Yes, That is a Barge with Trees Floating By!
Diana Balmori
Robert Smithson’s 1970 drawing, Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island, is a still life which we recently brought to life by actually constructing it. This floating island will be traveling around Manhattan for a week (from Sat, September 17th to Sunday, September 25th). It is Smithson’s concept, which the artist Nancy Holt, his collaborator, has helped to interpret and which members of my landscape office (Balmori Associates) and I have built. Jon Rubin, who selected the barge and tugboat, also had a hand in its final look.
Any small landscape like this (90 x 30 ft, the size of a small city garden), which is based on a drawing, requires some level of interpretation. Just the scale and type of vegetation and materials indicated by the sketch are open to discussion.
An additional interpretation from Valerie Smith, the curator of the Queens Museum of Art, can be found in her essay on Smithson in the recent catalog to her show "Down the Garden Path: The Artist’s Garden After Modernism." She interprets his floating island as a piece of Central Park, an interpretation which Nancy Holt supports.
When some of these interpretations found themselves at odds with each other–"not enough foliage," "we need to see through the foliage to the other side"–Diane Shamash, who directed the very complex project, came in to weigh the pros and cons of the interpretation. But these layers of interpretations were beneficial to the island, and were necessary to fulfilling Smithson’s sketch.
The unresolved struggle of landscape against fixity began when the still life came to life. Originally planned for spring, it could not all come together until the fall. It was a long and complex coordination and fundraising effort carried out mainly by Diane Shamash of Minetta Brook, under the umbrage of the Whitney Museum as part of its Robert Smithson retrospective.
The shift to autumn meant including plants not at their moment of most vigorous growth. If everybody was prepared to accept that deciduous trees get ready to drop their leaves in the fall, and the hurricane season produces strong winds and rains that could accelerate this process–meaning the trees will be sparse–it could be done. The issue was discussed over the team’s roundtable for over three months of preparation, and it was decided that it would be in the spirit of Smithson’s work to accept that leaves could and would be shed. Add to this a summer drought and brutal heat extended into September and you have trees getting ready to shed leaves even earlier. Last week when the trees were brought to the site, their fall shedding–particularly a willow–had begun. But there had to be a willow on the island, it was the one identifiable tree in Smithson’s drawing.
There was general dismay about this and one other tree, a sycamore, also a water-hungry tree that had dropped half of its leaves and looked quite transparent. This made the team uncomfortable. It was finally taken off the barge and replaced with an ash in spite of our advocacy. The willow’s shedding was countered by the addition of another willow to give greater thickness to the thinning foliage.
So here was the living entity of this landscape of a summer already past. Here was the most profound problem in actualizing landscapes: the acceptance of something living and therefore, constantly changing, is difficult. Of course, we all wanted Floating Island to look its best as it was tugged out for its week in the sun. "It’s got to start out full, and then we will live with whatever happens" was the main argument. But the issue lies in what "look its best" means. If understood well, it would be what fits its time. "But people who see it won’t understand it" ran another argument, "they’ll think that there is a sick tree or that something is wrong."
The Floating Island was tugged out last Wednesday and will start traveling around Manhattan this Saturday for a full week. Hurricane Ophelia is sending rain and wind our way and the tenuously held leaves will fall with them, maybe all at once. We have the chance then to see a landscape transform as it should, fitting its time and situation; its leaves changing color, or falling, leaving the structure of tree branches to be revealed. For whatever fixity was achieved at launch would dissipate once it continues its journey through time.
What is said here may be misunderstood as a clamor for the "natural." There is nothing natural or ecological about this landscape, at least not in the typical assumptions about both terms. I am standing on the barge on a steel deck amid huge six ton root balls of trees burlapped and cable-tensioned in wire cages that are fixed in place by steel supports welded to the deck. In between the root balls are bales of hay, rolls of geotextile (a cloth that lets water but not earth through), two inches of soil, grass sod to surface the top and shrubs planted through the geotextile. This is an artificial composition, a built landscape–as "built" as any architectural structure. But its materials are living and are neither artificial nor inert. And therein lays the difference. The living need to be of their time. In new ecological terms they will create an environment for living things if left to exist for a longer time.
