Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Diana Balmori and photographer Margaret Morton set out to upset the great tradition
of garden history in their photographic account of New York gardens
Transitory
Gardens: Uprooted Lives
(1993). Conscious that the wealthy have the resources
to establish, maintain and document gardens valued by traditional garden history,
Balmori and Morton announce their interest in documenting the impermanent urban
gardens made by poor people living on the edge. Their desire to examine 'ephemeral
constructions - found objects arranged in found places' is about the desire to capture
the momentary condition of gardens, made under circumstances which mean they
might only last for a month or even a day. While the topic is about 'community',
'appropriated' and 'homeless' gardens, it is also about the garden as a temporary
installation sited in transitory enclaves and borrowed places.
Beautifully composed black and white photographs portray gardens such as
'Tranquilidad' a Puerto Rican community garden at 310 East Fourth Street and
Spanish appropriated garden 'Jardin de la 10 B - C' at Tompkins Square Park. But
it is the most temporary garden 'compositions' made by the homeless, for example
'Jimmy's Garden' made by a middle-aged, peripatetic, Afro-American man, that
most interest these authors. Art photography is not out of place in a topic that is
devoted to gardens that most resemble the art installation. The authors celebrate
the use of particular garden building materials, 'found objects or salvaged, recycled
trash' (1993, 6): skids (wooden pallets), plastic milk crates, shopping carts, matting
or discarded carpet and used furniture are the stock in trade materials of the homeless
garden constructor. Plants, which take time to grow, are inappropriate for gardens like
Jimmy's Garden, which was bulldozed only days after its completion. The garden
'composition' is more likely to utilise representational items, such as brightly painted
metal flowers, which 'stand in' for plants and flowers. In these ways the authors
celebrate politically resistant avant-garde gardeners who seek to, 'liberate the word
garden
from its cultural straightjacket and validate the temporal, the momentary, in
landscape' (1993, 4).
Transitory Gardens: Uprooted Lives
(1993) takes the garden 'compositions' of
the poor, the homeless, the politically marginal and the disenfranchised and elevates
them to an art form of resistance. This is also partly expressed in their admiration
for gardeners who refuse to engage with government agencies and bureaucracies.
By generating, 'an aesthetic element uniquely its own' the authors invest hope in the
liberal humanist ideal that, 'the individual's creative expression' will go, 'beyond
education, economic class, age and gender' (1993, 7). The gardens celebrated in this
topic are anything but ordinary: they are spectacular urban forms of resistance, and
resistance is to be found, according to these authors, in extraordinary art forms. As
Felski argues, 'to contemplate something as art is to remove it, at least temporarily,
from the pragmatic needs and demands of the quotidian' (Felski 2000, 17). These
gardens are documented precisely because they are transitory representational
compositions which mimic, but never become, everyday conceptions of the garden
in urban places; their political
raison d'ĂȘtre
is predicated on a time frame which
rejects the mundane rhythms of everyday life.
Transitory Gardens: Uprooted Lives
is just one example of many which
illustrates that truly mundane, everyday places have been ignored in some historical
accounts. But this is not just the case with regard to radicalised liberal art critics
Search WWH ::
Custom Search