Untangling the garden as a site of pleasure and power in 5 art works

Since ancient times the garden has been a symbol of cultivation and civilisation. To prepare and manage a plot of land for largely aesthetic purposes, however, often means that something else must be sacrificed—namely native species of plants and animals, wildflowers and weeds—to make way for an organised arrangement of flora and fauna. In this way, the garden is not just a site of abundant beauty but has long been a symbol of colonialism too, of power struggles, the land being taken over, ordered and controlled at the expense of indigenous cultures. 

“I think the garden is a good way of talking about the state of the world,” curator Stephanie Rosenthal tells SLEEK about the latest exhibition to open at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, Garden of Earthly Delights. “To think about plants and the way that we have dealt with nature is a direct way to talk about what has happened in the world of humanity.” In this way, Garden of Earthly Delights—which incidentally takes Hieronymous Bosch’s famous triptych of the same name that pits pleasure and peril against each other as its point of departure (a version of one of the panels is exhibited in the show)— grapples with the manifold meanings and contradictions of the garden. Through a quintet of thematic perspectives—utopia/dystopia, anthropocene (human involvement), urban gardening, gardening as a system of thought and colonialism/migration—the garden unravels as a complex microcosm of the world’s struggles at large, undoubtedly exacerbated in a tense era of climate change.

Below, we explore some of those meanings through the works exhibited:

The sensual garden — Homo Sapiens Sapiens (2005),  Pipilotti Rist 

Where many of the works on display situate the garden as a complex arena of cultural differences and meanings, Pipilotti Rist’s 2005 film—planted in the ceiling like a kaleidoscopic window onto a primordial other world — portrays the garden as a swirling, sensual paradise. Through a globular fish-eye lens, naked nymph-like women are glimpsed, caressing fruits and flowers, their bodies swerving and shimmying in ecstasy, cascades of streaming hair washing over the camera. Here, the garden is pure pleasure, a gleaming potion of psychedelic colour, impossible joy in an alternate Eden—a safe haven prior to the industrialised harvesting of the land.

The tampered garden — Mesocosmic Indoor Overture (2019), Heather Phillipson

It might take a moment to realise that you can walk across the pungent mulsh carpeting the floor in English artist Heather Phillipson’s installation, Mesocosmic Indoor Overture. Without even casting an eye over the zany screens positioned in a triangular formation, the waft emanating from the soft underfoot is enough to transport you to a dank and earthy plot somewhere. Meanwhile, the rectangular screens present digitised footage of a canary-yellow, tulip-like flower, collaged against a galactic backdrop—it’s all pretty weird. The plant in question is the invasive skunk-cabbage—a fetid perennial wildflower native to North America and alien to Germany (and Europe) that spreads incessantly when planted (in Britain, it is an offence to allow the plant to escape from a regulated setting and grow in the wild). In this installation, Phillipson imagines a world in a near future, where plants which have been purposely grown by humans, supersede and take over. As Rosenthal says, “We don’t own nature, nature owns us…in the end nature will stay.”

The treacherous garden — Lawn 1 (2019), Lungiswa Gqunta

As the light catches on the severed zig-zag edges of the green bottles in Lungiswa Gqunta’s Lawn 1, it’s hard not to take a breath. A hundred or so broken bottles are arranged in a square formation at foot-level, violently gleaming; children are instructed to be held by the hand. Gqunta’s installation is a poetic representation of the gardens in South Africa that brutally keep trespassers out— largely directed at members of black communities —by attaching broken glass bottles to their fences. Gqunta renders the garden as a vicious marking of territory, a danger zone that divides rich and poor, black and white. The garden is far from a safe haven here, but a ferocious battle ground. 

The spiritual garden — 2012-2555, Korakrit Arunanondchai

New York-based and Bangkok-raised Korakrit Arunanondchai become a household name after being selected for this year’s Whitney Biennial, where he was exhibiting this installation simultaneously (on 20 July he withdrew his work in protest against the involvement of Whitney’s vice chair Warren B. Kanders in the production of tear gas). At Gropius Bau, however, the clear-sighted heartfeltness and meditative nature of this piece can be fully appreciated. At the top of a long room, two screens are placed on easel-like stands, behind them lies an altar-like formation: an empty rendition of Raphael’s foyer from the School of Athens is adorned with garlands of garish fake flowers. The screens show shots of the artist’s grandparents, their garden and scenes of a cataclysmic flood that devastated Arunanondchai’s homeland in 2011. Against a stirring, wistful soundtrack, there is the sense of being washed or carried away, the images are meditative, the land withers and renews, cleansing follows destruction, and life ultimately goes on. 

The colonised garden — Antoine’s Organ (2016), Rashid Johnson 

In the atrium of the Gropius Bau, you will be greeted with Rashid Johnson’s magnificent Antoine’s Organ—which resembles a sort a giant shelving system overflowing with verdurous houseplants that any green-thumbed millennial could only dream of. It is also the perfect work to sum up the conflicting ideas and themes that this exhibition sets up. On the one hand, it is gorgeously fresh and tactile, teeming with potted plants, shea butter sculptures, books, TV screens, even a piano, but on the other, the imposing grid-like structure is restrictive. The plants and flowers are penned in and organised, illuminated in unnatural neon lights, purely for aesthetic contemplation. In this way, the work is imbued with colonial politics, of taking over and reclaiming as one’s own. But it’s not purely negative: music brings Johnson’s flourishing ecosystem to life, suggesting harmony and poignancy in this situation at the same time. As Rosenthal notes, “People understand that to have a plant gives you a form of life. We live with them, they live with us.”

Garden of Earthly Delights runs through to 1 December 2019 at Gropius Bau.