[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a palm garden takes shape

I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Ange­les County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I took the pho­tos on the last day of July crude oil was still gush­ing into the Gulf of Mex­ico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar com­ing from the fenced-off pits where archae­ol­o­gists were work­ing behind the museum on extract­ing crit­ters and plants that got caught in the ances­tral goo.

Here, junior’s ball has some­how made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe res­cue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be dis­cov­ered by archae­ol­o­gists a few mil­len­nia down the road.

We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion. I posted [ before ] on the ear­lier stages of the gar­den, and it’s still not com­plete. But by now you can really make out many more of the ele­ments of what the final gar­den will look like.

There are many palm species used in the gar­den. A num­ber of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden tem­po­rary planters, these per­ma­nent homes are made out of thick steel plate–the “it” mate­r­ial of the moment for well-financed mod­ern gardens.

A closer look at the planter box…

In a back cor­ner you could see a col­lec­tion of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a bet­ter idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.

Another look at some of the palms in tran­si­tion… In this instal­la­tion some of the plants are rotated out accord­ing tot he sea­son. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.

LACMA was about to open a new facil­ity, the Resnick Pavil­lion designed by Renzo Piano. As the build­ing nears com­ple­tion more ele­ments of the Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion are being planted. In addi­tion to palms it includes sev­eral of the non-palm species. These are some spec­tac­u­larly var­ie­gated agaves plants of a fur­craea, pos­si­bly Fur­craea foetida ‘Mediopicta’–Thanks for the cor­rec­tion, Loree!

The way the plants have been shaped, with the low­est leaves removed, made them look like var­ie­gated New Zealand flax (phormi­ums) until you got close to them. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see if these agaves fur­craeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave fur­craea grow­ers are used to see­ing. This is in no way a nat­u­ral­is­tic gar­den, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them with­out run­ning over the leaves?

Detail: Fur­craea foetida, I think

Another detail of the var­ie­gated furcraeas

Another of the non-palm species: this cycad devel­op­ing this really cool cone. It’s prob­a­bly some­thing like three to four feet long.

A bench and real palms out­side the Resnick pavilion…

The sin­gle most dra­matic ges­ture is the place­ment of this palm with a thickly bul­bous trunk that’s been planted in a tight open­ing that leads two sto­ries down into a park­ing garage. The effect is like star­ing down into a North Dakota Min­ute­man mis­sile silo. It’s more than a tad unset­tling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than design­ing pleas­ant, unchal­leng­ing spaces.

Say “Los Ange­les” to some­one and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would prob­a­bly be one of the first things the per­son might bring up, even though the city’s offi­cial tree is the coral tree is and the offi­cial flower the bird of par­adise. “Cars” would prob­a­bly be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lin­ing the dri­ve­way down into the park­ing garage.

I’m not any­thing remotely resem­bling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I can show you that it has amaz­ingly sculp­tural trunks.

Look­ing up into the fronds gives you the sen­sa­tion clos­est what you get from many of the art­works Robert Irwin did before he designed gar­dens. The fronds fil­ter the light in inter­est­ing ways, and two or more lay­ers make things darker than just a sin­gle layer. If you stand in the dri­ve­way and look straight up the neg­a­tive space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the del­i­cate lay­ers of palm.

If you’d like to com­pare the effect of the palm fronds to an ear­lier Irwin piece, here’s a cor­ner of his Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece pan­els of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depend­ing on the num­ber of lay­ers, and the mesh turns opaque or trans­par­ent depend­ing on how the light is strik­ing it. The mesh inter­acts with views of the euca­lyp­tus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].

Artists often com­plain that big muse­ums don’t pay enough atten­tion to local artists in their scram­ble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another coun­try. This sum­mer day LACMA had sev­eral gal­leries devoted to the the pho­tographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of sev­eral of the gal­leries. But I didn’t iden­tify any plant species used in this gar­den that came from within a thousand-mile radius.

Word is that Robert Irwin is design­ing yet another gar­den, this one for a new fed­eral cour­t­house here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our Cal­i­for­nia species in the project? What about some of our del­i­cately trans­par­ent plants like deer weed or broom bac­cha­ris? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stun­ning trans­for­ma­tions as the sea­sons change? To see an impor­tant new, high pro­file gar­den com­prised of local natives would be such an amaz­ing opportunity.

September 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: British Petrolium • La Brea Tar Pits • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • Robert Irwin | 9 Comments »

getty garden, light and shadow

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.

Thanks, guys!

August 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

garden designer, artist

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.

