Rationing out the Rational: Where'd the Garden Go?!
I suppose most folks would not put the word ‘rational’ in the same sentence with gardening, a hesitation I am in agreement with.
When we think of rationality, we think of the world of work and the necessity that one thing follow another with a sort of inexorable logic. We associate it with science and with bureaucracy also, as well as with the working of the machine. To be rational is to be like Mr. Spock from Star Trek: cool, calm, collected and unflappable.
At this late date in Enlightenment virtues and after world wars and any number of minor and on-going wars, rationality doesn't seem all that it is cracked up to be. And nothing shows that better than the garden….and things, areas, that seem to be gardens but aren't really, are really forms of bio-commodity. Just think of the continent long strip 'garden' formed by the medians and sides of the highway system, the rationalized, Fordist plantings on all the big apartments, townhouses, etc.
I had reason to go northwest in the state recently but still inside the vast pan of development that now forms the Atlanta development area. If you noticed the picture which acts as the introduction for this issue, you will see a representative sample courtesy of Google Earth: a long stretch off of i-20, winging our way through continuous strip malls with all the franchises you come to know ad nauseum, finally winding up in vast developments and projects in the valleys and foothills leading into the north Georgia mountains. Vegetation is mostly scrub pine and mimosa and a few oaks all along the way, a vast green wall punctuated by oil change franchises, fast food joints, big box stores, and then repeating the cycle again and again until it appears to wane along country lanes---except now grossly laid out here and there with these independent mega-burbs (with mega-sized houses of course) with the traditional six foundation plants, maybe a Japanese maple in the front, maybe a Clematis feebly climbing up the post box pole. There seem to be hundreds of acres of these non-gardens allied with their houses, all crawling up the hills and lopping into the valleys. Like Levittown, maybe they’ll change into something less aggro-android and something that seems more attuned to a life well, if perhaps more simply, lived. Somehow I doubt it. Nonetheless, I am thrown into a giant depressive stupor on the final leg of the journey and on the way back. Its odd, but I'm not exactly sure why; after all, this is the way life is lived now; who am I to gainsay it? We’ve somehow traveled back in time to the cookie cutter fifties, except with a gigantoid vengence. This is the way the future will play out and IS playing out in exurban areas all over the USA. This is rationality with a vengence and with the feel of an unstoppable logic all its own that is indeed tied into the modern zeitgeist. (There are those like Jim Kunstler whose writing I have great affection for but which seems lost in a terrible fog after I actually go out into –well, into every place other than where I am now ) This is the rational logic (which at the end of its tether becomes ir-rational) and place to which our modern life has led us (and by modern I mean the last 250 years --- well, maybe even the last 2500 years).
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Well, the logic of the modern aside all, one can do, in the final estimate. is to do what one does. This last Freedonia project ( Vicki calls it the Friendship Gate and the Pacara gate from Inca Trail at Puca Pacara in Peru) has nothing of the 'logical' about it; or rather its logic, like most of the work I do, is tied to a very situated particular, a relationship between what I am able to pull off artistically, how far the client will let me push that exploration, and the area in which that exploration is to occur. In that sense, it comes closer to the expectations that occur with sowing seeds or planting a plant: you do the best you can it considering all the relationships of place, time, person, ability … and then let it develop. There is certainly an inner push outward that develops. And perhaps this could indeed be called a logic but a logic of the garden, of the bios, of zoë as the Greeks called life, except realized in concrete and tile. And ideally there is a somewhat explosive semiotic (associated with this particular piece anyway), a verging away in different directions of symbolisms, signs, portents, aspects, a series of different reading by whoever sees it yet still circling around to its concrete placement.
Those who would want it transplanted (as would be the case with those mega-burbs earlier) and tendered into a sameness would be out of luck --- like a particularly satisfying saxophone solo: couldn't repeat it if I wanted to.
