concerns had diverted my attention. What caused me to return to the topic of templates was two-fold. First, a newsletter from Andy Staples entitled “My Take on Templates”, and second, a response to my article last week from Bradley Klein in which he directed me towards a chapter he’d written for SportCult, entitled “Cultural Links: An International Economy of Golf Course Landscapes” (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Hegemony rules the day, the blob gobbles all
In truth, although I’d read Wide Open Fairways and some of his columns for Golfweek, I wasn’t overly familiar with Dr. Klein’s work, especially his more academic-bent material which can be troublesome to access. Luckily, though, my alma mater had a copy of Sportcult available. Thus, on a rainy evening I made my way downtown, parked on what was a hundred and some years ago a fairway of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club in Sandy Hill, got high off of the narcotic nostalgia of my university years as I strode through the largely brutalist buildinged campus, took a deep and strangely satisfying whiff of the unchanged pissy and musty odor of the library, ascended to the sixth floor, blew the dust from the shelves, and retreated to a corner with the 300 and some page volume in hand, prejudices and gripes in mind.
Dr. Klein’s chapter takes a broad look at the evolution of golf architecture, examining it not as a series of mounds and fairways and greens, an approach that is all-too-common and in my view limits much of what passes for writing about golf architecture, but rather as “aesthetic and cultural landscapes, with all that entails about their status as negotiated spaces mediating realms of territorial space, human cultural activity, and complex market relations transcending immediate regional boundaries” (Klein 211). In simpler words, golf courses are “carefully scripted as products of their culture, technology, and economy” (214).
“In this essay,” Dr. Klein states, “I explore golf design as one moment in the unfolding of modernity” (211). He then proceeds to categorize the three “basic styles of design”, or its various permutations, as “classical”, “modern”, and “postmodern”.
“Simulacrum”, “post-modernity”, “in this essay” – I was on familiar ground, suddenly transported back to graduate school. In truth, I’d assumed, naively, that I was the first “golf writer” to deploy such academic-jargony terms in his/her works, but, alas, Dr. Klein, a former professor of poli-sci at a number of renowned institutions in the United States, had done so decades prior to me.
Despite having been beaten and debated and deconstructed essentially to the point of exhaustion in academia, as well as in film and book and music criticism, the postmodern condition as it pertains to golf, more specifically how its cultural effects have influenced and shaped the trajectory of golf course architecture over the last forty years or so, has been severely under analyzed, if analyzed at all.
There have been countless authors and journalists and historians who have written at length – and sometimes very eloquently – about how and by whom and because of whom such fields of sand and grass and turf have been shaped and plowed and molded, but, conversely, there have been very few who have truly looked beyond the tight confines of golf literature’s dreadfully insular history to explore indepthly “why” they have been shaped and plowed and molded in such fashions.
In effect, then, Dr. Klein studies golf architecture, and its evolution, from a similar lens, or angle, that Keith Cutten does in The Evolution of Golf Course Design, my favorite work of the genre, wherein he claims “that the game did not evolve in isolation, having been profoundly influenced by social and economic factors over time,” yet “precious little (if anything) has been published about the evolution of golf course architecture and the reasons why these changes occurred. Understanding the relationship between the various design movements and trends, both positive and negative, is crucial to the advancement of both professional and public knowledge of golf course architecture.”
Interestingly, having published this article in 1999, seventeen years before Mr. Cutten defended his M.A. thesis which formed the basis of his book, Dr. Klein suggests that “curiously, not a single serious work has been devoted to the place that these landscapes occupy in our culture and aesthetic sensibilities. There are some suggestive works on the art of golf course architecture, most of them dating back to the mid 1920s, and all of them dealing with elements of sound design and how these might be practically implemented into an ideal golf course. As both literature and practical guides, such books are invaluable to students of the field seeking to understand what makes a good golf hole. But none makes any pretense of connecting to a wider world.”
