MARK C. TAYLOR AND HIS LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS
By Scott Edward Anderson // Photos By Jake Borden July 24
One of the first things you notice pulling up to Mark C. Taylor’s home is a large, rising stone that looks like a giant wave about to crest, thrust up from an ancient tectonic event known as the Taconic orogeny. To the left, skulls and bones of animals are nailed to trees as if on a set of a horror movie designed by Georgia O’Keefe. Several steel forms then come into view: a half sphere, a square-within-a-square-within-a-square, an inverted pyramid, another pyramid with its tip chopped off—what in mathematics is called a frustum—and an inverse pyramid embedded into the ground as if it fell from the sky.
In the center of an open, well-manicured lawn is a large dry-stone fire pit with pebble stone paths fanning in four directions and forming two intersecting—yet incomplete—infinity symbols. Everything in this garden appears disconnected yet not broken, as broken implies happenstance. No, these shapes and forms are intentional, forcing the viewer to question, “Why?” What appears solid is not. What appears linear is, on closer inspection, inverted. Everything is stone, steel, and bone. Natural and artificial, found and made, this is a garden of shifting perspectives—a philosopher’s garden. Some pieces come into view only to disappear again as you walk about the grounds; forms mimic shapes found in nature, and others come into view as your perspective changes.
For almost 20 years, Taylor—a contemporary philosopher, pioneering educator, and prolific author who has left an indelible mark through his boundary-crossing work—has crafted a landscape art and sculpture garden onto this Williamstown property on Stone Hill where he and his wife, Dinny, have lived since 1989. Throughout his decades-long career, Taylor has made seminal contributions to the fields of philosophy and cultural criticism by exploring technology’s role in education, visualizing complex philosophical concepts, and influencing generations of leading thinkers across many fields.
“Stone Hill has been teaching me the value of place in a world where place seems to be disappearing,” Taylor says. “ I always say to students, ‘What you think is a function of when you think and where you think.’”
At 78, Taylor has the rugged good looks of Richard Gere or Harrison Ford—not exactly what one thinks of when thinking of a philosophy professor. Having graduated from Wesleyan in 1968, he went on to pursue his doctorate in religion at Harvard Graduate School and landed his first job at Williams in 1973, where he quickly achieved tenure and taught for 34 years. (He also earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 1981.) He left Williams as Cluett Professor of the Humanities to head Columbia’s Department of Religion in 2007.
In 1995, Taylor received the National Professor of the Year award from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for promoting early online education. It started with a teleconference between a classroom in Helsinki and Taylor’s class at Williams and blossomed into some of the first webcast lectures and, later, into the Global Education Network, which Taylor co-founded with investor Herbert Allen, Jr., with the idea to provide high-quality online education. It was ahead of its time. “Mark stands out; he’s that rare bird who is a great teacher and is willing to challenge the system and himself,” says Allen, who believes teaching is Taylor’s legacy. “Great teachers live through their students and the students who follow their students.”
Alethea Harnish, who studied and co-taught with Taylor in his last class at Columbia, agrees. “He doesn’t want followers,” Harnish says. “He wants you to take what he has given to you and do what he can’t imagine doing himself and bring it back to tell him about it.” She was among dozens of other people who gathered at Stone Hill to pay tribute to Taylor last summer, including students from some of his earliest classes at Williams to the present day.
The gathering was organized by former students, including Tom Carlson, who studied with Taylor at Williams in the 1980s and is now a professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he directs UCSB’s Humanities and Social Change Center. “Taylor’s belief in his students enables them to take what they learned in his classroom and head out into the world and make things happen,” says Carlson. “If you look at the academics who were formed in his classrooms and you look at their records and their teaching, it’s really an impressive legacy.” In addition to Carlson, Taylor’s students who have gone on to important academic positions include Jeff Kosky, professor of religion at Washington & Lee University, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, who now holds the position at Wesleyan once held by Taylor’s undergraduate professor Steve Crites.
Bill Little is another former student whose father, H. Ganse “Binks” Little, was a longtime colleague of Taylor’s at Williams. “Mark’s teaching coursed through us with such vitality that we, too, became teachers in one form or another,” says Little. The dancer, author, and philosopher Kimerer LaMothe, who took her first class with Taylor (Religion 301) when she was a junior at Williams in the ’80s, recalls what she sees as his paradox: “This daring, idol-bashing provocateur was a devoted dad who had married his high school sweetheart. This fierce intellect shredding the work of his fathers went home every day to his children, paying close attention to them.”
