This was fun: I opened up the Museum of Modern Art gift catalog yesterday and saw this on page 2, the Andrea Air Purifier. Instead of filters or electric charges, Matthieu Lehanneur’s machine from 2007 uses a live plant.
Once again I get the feeling that gardeners are way ahead of the curve. Plants to clean the air? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?
And then there’s the matter of the price tag $199, plant not included. Yikes. But the manufacturer makes some claims about how the gizmo is lots more efficient than traditional purifiers or even plants:
Based on experiments performed by RTP Labs, Andrea improves the efficiency of formaldehyde removal from the air relative to plants alone by 360%. Relative to HEPA and carbon filters, comparison between the RTP Labs data and literature data show an improvement in formaldehyde filtration efficiency of 4400%. These data confirm that while plants alone in an interior setting are more efficient than HEPA and carbon filters at removing toxic gases from the air, they are significantly less efficient than Andrea. Even more important, the rate of gas removal by Andrea is, according to the RTP Labs data, over 1000% faster than for plants alone.
Much of the technological magic appears to be due a fan that circulates air around the plant and then into the room—something that you could probably rig up in the privacy of your own home. (Be prepared to water your plant more often.) As a fun piece of conceptual art that was part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, the price wouldn’t be that outrageous. But as a functional appliance I’d probably opt for a few little green machines, growing and photosynthesizing and blooming through the winter doldrum months…
I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty Center whenever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a perfect day for a stroll through the garden to see what new things I’d find.
If you’ve never been to the garden, it divides into two large parts: a central bowl holding a maze of two colors of clipped azaleas and its surrounding plantings, and, above it, a straight watercourse that is shaded all along its length by London plane trees, a cousin of the American sycamore.
This trip I was concentrating on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the overall design and plantings.
To experience the upper watercourse, you follow a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shelter of the trees, letting you experience the bright Los Angeles sunlight and how it contrasts with the dappled light the trees provide in the spring, summer and fall.
The watercourse near the top of the Central Garden
The watercourse, the sheltered core of this top garden, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a waterway that glides quietly over a textured streambed down below.
The effect of the dappled sunlight is repeated in the plantings. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alternate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to distinguish the alternating light and shadow of the trees above from the dappled plantings below. It’s a little confusing, a tad disorienting. And if you’re fascinated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a quietly thrilling experience.
Even this little detail, a planting of succulents, plays with contrasts, light and dark. It’s a little corner that would look great in a home garden, and here it further helps to reinforce the vibrations of light and dark in the upper garden.
When I first saw the garden I thought the plantings were a little chaotic. All this light and dark, all this continual contrasting of colors and plant shapes seemed restless. Small doses would look great as perky little container plantings, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a little English cottage garden doped up on steroids.
But I’ve been changing my mind. All this craziness reinforces the intense vibration of contrasts that you experience walking the zigzag path.
Once you make your way out of the upper portion of the garden you’re set free into the relative calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzagging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shifting from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower garden ensures that one of the sides will experience shade during most of the day. And the plantings down here, still alternating dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.
Yes, each trip here I see something new. But I also realize that making this kind of garden happen is such an extreme commitment of resources and labor.
I haven’t quite figured out a way to photograph the capital outlay it takes to keep this garden looking great. But I’d like to end this post with a tribute to the heroes, those dedicated gardeners who make this place a garden worth visiting several times a year.
Here’s a really interesting painting that I encountered Sunday while I was visiting the Getty Museum. It’s “The Tulip Folly,” by the 19th century French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was having a big show in one of the galleries. (The painting was on loan from Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.)
The scene takes place during the 1630s tulip mania and shows a soldier guarding a potted tulip, while other troops stomp out fields of flowering bulbs. The piece was painted in 1882 during a time of economic distress around the Paris Bourse Crash, a time even more economically unsettled than our own. Gérôme was painting tulips and the tulip folly alright, but he was also commenting on his own day, which saw a great stock market crash three and a half centuries after the collapse of tulip values.
