Avant gardening
Jul. 23rd, 2006 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWell, I performed a Momus set last night outdoors, standing right in the conceptual garden (the sixth in a series) by Atelier Le Balto. In fact, the avant gardeners even have their office in the Kunst-Werke courtyard.
At a time when territorial invasion has become a malign trend, it's nice to see that a more benign use of territory is also fashionable: the transformation of dead sites into gardens. At Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for instance, as well as two Wild Gardens designed by Atelier Le Balto, you can currently see a show called Tropico-Vegetal. This show takes off from the work of Sergio Vega, whose installation Paradise in the New World at the Venice Biennale was, for me, the highlight of the 2005 show.
At Palais de Tokyo, as curator Marc Sanchez explains in a series of video clips about the show, there are five individual exhibitions, taking off from Vega's conception of tropical South America as both a real and a mythical place. The rest of the shows concentrate on "the zone of vegetation". In an installation called "Through the woods to find the forest", Henrik Hakansson has made sculpture of fallen forest trees and fifty species of orchids suspended from steel cables. His main material is "the universe of the forest, its plants and luxuriant trees, its insects, frogs and serpents".
Based on a 17th century book he found which described (with maps) exactly where to find an earthly paradise in the rain forests of Brasil (a place called Matto Grosso, paradise hunters), Sergio Vega has made an installation called "Un Petit Coin de Paradis", recounting his own rather haphazard experiences tracking down and finding this spot.
The Palais de Tokyo gardens will be dismantled in August, perhaps to be reassembled somewhere else. The idea would please Leipzig-based Atelier Atlas, who make mobile and brief-duration gardens: "A small experimental garden may have a life of but a few moments", they say.
Let's hope that Ian Hamilton-Finlay's conceptual garden at Little Sparta, outside Edinburgh, lasts a wee bit longer.
At a time when territorial invasion has become a malign trend, it's nice to see that a more benign use of territory is also fashionable: the transformation of dead sites into gardens. At Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for instance, as well as two Wild Gardens designed by Atelier Le Balto, you can currently see a show called Tropico-Vegetal. This show takes off from the work of Sergio Vega, whose installation Paradise in the New World at the Venice Biennale was, for me, the highlight of the 2005 show.At Palais de Tokyo, as curator Marc Sanchez explains in a series of video clips about the show, there are five individual exhibitions, taking off from Vega's conception of tropical South America as both a real and a mythical place. The rest of the shows concentrate on "the zone of vegetation". In an installation called "Through the woods to find the forest", Henrik Hakansson has made sculpture of fallen forest trees and fifty species of orchids suspended from steel cables. His main material is "the universe of the forest, its plants and luxuriant trees, its insects, frogs and serpents".
Based on a 17th century book he found which described (with maps) exactly where to find an earthly paradise in the rain forests of Brasil (a place called Matto Grosso, paradise hunters), Sergio Vega has made an installation called "Un Petit Coin de Paradis", recounting his own rather haphazard experiences tracking down and finding this spot.The Palais de Tokyo gardens will be dismantled in August, perhaps to be reassembled somewhere else. The idea would please Leipzig-based Atelier Atlas, who make mobile and brief-duration gardens: "A small experimental garden may have a life of but a few moments", they say.
Let's hope that Ian Hamilton-Finlay's conceptual garden at Little Sparta, outside Edinburgh, lasts a wee bit longer.
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i just can't stop talking
Date: 2006-07-23 01:44 pm (UTC)looks a bit like the set for caligular in pastel
Re: i just can't stop talking
Date: 2006-07-23 01:45 pm (UTC)> looks a bit like the set for caligular in pastel
that would be caligula
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 04:14 pm (UTC)Just spent the better part of the month on my back with encephalitis and lyme disease contracted while photographing wild bog orchids.
My carnivorous plant garden has been kinder.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 04:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 04:27 pm (UTC)Now I just have to deal with my high cholesterol. Guess I'll have to eat more plants. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 09:21 pm (UTC)Sadly, I'm now hearing less tree frogs at night, and more locusts are trilling in the afternoon, which means summer is beginning to fade. Here's (http://www.lordwhimsy.com/trifles/webbsmill.mov) a short Pine Barrens Tree Frog clip I shot this June. They're very rare. No bears that night, thankfully.
