[ Lost in the Landscape ]

chemistry, physics, biology

Here’s a cool art­work by Heather Ack­royd and Dan Har­vey that was fea­tured at the recent Wim­ble­don tennis-thing. It’s made of three pan­els of grass.

The sec­tions were grown in a dark­ened space under arti­fi­cial lights that pro­jected through pho­to­graphic neg­a­tives. The brighter the expo­sure, the richer the green color.

It’s the reverse prin­ci­ple at work as leav­ing a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.

So what would you call this art process? It’s basi­cally using light to effect a trans­for­ma­tion of some kind of mate­r­ial, and that’s pretty much the def­i­n­i­tion of photography.

Photography’s first rev­o­lu­tion was the abil­ity to use chem­i­cal processes to fix an image made by light–think of the pho­tog­ra­pher dis­ap­pear­ing into a dark­room with some unpromis­ing plates or film and com­ing back with a mag­i­cal image. Then the physics of turn­ing light sen­sors into elec­tri­cal impulses made chemistry-free imag­ing pos­si­ble, lead­ing to things like tele­vi­sion cam­eras and your cell­phone camera.

And now comes this process where the record­ing device is bio­log­i­cal. Of course, rely­ing on some­thing liv­ing and grow­ing, the result is any­thing but per­ma­nent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Noth­ing lasts forever.

The grass art­work reminds me of Den­nis Oppenheim’s bril­liant 1970 pho­to­graphic per­for­mance, Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sun­burn on the beach. The first pic­ture shows him at the begin­ning, with the book. In the sec­ond, hours later with the book removed, a sun­burn describes the area where the book pro­tected him.

Den­nis Oppen­heim. Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Sun­burn. Chro­mogenic prints with applied text.

It’s just as much a “bio­log­i­cal pho­to­graph” as the Wim­ble­don piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its exe­cu­tion, the Oppen­heim piece, com­ing out of con­cep­tual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.

Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swim­suit shaded your body, why not con­sider your­self a walk­ing pho­to­graph?


[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wim­ble­don grass pieces, and to Cre­ative Review, where I’ve linked. ]

July 18 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Dan Harvey • Dennis Oppenheim • grass • Heather Ackroyd • lawns • sunburns • suntans | 4 Comments »