April 11 2010 | Categories: art | Tags: light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 7 Comments »

a visit to the l.a. county museum

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.)

January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

getty center garden in winter

John and I spent the hol­i­days at his aunt’s house in the Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood of North­ridge. Christ­mas at her house is a fam­ily affair, but with fam­ily dis­persed around the coun­try, it’s not always as rau­cous as it some­times has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big con­tin­gent of imme­di­ate fam­ily, includ­ing Jenny and her mad sci­en­tist hus­band from South Car­olina. Past read­ers of this blog might rec­og­nize Jenny’s name as a some­times con­trib­u­tor of pho­tos and com­ments. It was great see­ing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)

Fri­day, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Cen­ter for an exhi­bi­tion of the pho­tographs of Car­leton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty with­out tak­ing in its gar­dens would be unthink­able, and we spent more time out­doors than we did in the galleries.

It had rained the pre­vi­ous two days, clear­ing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hill­top were spec­tac­u­lar. Here you can see the sky­lines of Cen­tury City in the fore­ground against down­town in the distance.

This is the view to the south­west, across Santa Mon­ica Bay. The dis­tant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.

The visit last Fri­day was the first time we’d vis­ited the gar­dens of the Getty Cen­ter dur­ing the win­ter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den adver­tises itself as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it dur­ing a time that was less porno­graphic with flow­er­ing plants.

Still, there were flow­ers. This is the core plant­ing of clipped aza­leas in the cen­tral water fea­ture. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the lit­tle mazes were show­ing any flow­ers. In addi­tion to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two aza­lea vari­eties dark­ens and red­dens in the cooler win­ter weather, mak­ing the plant­ing appear to be com­prised of inter­lock­ing rings of dif­fer­ent plants.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a lit­tle bit of clip­ping. The aza­leas are lit­tle float­ing islands in the water, so keep­ing them trimmed involves a lit­tle more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.

John’s aunt vol­un­teers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeep­ers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed get­ting in a boat and row­ing to the aza­leas. Then, after paus­ing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shal­low, and that they actu­ally just donned some waders to do their work.

Aside from the aza­leas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvil­leas, brug­man­sias, roses, eryn­giums (sea-hollies) and some win­ter bloomers. Most of the inter­est came in the form of foliage and stems.

Here are some details from the plant­i­ngs that empha­size color, form and tex­ture, most of it best appre­ci­ated at close dis­tances. Some of the color com­bi­na­tions rant toward the mono­chro­matic. Here gray suc­cu­lents con­trast with the black leaves of Ophio­pogon planis­ca­pus.

This one fea­tured yel­low and green.

The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.

In this com­po­si­tion, the silver-leaved Dichon­dra argen­tea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (prob­a­bly a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, let­ting the dichon­dra regain its dominance.

Some of the color com­bi­na­tions were more varied.

Some plant­i­ngs ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this plant­ing (lower right) are a lit­tle too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice con­trast to this com­bi­na­tion. But the flow­ers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?

But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?

In a nod to the sea­son, sev­eral spec­i­mens of browned late-season grasses moved dra­mat­i­cally in the strong mid­day winds. Before you go get­ting any ideas that this was a plant­ing in the height­ened nat­u­ral­is­tic style of the New Peren­ni­als gar­den design­ers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were sin­gle plants of con­trast­ing species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.

In this last photo, in con­trast to the pre­ced­ing pic­tures of win­ter grasses, two plants with some­what grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s win­ter. To the left is the restio, Chon­doropetalum ele­phan­ti­num, and the right is var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic, Tul­baghia vio­lacea.

Some gar­den design­ers would like you to be able to know exactly what sea­son it is by look­ing at the plants in the gar­den. Fol­low­ing this phi­los­o­phy you should be able to set your cal­en­dar by look­ing at the gar­den. But what gives away the fact that it’s win­ter in this photo are the two vis­i­tors, bun­dled up against the cold. Looks like win­ter to me!

December 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • Los Angeles • plant combinations • Robert Irwin • seasons • winter | 6 Comments »

let it rust

Picasso and on occa­sion other artists have been cred­ited with the quote that goes some­thing like, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Left: Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter, Los Ange­les [ source ]

The gar­den designed by Robert Irwin at the Getty Museum in Los Ange­les has both received raves and been the topic of rants. After my vis­its there I’m torn some­where in between. There are things I like about it, and there are things that seem like missed oppor­tu­ni­ties or inap­pro­pri­ate choices.

One of the things I really like is its use of sheets of steel for retain­ing walls. (You can see it in the fore­ground and middle-ground in this picture.)