That high school sweetheart, née Dinny Stearns, counts among her ancestors Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and is distantly related to T.S. Eliot. She also worked at Williams for 31 years before retiring in 2014 as chief technology officer. The two married in 1968 and together raised their two children in Williamstown before moving out to the southern end of Stone Hill.
While some would question how she could let her husband get away with what Taylor himself has called his “folly,” Dinny doesn’t see it that way. “I’m the beneficiary of his creativity,” she says. “I enjoy letting his mind run wild.” The landscape and sculpture garden are only part of it. Taylor’s barn studio houses his books, family artifacts, and the workspace for his ongoing projects, serving as a repository for much of his thinking. He has binders for every course he has ever taught, and even several of the most important and influential classes he took as an undergraduate at Wesleyan.
Suspended from the ceiling at one end of the barn is a large vitrine and lightbox, which he constructed for Grave Matters, his 2002 exhibit at MASS MoCA. In the glass case are 144 tiny compartments holding small black plastic film canisters, each of which contains soil taken from the gravesites of one of Taylor’s “ghosts,” the philosophers, artists, writers, and other thinkers who influenced him. Chief among these ghosts are two of the philosophers whose work he originally studied: Kierkegaard and Hegel. The other, Nietzsche, is represented by the large script “D” tattooed on Taylor’s left arm. Nietzsche signed his last work “Dionysus,” Taylor explains, and this D comes from that signature. It’s the same D that Taylor had fabricated into a large steel sculpture for his garden, along with Kierkegaard’s initial “K” and the “H” of Hegel. The K was the most complicated, says Taylor. “The guys had to suspend the top section in the air and weld it in place to the bottom section.” Examining the spot where the two sections come together, one can sense the tension in the joint.
The idea of ghosts stems from Taylor’s view of the afterlife. “Whatever afterlife we have is the way in which we live on in those who come after us,” he says. With his “art-and-thought garden” on Stone Hill, Taylor has brought his entire philosophy to embody the landscape of his place. “I am the ghost host, my ghosts live through me, and I give them voice, but they’re the ones that make me what I am, as I will for my students.”
Death and ghosts have long been on his mind. Paul Lieberman, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times, has been to Taylor’s house and gardens numerous times over the years and occasionally leads tours of the property. “The first time I went to his house, one of the things that struck me was a living room that’s all about death,” Lieberman says. He’s talking about the photographs and grave rubbings that encircle the living room, which were part of Taylor's MASS MoCA exhibit, contrasted by a big, picture-window view west towards the Taconic Range.
Taylor didn’t start out to create a sculpture garden. He began by simply clearing the brush that was encroaching on the open space of their property. When he found the outcropping of stone that appears to be rising like a wave, uncovering it was more than aesthetic; it was a way of recovering. In fact, for Taylor, recovering had multiple meanings. “I was thinking of recovery in three ways,” Taylor says. “Recovery as retrieving. Recovering as a place to recover. And recovering as covering over again. Because what we have been doing has been covering and recovering place.” Recovering Place became the title of his book of photographs and short essays about the garden published in 2016.
Recovery at the time for Taylor had yet another meaning. In 2005, he required a biopsy on his pancreas, which unfortunately led to septic shock, and Taylor nearly died. Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1988, Taylor now wears an artificial pancreas that manages his blood sugar digitally, a device that inspired his 2021 book, Intervolution: Smart Bodies, Smart Things, about how artificial intelligence and technology are altering human life.
Working on the landscape and the art he placed in it was an act of recovery from his illness. “In order to recover, that is to heal,” says Taylor. “We have to overcome the recovering that hides by recovering, by retrieving the place that grounds us.” This type of turning over words and meanings pervades Taylor’s writing—and hints at the influence of the French Deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, with whom Taylor was friends—as he strove to create what he calls a “philosophy of culture.”
The central theme throughout Taylor’s diverse works is interconnectedness—the interplay of physical and digital, nature and technology, a professor’s teaching and their student’s impact. The exploratory nature of his career reveals a worldview integrating these disparate facets into a philosophical whole. The landscape and sculpture garden, which melds environment, art, and perspective-shifting experience, epitomizes Taylor’s determination to bridge concept and embodiment, to take philosophy off the page.
Like some of the artists Taylor has written about over the years, his landscape works bring the viewer into the art. Not like the various “immersion” experiences that have become popular over the past few years, but more like James Turrell’s “skyspaces”—one of which can be experienced at MASS MoCA—enclosed structures with an opening to the sky, giving the viewer an ever-changing perspective.