While looking for images of this painting I ran across a couple other interesting depictions of the tulip mania. Both were painted by Dutch artists closer to the actual tulip market crash, and both paintings reside in Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum.
Hendrik Gerritsz Pot painted an allegory of Flora’s Wagon of Fools around 1640. This painting shows a cartload of tulip-deranged wackos leading the common workers into the sea. Substitute Wall Street bankers for the tulip-snorting loonies and I think it has special resonance for us today.
Jean Brueghel the Younger’s Satire of the Tulip Frenzy is even unkinder towards the participants in the frenzy. They appear in the painting as monkeys. Smack!
As unflattering as the speculators appear, in some ways the previous image of Flora’s wagon comes off as being a stronger indictment of the damage done to a general population by a moneyed elite. Still, Brueghel’s monkeys are pretty wild and I like his work better as a painting.
Sometimes I feel a little silly chasing after an unusual plant that I absolutely must have. (If you hear of a land run on San Diego ragweed, I might have something to do with it…) Maybe these images, combined with the experience of our current economic times, will slap a little bit of sanity into me.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently featuring a series of installations and exhibitions looking at notions of food, culture and art. The program, EatLACMA, is co-curated by the collective that goes by the name of Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young) along with LACMA curator Michele Urton.
Åsa Sonjasdotter has contributed The Way Potatoes Go, a vaguely California-shaped planter containing soil, potato plants, plant labels and straw mulch. In the piece she explores the 10,000 years of history and culture associated with potatoes, one of the plants with the longest and richest narratives.
From the artist’s statement: “The varieties exist as a result of coincidences, accidents, planning, violence, and careful custody over thousands of years. Through tracing their different backgrounds a history of human desire appears.” Go to [ http://eatlacma.org/gardens/ ] and click on The Way Potatoes Go on the map for details on the varieties.
If you can’t check out the piece in person here are a few random details of it:
You can also click [ here ] for further information on how the artist got interested in this, one of the most primal of foods.
Over the summer this garden of historical potatoes will be viewed by tens of thousands of people. Although many gardeners will already be familiar with some of the rich history of potatoes, this installation will bring that knowledge and appreciation to a wider audience. And the artist’s story is a compelling read.
Services that will print a custom fabric for you have been around for a little while. Now there’s Shortomatic, a firm that will take a design or photo that you upload and turn it into a pair of boardshorts—just in time for summer. Even if you don’t spring the $99 for the shorts, you can noodle around on their site and see what your photos might look like turned into clothing. I played a bit with some mostly garden photos:
The original photo, some variegated Agave americana at the Huntington Library’s desert garden…
…And the photo imagined as a pair of shorts using the Shortomatic design tool. These have a bit of a lederhosen/bondage vibe. I’m not sure I could pull off this look at the beach.
Here’s a photo from last summer of a sphinx moth hovering at night over some sage flowers.
…And the same photo turned into a pair of shorts.
A photo of the West Side of Los Angeles, taken from outside the gardens at the J. Paul Getty Museum on a cool, clear January afternoon.
Board shorts with the skyline used for a border at the base of the leg openings.
This is another succulent photo, using the “find edges” filter in Photoshop, a huge cliche if there ever was one. And then I took the photo and tilted it towards the red end of the spectrum.
And here’s what it looks like turned into shorts.
Oh good, another black hole where you can throw your spare time…
I had the chance to fast-forward through a documentary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Owning the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy science of geoengineering, in which scientists and charlatans attempt to modify the earth’s weather.
As one cautionary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hatfield who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hatfield set up his apparatus on the eastern edge of town and got to business seeding clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 people were dead in the ensuing flooding. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a charlatan taking advantage of a natural weather occurrence. Whether this sort of weather modification actually makes a difference in practice is in dispute. ]
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, is interviewed and gets some of the better lines in the film:
“One of the great sadnesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warming get completely out of control is [these geoengineering proposals] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…
“The 20th century taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that scientific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trouble. Any sort of solution that we could introduce that was actually going to lower the temperature of the world several degrees—you know, whatever geoengineering solution—is inherently a big scale scary as hell.”
Interestingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or looking out at the world from the climate controlled space of a car interior. All that reinforces one of the film’s points that we’re a culture that has cut ourselves off from what the environment brings us naturally.
I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some people are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the perfect temperature. Just extrapolate that out onto the entire earth and you can see that coming up with a scheme to modify weather so that everyone is happy is bound to be an impossible task.
What if Siberia decides it wants to grow tropical mangoes and geoengineers a frost-free climate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What happens to the rest of the world?
I’m one of several artists in town who’ve been nominated for the San Diego Art Prize, an annual opportunity for long-established local artists to partner with newer emerging talent and hold a joint exhibition that will rocket everyone to fame and fortune—or at least that’s the idea behind it.
Even though I’ve been around town for a few years, I’ll be showing as “emerging talent” along with a dozen others who’ve been nominated by various artists and art professionals around town. The show is the speed dating exhibition, where the established artist can get to know the nominated artists and select their choice of the person they’d like to exhibit with. It’s also a chance for folks in town to take a look at our work.
I’ll be showing part of a photography-based installation that looks at the names people have given to features in the landscape, particularly to features that bear a resemblance to humans. Some of the names are fanciful and fun, others march pretty quickly into territory that’s pretty rude or offensive. Landscape photography that takes on issues of racism? Well, why not? (My recent blog post on culturally offensive plant names comes from the same place in my brain and deals with some of the same issues.)
James SOE NYUN.CADP1001: The Face in the Rock, Dana Point, California. Pigment print on board, 10 x 12 1/2 inches.
Here’s a recent image that’ll be in the show, one of the more fun ones, a formation up the coast at Dana Point.
James SOE NYUN.AZCNM0802: China Boy, Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona. Pigment print on board, 12 1/2 x 10 inches.
And then there’s this one from Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, one of the potentially more offensive ones. Although the name probably dates from the 1930s, when people thought a name like this was okay to use, the name still appears on signage to this day.
I did a post on this body of work a couple year ago [ here ] but this is the first time it will be exhibited.
The scoop:
New Contemporaries III runs Sat., April 24 – Sat., May 22, 2010
at Project X: Art, 320 S. Cedros Ave. Ste. 500 , Solana Beach, 92075
Exhibition hours: Tue - Friday 10 - 5, Saturday 11 – 4 pm
Opening Reception: Sat. April 24, 6 – 10 pm
Panel Discussion: Saturday, May 15 at 6 to 8 pm
Drop on by to the opening and introduce yourself if an Icelandic volcano isn’t getting in the way of your air travel!
Any rabid garden enthusiast visiting Los Angeles will probably want to put Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum on their list of places to visit. I’ve written about it a few times, including [ here ] and [ here ], and so have a lot of other bloggers. Robert Irwin is also involved in an installation of palm trees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The garden-making is a fairly recent addition to the projects of this amazing artist. Before taking on biological materials he created a rich body of work that plays with subtle ways you perceive light and space. Yesterday I had a chance to visit a show of some work in progress to see what he’s doing these days.
Robert Irwin.#4 X 8’ Four Fold (detail) 2010. Photo credit: Philipp Scholz Rittermann
To look at this image to the left you’d maybe swear that this is a painting of stripes. But step into the gallery and you realize that these works are actually made out of evenly spaced fluorescent tubes, each of which has been wrapped in gels to modify their color and to provide linear patterns on the face of the bulbs. Most of Irwin’s art uses simple techniques like this, but the more you look, the more you get pulled into them.
The effects are so subtle photos can’t really do complete justice to the pieces. But the photographer, Philipp Scholz Rittermann, one of our local really talented camera guys, has made a beautiful interpretation.
You can see the vertical lines of the tubes, the lines of the dark gels, the subtle colors the tubes cast onto the fixtures and the spaces between them, and the delicate shadows of the fixtures. The tubes, the gels, the fixtures, the shadows—everything works together to give you a quietly rhythmic progression.