In this sense, then, Mr. Cutten seems to have heeded Dr. Klein’s call to arms. As has Dr. Elizabeth Jewett, whose thesis, “Behind the Greens: Understanding Golf Course Landscapes in Canada, 1873-1945”, also does a first-rate job of expanding its scope of study beyond the dirt and turf and is thus well-worth a peruse for this very reason. Perhaps there are more works that have done so, too, although I am not yet familiar with them. This is something I’ve attempted to do, albeit in a different, less academic manner, here (still my best piece), here, and most recently, here.
So by this point, and with valid reason, you may be asking exactly what does all this have to do with Redans, Alps, Capes, Bottles, Shorts, and Edens, with Old Macdonald, the two reconstructed Lidos, The Match at PGA National, Meadowbrook, Charleston Muni, etc, etc. How are you going to tie this together, son?
In the opening paragraph of his newsletter, Mr. Staples reveals that “I tend to listen to a variety of music – U2, Talking Heads, 21 Pilots, and a new one for me, Lord Huron. I’ll often have a new song or artist pop into this mix that makes me think, “wait… why does this sound so familiar”? Turns out, many of the most popular hits from the past century all utilize the same base chord progression… I’m no musician, but you can read more about that here.
This got me thinking about how similar this is to the use of Template holes in golf.”
This opening salvo, specifically its connection between golf and music, in combination with Dr. Klein’s suggestions of simulacrums and post-modernity in golf architecture lurking at the forefront of my mind, directed me to the writings of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, of course, two of my touchstones and, in my view, the two most interesting cultural theorists over the course of the last however many years. Two academics who also regularly contribute (or contributed, in Fisher’s case) pieces for popular press in the U.K., neither Fisher nor Reynolds ever mention golf in their works; however, much of their output (all of it, really, in Reynolds’ case) pertains to music, specifically how wider social and economic factors (those of modernity, post-fordism, late-capitalism, late-late-late capitalism now) influenced, shaped, thwarted, and ultimately stalled popular music and culture, from the psychedelic 1960s, to post-punk, to the birth of rave, to Britpop, to the garage rock revival, to hauntology, and, finally, to whatever it is we are going through now.
“Golf follows wherever there is economic growth,” Dr. Klein reminds us (Klein 219). The most fervent growth in golf construction during the postmodern period, which roughly began in the 1970s, occurred in Asia, where “the private sector dominates the game” (219) and where, highly exclusionary as it still is, it thus remains “a symbol of western culture that designates the participant having made the transition into a “modern world capitalist system”. That is why access to golf courses is still so valued among those seeking international validation” (220). Meanwhile, in North America and in Europe, particularly as the former Eastern-Bloc emerged from communism, the majority of new builds were tied to real-estate developments, high-end resorts, or expensive daily-fee clubs.
As I concluded in my recent piece about the evolution, or devolution, of golf in Quebec, these highly manicured, heavy handedly shaped, ever plush-green golf courses, in one way or another, were designed and maintained in a manner meant to invoke, to be simulacrums of, the supposed ideal of a “country club”, namely Augusta National, and all that it represented, culturally and economically.
These courses were thus constitutive of the first strand that Dr. Klein diagnoses as being prevalent within the postmodern period of golf architecture: “hyperreal evocations that draw upon classical imagery to suggest, and sometimes to simulate, a pseudospace of tradition” (Klein 213).
The second strand, however, is where Dr. Klein (at least in this piece) and I differ in our respective judgements or outlooks; it is also where, I will proceed to suggest, such template-laden golf has become its cultural end point, its final hurrah, if you will.
Dr. Klein defines minimalism, the second strand of “postmodern” golf architecture which back in 1999, only four years after the opening of Sand Hills, was still really in its infancy, as “golf’s version of a low-budget return to nature – that seeks from an area that, though affected and influenced by human practices, is not directly structured according to plan” (212).
