Katie Holton: Paths of Desire Preview by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Katie Holten

Paths of Desire

Katie Holten

Paths of Desire

Contents 07

Foreword Paul Ha

Paths of Desire Lia Gangitano

Watermark: Can southern Louisiana be saved? Elizabeth Kolbert

Thoughts on Urban Prairies Scott F. Woodbury in conversation with Katie Holten

Growing Natives Andrea Zittel in conversation with Katie Holten

Edible Estates Fritz Haeg in conversation with Katie Holten

A Reﬂection on Cities of the Future James Howard Kunstler

The Language of Landscape Anne Whiston Spirn

The Bullet Catcher A.M. Homes

My Favorite Plant Chris Somerville

A Different Kind of Practice Regina Gleeson in conversation with Katie Holten

A Field Guide to Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit

105 Having a Wonderful Time J.G. Ballard 110 Sources 111 Notes on Contributors 114 Biography 116 List of Works

opposite and preceding pages: The Black Tree, 2005–2007, cardboard, wood, wire, and duct tape, approx. 10.5 x 11.3 x 10.8 feet. Originally installed at VAN HORN, Düsseldorf. Installation views at Schürmann Berlin, January 19-March 24, 2007. Image courtesy Heins Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath.

Paths of Desire (erised fo shtap), 2006, ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches.

Foreword Paul Ha The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is delighted to present Paths of Desire, the first solo museum exhibition and installation by Irish artist Katie Holten in the United States. The exhibition reaffirms the Contemporary’s commitment to presenting groundbreaking exhibitions and to commissioning new work by living artists. Katie’s work is particularly relevant at this time of renewed focus on the challenges facing our global environment, and I am deeply grateful to her for creating such extraordinary work for us during her residency in St. Louis. As a museum of contemporary art, one of the most important things we do is support and exhibit the work of living artists and I am proud to once again do so with the work of this exciting young artist. I am enormously grateful to those whose generosity made this project possible. My thanks to Katharine DeShaw and the Nimoy Foundation, Leonard and Susan Nimoy, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Culture Ireland for their support of the exhibition, artist residency and artist’s book. I am also thankful to Deborah Patterson and the Monsanto Fund for supporting the related community outreach programming. In addition, I am very thankful to Christy Gray and the Whitaker Foundation, the William E. Weiss Foundation, Jill McGuire and the Regional Arts Commission, Jim Weidman and the Arts and Education Council, the Missouri Arts Council, and all of the members of the Contemporary for their ongoing support of our exhibitions and educational programs. I am deeply grateful to my long time colleague Lia Gangitano for contributing her thoughtful essay to this publication. As director of PARTICIPANT INC, one of New York’s newest and most innovative non-profit gallery spaces, Lia’s take on Katie’s work is appreciated. I also want to acknowledge Bruce Burton, our in-house graphic designer, for the extra thought and effort he put in to design this artist’s book so that it fulfilled Katie’s vision. On behalf of the Contemporary and its Board of Directors, I would like to thank everyone who helped organize and present this exhibition—especially our dedicated staff members. My appreciation is extended to Shannon Fitzgerald who first brought Katie’s work to the Contemporary’s attention and contributed much initial work on the project. I want to especially thank Shane Simmons and Mike Schuh for the skill and creativity they used to make the complicated installation go so smoothly. I thank Rebecca Walsh for her assistance coordinating the many details of the exhibition, residency and artist’s book. And, I want to thank our Grand Center neighbor Stan Jones for opening the doors of his home and inviting Katie to be his guest during her long residency in our community. I am grateful to our Board of Directors and especially to the leadership provided by Board Chairman John Ferring. John’s oversight of the Contemporary enables us to create an atmosphere where cultural and artistic risks are encouraged so we can continue to achieve our bold mission. I am also particularly indebted to Emily Rauh Pulitzer for her ongoing support of the Contemporary and for continuing to be my valued colleague. Presenting contemporary art is both an exhilarating and daunting undertaking. Exhibiting work without the reassurances offered by historical perspective requires a leap of faith and a conviction in the importance of contemporary creativity. I am deeply thankful to all our supporters who allow the Contemporary to play a role in our cultural development. Paul Ha Director 8

Excavated Tree (photograph of an excavated Cox’s Pippen tree re–erected in a shed), 2005, Lambda-Print, 11.8 x 15.7 inches, Edition of 15 + 2 AP. Edition printed by the artist and VAN HORN, Düsseldorf. Original photograph (1952) courtesy of David Johnson, East Malling Research, UK. Image courtesy the artist and VAN HORN, Düsseldorf.