Each mate­r­ial that you use in a garden–whether it be wood or stone or steel–has its own per­son­al­ity. I par­tic­u­larly like the warm brown color that that steel ages to, as well as the indus­trial vibe that it brings.

While it prob­a­bly doesn’t rise to the Picasso’s level of theft, using sheet steel for retain­ing walls is an idea I’ve incor­po­rated into my own gar­den. Two sides of the raised bed I put in last fall use the material.

My gar­den­ing bud­get is noth­ing like the Getty Museum’s, so instead of inch-thick mate­r­ial I used 11-gauge sheets (just shy of 1/8 inch thick). Also, since steel is heavy stuff, thin­ner sheets don’t require heavy equip­ment and can be han­dled by two peo­ple. I welded inch-and-a-half angle iron to the top edges, both to give it extra rigid­ity to help hold back the soil and to give my scrawny lit­tle sheets some visual heft.

Over eight months the walls have taken on a warm patina and are almost as alive as the plants in the bed.

I don’t con­sider myself to be mainly swayed by prac­ti­cal­ity over aes­thet­ics. Since steel rusts and degrades over time, using it for a retain­ing wall is prob­a­bly a less durable option than using other mate­ri­als. Still, as far as the longevity of the steel is con­cerned, I’m encour­aged by a scrap that I’ve had out­doors for the last ten years. When I cut into it recently the inte­rior was pris­tine and shiny. Only the outer shell showed any signs of rust. Of course, steel that’s in con­stant con­tact with the ground and moisture–like my gar­den retain­ing wall–will degrade quite a bit faster.

We’ll see whether this is a five-year solu­tion or one that will out­live me.

July 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • planters • raised beds • Robert Irwin • rust • steel | 4 Comments »

“garden art”">“garden art”

Set in the fake for­est of UCSD’s euca­lyp­tus groves is one my favorite art­works. Robert Irwin’s Two Run­ning Vio­let V Forms was installed in 1983 as part of the cam­pus’ Stu­art Col­lec­tion of site-specific out­door art. The piece, like much of the artist’s out­put, is a sub­tle pres­ence that takes a while to absorb.

Here’s how you might encounter it, approach­ing on a path through the trees:

The piece is pretty unas­sum­ing and is almost not there. Stain­less steel posts raise two V-shaped runs of a tight blue-violet col­ored chain-link mesh up into the tree canopy. That’s basi­cally all there is to it, mate­ri­ally at least, which of course would be basi­cally say­ing the same thing as a Mark Rothko paint­ing is a piece of stretched cloth with some paint applied to it.

Once you add some light, the magic hap­pens. Depend­ing on where you stand and depend­ing on how the light hits it, the piece’s pan­els are either almost trans­par­ent or absolutely opaque. What looks trans­par­ent sub­tly dark­ens and col­ors what you view through it. The pan­els that appear opaque accept shad­ows of the sur­round­ing branches grace­fully.

Move around the work and things change. What starts out trans­par­ent turns opaque; what begins as opaque dis­solves into a blue-violet vapor. Vis­its dur­ing sunny weather end up being sub­tly dif­fer­ent from those on over­cast days. Like the liv­ing trees around it, the piece responds to the weather and its surroundings.

To the gen­eral pub­lic Robert Irwin is now prob­a­bly most famous–to me unfor­tu­nately so–for design­ing the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA. It’s a beau­ti­ful and inter­est­ing gar­den, but not one that shows off what he does best. The Getty web­site talks about the gar­den as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” which any gar­dener would say about their own gar­den. But it also is a descrip­tion I’d apply to the piece at UCSD.

It’s inter­est­ing that the Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, from 20 years ear­lier than the Getty gar­den, also has a botan­i­cal ele­ment. The Stu­art Col­lec­tion descrip­tion men­tions that “[p]urple flow­er­ing ice­plant, echo­ing but not match­ing the color of the chain link, is planted under the fence.” When he was work­ing on the Getty gar­den, Irwin was quoted declar­ing him­self not to be a gar­dener, and of his work­ing with plant con­sul­tants to com­plete the design. This is where bring­ing in a plant con­sul­tant at UCSD might have resulted in a dif­fer­ent art­work. Today, the ice­plants live on only as one or two lit­tle mounds that almost never bloom. You wouldn’t take them to be inten­tional parts of the art­work. Planted in the fairly deep shade of the under­story, these sun-loving suc­cu­lents live out a mea­ger exis­tence, deprived of the very light that gives life to the art­work high overhead.

March 17 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Robert Irwin • site-specific art • UCSD | 1 Comment »