The Garden

June 2-July 29, 2006
Cari Gonzalez-Casanova,Tina Hauser, Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs, Peter Schmitt, Anke Wenzel.
Guest writer: Jennifer Ferng, PhD Candidate, Fellow History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT.

The Garden features the works of five emerging artists of different backgrounds: Cari Gonzalez-Casanova of New York and Marseille (S-Files Museo del Barrio); the sculptress Tina Hauser, living between Mühlehorn and Zürich, educated in Lucerne and a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy (Prof. Klaus Rinke); the photographer Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs, born in Bogota Colombia, educated in Lausanne, lives and works between Geneva and Zürich (Swiss Awards Basel 2004, 2005); Peter Schmitt, another graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy (Prof. Thomas Ruff) who is now a graduate student in the Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab; and Anke Wenzel, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg.

Guest writer: Jennifer Ferng, third year Ph.D. student in the History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT. Jennifer Ferng received degrees in architecture from Rice University and Princeton, and has taught both architectural history and design at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design. Her research is broadly situated between architecture, art history, and history of science. She recently presented her ongoing work on 19th century botany, conventions of ornament, and mimesis at the College Art Association’s annual conference in Boston.

It is understood that this gathering is a brief and partial consideration of a scene of art being created now. The selection attempts to revisit the subject of the garden as a geopolitical space through artistic positions that are nourished by their intersections with disciplines such as architecture, art history, philosophy, the natural and computer sciences. The artworks selected are exemplary of the developing vernaculars of each of the artists. I believe the artists show a ‘kind of spatial imagination capable of combining the past in a new way and reading its less tangible secrets off the template of its spatial structures’. (1) The garden has been an artistic recreation of nature, a Platonic form, an ideal place beyond the everyday world that used to be of reality. Traditionally dealing with the elements of nature, the garden has been both real (like the stones, trees, flowers and buildings in it) and vague (like its sky, water and shadows). Today, the garden remains a locus where spaces exist in conflict. The garden enacts landscape within a landscape, both as a physical terrain and as an often charged immaterial image. It derives from a process where the perceived and the conceived axes of space converge. An important point seems to be that the garden ‘relies on human intervention for its creation and maintenance.’ (2) It is a space where poiesis and praxis are needed.

The interest to put together this exhibition arose about two years ago, from the candid observation that the work of so many interesting emerging and established contemporary artists had to do with ideas related to the natural and urban landscapes, and to gardens. An exhibition and performance at Deitch Projects New York on the occasion of the 2006 Armory Show titled The Garden Party attempted to ‘create a contemporary version of the fête champêtre’ ‘following the art historical theme of the erotic garden established by Giorgione and Edouard Manet’. (4) Is this recent antecedent enough to support a hypothesis that the broad subject of gardens, with its long history, may perhaps be a motif of relevance to the art of our time? Common to these works is the evocation of the space of the garden as a social product that helpsto recover sites of resistance: the garden as a political text that reclaims and dissolves a discourse related to modernist utopias; the garden as pleasuredome or perversion of recycled waste; the garden as a locus ceruleus responsible for a lost aesthetic experience; the garden as a site for hybridization and new lifeforms; the garden as a lost or found space for memory, allegory and metaphor.

Finally, a state of flux between realization and nostalgia may perhaps be related to the works of these artists. The garden persists, in face of defeat through failure and banalization, as a
perennial in the search of a poetic space that retains a concern with remaining human.

Gamaliel R. Herrera
Boston, May 2006.

Notes:
(1) Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: The cultural logic of late capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press 1991: 364-365).
(2) From an interv iew with Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Miami 2005.
(3) From The Garden Party Press Release, Deitch Projects New York, March 2006.

Non-Places of Domesticated Milieu

Edenic paradise has historically been the eternal symbol of man’s return to his original place of birth and represents his deeply problematic relationship with the earth from which he was created. Pleasure gardens, such the lakeside hamlet near Le Petit Trianon where Marie Antoinette and her ladies-in-waiting pretended to be pastoral milkmaids, were often rife with fictional narratives and secretive affairs. The measured agility of labyrinths and mazes similarly offered confusing adventures in a calculated environment hidden behind tall hedges. In contrast, finely manicured English landscapes such as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew exhibited the British explorer’s control over nature and his wide collection of exotic plant specimens from the colonialist realm. Chinese and Japanese tea gardens of centuries ago evoked meditative slowness by exposing the visitor to the experience of sculptural elements of wood, stone, and water, alongside sweeping willow trees and miniature bonsai. Even the quotidian front lawn, positioned in front of the American two-story home, and Astroturf, its synthetic sibling bred in golf courses and sports stadiums, are both banal testimonials to the legacy of the garden. In the present day of genetically modified organisms, cloning, and experiments with the human genome, the universal garden is now also the interior space of the contemporary laboratory and the artist’s studio.

