Getting People to Look at Plants

The New York Botanical Gardens has devised an ingenious way to encourage people to look at plants.  In the summer of 2011, curators paired a display garden inspired by the Alhambra with Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry on landscapes printed on strategically placed boards throughout the gardens.  The exhibit entitled Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra occasionally hosted flamenco music and dancers, and the cafes offered Mediterranean cuisine.  This summer, the curators brought together plants found in Monet’s gardens at Giverny and the French Symbolist poets Mallarmé and Rimbaud.  There was also an exhibit of Elizabeth Murray’s photographs of Monet’s gardens as well as Water Lily Concerts with chamber music by French composer Debussy.  Of course the cafes offered French food.  This mix of gardens with artist, poet, photographer, musician and chef unites similar sentiments expressed through different medium any one of which might be enough to spur a visit.  Once there, the experience multiplies as the initiating art form exposes you to the possible enchantment with another.  Further, associations are refreshed through the reinterpretation of a foreign land’s gardens or remembered from viewing Monet’s water lily paintings in a museum.

This exhibition is wonderful in its complete aesthetic experience.  Aesthetics is not limited by definition to visual perception alone; aesthetics is the perception of all five outer senses.  People experience the world through their perception of it and find it more meaningful when all the senses are engaged.  While designers tend to focus on appearances, and it is true that the visual sense is privileged, deeper feelings depend on the alerted perceptions of sound, taste, smell and especially touch.  Teachers of young children know that learning occurs differently for each and cultivate a variety of sensory techniques to effectively convey information.  People may develop compensating skills for difficult learning, but prefer methods that are more easily accessed.

Designers know that most projects are dominated by function with the “niceties” vulnerable to practical cost saving cuts.  People do need for things to work.  The generous budget might seem excessive with upgraded products or finishes often absorbing the so-called excess.  However, opulent gold-plated bathtubs do not enrich the experience of bathing.  One lesson from this recession – I hope – is that longer-lasting materials will be chosen making them both more sustainable and more likely to be emotionally satisfying.  The sustainable aesthetic then would be design that achieves its purpose through full aesthetic experience.

If I argue that the Monet’s Garden exhibit does this, how does that compare to the design premise of Disneyland or Las Vegas hotels?  Simulating European cities or ancient Rome can never stand for the true experience because its sanitized version is a thin visual veneer of the actual experience.  Meant to entertain, the spectator has to buy into the illusion absent the smells, sounds and feel of the actual place.  On the other hand, Monet’s Garden exhibit is meant to educate, and this makes the difference.  Each form of artistic expression offers either something familiar, or something new and challenging.  Thus the plants participate with the poetry, music, food and feelings, and have a chance to inspire the imagination.

Body of Work: Diebenkorn at the Corcoran

The Ocean Park series is the name of the body of work painted by Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993) during the last twenty-five years of his successful career.  An abstract expressionist, Diebenkorn lived in Southern California during this period and named his paintings by place and number alone.  Following the first major retrospective of the series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then at the Orange County Museum of Art, the exhibit came to the East Coast at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the summer of 2012.  Large oil canvases, smaller acrylics on paper, watercolors on flimsy trace, and even tiny paintings on cigar box lids, this show encompassed his full exploration of media as well as his thorough investigation of, in his words, color, form, space and line.

Diebenkorn’s work attracted my attention many years ago.  I remember paintings with chalky and smoldering color patches next to lines that frame and release simultaneously, and suggestions of picture-free landscape.  Diebenkorn’s larger paintings are bigger than a spectator making them fields to enter, and the smaller ones seem to be windows to peer through.  They are balanced without mirroring symmetry, centered without objects, frames or perspectival devices, and complete without being overly polished.  Nothing seemed rushed or accidental or over-wrought.  The art opened my sensibilities and retained my interest without insulting my emotions.

Those who create have their purposes and corresponding materials for execution.  Each project has unique pressures in the making and judgment in the finishing.  Over time, sometimes, an artist develops both vocabulary and methods that becomes a signature recognizable to others.   Those who follow this work see the flow of thought from one project to the next, and these developments and evolutions become clearer with exhibitions that gather a lot of work in one place for viewing.  Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many, many times, but until the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit where a dozen of these paintings of the same subject were displayed in the same room, their visual connections were more imagined than perceived.  If before the paintings were only available sequentially, now they could be experienced in the sweep of the eye collecting impressions in layers.

Taking an idea to exhaustion gives it a chance to be fully realized.  The patience to work through one project, learn all you can, accept that it is the best you can do at that time, and then set it aside for the next commitment takes disciplined curiosity.  Seeing a collection of such work allows others to participate in this forward motion as well as to witness the artist’s honest reappraisal of past effort.  No one does this better than Diebenkorn whose play of tones for instance in blues, greens and grays, cut with fine black lines, scraped down and built up as repetitively as a Philip Glass piano solo, and in this he shows his hand, his eye, his arm’s reach, the concerns of his heart and his intellect’s questions; that is, his whole body in his work.

To Nest or not to Nest

More and more American households are made up of single people.  From recent graduates to the retired, developers are predicting the greater rental market to be studio and one-bedroom apartments.  While some designers think that great interior design is only worth attempting in larger homes with “themed” rooms expressed in furniture style, material textures and colors, and associative “meaning,” good design is even more critical if small spaces are to feel like home.

Such design begins from the moment you open the door and cross the threshold.  What greets you?  Make it strong so that it is noticeable.  A soft carpet under foot, a favorite picture on the wall, and a shelf or table for your keys, bag and mail instantly welcome you.  Keep functional kitchens and baths clear of clutter, and shift the focus away from the fixtures and appliances with new towels and matching accessories.  If the cabinets are acceptable, add things that blend enhancing their presence; if not, add things that contrast and distract your visual attention.  Keep this simple:  if purple is your favorite color, then use it plainly and boldly.

For the primary living spaces, first think about the visual assets.  View is important because you “borrow” space from beyond your limited square footage.  If you have a good view, place your reading chair or desk there.  You’ll appreciate it every time you sit down or stand up.  Even if you don’t have an appealing view, put your dining table by a window.  This may mean that the table is not right next to the kitchen, but there’s no reason to save a few steps when the destination is pleasant.  Eating is a reflective and nourishing act.  Put a small lamp on the table reminiscent of an intimate bistro.  In the sleeping area, avoid jamming the bed sides against a wall or it will be too difficult to make.  A made bed is probably the single most worthwhile daily effort to make to keep a small place tidy and inviting.  Above all, have good lighting.  Evening hours matter and multiple lamps provide better illumination than a single bright ceiling light.  It is also nice to turn lights on when you arrive and off when you are putting your home and yourself to bed.  Include a plant – they clean the air and say a caring person lives here.  If it dies, replace it and try again.

One of the harder lessons is that it is better to have nothing rather than furnishings that are cheap, in poor repair, or that you just don’t like.  If it is dirty; clean it.  If it is beyond repair; throw it away.  If it doesn’t fit; sell or donate it.  Sparse is easier and quicker to clean, but shabby just makes you feel … well, shabby.  Even if you like to entertain, arrange your space to work best for when you are alone.  The activities change anyway when friends are over, but when you are alone, your nest has to support you both physically and emotionally.