C’est la vie
Written to accompany the exhibition 100% natural in December 2000 at the Ian Gates Gallery.
We put them in our homes and offices. We give them to each other on special occasions, or as romantic gestures. We take trips to the countryside so that we can experience them first hand. We pollute the atmosphere and kill them off without even thinking about it.
Plants are all around us. They have inhabited the earth far longer than mankind has. Some of them even outlive us by centuries. They come in a massive array of colours, shapes, and sizes. Some are good for us, others are poisonous. We eat them with everything, some people eat only them.
One of the nations favourite pastimes is horticulture, or gardening, whichever you prefer. This is a subject that is taken extremely seriously by some people, so much so that it has magazines and television shows devoted to it. For others it is simply a way of spending a pleasant Sunday afternoon, and for others still, it is a chore, to be avoided as much as possible. Whatever your feelings though, it is difficult not to be moved by some of the most beautiful of natures bounty.
A stroll through the countryside in the height of summer can bring some of the most beautiful sights and smells to your nose. An English country garden is often a place to be proud of. The mixture of colours and aromas is a sight to behold. Combined with the untamed nature of the English countryside, there is surely nowhere better. The rolling hills, fields of corn and oilseed rape, massive blocks of colour, swaying gently in the breeze. Michael Landy, in his piece costermongers stall (first made 1992) is a tribute to this notion of the English country garden. He has taken a mixture of flowers of varying colours and presented them to us, almost like a portable garden. It could be seen as having brought an English country garden into the art gallery. By presenting it like this, he is able to take a ‘little piece of England’ with him wherever he goes, or rather wherever the artwork goes.
It’s not always like this though. The English countryside in winter can be a barren, rather boring place (unless it’s covered in snow). Plants also, are not always the beautiful creations that you see in the Chelsea flower show each year. For every rose, there is a hundred weeds, that are usually exterminated. A garden left to it’s own devices will more often than not simply turn into a mess of grass and weeds. The chance of anything ‘beautiful’ growing is limited. Some people might argue though that this is the natural state, that in this situation nature has been allowed to take it’s own direction. In fact it’s difficult to conceive how any of the more ‘beautiful’ plants could ever have come into being in the first place. When left to it’s own devices, nature always seems to favour the weeds over the flowers. Still, it must have happened somehow. In his installation TV garden (1974) Nam June Paik offers us a post apocalyptic vision of what the world would be like if the plants were in control. In this piece we see a group of television sets, embedded in a dense forest of plants. All traces of humanity are being slowly covered over as the plants once again reclaim the planet as their own. An interesting point to insert here is that we, as oxygen breathing life forms, need plants in order to live. They absorb the carbon dioxide that we expel, which is poisonous to us, and release oxygen back into the atmosphere, which allows us to breathe. They however (plants) don’t need humans in order to survive. There are plenty of other life forms on this planet that expel carbon dioxide. It is an entirely one way relationship.
In another sense fruit and vegetables make up a large part of our diet as humans. Again it is all take take take. Because, unless you believe certain science fiction films, plants don’t really eat people. We take their fruit, and leaves, and eat them. However, if you’ve walked through my local market (or any market I suppose), and you’ve seen the colours, and smelt the smells of the fresh fruit and veg, then I think that we can be forgiven. To be surrounded by fresh fruit and veg, all with their distinctive smells, and of course the colours, is a true feast for the senses. The piece by Mario Merz takes these ‘objects of desire’ and lays them out for us to view and smell. The colours and shapes are arranged on a spiral table. The colours presented are absolutely gorgeous. And of course they are all natural colours as well. In the centre is a group of branches, that have been arranged, and tied together at the base, thus giving the appearance of a tree. This is complimented by an aluminium structure that mimics the design of the branches. At the top is a yellow and blue cone. From a distance it appears to be a bird, sitting atop the tree. It’s only as you get in close that you realise your mistake, and find that it isn’t part of the tree, it is in fact part of a different structure altogether. Merz has managed to play off the sumptuousness of the natural objects with the steely minimalism of the man made structure.
Since time immemorial, man has attempted to copy nature, even to improve on it. This is especially poignant in contemporary debates in science which often ask whether we should be tampering with nature. People argue that nature has made things a certain way, and that millions of years of evolution can’t be wrong. The truth of course is that man has been improving on nature for thousands of years. Not necessarily in scientific terms of course, but in terms of art. Ever since the first landscape paintings, artists have realised that they can mould nature to fit their own particular vision.
Nature, by it’s very nature, places objects in a seemingly random fashion. It has no regard for pictorial structure. Thus artists realised that in order to achieve a ‘perfect’ painting, they sometimes had to improvise, remove an odd tree from here, or add a bush there, just little changes in order to make the painting more attractive. Ever since people started building houses, they have been asking artists to paint them. This often involved a lot of scenery, setting the house in a rural paradise. It often became the job of the artist, not simply to copy slavishly, but to improvise. The owner wanted their house to be the grandest one around. The painter therefore had to use a little (or in some cases, a lot) of artistic licence. Adding or subtracting trees. Changing the sky to something more pleasurable, and so on. As time went on, more and more buildings appeared, and the amount of countryside started to disappear. The very nature of landscape painting changed to reflect this. Today nature is almost everywhere. But not nature in the traditional sense. Nature in the ‘tamed by man’ sense. This is the point where Kirstie Davies comes in. Her work is a modern day landscape art. She uses paint on canvas, although this canvas comes in the shape of hats and umbrellas. To this she adds a mixture of natural materials, from flowers to grass, moss to twigs. She is taking items that are more often than not seen only outside. Then by carefully combining them she creates a delicate, yet powerful piece of art work. Something from outside designed to be seen inside. It is interesting that the objects she has chosen to use have such potency as objects in their own right. Umbrellas come in a myriad of different designs and sizes. The design you choose can say lot about you, and what past times you enjoy. Do you have a plain black business umbrella, or do you have a brightly coloured one. Is it a large golf umbrella, or a well used fishing umbrella. Is it a barbie or an action man design. The possibilities are endless. Hats are just as potent, if not more so. They convey so many meanings. They can imply your religious beliefs, your class status, your personality, and so on. People today tend not to wear hats as much as in the past. So it’s interesting that many fashion designers still insist of having hats for their models in catwalk shows. Even though a lot of these hats are only one off, and not meant to be sold. It’s simply that the clothes don’t look complete without a hat on top.
In the high pressure world of fashion, there is constant pressure to come up with something different. It comes as no surprise then to find that nature ranks high on lists of inspiration. The near infinite quantity of styles in nature prove to be an ongoing mine for ideas. Two pieces, one by Christian Lacroix, and the other by Yves Saint Laurent, show the direct influence of nature in their work.
On this note we find that we have come full circle, as we have found yet another way that we surround ourselves with nature.
Today, nature has fully infiltrated our lives. It is everywhere. We put it in our homes and offices. We give it to each other on special occasions, or as romantic gestures. We take trips to the countryside so that we can experience it first hand. We pollute the atmosphere and kill it off without even thinking about it.
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