10.04.2022
EXHIBITION REVIEW:
The Botanical Revolution: on the necessity of art and gardening
Man and nature in their most beautiful, educational and confronting appearance. ︎︎︎︎︎
Through a wide selection of works from contemporary artists in combination with designed objects and old master paintings, the Central Museum attempts to portray the ecological significance of gardening as a metaphor for ‘tending and maintaining our world’. Ambitious statements about rethinking our relationship with nature, posing critical questions about the way in which we exploit and exhaust natural resources, and challenging us to radically reshape our relationship with the natural world, promise to provide a foundation for a vigorous revolution. However, the visitor instead mainly finds the human fascination for the beauty and resilience of nature reflected in various objects.
︎︎︎Figure 1 - The modular walls create new connections between various artworks. (photo by author)
Before entering the exhibition, a thick reference book consisting of twenty double-sided A4 paper is placed into the hands of the visitors. While reading the aspiring introductory text about the tension between nature and culture due to the human exploitation of natural resources, it seems as if the book starts to weigh even more heavily. The first page pays a tribute to the exhibition designers who place ‘ecological issues, sustainability and thorough, critical material research’ central to their practice.1 A painful contradiction which leaves a bad taste in the mouth after the exhibition’s passionate promises.
The table of contents shows that the exhibition is made up of four different rooms, or Chapters, with an additional smaller space and the extra use of the museum garden. Room number one reflects on the age-old concept and tradition of Paradise. The eye is immediately drawn to the colourful, highly detailed Persian carpet stemming from the early 20th century. The carpet’s perfectly geometric representation of the symbolic Persian garden shows the physical human necessity of nature in dry and sunny climates. This Persian concept of Paradise is contrasted with Western, religious paintings. Various Biblical paintings refer to the Garden of Eden and show how man has been obsessed with the concept of a botanical paradise for centuries. The old artworks depict Adam and Eve, living in harmony with each other, the world and nature, just before the moment of the Fall, where Eve is tempted by the devil to eat the forbidden fruit, causing them to be expelled form the lush garden. Placed within the context of this particular exhibition, these classical paintings might cause the visitor to reflect on the role of humans in the loss of our own natural paradise on earth due to the lack of moral control. Despite the showrooms’ nickname ‘the Stables’, referring to the widespread spaces, the museum manages to create a coherent exhibition where the rooms are divided by tactically placed modular walls, creating a cleverly thought-out interplay between the objects, resulting in new possible interpretations (Fig. 1). The peaceful exhibition design is inspired by Japanse Zen gardens and is occasionally interrupted by the addition of industrial elements — perhaps a rather too literal interpretation of the exhibition’s intention.
After a slight overkill of Biblical scenes, the visitor enters room two through a narrow hallway; Front Yard/Back Yard/Allotment. The paper booklet explains that with the onset of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, ‘allotments were established for urban workers as the antidote to emerging urbanisation and the pollution of the Industrial Revolution’.2 Although the text makes an appealing observation about how these allotments allowed the workers to escape the toxic fumes and tedious factory labour, the objects in this room mainly advocate the joy of gardening and the beauty of nature. An online archive consisting of a collection of plants from someone’s own neighbourhood, a nature diary kept by various gardeners, or a time-lapse-like meditative video of an artist’s backyard, are particularly difficult objects to create relevant connections with the promising text. By not juxtaposing rooms one and two, the exhibition misses an opportunity to emphasise how our relationship with the environment has changed because of the rising industrialisation, which, for instance, was so evident in the planted allotments for factory workers.