For Klein, such works of minimalism, at least to a certain extent, provide an antidote to the placelessness and sameness that was, and remains, prevalent in much of the work produced by the practitioners of the first strand of postmodernism (that of Nicklaus, Rees Jones, Trent Jones Jr., Fazio, among others). Minimalism’s return to nature, the soft hand with which its practitioners built and shaped their golf courses, and how they incorporated the already existing elements of the land and landscape into their golf courses, at least the early ones, instilled in them “a distinct sense of place” (224).
Yet, as Dr. Klein proceeds to warn, “questions remain as to the point of such an inflated evocation and use of signs. To some extent, the signs are part of the given terrain, and yet there is also the possibility that they become marketing tools that help promote attention. The difference here from some of the more egregious flaunting of postmodern kitsch and commodification is that at least the materials were there before the golf course, and so they have not been entirely manufactured but in fact highlighted. There remains a strong element of museum tableau here” (224).
However, minimalism, if it ever did exist (just like the entire notion of “postmodernism” in fact) is now dead and gone and buried. When its death knell rang, exactly, is up for debate: I would cite Streamsong as its last stand; some might cite Sebonack; and others perhaps Chambers Bay.
For the sake of this essay, Streamsong provides a useful point of study, for it not only features golf courses built by the three main practitioners of “minimalism”, but also highlights their primary shortcomings in explicit fashion, more so than at any other resort I have yet visited. Namely, they are highlighted from the perched vantage of the 1st tee of Streamsong Blue, where a hundred feet below the rest of Doak’s Blue course and Coore and Crenshaw’s interwomen Red course are almost entirely visible in a jumbled, indistinct, essentially homogeneous pomace of rumpled brown turf, jagged-edged bunkering, and humped and hollowed green complexes sprawled from one edge of the eyesight to the other across the Floridian plain.
In short, as I wrote in my piece about the renovation of Baltusrol, this vista, breathtaking as it is, emphasizes that “my biggest gripe with Doak and Coore and Crenshaw and Hanse (among a few others) is that their work is far too similar to eachothers’. There’s a far greater variety and sense of individualism in the catalogs of, say, Donald Ross and Stanley Thompson and Dr. Mackenzie than between those of these three modern firms – with Streamsong being perhaps the prime example of this.”
Part II
As a disclaimer before we start this part, just because I cite and rely upon various theorists does not necessarily mean that I agree with everything that they claim or conclude. Nevertheless, I believe that the works of Fisher, Reynolds, Jamieson, and all, provide interesting elucidations of the wider postmodern cultural zeitgeist that, I suggest, gave rise of minimalism and, with it, template-laden golf architecture. If, as Dr. Klein challenged, we are to look at golf courses as “aesthetic and cultural landscapes, with all that entails about their status as negotiated spaces mediating realms of territorial space, human cultural activity, and complex market relations transcending immediate regional boundaries” (Klein 211), then such a theoretical approach proves fruitful.
“Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is,” Reynolds suggest, “…its past. {…} This is the way pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing.”
– Simon Reynolds
Western culture built narratives, it’s what we did and still commonly do. The enlightenment, for example, was a new chapter, a real step forward; from the enlightenment through to the modern, western culture always believed in a sense of progress, of moving forward. That was the narrative, the grand narrative, it told itself. The dark underbelly of this narrative of progress, its blindspots, its losers, are, of course, seemingly too obvious now to have to elucidate in detail.
“Thus, “while 20th century culture”, Fisher claims, “was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.”
– Mark Fisher
One of Fisher’s most endearing beliefs was in the evolutionary aspect of popular modernism, its ability to conceive and transmit to the receiver a better world, a better future. By “popular modernism”, he meant a kind of culture that straddled the experimental and the mainstream. Although “popular culture” and “high modernism” may now seem to be irreconcilable terms, in the 1950s and 1960s and even into the 1970s, conversely, when The Beatles and the Beach Boys and The Who were among the biggest bands in the world, when films such as Alice in Wonderland and Easy Rider and The Endless Summer were box office hits, when public television offered educational and experiential programming (Doctor Who most notably), and when Penguin Paperbacks were widely available and read, popular culture could still critique, rather than just affirm, existing culture, the status quo.
