Public Art Goes Natural
Introduction, Molly Kleiman
"And Immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." — Larkin, "High Windows"
"Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection." — Emerson, Nature
As a kid, I used to watch "Wild America" and thrill at the very idea that this country contained pockets of unadulterated green space populated by, yes, animals. The terms (perennial scrabble favorite, "lynx"), the epithets (the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef). Growing up near the Great White Way, the greens I encountered were the crowded, very used pocket parks of the city and the polite lawns of suburbia. What is it that obsesses us about nature–its chaotic control over us, our infinitesimal smallness in comparison, our inevitable death, the inevitable continuance of everything else. As poet Billy Collins teases in "Marginalia," "And if you have managed to graduate from college / without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" / in a margin, perhaps now / is the time to take one step forward."
The following artists invite us to explore nature’s perfection and tempt us to fear and fathom what lies beyond our sun-comprehending glass. Outside of the gallery, the museum, the home, these projects not only open themselves up to the chaos of the elements, they use the elements (wind; rain; bananas), reframe nature (please, float in a "thinking box"; sail on a mirror boat; follow serpentine paths through a rainforest), dress up our parks (why not add some flashy orange flags), imitate the organic (virtual flowers bloom; fake dolphins freeze mid-dive), revive our habitat (tree mountains and dirt tongue-chairs purify the ecosystem). These projects prove that municipal systems, political action, ecological preservation, landscape design and public art are no longer discrete disciplines. We have begun and must continue to integrate these areas–for the sake of curiosity, discovery, and survival.
