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| With its explicitly utilitarian didacticism and naturalistic horticultural arrangements, one might well ask, “What makes The Means of Production a work of art?” Clearly the project facilitates the production of art by directly furnishing materials for art making but is it itself a work of art? At first glance, the plantings are quite pleasing to the eye, the bright varicoloured stems of willows and bamboo contrasting with the dark sculptured shapes of the coppiced trees. In addition, Means of Production is paradigmatic; a working model of inner city forestry and neighbourhood self-sufficiency, an homage to arcadian tradition and ecological agit prop. But this is only part of the aesthetic equation. In my previous land art work, (Cottonwood Gardens, Healing the Cut- Bridging the Gap, Memory Trees etc.), I have adopted what the late Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys called “the homeopathic role." Here, the artist, and by extension the work, become covert agents of social change. Beuys, despite his stated aspirations, was himself extremely overt, caught up in the overblown celebrity culture of the twentieth century avant-garde. Yet some of his later works, notably Stadtverwaldung statt Staatverwaltung (also known as Seven Thousand Oaks) pointed out a way toward a new, more subtle artistic mandate. Considering urban reforestation as art, moves us away from the pervasive banality of the artist as stylish maker of branded fetish objects, purveyed to an ever-shrinking audience of cognoscenti; the kind of art that can at best evoke some small frisson or a knowing, ironic wink. Means of Production abandons this game. There is no more secret handshake, no more “Fifteen minutes of fame.” I succeed only when the viewers of my work forget about me and any cleverness of artifice and begin to experience the work completely as ambience. Then, they might start asking the questions that I want them to ask. After numerous cycles of harvest and regrowth, any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have disappeared. It will no longer matter. And now it gets interesting . . . Because now the artwork has receded into what Walter Benjamin has called “the optical subconscious.” The artist’s unseen hand. The work no longer screams out, “ART”, but has already become part of the infrastructure, part of our assumptions, and an internalised component of the urban visual field. In short, The new normal. |