For this flourishing post world-war state in the U.K., Fisher cites, among other things, a flourishing welfare state, social security, ample time-off from work, educational grants, class consciousness, and the possibility of legitimate upwards mobility. As Jon Lindblom writes in his own study of Fisher’s notion of “popular modernism”, “central to this post-war cultural trajectory was a link between modernism and utopia that articulated itself in terms of confronting and breaking away from the seemingly given and the static conception of reality that goes with it. A standard criticism of utopian thinking is that it threatens to become a product of mere imagination that has nothing to do with how things actually are like. Yet utopian thinking can also have a mobilizing potential, wherein its widening of the imagination may function as a resonating critique of the limitations of the present.”
It is to general ethos of mobilizing potential, then, that we can attribute Robert Trent Jones’s ideology, namely his desire to move golf architecture beyond that of the golden age practitioners. “Jones was one of the era’s keenest observers of how technology was changing the game,” writes his biographer, James R. Hansen. “Robert embraced these innovations, envisioning a bright boundless future for golf both in the United States and abroad. He saw great potential in the dynamics of modern industrial society for fundamental improvements in the design and construction of golf courses and in how the modern golf designer could enrich the challenges of the traditional game with new strategic features” (Hansen 94).
Were Robert Trent Jones’ motivations perhaps wayward, his vision of golf architecture contumacious? Maybe. Everybody has their own opinion in regards to that; what cannot be denied, however, is his belief that golf architecture, and thus the future of the game, could be, should be, improved upon from how his predecessors conceived it. In other words, that forward was the way.
When modernism morphed into post-modernism, exactly, is another matter up for debate – usually the late 1970s are cited, especially in the arts. Fisher, meanwhile, cites 1979 as the defining year of the second half of the twentieth century. This culminating year in the decade of Nixon and Vietnam, the hostage crisis and the fuel embargo, the subsequent rise of Thatcher and Reagan, being the point when, according economist Christian Marazzi, the switch from Fordism to Post-Fordism fully occurred, and, in turn, the last and decisive step on the path towards “capitalist realism”, or the “slow cancellation of the future”, was taken. Although the term “post-fordism” has been replaced in popular vernacular by “neoliberalism”, this shift brought with it an economy centered on just-in-time production, the internationalization of capital, the deregulation of industry, insecure labor, and the entrepreneurial self.
Long story short, Fisher concludes that the rise and spread of neoliberalism – with its planned attacks on social security, public services, welfare, unions, coupled with the looming inevitably of climate disaster – has, for all but the very richest, over the course of the last forty years or so, deprived western society of its ability to conceive for itself a better future, specifically one that is free of neoliberalism and its hell-bent business ontology. Thus, a “depressive hedonism” has become prevalent, which manifests itself in, for example, the ever-worsening pandemic of mental health. “I rather not think about it,” is how most people think about the future now. As Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek both famously proclaimed, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Thus, “while 20th century culture”, Fisher claims, “was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.”
Nicholas Diaz sums up this concept of “the slow cancelation of the future” as such: “what does this mean? To understand this we have to first consult Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Bifo, describing the postmodern condition, coined the phrase “the slow cancellation of the future,” a condition where life continues, but time has somehow stopped. Essentially, what he is saying is that we are trapped in a condition where there is no longer real and significant cultural movement or development, there is no longer a future. The whole subjective dimension of the future has gradually disappeared, been cancelled, so we find ourselves repeating the past. The innovation, sense of possibility, and continuous production of newness seen in the 20th-century culture of popular modernism no longer exists.”
It is such a “slow cancellation of the future” that, according to Fisher, characterizes our postmodern culture.
