Art that LIVES and GROWS
Plants are the medium in this exhibition exploring the idea of art as a living system
It’s the scent that gets you first — dank and verdant, notably oxygen rich, with soft floral notes and a whiff of cut grass. Follow your nose, then, to the main contemporary gallery space at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where a wall of potted greenery towers and flourishes in the full, baking sunlight. The space, part of the Gardner’s 2012 expansion, has always seemed like a giant terrarium anyway, with its 20-foot wall of floor to ceiling windows — odd for a museum, where light sensitivity is baked into 90-plus percent of its displays. Now fitted for summer with jungle-dense foliage stacked nearly as high as its skylights, it’s as though the building has finally found its true purpose.
However happy the greenery may be with its daylight exposure, it’s neither decorative nor seasonal — at least not entirely. It’s part of “Antoine’s Organ,” an installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Rashid Johnson. The piece, first realized in 2016, isn’t a stand-alone; it’s part of “Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art,” the Gardner’s eight-artist summer exhibition exploring the idea of art as living system, not static object. But, really: Johnson’s work dwarfs all else, and imbues the space with a vibrant, enveloping magic. When you’re in it, you can all but feel it breathing.
Living matter has long been raw material for contemporary artists; the field of “bio art,” has its roots in the back-tothe-land movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, when toxic devastation wrought by underregulated industries caused rivers to spontaneously combust, or poisoned entire communities with covered-up chemical waste dumps.
Art from that era, not surprisingly, had an aura of protest and warning; the American duo of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are the avatars of the early movement, pledging in the 1970s to only make work that benefited the natural environment. That led to things like cultivating small-scale or
chards and fish farms in museums themselves and feeding their audiences from the resulting bounty. It was a blunt response to an explicit threat: We’re growing this in here because we can’t be sure it’s safe to do it out there. More recent years— she died in 2018; he in 2022 — saw the pair engage such issues as vanishings watersheds and the enormity of climate change; that their 50plus-year career never lacked for material tells us something about how such warnings were received.
Their work isn’t here, but any artist who engages with living systems does so at least partly in their long shadow. In the small anteroom to the main gallery space, Ackroyd & Harvey (the collaboration of British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey) display the fruits of many months of slow-growing labor while they were artists in residence at the Gardner this spring. Two big panels hang in low light here, each an oblique effigy of a woman: On the left, Netooeusqua, and on the right, Elizabeth Solomon. Each comes hazily into view in shades of green, the product of the artists’ unique, laborious process of exposing grass seed to varying intensities of ultraviolet light to produce gradient images, not unlike a photograph.
Gross manipulation of nature itself underpins the portraits, the inherently organic under intense constraint. Another layer gives the images weight beyond the apparent environmentalist scold: Both women are Indigenous environmental justice activists from nearby nations; Netooeusqua is Shinnecock, and Solomon, Massachusett. Their images are built with a highly cultivated product of their ancestral lands — a forced hybridity that now produces manicured lawns all over the region, where once there was only native plants, and people. The tone, at least for me, was poetic, and tragic; unmaintained, as the artists plan, the portraits will yellow and die, becoming dessicated remnants of their currently living form.
Manipulation plays an outsize role in a lot of environmentally conscious art; we do these things, it often seems to say, because we can. That’s the spirit of Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans’s “Still Life (In course of arrangement) . . . VI,” 2020, I think, with a pair of willow trees mercilessly crucified on trellis grids and set to jerky rotation in a spotlight’s glare. It’s a kind of horticultural cruelty taken to absurd extreme. Gardeners train plants to do unnatural things for decorative spectacle all the time, torquing the natural into unnatural versions of itself. There are all kinds of ways to extrapolate that, but the bent of the piece has a flavor of the theater of the macabre — that all is here on earth for human amusement, pain and contortion be damned. It’s hard to think of a factory farm, or a feedlot, or a suburb, and do anything but agree.
A subtle counterpoint — hard to find, in this field — is Piero Golia’s “Ikebana #3,” 2021, in which an angular, Brancusi-esque block of wood has been infected with fungal spores. The piece requires care: several times a day, a gallery attendant spritzes the divots where the spores are lodged, encouraging them to bloom. Waiting for a work to show up over weeks and months, before your eyes, is a delightful subversion of a culture increasingly trained to be impatient. With gratification so delayed, the piece activates a muscle badly atrophied in an era of firehose information input: the imagination. There’s also a chance that the spores — oyster mushrooms; delicious — won’t survive. There’s a message there, too.
Johnson’s piece — central, towering, profound — intends no such subtleties. Amid its houseplant glade, the artist has strategically inserted critical tomes on Black American culture — W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk;” “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Debra J. Dickerson’s “The End of Blackness.” Roughly carved sculptures of shea butter — uniquely sourced from the karité tree in the African Sahel and used as skin therapy there for millenia — are interspersed amid the greenery; old monitors playing hip-hop and gospel performances crackle at intervals throughout.
Deep inside, barely visible, a piano is situated at eye level — a rotating cast of Berklee College of Music students plays it every day, infusing the living scene with a haunting human vitality; that it’s jazz (“Antoine’s Organ” is named for Antoine Baldwin, the musician whom Johnson enlisted for the work) is of a piece here. Johnson’s work enlists nature itself as a metaphor for the persistence of both life and culture in a rigid, inflexible, and ultimately hostile environment. It’s notable that the structure on which everything rests is a uniform black grid. It echoes the strictures of Modernism, descended directly from a world where swift technological advances enabled colonial plunder and set the foundation for a contemporary urban world, where those disparities calcified in oppressive housing projects and urban neglect.
“Antoine’s Organ” envelops its frame, and significantly, imbues it with life, an allegory for the Black diaspora’s thriving impact in America and beyond, against all possible odds. Where there’s light, there’s hope; every sunrise prompts another iota of new growth, bathed in the bright light of day.