The highlight of the four chapters must be the third room, which bears the same title as the exhibition. Elaborating on the general introductory text, the garden, as a mirror of society, ‘is not a neutral space, but a place where the relationship between nature and culture is expressed’.3 Science and botany are central to the way we interact with nature. This chapter builds on the eighteenth-century urge - originating from the Enlightenment - to divide and categorise the natural world, resulting in a hierarchy with humans at the top. Curious objects such as the Collector’s Cabinet, filled with rare and precious raw materials, or the detailed description of exotic insects’ metamorphosis in the book Metamorphosis in Surinamese Insects, demonstrate this European fascination with rational systems for understanding the world (Fig. 2). Reducing man and nature to hierarchical categories is a frequently recurring topic in current climate debates, as it is argued that we should have a different perspective on the complex relationships between the various forms of life. The exhibition seeks to contrast these two ways of thinking by radically placing a moss-covered stone directly opposite to the scientific cabinet (Fig. 3). Three centuries ago, the leading Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) placed moss at the very bottom of the hierarchy as the lowest species. Besides the fact that more recent studies have shown that moss plays an inherent part of the ecological system, and that people therefore can be wrong with their interpretations of the natural, this stone also evokes other significant connections between humans and nature. Normally, museums idolise the creation of the human. Whether it is a beautiful sixteenth-century painting or a cleverly designed tool to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean; it is always connected to the masterly mind of mankind. This rock, however, puts the non-human first, as the creator of something beautiful and worthy of being exhibited in a museum. It makes you rethink our relationship with nature and how we constantly derive from a human centred perspective, even if we do create ‘for’ the natural world.
︎︎︎Figure 2 - Metamorphosis in Surinamese Insects, Maria Sibylla Merian, 1705. (photo by author)
︎︎︎Figure 3 - Stone with Moss, Andrea Büttner, 2021. (photo by author)
The final room, called Gardening in the Anthropocene, is by far the smallest exhibition space. With only four works on display, the exhibition links the 1972 manifesto Pollution-Cultivation-New Ecology by Japanse artist Tetsumi Kudo to the remaining artworks. Kudo ‘called for the creation of a new relationship between nature, man and technology’.4 His vision is reminiscent of contemporary discussions about the harmful influence of man on the natural world and the indication of the current epoch called the Anthropocene. After a fairly extensive showcase and three somewhat far-fetched works, the end of the exhibition is near. Despite being the very last work in the final room, the modest looking photographic series Rooted, manages to re-grab the visitor’s full attention one last time. Henk Wildeschut has recorded ‘the improvised gardens of people who have been uprooted in recent years and ended up in refugee camps’.5 The photographs show how refugees added demarcated gardens to their tents or other temporary accommodations (Fig. 4). The most striking thing is that they do not plant vegetables or other food providing botanicals, but prefer colourful flowers and ornamental plants instead. The five small but striking prints raise the poignant critical questions and issues that most of the previous works in the exhibition failed to adequately address. If even in this extremely hopeless situation, gardening and seeing plants blossom can provide comfort and a sense of home, it is impossible to place nature below humans in hierarchy. Looking back at the exhibition’s main statement about gardening being a metaphor for tending and maintaining our world, this work provides hope. Hope that even in the most desperate and severe situations we are facing today in the Anthropocene, we humans can rethink our relationship with the environment and start growing concerns and solutions for our damaged world.
︎︎︎Figure 4 - Photographs from the series Rooted, Henk Wildschut, 2015/2018/2011. (photo by author)
The exhibition finishes in the museum garden with a slightly poor attempt to ‘literally’ involve nature. Instead of creating one cohesive narrative, the four chapters feel like separate books, all conveying their own big ideas. Moving from religious associations to industrialisation and the hefty Anthropocene, the exhibition’s original perspective of portraying the ecological significance of gardening as a metaphor for rethinking our relationship with nature tends to get lost. Some specific parts nevertheless manage to raise relevant issues and pose critical questions onto the visitor. The sharp and well-formulated statements that are printed into the polluting take-home booklet, ironically ‘save’ the exposition. The Botanical Revolution is very verbose and uses only a limited number of relevant and powerful objects, thus leaving it up to the visitor to visualise and imagine new relations between the human and non-human. With the majority of works emphasising the beauty and joy of nature, the high ambitions remain unfulfilled and the promised revolution absent.
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1 Exhibition booklet, p.2.
2 Exhibition booklet, p.9.
3 Exhibition booklet, p.15.
4 Exhibition booklet, p.22.
5 Exhibition booklet, p.25.