'What is the place of the garden in British art?'. Recognising the
cultural importance of gardens to the nation, it presented a
formidable overview of their representation in different mediums by
artists from the early nineteenth century through to the beginning of
the twenty-first. The exhibition's focus was not gardens themselves
but rather how artists creatively interpreted ideas and concerns
associated with them. The artworks utilised gardens as a tool to
express the varied cultural means of domesticating the natural world,
reflecting idealised notions of paradise as sites of pleasure and
abundance, and expressions of national and personal identity,
embodying ethnicity, aspiration and affluence.
These ideas of gardens were presented in the works through
traditional forms of representation, employing metaphor and
symbolism, from which the viewer interpreted and constructed the
artists intended meaning. This form of representation has dominated
artistic production since the Renaissance, and is as evident in 18th
century landscape painting as it is in 20th century land art.
Likewise it is a thread which links the British landscape garden with
recent conceptual gardens at shows such as Chaumont and Future Gardens.
But a paradigm shift has been apparent in the art world in recent
years marking a social turn in the type of works created, not merely
in subject matter, but in the very manner in which they are made.
These developments were recognised by French curator and theorist
Nicholas Bourriaud in work emerging in the post-conceptual practices
of artists in the 1990's, to which he applied the term 'Relational
Aesthetics'. He identified artistic activity which "strives to
achieve modest connections, open up (one or two) obstructed passages,
and connect levels of reality kept apart from one another." Such
levels of reality which were separated previously by the distances
between the artist, the object and the viewer.
Moving beyond traditional mediums such as painting, sculpture and
performance, with their focus on art objects and events, these new
works are to be understood as social spaces and forms of
collaborative or interactive situations. They activate, illuminate
and investigate the lifestyle bonds between citizens, media and
technology,
effectively changing the role of an artist from a producer of
aesthetic objects or theatrical spectacle to a cultural service
provider. Embeded and engaged in different real life situations, the
artist's role is to provide, facilitate and encourage interactions.
In this manner, such activities render previously held distinctions
between form and content redundant.
Curating this year's Tate triennial exhibition 'Altermodern',
Bourriaud further investigated the developments taking place in this
expanded field of artistic practice and their relationships to social
and technological progress. In an increasingly global,
interconnected, omni-cultural world, relationships are accelerated,
distances reduced, and behaviour modified by new forms of networking
and mobile communications. Ever more levels of interaction offer ever
more opportunities for artworks, traversing cultures, languages,
times and places. He suggests "our globalised perception calls for
new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a
more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-
national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and
teeming universe."
Whilst the exhibition did not feature any works which dealt with
gardens in this manner, it nonetheless provides an opportunity to
rethink the relationship between art and gardens in a new way.
Opening up everyday interactions as a context for artistic production
breaks down the barriers between objects and situations traditionally
considered art, and those that have previously been excluded from
such aesthetic consideration. This mode of artistic production
involves not simply the artist and the viewer, as in traditional
practices, but also as many other players as are engaged in the
activities which define the artwork. The art site becomes no longer a
fixed precondition of meaning but rather one generative element in an
interrelated network of relationships. The site of a work can be as
varied as a community, an institutional structure, a commercial
transaction or a street corner.
Consequently, as gardens are defined by our relationships to both the
natural and social realms, the potential for exploring these are
ideal within such an artistic practice. Whilst a garden is quite
obviously a specific site in material terms, the meanings derived
from it are culturally relative and evasive of one definitive
meaning. A 'sense of place' is no longer a fixed immutable truth but
rather a product of contextual factors. As Bourriaud suggests
"artists translate and transcode information from one format to
another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives
rise to practices which might be referred to as 'time-specific', in
response to the 'site-specific' work of the 1960s." This opens
playful possibilities for a new art of gardens, defined not simply by
the objects and forms utilised in them, but by how we actually behave
and engage with each other within them. An artistic practice in which
both artists and garden makers have roles to play.
Garden Design Journal, September 2009
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