Robert Irwin.#3 X 6’ Four Fold (detail) 2010. Photo credit: Philipp Scholz Rittermann
If I’m remembering the helpful gallery folks correctly, each piece has four different states, with different bulbs being on at different times. One of the big themes of the Getty garden is change—which really isn’t something you have to explain to a gardener—and these new pieces play with how different the same arrangement of bulbs appears as you turn some bulbs on and off.
Take a look at my garden photo at the top of this post, and look how the central topiaries of two kinds of clipped azaleas uses the subtly different leaf and flower colors to create interlocked formations. Next, look at one of the fluorescent bulb pieces and notice the subtle interplays of light and shadow that make up the work. It’s the same basic principle, but applied to wildly differing materials. As the plants in the garden go in and out of bloom, as the seasons change, the relationship of the formations shifts. Same goes for what happens when some bulbs are on and others blacked out.
I don’t often leave an exhibit thrilled and tingling, but this time I did. If you can make it to the exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, go quick, before the show closes May 1. Or if you’ll be in New York in the fall, I believe I heard correctly that there’ll be a show of this work at the Pace Gallery.
Another quick stop over the holidays took the form of a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Installed at the new main entrance is this battalion of 202 antique streetlights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden. Streetlights like these of course were positioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced regularly. Clustering them together like this accentuates that fact, and to me makes the whole installation seem maybe just a little bit militaristic.
Arranged behind the Burden piece are some palm trees, the first plantings of what will be a large installation of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a separate garden than plantings integrated into the art and architecture.
Their trunks echo the posts of the streetlights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a regular pattern. Also, as with the streetlights, they’re a collection of different kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is Southern California’s light, and the species of palms have been specially chosen to gather and reflect the interplay of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sample ], and I’ll be checking back on this installation as time goes on.
The whole vertical shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s latest building, the newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has red exterior accents, including plenty of red columns.
The landscaping in this part of the museum is interesting in that it uses palms or flat plantings. Virtually no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban planting that in part seems designed to give the homeless no place to camp.
Most horizontal surfaces, using decomposed granite or this Turfstone product, are designed as walkable extensions of the concrete paving. Where does the landscape end and the urban fabric begin?
Here’s an interesting gardening aside: The Museums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a substance that has preserved bones of sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imagine trying to garden where digging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in contact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a garden book that even begins to discuss what to do with this kind of soil problem. While the park containing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plantings seemed free of the muck.
My main reason for visiting LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassembles many of the works that were seen in the seminal 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition of landscape photography. These works in the show signaled a break from the more romantic takes on what landscape photos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human presence reigned supreme.
One of my favorite photographers in the show, Robert Adams, often combines the romantic sublime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” from 1973 [ source ], a great example of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human landscape often fails to live up to the stunning geography where it’s sited.
Seeing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. (From this photo you can see that he takes “traditional values” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snippet gardeners and landscape designers might like to think about.
Not surprisingly, many photographers have loved gardens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of disillusion.” Gardens are in fact strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries not from but of truth.
—from the essay, “Truth and Landscape” in Beauty in Photography
In parting, let me move from beauty in photography to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, backlit by the afternoon sun:
(For another example of Burden’s work, check out the installation of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 matchsticks that the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited: The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.)
I was browsing the web to see what was out there in the way of birdhouse designs that might be compatible with a home that doesn’t aspire to look like it was built in the 14th century. A few screens into the results, out popped this design by Dennis Clasen that’s being merchandised by Manufaktum in Switzerland [ catalog page ]. Apparently the designed debuted at the 2008 Design Biennale in Saint Ettiene, France.
A birdhouse masquerading as a closed-circuit TV camera: Yeah, it’s fun and funny. But to me it seems to be a bit of social commentary, something about our lives these days that are subject to continuous surveillance and how people seem to be willing to give up their liberties in the name of something they perceive as security.
Or maybe I’m over-interpreting and it’s just a funny little birdhouse?
I love this birdhouse!
