The Asphalt Garden
by H. L. Resnikoff
As hints of autumn scent the September air, Boston art galleries open their doors with renewed vigor for the fall season. fr’s pair of works with the conventionally noncommittal label Untitled at the Laconia Artists Corporation gallery show once again the amazing ability of simple visual metaphors to illuminate the predicament of life. They also illustrate how helpful it is for the viewer to know something about what the artist has mind. Fenner is an artist who is also a landscape architect. Her art is usually realized in works that incorporate living lawn grass in natural wood containers. Unlike British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey whose grass photographs were recently grown at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (They use photosynthesis as a photographic process to develop images exposed on living grass that produces transient works which owe most of their interest to this unusual technique), Fenner offers conceptual artworks that call upon the viewer to understand living grass as a visual metaphor for life – changing and unpredictable, exuberant and unruly, fragile and fecund, and constantly in need of tender care.The two identical pieces shown at the Laconia gallery offer the contemporary alternative to grass. Shoveled and rolled by the artist into a stainless steel frame, a slab of fresh black asphalt looks back at the viewer from the gallery wall. One rarely takes the trouble, nor has the opportunity, to appreciate the intricate texture and rich unalloyed blackness of asphalt nor to contemplate that even asphalt can have a fresh, young look. The steel should be understood as part of the work–a kind of metal curbstone–as well as a separator between the asphalt and the gallery wall.This work is, first of all and from this artist, a visual metaphor for the fabricated universe of city and suburb that competes with, and increasingly supplants, the natural world. Asphalt and steel are enduring and predictable, stable and sterile, sturdy and easily satisfied – the former by an occasional hot patch kiss and the latter by a periodic facial. That there are two, hung next to each other, emphasizes that we live in the Age of Asphalt. If we know Fenner’s art, the asphalt works remind us of grass by its absence, and then, perhaps, of the ubiquitous suburban contradiction of asphalt and grass along the driveway and the roadside. But Fenner presents us with the larger contradiction of human creativity that must always be, at least in part, opposed to nature while we, as creatures of biology, must always be, at least in part, one with nature. Finding an enduring balance is one of the unending tasks of life.But that is only the surface level of meaning. The viewer is also reminded of the long and intricate history of black paintings, beginning with Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square almost a century ago, which Fenner’s independent creation closely resembles, both in organization and in content. Both are square. Malevich surrounded his black square by a white border that reinforces its geometric, i.e. fabricated, nature. Squares and, more generally, rectangles are found in the manufactured world and in Plato’s theory of ideals but not in nature. Malevich’s geometrical work glorified the role of the human as prime mover, a creative force in the universe independent of nature and god. Fenner deprecates the role of the human as prime contractor, building to code without question or conscience.The viewer can hardly avoid contrasting the rich but stressful artificial environment in which most of us live with the simple but impoverished natural state encapsulated in the metaphor of the Garden of Eden. Fenner’s asphalt and steel art is a visual metaphor for human creativity from which the human touch is absent.These thoughts rarely emerge during the uncountable hours we spend driving on asphalt. Perhaps art focuses thought.
. L. Resnikoff
