Filling the Surreal Gap

 

 Successful gardens rely on  a bit of tension between the wild and the civilized (or as the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it as the the title of a book, between the 'raw and the cooked'). Too much order and the garden seems too artificial, too little and it seems like the abandoned yard next door.

Of course, that dividing line is a pretty artificial one. Look though any glossy garden design mag and you'll see plenty of very modern stuff which look like it came straight from a drafting table, with very rectilinear components and modern materials. Sometimes these designs work but only for those owners  who have no wish to 'be outside in the garden.' These are gardens to be walked though at the most. The idea of fiddling with placement or doing any digging is not really possible, just as you wouldn't think of altering a painting once it is done and handed off to you.

If I had an aesthetic tendency in the garden it would be toward a sort of surreal naturalism. (In a previous house I had, I had the occasion to be involved in an interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard, a famous French philosopher known for his 'post-modern' works. As he was coming up my driveway with his entourage, he made a disparaging remark about surrealism (This incident obviously left a mark on me since I belately realize that I mentioned this earlier in june of 2009 on this blog). Which I thought was surreal in and of itself...in fact now that I'm thinking of it, similar to a comment which Alan Sondheim, one-time director of the old Nexus art center made as he walked around the house, something to the effect of 'Gee, look at all this outmoded surrealism!! I began thinking about those two stores as I worked on a bit of writing for the Burnaway.org page on reflections on the new Salvador Dali exhibit at the High Museum.)

 

(photos taken by Sandrine Arons)

Certainly the old southern yard was a kitschy affair with its everted truck tires painted white, bottle trees and general bric-a-brac, all going be the way side as modernisms antisepticism made its way. But maybe this southern kitsch was ahead of its time, the time of objects, of stuff, things, the banal pushed into the forefront of consciousness and laden over a fecund patch of the garden to grow later into PKDick's 'kipple'...glorious piles of stuff proliferating everywhere, capitalist materialism's cornucopia pushed to its suffocating limit.....and then all that stuff beginning to mate with and hybridize it's 'stuffness'...and now that I think about it, much like nature's fecundity transferred to the machine, Perhaps THAT is our new hybridized surreal, the machine becoming the plant-like ooze of almost-automatic production. 

I seem to be getting out of hand (and head) here so herewith a couple of new pot designs, combination of cement and hypertufa, susceptible to being painted if so desired. These are a couple of special orders for H. and C.  Thanks guys!!