If the garden is equally a model of the world at large, then Cari Gonzalez-Casanova has cleverly recreated her own nostalgic utopia in the form of an ecological system within a largescale diorama. In Tree-House: Maquette for Urban Project Nomadic Green Spaces (2004-5), the visitor looks through a singular, cut-out hole in a plexi-box covered in one-way mirror film to behold a landscape of handmade miniature trees fashioned from wool, moss, dried plants, and floral foam. Feeling somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, the speculative eye is free to wander from treetop to treetop. Gonzalez-Casanova’s environment is the exact reversal of Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific whose aerial photographs of real cities resemble hyperdetailed scaled models of plastic-looking buildings and streets. Her vision of life down the rabbit hole is strangely surreal, interrupted by a looming periscope that surveys the sewn dominion. This careful craftsmanship emphasizes Gonzalez-Casanova’s yearning to reassert the importance of human intervention in the face of soulless modern conditions, which threaten to replace such individuality. The realness of this microcosm exists only through the looking hole, but its importance lies in its role as a psychological Wunderkammer in which we can find wistful refuge.

Rather than being contained, what Anke Wenzel calls “ornamental longing” freely draws upon and expands into lush patterns of Persian carpets and Islamic tiles as well as the architectural plans of meticulously conceived gardens. Wenzel’s encyclopedic collection of color drawings widely ranges from flat optical nets to more intricate designs of checkerboards and diamonds. Her reordering of geometry and arrayed motifs harkens back to the 19th century attempts of Christopher Dresser or Owen Jones to generate graphic relationships between ornament and nature, by utilizing flat planes of color, symmetry, and the repetition of uniform elements. In Arcadia Diabola I (2005), foreground and background are both effaced in a rush of darting redeyed chains that break out from the center of the drawing. Triangular swaths of black and white black and white patterns further subdivide the composition and vigorously suggest new figurative structures that emerge from the bemused conflation of clashing lines and shapes, posing a unique language of difference.

For Tina Hauser, her photograph of Garden of Pleasures (2003), an installation occupying several stories in a museum in Sion, Switzerland, does not replicate an innocuous garden variety scene but one that is grotesquely abject. The urban wasteland serves as the tableau upon which to reenact wronged household dreams in a desolate, public environment of junk and unwanted refuse. Recalling the Marxist transition from material production to social forms of life, the commodities of the private interior are imposed directly onto the man-made social landscape, evoking a doubled form of domestication or artifice-on-artifice. White, spray-painted scavenged kitchen cabinets, desks, and shelves now huddle closely together, assembled as an adopted family, struggling in a vast and foreign landscape of strewn paper, discarded objects, human detritus, and matted pulp. Trash rapidly courses down to a precipice where the second hand family needlessly teeters on the edge, succumbing either one by one to gravity or to their resigned fate as outcast, complacent bodies in a sea of unnamable material. Our empathic desire remains with the deserted souls still waiting on the side of the abyss.

On the contrary, instead of being cast aside as innocent bystanders, we are thrust into direct engagement with the photographs of Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs. In surpassing the classic mise-en-scène, she creates her own mise-en-place (putting in place) staging, making sure each subject, texture, and action is pre-situated to suggest the prototypical setting from a

Spanish tela novella, a science fiction episode, or even a celebrity paparazzi shot. An inert man lies face down in the paisley rug in Docteur Hugo (2001). With one hand placed on his back, a concerned woman looks at an elderly man dressed in all white who wears a stethoscope around his neck. Their respective relationships are unclear – are we witnessing a true moment of compassion or something ruthlessly conspiratorial? Our lingering hesitation is heightened by the strange juxtaposition of an exterior forest of trees, crowding into the framed view, which contrasts with the hectic appearance of the flowered print couch. Her images of bourgeois and blue-collar Hispanic individuals interrogate the visitor to create his own narrative explanations behind the seemingly prosaic events in banal surroundings, which belie inquisitive and ethnically charged biases implied by the artist herself.

Likewise, the kinetic sculptures of Peter Schmitt invite, and in fact, provoke our immediate interaction. He does not assign a prescribed title to 004#03 (2003), only a series of numbers, indicating its artificial origins. Its formal resemblance to that of a tree implies that the garden is now embedded inside the eighty-seven units that are controlled by remote random driving software and hang from multiple antenna appendages. The small dangling machines bear fruit in the form of paper receipts, which are printed with numeric data and then, in turn, drop from mid-air directly onto the gallery floor. The slow accretion of ejected receipts self-assembles into physical piles that spectators either gather together as souvenirs or scatter like dried, wilted leaves on the ground. 004#03 creates a closed feedback loop between the production and the reception of contemporary art, deftly luring and manipulating us into a cycle of self-critical inquiry. Schmitt’s paper receipts manufacture the invisible as visible and tangible, becoming the physical embodiments of the electronic signals between software and machine unit. Visitors become automatically incorporated into this Heideggerian Gestell, or undefined framework that begins to ignite our thinking about our questionable status as active consumers of art or merely passive agents of the machine itself.

Jennifer Ferng
Cambridge, May 2006.