The New Gardens Of Art

"Gardens and the Death of Art" by Stephanie Ross, in Landscape Architecture (July 1998), 636 Eye St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001–3736.

Today it is little more than a hobby—albeit an immensely popular one—but in the 18th century, gardening was a fine art. English author Horace Walpole even grouped it with poetry and painting—"Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn Nature." Yet if gardening no longer is kin to poetry and painting, high art has not completely abandoned the landscape, asserts Ross, author of What Gardens Mean (1998). Many recent works of "environmental art," she argues, "fulfill the same functions" the gardens of Walpole’s day did. "By inhabiting, addressing, and altering a site, they call into question our relations to landscape, nature, and art."

The contemporary artists whose works "most clearly recall those earlier gardens," Ross writes, include Alan Sonfist and Meg Webster. Sonfist’s various Time Landscapes are tracts reproducing an urban area’s vanished native flora. When his Time Landscape in New York

City’s La Guardia Place is finished (the first stage was dedicated in 1978), it will exhibit three stages of a forest as it would have been in the colonial era. Webster’s work Pass, installed in Saint Louis’s Laumeier Sculpture Park between 1990 and 1992, reproduces a variety of different habitats and plant varieties found throughout Missouri, including a fruit orchard, a woodland stream, a pond, sun and shade gardens, herbs, berry bushes, and various prairie grasses and flowers.

But even less obviously gardenlike works of environmental art—such as Michael Heizer’s desert sculpture Double Negative (1969), in which 240,000 tons of earth were carved out of two facing cliffs— "force us to rethink our place in the landscape, our roles as perceivers, enjoyers, consumers, destroyers," Ross observes. "They raise profound metaphysical questions about permanence and change, about human will and agency."