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?
After living with drought for the last several years it’s refreshing to take a look at some gardens where water appears as an unlimited resource. Last weekend’s L.A. Times Home section featured an article on iwagumi, the art of aquascaping. Take a Japanese garden aesthetic, only apply it to a fishtank, and you have a basic take on iwagumi.
Above:Luis Carlos Galarraga, Sao Paulo Brazil, “When the rocks flow.” [ source ]
Each year the Aquatic Gardeners Association hosts a competition for photographs of these carefully planted tanks. (This year’s contest deadline is September 30.) Contestants have to apply the same design sense that they’d need to work with in a garden on land. But instead of the familiar plants of the terrestrial realm, they’re using aquatic species, most frequently planting them among an assortment of striking stones. In these gardens the delicate creatures overhead aren’t birds, but fish.
The image above and the two below are medium-sized tanks from last year’s competition. Click on the “source” link and you’ll be taken to the page where you’ll see more images of each project, along with comments from the competition’s judges. It’s a very specialized aesthetic that they’re employing in the scoring, but the comments are interesting to read with a grain of salt, and might give you ideas on how to play with plants and space in gardens that live on the other side of the water table.
Above:Mélisse Moireau, Sarcelles France, “Grassland sunset.” [ source ]
Since we’re air-breathing creatures these tanks transport us to a realm where we normally don’t have an opportunity to look at in any detail. They remind me a lot of the photography of Karen Glaser, a Chicago photographer that I had a chance to exhibit with a few years back in a group show here in town at the Museum of Photographic Arts. Much of Karen’s work is taken underwater, in the oceans or in swamps. Her magical, mysterious work is nothing like the clichés that make up most other underwater photography.
This image:Karen Glaser: Dust Storm in Catfish Sink, 2006, Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 37x25in.
Check out her website for lots more examples of her beautiful work.
A woman in my office brought in a couple flats of lettuces that her father had grown. Every few months the father’s garden gets to that exuberant point where there’s no way you can begin to eat everything it produces. What better thing to do with it than share?
I brought home a couple heads that are making their way into salads. People rave about the difference between home-grown and store-bought tomatoes, but lettuce can show similar differences. The thick outer stems in the salads had a delicate crunch without the bitterness that you often encounter.
Talking to my coworker she was saying how her father was getting distressed with the new watering restrictions. Apparently he was used to watering his vegetables every day. She was trying to assure him that cutting back to every other day probably wouldn’t make much difference, even in midsummer.
In addition to salad I made this abstraction using another closeup of the lettuce as a source. This employs the much-overused Find Edges filter in Photoshop, in combination with a couple of other controls. I tried to keep just a hint of the lettuce to credit the biological source of the image. It’s a desktop doodle at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll do anything with it.
So, is this what they call playing with your food?
Photographing a tree can present some challenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best lighting conditions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the background behind the tree may be an unsightly or incomprehensible mess.
Last year I ran across the work of Korean photographer Myoung-Ho Lee, whose photos of trees present an elegant—and spectacularly not practical—solution to this problem of background. He just brings a plain background with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you figure that the trees in the photos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the background sheet has to be.
Some of the photos have just the tree isolated against the plain background. Others show the tree and background in the larger context of the landscape where the tree is growing.
The results are pretty amazing, and create photos that are rich with suggestion and ideas about photography.
You might be driven to think about the fact that to photograph something in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of selecting the tree isn’t really digging the thing up from nature, it’s still bringing something from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography—and much of art—is finding something interesting interesting in the world and bringing it into a gallery.
You also might think that looking at a photograph of something might tell you something about how the thing in the photo looks, but very little about its context or meaning.
And you might even think of Marcel Duchamp displaying a signed urinal in an exhibition, with the basic premise that if an artist calls something art, it’s art.
None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will probably have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, however, that these are some of the more striking photographs of trees that have ever been taken.
Community gardens are at least as much about community as they are about gardening.
From 120 miles away, I followed in the pages of the Los Angeles Times the final days of what was then the country’s largest community garden. In a controversial land deal, the city had sold the site just south of downtown Los Angeles where almost 350 families had been growing crops for their kitchens or for sale, and the community gardeners faced having their spaces bulldozed. The story of the gardeners trying to save their spaces in the face of a city government bent on finding more profitable uses made for compelling newspaper copy, and it’s now the subject of The Garden, the Academy Award nominated documentary that is making its way around the country in general release.
Check out its most current screening dates on Facebook. The film came to town two weeks ago, but it was gone within a week, like much of the produce grown in the garden it profiled.
Yard-sharing offers a smaller-scale alternative to the larger community gardens and some of the politics that go with it. Hyperlocavore is a social network that helps to match up people who want to garden with homeowners or renters who want to produce food on their land but lack the time or expertise to do it.
It’s a fairly new space online, and not all communities have people who want to participate. Here in San Diego, for instance, there’s currently only one person on the site. But with growing press, there should be more collaborators signed up. It’s a great concept, building community, one garden at a time.
You can also check some of the other garden-based social networks on Ning: Here. There might be just the perfect space for you and your interests. And if not, you can create one.
I started this blog because I was feeling that I was entering a bit of an imposed artistic hiatus. Kodak had stopped producing the specialized film I used for most of my photography, and I’d bought the last of the old stock of it that people had to sell on eBay.
I enjoy gardening at least as much as art-making. Also, the idea of a garden plays with the same kinds of ideas that I was interested in when I did my art, stuff like the edges between human culture and nature, and the environmental costs of human habitation. The idea of a garden blog seemed like it could keep me thinking about some ideas that interested me. And it might push the some of the same creative buttons that photography did.
