Los Angeles artist Jennifer Steinkamp has been creating computer-generated botanical video installations for the last decade.
A spectacular new work, Madame Curie, just opened at the downtown gallery of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. It fills a 4,500 square foot gallery with swirling computer-generated flowering shrubs and trees based on a list of plants Madame Curie tended in her garden. YouTube doesn’t have any examples of this work yet, but you can see documentation at the artist’s own website [ here ].
The new work places the viewer into clouds of branches and flowers that swirl against a dark black background. This is a garden growing without a sun, reacting to an un-felt wind, out in space or down at some sub-atomic level. It’s all mysterious, exhuberant and flat-out beautiful.
Enjoy these short clips of some of her other works. And if you’re in San Diego through our flowery late winter or spring, stop by the museum for a look at this new piece. Meeting the work face-to-face is totally more engrossing than watching snippets on your computer. (Madame Cuire will also be on view in Los Angeles at ACME from February 12 – March 12 of this year.) It makes the plant world of Avatar look like bland Etch-a-Sketch drawings. And just imagine if this work were in 3D!
And here’s a final one that isn’t botanical, but it’s oh so cool, especially when you get into the space and interact with the projections:
What are bloggers talking about during these cold January days? Here’s an addictively fun way to find out.
Wordle lets you generate word clouds that are stunningly beautiful to look at. The site calls itself “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide,” but I’d argue that it’s an interesting way to figure out the gist of what’s being discussed.
Word clouds have been around for a few years now. I wrote about them back in the earlier days of this blog, and this blog displays a tag cloud on the left panel. But Wordle gives you all sorts of control over things like color, font, language and arrangement. Just click on the home page’s “Create” tab to get going. All you need is some canned text, a link to a blog or website with an RSS or Atom feed, or you can enter a del.icio.us username to see a cloud of their tags.
Here’s a quick Wordled look at some of the posts on some California mostly-gardening blogs. I selected black backgrounds for all of them so that there’s a basis for comparing them visually, but I had way too much fun creating color combinations and picking fonts and word arrangements. The blog contents should be current as of last night, January 13.
(There are a huge number of these. I’ve been home with a cold, too messed up to think coherently–but not too compromised to play with shapes and pretty colors. It makes me wonder whether the part of the brain that thinks is even in the same zip code as where artistic activity takes place…)
To start off, the content of this blog, before this post…
Our weekend Netflix viewing was The Savages, a 2007 film starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman who play a sister and brother who are called in to care for their ailing father. The siblings leave New York City and Buffalo in the fall to pick up their father in Sun City, Arizona.
I laughed at some of the establishing shots of the landscaping in Sun City. I had to share.
Long rows of these soccer ball trees are shown all over Sun City.
Houses with these ball shaped trees...Big palm trees, but the planting budget didn't allow everyone to get one of their own...This hedge really got me laughing. What emerges from behind the hedges two seconds after this shot is even funnier...
As far as the film, I liked it. As expected, the siblings have issues between them, including some sibling rivalry that’s simmered for four decades. But all in all they’re adults trying hard to do the right thing for their father: nothing too Hollywood and cloyingly uplifting, but nothing that’s a real downer, either.
Of course such mature behavior would never fly in many families I’m familiar with. Overall it left me with the feeling that’s best summed up by a bumpersticker John has that hasn’t made it onto a vehicle yet: My Family is More Dysfunctional than Yours.
I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Angeles County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.
When I took the photos on the last day of July crude oil was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar coming from the fenced-off pits where archaeologists were working behind the museum on extracting critters and plants that got caught in the ancestral goo.
Here, junior’s ball has somehow made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe rescue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be discovered by archaeologists a few millennia down the road.
We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Garden Installation. I posted [ before ] on the earlier stages of the garden, and it’s still not complete. But by now you can really make out many more of the elements of what the final garden will look like.
There are many palm species used in the garden. A number of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden temporary planters, these permanent homes are made out of thick steel plate–the “it” material of the moment for well-financed modern gardens.
A closer look at the planter box…
In a back corner you could see a collection of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a better idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.
Another look at some of the palms in transition… In this installation some of the plants are rotated out according tot he season. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.
LACMA was about to open a new facility, the Resnick Pavillion designed by Renzo Piano. As the building nears completion more elements of the Palm Garden Installation are being planted. In addition to palms it includes several of the non-palm species. These are some spectacularly variegated agaves plants of a furcraea, possibly Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta’–Thanks for the correction, Loree!
The way the plants have been shaped, with the lowest leaves removed, made them look like variegated New Zealand flax (phormiums) until you got close to them. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be interesting to see if these agaves furcraeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave furcraea growers are used to seeing. This is in no way a naturalistic garden, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them without running over the leaves?
Detail: Furcraea foetida, I think
Another detail of the variegated furcraeas
Another of the non-palm species: this cycad developing this really cool cone. It’s probably something like three to four feet long.