For Fredric Jameson, likely the most known theorist of postmodern culture and its effects on society and art, postmodernism is the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. “Postmodernism is a forced and highly permeating field, given that cultures are formed through mass-media or mass-culture. This so-called mass culture indirectly forces us to shape our ideologies and brings us under the influence of media culture – a process that Jameson calls hegemony. This hegemony, however, has nothing to do with the postcolonial idea of colonization; rather it is a form of hegemony in the postmodern world, where media and capitalism play the most significant role in colonizing people’s thoughts and ways of life.
Jameson argues that postmodernism is the age of the end of traditional ideologies. The ending of traditional ideologies can be seen through the new wave of aesthetic productions.”
Unlike classicism, romanticism, or modernism even, postmodern art is difficult to characterize, but broadly it can be categorized as featuring elements of irony, intertextuality, bricolage, appropriation, pastiche, and a distrust or lack for those grand, sweeping narratives.
According to Jamieson, revivalism and pastiche have become the main characteristics of postmodern art, as has “a mode of nostalgia” that can understood not as much as a way of recovering lost time, as it is for Proust, for example, but rather as “a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of the retreat from the modernism challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience.”
Naturally, in the face of a threatening and scary future, this looming void of A.I. dominance and climate disasters, popular culture has thus resorted to the soothing comforts of nostalgia.
From its very outset, minimalism was explicitly retrogressive, in ethos and style, and it made no bones about being so, as evidenced by the very name of Mr. Doak’s firm: Renaissance Golf Design. Whether one cites Pete Dye (whom Dr. Klein groups among the second strand of postmodern architects) or Tom Doak and Coore and Crenshaw, their work explicitly features such formal attachments to techniques and formulas of the past: namely that of the old world, in Pete Dye’s case, with his extensive use of rail-road ties, pot bunkers, and mounding that harkens back to Prestwick, in particular; or to the golden-age architects, in the case of the two latter firms and their offsprings.
In fact, the beginning of both Doak’s and Coore and Crenshaw’s careers effectively coincides – and contrasts – with the launch of the Big Bertha driver, in 1991, arguably the biggest leap forward in terms of golf equipment.
What popular culture, in fact all culture, even most alternative culture, nowadays lacks, due to this “cancelation of the future”, is what Fisher terms as “the pang of the new”, in this era that Simon Reynolds terms a “pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration.”
In effect, if you took someone from 1995 and beamed him to 2023, society, especially its art forms, wouldn’t seem all that innovative to this hypothetical time-traveler.
“Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is,” Reynolds suggests, “…its past. {…} This is the way pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing.”
Although both come from relatively the same angle, that of a highly Derridian/post-structurialist/hauntological bent, Reynolds’ conclusions in Retromania are perhaps a little more immediately relevant (read: direct) to golf’s zeitgeist currently than Fisher’s. In particular, Reynolds cites Youtube, more specifically its endless archive of historical footage, as being one of the prominent drivers of this nostalgia-fuelled “retromania”: “the young musicians who’ve come of age during the last ten years or so have grown up in a climate where the musical past is accessible to an unprecedentedly inundating degree.
The result is a recombinant approach to music-making that typically leads to meticulously organized constellations of reference points and allusions, sonic lattices of exquisite and often surprising taste that span the decades of and the oceans.”
Close to this line of thought, Ipod and “download culture”, rather than open up peoples’ cultural horizons, as it promised to, contrarily bogged most down into different niches and rabbit-holes, precisely because of the very abundance of material readily available, suddenly at arm’s grasp, effectively for free. In the face of the great ocean descending upon them, however, most closed shop, resorting to the familiar or nearly familiar.
Part III
“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?”
– Simon Reynolds
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.
– Brian Eno
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.
– Simon Reynolds
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,”
– Mark Fisher
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 Cisco and Precision Pro, among others. Thus, is the Fried Egg, as it perhaps once would, now going to criticize the big-name courses like Coore and Crenshaw’s Cabot Cliffs? Or Sheep Ranch? Or Mammoth Dunes? Courses that, perhaps sponsors might be uneasy if they bash given the big-names behind such resorts?
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.
