Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Art Trend Alert: Indoor Plant Art
Posted by Corinna Kirsch on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:44 AM
When gophers overrun a patch of green, park rangers root them out. Art critics aren’t like park rangers; when we see too much of the same type of art, we call it a trend. Then if there’s meaning behind that trend, we call it a movement.
Here are 11 examples of “live plants in galleries” and a couple of close calls thrown in for good measure. As I mentioned in The L Mag last week, everyone’s making indoor plant art, so it’s a trend. But a movement? It’s hard to tell at this point if we’ve grown uneasy with the stolid white cube, or if we just wish art was more like a Chia pet.
2. Rosemarie Trockel, "A Cosmos"
3. Martin Creed
4. Paula Hayes, "Nocturne of the Limax maximus", 2010
5. Eran Schaerf
6. Anything on VVORK
7. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, “Stray Light Grey”
8. Daren Bader
9. Heidi Norton
10. Corey Escoto
11. Phoebe Washburn
Close Calls
1. Thea Djordjadze, “As Sagas sa”, 2012
Djordjadze’s sculpture-in-a-greenhouse at Documenta (13) is almost a plant in a gallery.
2. Michael Pybus, “Pika Pika Pika”, 2012
Until this limited-edition Pikachu-shaped planter with seeds shows up in a gallery, it’s not part of this trend.
This is one of the smartest Tumblrs around, compiling a list of historic and a few contemporary examples of plants in galleries. Really, it’s amazing to think that MoMA kept plants in their galleries—not as art, but decoration—through the 1980s, and that the museum kept the same plants in their galleries for decades.
4. That grassy knoll at Art Basel Miami Beach
It's astroturf, and it's not art.
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