A bench and real palms outside the Resnick pavilion…
The single most dramatic gesture is the placement of this palm with a thickly bulbous trunk that’s been planted in a tight opening that leads two stories down into a parking garage. The effect is like staring down into a North Dakota Minuteman missile silo. It’s more than a tad unsettling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than designing pleasant, unchallenging spaces.
Say “Los Angeles” to someone and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would probably be one of the first things the person might bring up, even though the city’s official tree is the coral tree is and the official flower the bird of paradise. “Cars” would probably be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lining the driveway down into the parking garage.
I’m not anything remotely resembling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I can show you that it has amazingly sculptural trunks.
Looking up into the fronds gives you the sensation closest what you get from many of the artworks Robert Irwin did before he designed gardens. The fronds filter the light in interesting ways, and two or more layers make things darker than just a single layer. If you stand in the driveway and look straight up the negative space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the delicate layers of palm.
If you’d like to compare the effect of the palm fronds to an earlier Irwin piece, here’s a corner of his Running Violet V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece panels of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depending on the number of layers, and the mesh turns opaque or transparent depending on how the light is striking it. The mesh interacts with views of the eucalyptus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].
Artists often complain that big museums don’t pay enough attention to local artists in their scramble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another country. This summer day LACMA had several galleries devoted to the the photographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of several of the galleries. But I didn’t identify any plant species used in this garden that came from within a thousand-mile radius.
Word is that Robert Irwin is designing yet another garden, this one for a new federal courthouse here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our California species in the project? What about some of our delicately transparent plants like deer weed or broom baccharis? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stunning transformations as the seasons change? To see an important new, high profile garden comprised of local natives would be such an amazing opportunity.
This was fun: I opened up the Museum of Modern Art gift catalog yesterday and saw this on page 2, the Andrea Air Purifier. Instead of filters or electric charges, Matthieu Lehanneur’s machine from 2007 uses a live plant.
Once again I get the feeling that gardeners are way ahead of the curve. Plants to clean the air? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?
And then there’s the matter of the price tag $199, plant not included. Yikes. But the manufacturer makes some claims about how the gizmo is lots more efficient than traditional purifiers or even plants:
Based on experiments performed by RTP Labs, Andrea improves the efficiency of formaldehyde removal from the air relative to plants alone by 360%. Relative to HEPA and carbon filters, comparison between the RTP Labs data and literature data show an improvement in formaldehyde filtration efficiency of 4400%. These data confirm that while plants alone in an interior setting are more efficient than HEPA and carbon filters at removing toxic gases from the air, they are significantly less efficient than Andrea. Even more important, the rate of gas removal by Andrea is, according to the RTP Labs data, over 1000% faster than for plants alone.
Much of the technological magic appears to be due a fan that circulates air around the plant and then into the room–something that you could probably rig up in the privacy of your own home. (Be prepared to water your plant more often.) As a fun piece of conceptual art that was part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, the price wouldn’t be that outrageous. But as a functional appliance I’d probably opt for a few little green machines, growing and photosynthesizing and blooming through the winter doldrum months…
I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty Center whenever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a perfect day for a stroll through the garden to see what new things I’d find.
If you’ve never been to the garden, it divides into two large parts: a central bowl holding a maze of two colors of clipped azaleas and its surrounding plantings, and, above it, a straight watercourse that is shaded all along its length by London plane trees, a cousin of the American sycamore.
This trip I was concentrating on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the overall design and plantings.
To experience the upper watercourse, you follow a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shelter of the trees, letting you experience the bright Los Angeles sunlight and how it contrasts with the dappled light the trees provide in the spring, summer and fall.
The watercourse near the top of the Central Garden
The watercourse, the sheltered core of this top garden, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a waterway that glides quietly over a textured streambed down below.
The effect of the dappled sunlight is repeated in the plantings. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alternate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to distinguish the alternating light and shadow of the trees above from the dappled plantings below. It’s a little confusing, a tad disorienting. And if you’re fascinated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a quietly thrilling experience.
Even this little detail, a planting of succulents, plays with contrasts, light and dark. It’s a little corner that would look great in a home garden, and here it further helps to reinforce the vibrations of light and dark in the upper garden.
When I first saw the garden I thought the plantings were a little chaotic. All this light and dark, all this continual contrasting of colors and plant shapes seemed restless. Small doses would look great as perky little container plantings, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a little English cottage garden doped up on steroids.
But I’ve been changing my mind. All this craziness reinforces the intense vibration of contrasts that you experience walking the zigzag path.
Once you make your way out of the upper portion of the garden you’re set free into the relative calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzagging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shifting from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower garden ensures that one of the sides will experience shade during most of the day. And the plantings down here, still alternating dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.
Yes, each trip here I see something new. But I also realize that making this kind of garden happen is such an extreme commitment of resources and labor.
I haven’t quite figured out a way to photograph the capital outlay it takes to keep this garden looking great. But I’d like to end this post with a tribute to the heroes, those dedicated gardeners who make this place a garden worth visiting several times a year.
Here’s a really interesting painting that I encountered Sunday while I was visiting the Getty Museum. It’s “The Tulip Folly,” by the 19th century French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was having a big show in one of the galleries. (The painting was on loan from Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.)
