Huts, treks, hikes, tents, plots and allotments

I went yesterday to see what was going on at the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (14 February–18 April), or at least the half of it that's happening at the Martin Gropius Bau. The work had a pleasingly pragmatic, political, committed slant: most of it seemed to be about things like spirit of place, town planning, architecture, and psychogeography. There was an emphasis on greenery, utopianism and healing. My favourite room was the one given over to Temporary Utopias, a thematic installation by Ingrid Book and Carina Heden.



Book and Heden are two Swedish artists in their 50s. They live in Oslo and have been working as a team since 1987. It's tempting to think of them as a lesbian wife and wife art team, a kind of radical Scandinavian libertarian gardening version of Gilbert and George. Their room, on the north side of the Gropius Bau, overlooking one of the longest surviving bits of the Berlin wall, contained about ten large photos of allotments, gardens, excursions, greenery. Over by the windows there was a real hut with a kind of Japanese patio with cushions you could recline on while you watched videos of people taking wooded treks, digging vegetable plots, putting up tents, and just generally communing with nature.



This is a theme I've photographed myself, snapping, for instance, the allotments in Treptower Park. 'Green religion' and its link to radical-utopian post-protestant politics is something you notice as soon as you enter German-Scandinavian mindspace. It's a quiet but somehow fanatical reverence, a need to sit and contemplate greenspace, to recycle garbage, to use wind power. Yesterday I also went up Berlin's TV tower, and saw again the wind farm propellors, the lakes and forests surrounding this city, as well as the greenery that permeates it. Nature is built right into Berlin, and when you live here it's the British and American indifference to nature which becomes the oddity, the anomaly. US and UK green politics seems to be a non-starter. People in the US and UK don't separate burnable trash from non-burnable. There's little effort in those countries to develop wind, wave and sun power. Japan is much closer to the German and Scandinavian countries in its attitude to nature and recycling: Tokyo is surprisingly leafy, and the architecture of sentos, temples and teahouses is often carefully designed to frame relaxing and inspiring garden scenes. (Of course, the early history of the US also contains a certain amount of this reverence, this linking of nature to radical politics, in books like Thoreau's Walden. The theme seems to peter out thereafter, or rather, to become the resort of dubious 'evil' characters like the Unabomber.)



Anyway, Book and Heden's Temporary Utopias pleased me with its gentleness and utopianism. According to the blurb, their installation 'is about the small utopias of single individuals next to the great social structures, and about the way in which utopias come to expression in urban space. Book and Heden regard the garden as a location where utopias are realized on multiple levels. By growing your own garden, you combine practical work with ideals and dreams...' This infolding of the metaphysical into the details of the small and the practical seems very 'Japanese' to me, very shinto. And the wooden hut with its cushions reminded me of a certain teahouse I once visited in Kyoto.

Book and Heden have something in common with one of my favourite Scottish artists, the neo-classicist Iain Hamilton Findlay. One of Book and Heden's most Findlay-like projects is a book documenting inscriptions carved on stones between 1883-1898 by Alfred Bexell, a Swedish landowner and liberal Member of Parliament. Bexell had worthy sayings, well-known and unknown names from world history carved on several hundreds of boulders, stones and rocks in and around the forests of Grimeton, South Sweden. Book and Heden have also made work inspired by the German garden architect Leberecht Migge (1881-1935). Migge 'defined culture as a form of cultivation similar to artistic work. In his view, useful was beautiful, and individuals should be allowed to combine creativity and utility by being self-supplied with food and lodgings. One should be able to live off the land, not necessarily in the countryside. Book and Heden have fetched inspiration from this almost forgotten, but visionary garden architect, and they hope the audience will use Migge's tent construction with its sleeping areas and lie down for a rest.'



This sort of edenic, utopian yet rational nature-reverence groups and curates some of my favourite parts of the past -- the 18th century in the form of Voltaire, Rousseau, David and Poussin, Japanese animism, the early days of the American republic -- and suggests that they might also be some of the best parts of the future. Why on earth shouldn't huts, treks, hikes, tents, plots and allotments be the most 'futuristic' thing imagineable? We just need to take Voltaire's advice and cultivate our garden. I'm going to start right now by making a cup of green tea.