(Left:James SOE NYUN.Calla Lily Dissection II, 1997. Pigment print, ca. 13 x 19 inches.)
Maybe the blog has functioned too well to keep me out of the studio. But I’ve been reprinting at some of the garden-based photography I did in the past and seeing how it might point in new directions.
Recently I was invited to show of my older work at a small gallery in Escondido, in northern San Diego County. The show is Eyesight is Insight / Art + Science, and is curated by Ruth West and Sarach Attwood. The show opened yesterday, and remains up through July 3 at the Escondido Arts Partnership Municipal Gallery. These are a couple of the works in the show, images from my Destructive Testing Series, a small group of works where I use plant materials from the garden in little science experiments.
(Left:James SOE NYUN.Fig Leaf Flammability Test 6b, 2000. Pigment print, ca. 19 x 15 3/4 inches.)
In addition to reprinting some fo the older work, I’ve actually been doing a little bit of work looking at gardening. I’ll share some of it here once I get to something I’m willing to show the world.
In the meantime, I’m happy to share some of this older work. Stop by the show if you’re in the headed for Escondido!
It’s hardly May, and I have my first tomatoes of the season already, this gorgeous pair on a seedling of the heirloom Cherokee Purple.
Okay, I cheated a little. These are actually hothouse tomatoes. Some seed I planted in the greenhouse last spring didn’t germinate until last fall. Transplanting the plants outdoors in November would have meant certain death for the little tomatoes, but I didn’t have the heart to pull them out. One of them set down roots through the drainage holes of the pot and just kept growing. Although the greenhouse is too shady and unheated, the plant survived. And now I have these first two tomatoes, with more on the way.
I’ve never used the greenhouse for anything as practical as growing veggies, so this will be an interesting experiment.
The first artichokes of the season are also on some plants that were almost accidents. For years we had a clump of an especially good selection growing in the veggie garden. But a room addition on the house put the garden in shade, and the plants went into decline. I dug them out and was going to toss them, until I decided to try a couple stems in the back of a new raised bed. The combination of more light, more moisture, and fresh compost-rich soil worked their magic, and the plants are now looking as good as they ever have.
I like to think that I earned some bonus points for showing some mercy and not tossing the tomato and artichoke plants into the greens recycling. But in the case of the artichoke, at least, it’s another life lesson in trying to find the right location for an underperforming plant.
Are there any plants that you’ve had similar experiences with? Any “rescue plants” that ended up rewarding you as much as others you’d planned for?
In a world where color photographs are easy to come by it can be refreshing to stand back and look at images where the color has been simplified down to tones of black, white and gray.
Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938) compiled his massive series, Wildflowers of New England, Photographed from Nature, in the early part of the 20th century. The photos are warm-toned platinum prints where the plants form decorative patterns. You can tell that the photographer was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, and many of the photos could serve as templates for carved decorations on a piece of furniture.
Left:Edwin Hale Lincoln.Convolvulus Septium, Hedge Bindweed, Morning-Glory, plate 124 from Wildflowers of New England, Photographed from Nature, Volume V, 1904. [ photo from the de Young Museum, which had an exhibition on Lincoln last year ]
Left:Edwin Hale Lincoln.Acorus Calamus, Flag-Root, Sweet Flag, Calamus-Root, 1914. [ image from Alan Klotz Gallery, which will be featuring Lincoln’s work in a show that runs from May 7th to July 2nd ]
Different from Lincoln’s work are the later photographs of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). His 1928 Urformen der Kunst, published in the 1929 English edition, Art Forms in Nature, features 120 beautifully grainy photogravures. (Soulcatcher Studio has the entire volume online.) Blossfeldt followed up the book with a second volume in 1932.
Blossfeldt, like Lincoln, came out of an arts and crafts orientation, in his case, that of ornamental metalwork. But Blossfeldt moved in closer to his plants, often showing them in extreme magnification. He didn’t claim to be a scientist, and instead was looking at nature for the ultimate inspiration for human art.
(BTW, If you happen upon reruns of the TV show Will and Grace, take a look at Will’s apartment, and you’ll see several framed Blossfeldts prints on the set.)
Karl Blossfeldt.Sanguisorba, swallowwort, from Urformen der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wikimedia Commons ]
Karl Blossfeldt.Monkshood, from Urformen der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wikimedia Commons ]
But that’s barely scratching the surface. Check out Edward Weston’s stunning, almost lewd Cabbage Leaf. Or Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia. Or one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s calla lilies.
Or next time you go out into your garden to photograph a plant, put your camera in black in white mode, and notice the things you start to pay attention to once the color isn’t there as a distraction…
Here’s a sculpture that sits outside the kitchen window. Made out of chunks of colored glass that have been mortared into a steel frame, it’s perky all day long. But when the light casts the perky shadows on the wall behind it, the sculpture turns into a bright celebration of the afternoon sunlight.
John used to work with Diane Dandeneau, the artist who created this sculpture as a prototype for a some outdoor objects she was interested in making.
Where you put a piece of art in the garden is almost as important as the piece you select. Diane’s sculpture is currently set against a greenhouse wall, which is a pretty busy background and doesn’t really do it justice. But until we find the perfect spot, we can still enjoy, either when we’re near it in the garden, or while we’re looking out the window.
I love this birdhouse!
Left: Edwin Hale Lincoln. Convolvulus Septium, Hedge Bindweed, Morning-Glory, plate 124 from Wildflowers of New England, Photographed from Nature, Volume V, 1904. [ photo from the 