The scene takes place during the 1630s tulip mania and shows a soldier guarding a potted tulip, while other troops stomp out fields of flowering bulbs. The piece was painted in 1882 during a time of economic distress around the Paris Bourse Crash, a time even more economically unsettled than our own. Gérôme was painting tulips and the tulip folly alright, but he was also commenting on his own day, which saw a great stock market crash three and a half centuries after the collapse of tulip values.
While looking for images of this painting I ran across a couple other interesting depictions of the tulip mania. Both were painted by Dutch artists closer to the actual tulip market crash, and both paintings reside in Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum.
Hendrik Gerritsz Pot painted an allegory of Flora’s Wagon of Fools around 1640. This painting shows a cartload of tulip-deranged wackos leading the common workers into the sea. Substitute Wall Street bankers for the tulip-snorting loonies and I think it has special resonance for us today.
Jean Brueghel the Younger’s Satire of the Tulip Frenzy is even unkinder towards the participants in the frenzy. They appear in the painting as monkeys. Smack!
As unflattering as the speculators appear, in some ways the previous image of Flora’s wagon comes off as being a stronger indictment of the damage done to a general population by a moneyed elite. Still, Brueghel’s monkeys are pretty wild and I like his work better as a painting.
Sometimes I feel a little silly chasing after an unusual plant that I absolutely must have. (If you hear of a land run on San Diego ragweed, I might have something to do with it…) Maybe these images, combined with the experience of our current economic times, will slap a little bit of sanity into me.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently featuring a series of installations and exhibitions looking at notions of food, culture and art. The program, EatLACMA, is co-curated by the collective that goes by the name of Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young) along with LACMA curator Michele Urton.
Åsa Sonjasdotter has contributed The Way Potatoes Go, a vaguely California-shaped planter containing soil, potato plants, plant labels and straw mulch. In the piece she explores the 10,000 years of history and culture associated with potatoes, one of the plants with the longest and richest narratives.
From the artist’s statement: “The varieties exist as a result of coincidences, accidents, planning, violence, and careful custody over thousands of years. Through tracing their different backgrounds a history of human desire appears.” Go to [ http://eatlacma.org/gardens/ ] and click on The Way Potatoes Go on the map for details on the varieties.
If you can’t check out the piece in person here are a few random details of it:
You can also click [ here ] for further information on how the artist got interested in this, one of the most primal of foods.
Over the summer this garden of historical potatoes will be viewed by tens of thousands of people. Although many gardeners will already be familiar with some of the rich history of potatoes, this installation will bring that knowledge and appreciation to a wider audience. And the artist’s story is a compelling read.
Services that will print a custom fabric for you have been around for a little while. Now there’s Shortomatic, a firm that will take a design or photo that you upload and turn it into a pair of boardshorts–just in time for summer. Even if you don’t spring the $99 for the shorts, you can noodle around on their site and see what your photos might look like turned into clothing. I played a bit with some mostly garden photos:
The original photo, some variegated Agave americana at the Huntington Library’s desert garden…
…And the photo imagined as a pair of shorts using the Shortomatic design tool. These have a bit of a lederhosen/bondage vibe. I’m not sure I could pull off this look at the beach.
Here’s a photo from last summer of a sphinx moth hovering at night over some sage flowers.
…And the same photo turned into a pair of shorts.
A photo of the West Side of Los Angeles, taken from outside the gardens at the J. Paul Getty Museum on a cool, clear January afternoon.
Board shorts with the skyline used for a border at the base of the leg openings.
This is another succulent photo, using the “find edges” filter in Photoshop, a huge cliche if there ever was one. And then I took the photo and tilted it towards the red end of the spectrum.
And here’s what it looks like turned into shorts.
Oh good, another black hole where you can throw your spare time…
I had the chance to fast-forward through a documentary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Owning the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy science of geoengineering, in which scientists and charlatans attempt to modify the earth’s weather.
As one cautionary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hatfield who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hatfield set up his apparatus on the eastern edge of town and got to business seeding clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 people were dead in the ensuing flooding. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a charlatan taking advantage of a natural weather occurrence. Whether this sort of weather modification actually makes a difference in practice is in dispute. ]
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, is interviewed and gets some of the better lines in the film:
“One of the great sadnesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warming get completely out of control is [these geoengineering proposals] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…
“The 20th century taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that scientific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trouble. Any sort of solution that we could introduce that was actually going to lower the temperature of the world several degrees—you know, whatever geoengineering solution—is inherently a big scale scary as hell.”
Interestingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or looking out at the world from the climate controlled space of a car interior. All that reinforces one of the film’s points that we’re a culture that has cut ourselves off from what the environment brings us naturally.
I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some people are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the perfect temperature. Just extrapolate that out onto the entire earth and you can see that coming up with a scheme to modify weather so that everyone is happy is bound to be an impossible task.
What if Siberia decides it wants to grow tropical mangoes and geoengineers a frost-free climate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What happens to the rest of the world?