The garden is an extension of Taylor’s philosophical and art-critical writings and, in some ways, the culmination of his life’s work. One can see the through-line even from his earliest books—the cover of Altarity, published in 1987, for example, features a decapitated pyramid, which reappears in several of his steel sculptures at Stone Hill.
While Taylor has hired local craftspeople to construct his sculptures and stone works, he and Dinny do the work of maintaining the landscape. “One of my mantras is that I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t cut their own lawn,” says Taylor, who tends to the landscape as an exercise in discipline and connectedness to the land. This work ethic traces back to his childhood in suburban New Jersey. Both his parents were teachers—his father taught science and his mother literature—and they imparted a sense of the importance of hard work and discipline. “From the time I was ten, I was cutting lawns in the neighborhood and tending gardens,” Taylor recalls. He still has the notebooks where he kept track of his lawn jobs and earnings, and he can visualize many of the lawns he cut. “What all that physical labor taught me was discipline,” Taylor offers. “I would not have written all the books I’ve written if I hadn’t cut all the lawns I’d cut.”
Their children, Aaron Taylor and Kirsten Carr, recall that working in the yard was both an expectation and a gift. It was, as Taylor’s son says, partly about the work ethic, “but also about taking the time to appreciate things, whether it’s the outdoors or your family or friends.” Carr, who had firsthand experience taking a class from her father as a sophomore in college, underscores his love for teaching. “He cared so deeply about his students. He helped them discover a true love of learning,” says Carr, who includes herself as one of those students.
Jack Miles, the author of God: A Biography, among other titles, is one of Taylor’s oldest friends. The two met at Harvard in 1968 and recently authored a book together, A Friendship in Twilight, consisting of their correspondence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Miles recalls being in touch with Taylor when he started working on the garden. “Mark said, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t quite know where it’s going.’ And I was pleased about that,” says Miles. “I thought this moved it closer to the experience of an artist. This is a work of art, obviously, and it is the work of an artist who happens to be a philosopher. It is laden with philosophical allusions, but it still has power as an autonomous work of art.”
Although Taylor retired from formal teaching as of last year, his former student Tom Carlson invited him to be a guest lecturer at UCSB last semester. And Taylor continues to explore through his writing and possibly additional sculpture or landscape art at what he calls “neXus.” His latest and 36th book, After the Human: A Philosophy for the Future, which will be published by Columbia University Press this fall, examines the issues around generative artificial intelligence in much the way he has approached his consideration of markets, technology, time, fashion, art, and architecture. Indeed, the way Taylor has analyzed everything he’s taken on is with an almost Hegelian resolve to get to the spiritual roots of our culture.
“To think differently is to be different,” Taylor explains and, in many ways, that’s what his project is all about, as it is with all artists. “At a fundamental level, if you see the world differently, you’re going to act differently.” Stone Hill represents for Taylor a living embodiment of his philosophy and an extension of his prolific writing. Still, Taylor does think about the impact of his work or his life and wonders if he’s made a difference. “The world is literally ablaze, and what am I doing? I’m sitting here writing a book that nobody will understand and creating a garden that nobody ever sees.”
The question of who sees this garden is a complicated one. First, it’s located on a private residence, and it’s not a traditional sculpture garden such as Storm King or Art Omi, with titles and explanatory signage. “The place really only comes alive when you’re talking with Mark about it,” says Kathy Morris, the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts at the Clark Institute. She was involved in the 2016 exhibit about Stone Hill, Sensing Place, co-curated by Taylor and Hank W. Art at the Clark. “It’s as much in his mind as it is on the ground.”
The death of Taylor’s brother last year and a recent surgery brought the specter of death closer to his mind these days. “With diabetes, there is no such thing as simple surgery, ” he says. His new book opens with the observation, “Philosophy is a prolonged meditation on death.”
What will happen to this project after Taylor is gone? Would the Clark or Williams take it on? The grounds alone would require a significant endowment to manage, especially with the intensive landscaping required to keep nature from taking over. There are examples of such important, permanent institutions being created from the estates of artists and writers throughout the region—think Daniel Chester French’s Chesterwood, Edith Wharton’s The Mount, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, or Fredrick Church’s Olana.
The Clark’s Morris admits it’s a tough thing to try to figure out. “I can’t answer what he should do or what he will do,” Morris says, “but I would say, and I think Mark would agree with this, that if over time nature reclaims that land, and it all gets obliterated, in some ways, that’s exactly what he writes about all the time. And there’s something poetic about that.”