—The Lord in the Leaves
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 09:33 pm (UTC)Why is it that city dwellers are politically inclined to the left? Part of it is that there is more sharing: sidewalks, busses, and subways. But I also think when you look around you, and all you see are man-made buildings, you lose an appreciation for the size and majesty of nature, immutable and constant, and you believe that man can create utopia as quickly as he throws up an office building.
-henryperri
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 11:15 pm (UTC)Also, I think city-dwellers are more left-wing because they're surrounded by "the other", people of other ethnicities, for instance. This keeps them tolerant.
As for nature being "immutable and constant", I'm reminded of something from the biography of Bertolt Brecht. On one of his many displacements, as he escaped the Nazis, he was living in a house next to a stunning view of mountains. But he moved his writing desk away from the window. He had no interest in a landscape that could not be changed by humans.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 11:44 pm (UTC)Fantastic! Your garden, I'd guess, is the most fantastic place in New Jersey. Was that "Village Green" video on your site actually shot there? I want to ramble around it that place forever!
Again, thanks for the beautiful greenness. If you can believe it, Glendale isn't exactly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 11:50 pm (UTC)That 95% figure. You just pulled that out of your ass right?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-24 12:41 am (UTC)Bumpkins anonymous
Date: 2006-07-24 12:58 am (UTC)It's been my experience that most people in cities tend to mean well and talk a good game, but because they are so physically isolated from nature, they can do little in the way of action other than tourism--at which time many, even good friends, come off as spoiled children (you can tell right away who the NYers are when kayaking or hiking: they're the ones making demands). It's an amusement ride to them, another artificial constuct made solely for their benefit. They can't seem to shut up and muster the slightest bit of reverence for the place they're in, which took millions of years to come about--as opposed to the paltry century it took to raise most American cities. They may have green sympathies, but they inhabit another world, and have little or no understanding of the one in which I live. No wonder most naturalists are misanthropes.
I belong to numerous organizations who try to keep real estate developers from encroaching on the unprotected parts of this region, (http://www.nps.gov/pine/) which is the last of its kind on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I patrol sensitive areas to prevent poachers from stealing animals and rare plants, many of which live nowhere else. You wouldn't want to see what this area would be like if people like myself moved to a city. It would be a massive airport for New York and Philadelphia, like they had originally planned. I dearly hope I can help to keep it as 'immutable' as possible during my lifetime.
Re: Bumpkins anonymous
Date: 2006-07-24 01:40 am (UTC)I'm not a huge nature fan myself. Like momus was saying, the nature vista is unchanging unless there's a thunderstorm. I'd rather eat my cereal and keep an eye on the street below, the cars.
I like to enjoy a sunny day from behind a glass window
I'll take the city, an enclosed orb, underneath the water maybe, now there's something to watch! but not the mountains. BORING
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-24 01:42 am (UTC)When you get a little older your mommy and daddy might take you to the Big City. They have lot's of candy and ice cream there. And if you're lucky they'll take you to an urban area like San Francisco where natural wonders abound.
Re: Bumpkins anonymous
Date: 2006-07-24 02:35 am (UTC)"...which is where the subtle thesis of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice comes in. He argues, with terrible persuasiveness, that a superabundance of options is not a blessing but a certain recipe for madness. Nowhere do people have more choices than in New York. 'New Yorkers should probably be the most unhappy people on the planet,' says Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore. 'On every block, there’s a lifetime’s worth of opportunities. And if I’m right, either they won’t be able to choose or they will choose, and they’ll be convinced they chose badly.'"
"Economists have a term for those who seek out the best options in life. They call them maximizers. And maximizers, in practically every study one can find, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do (economists call these people satisficers). 'My suspicion,' says Schwartz, 'is that all this choice creates maximizers.' If that’s the case, New York doesn’t just attract ambitious neurotics; it creates them. It also creates desires for things we don’t need—which, not coincidentally, is the business of Madison Avenue—and, as a corollary, pointless regrets, turning us all into a city of counterfactual historians, men and women who obsessively imagine different and better outcomes for ourselves."
Re: Bumpkins anonymous
Date: 2006-07-24 06:08 am (UTC)Leftist City Dweller
Date: 2006-07-24 01:13 pm (UTC)Re: Bumpkins anonymous
Date: 2006-07-25 02:24 am (UTC)--Sumomi
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 01:41 pm (UTC)High Cholesterol
Date: 2006-11-29 09:16 pm (UTC)http://www.lower-cholesterol-secrets.com/