Paths of Desire Lia Gangitano A found photograph titled Excavated Tree1(opposite) shows an uprooted tree suspended in space within a large shed, revealing its roots and branches for examination. It seems, as well, to be suspended in time. From this black and white archival document, originally intended for scientific use, Katie Holten draws a myriad of resonant references—fast-forwarding this image, perhaps previously frozen, into an increasingly resolute present. She does so through direct means, namely, by emulating the tree’s color as it appears in the photograph: black; as well as its form: roots elevated and displaced from the possibility of holding ground. As the centerpiece of her site-responsive exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Holten constructs, to scale, the entire structure of a Flowering Dogwood, a native Missouri tree, made from materials gathered from refuse generated by the museum, including recycled cardboard, wire, PVC, paper, and tape. Designed to draw one in, much like the extreme gravitational pull of a black hole in space, Holten’s tree also shares some of the black hole’s more abstract properties, such as inescapability (particularly as it pertains to the obliteration of light); an ability to warp paths towards its center; and certain loss due to inevitable collapse, if encountered. In Stanley Kubrick’s landmark sci-fi film of 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, what appears to be a black rectangle in space, “a shrieking monolith,” is the catalyst for the end of one evolutionary cycle and the beginning of another. When touched, this void gives way to new forms of life but is, perhaps, a cautionary vehicle as well—a warning symbol that points to the possible dissolution of the present. Within the wilderness of outer space, Kubrick mined more localized fears, positioning advanced technologies as a sinister influence, forcing the advancement of human evolution at the hands of an overly sensitive robot (HAL-9000), leading humanity to the verge of a black hole. . . However eclipsed in time, Kubrick’s vision of the future, as expressed through the perils of space travel and fear of alien intelligence, also referenced the untamed wildernesses of the past and remains a prescient implication as progress threatens to annihilate what was previously considered a boundless reserve, nature. In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronted the abhorrence of wilderness within frontier culture, asserting both the beauty and the goodness of the wild. Henry David Thoreau is associated with discourses of nature as unspoiled, wild, and distinct from the built environment of the urban. Changing urban imperatives continue to shift the construction of nature. In recent times, nature is more than ever being commoditized, either for resource extraction (logging, privatized water) or as recreation (ecotourism). These views are firmly rooted in a modern dualism in which nature is seen as external to society: its other.2 An interest in black holes and society’s other (its absence) may also point to their opposite, a concern for “the mathematics of presence,”3 that Holten intuitively maps in the research, notes, and drawings that proliferate her installations and accompany largescale works. Considered by the artist to be a ‘‘drawn object,’’ like much of her recent work that deploys various reconfigurations of recycled material, Excavated Tree: Missouri Native (Flowering Dogwood) (pages 26-27), manifests Holten’s belief that our experience of ‘‘nature’’ is inherently social and equally defined by the detritus, networks, and boundaries of the urban environment. “Desire Paths,” the architectural term that provides the title of her

This photograph was taken in 1952 at East Malling Research, UK and was appropriated by Holten in 2005 and titled Excavated Tree.

Peggy Bartlett, “Introduction,” Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, ed. Peggy Bartlett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005): 13.

“the mathematics of presence” is taken from Holten’s notes (see page 56)

Walk in St. Louis (desire path on Lindell Boulevard), 2007.

exhibition, emphasizes the fact that in rural and urban spaces, informal human patterns against the grain of “official” or planned pathways can alter pavement, sidewalks, and fields of grass alike. As well, Holten’s approach to site-specificity is informed by an understanding that the demarcation of sanctioned routes can be rendered invisible even when one’s daily choices are influenced, if not engineered, by such spatial margins. Meaning, that paths of desire can also designate possibilities beyond, or resistance to, the formal separations indicated by ubiquitous fences, trees, or planters that delineate neighborhoods along lines of segregation, for example. Like ‘identity,’ definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural environment’ are complex and contested. The predominant meaning has traditionally been ‘our nonhuman surroundings,’ with an understood dichotomy between what is a result of the human influence and what remains untouched. The dichotomy between the natural and the manufactured is, of course, artificial. Nature has long been subject to human influence through what is planted, supported, or tolerated. . . 4 Holten’s initial proposal for the Contemporary in 2005—to plant an urban prairie in a vacant lot in the city center of St.Louis—resides, like many examples of persistent utopian models, in the form of documentation. The unrealized proposal and subsequent conversations about the transgressive potential of the obsolete, the unfamiliar, the unrecognizable, also become integral parts of her work, taking forms such as research, plans, and imaginative sketches that, when collected, certify this potential. Holten’s methodology insists that nothing is wasted. Her longstanding practice of transplanting weeds is similarly pro-active, constituting an “ephemeral action” that questions “the direction life has taken”5 by particularly humble means, such as moving weeds from outside to inside, to neglected spaces, or to places soon to be uprooted by high-end development. These small gestures may redirect one’s attention, or inspire the taking of a walk. While in residence in St. Louis, Holten plans to take walks around the city, using the museum, which is located in Grand Center, as the starting point for excursions north, south, east, and west, charting modest paths to instigate questions regarding a larger history of place, for example, the locus of Lewis and Clark’s journey toward the Pacific. Part social investigation in the Situationist

Susan Clayton, “Introduction,” Identity and the Natural Environment, ed. Susan Clayton, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 6.

Katie Holten: Paths of Desire, press release, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2007.

tradition of the “derive,” and part homage to historic works such as Richard Long’s Path Made While Walking, Holten’s walks insist on the importance of social engagement in the natural world, that is, the urban environment. Holten’s social engagement, as evidenced by public works, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and community organizing, is also manifested in various printed matter, ranging from handmade zines and flyers to publications incorporating the work of herself and others. In the spirit of such publications as Avalanche (1970-‘76), a magazine that sought to provide a platform for evolving art forms (Earthworks, Conceptual art, performance, video, etc. . .) and their social imperatives, Holten’s publications serve as subtle agents of a defiant worldview. It has been said of Avalanche that “ . . .the studied informality of the interviews [. . .] corresponded to the countercultural politics and grassroots ethos embodied by the publication, with its ad hoc feel and modest circulation. Its frank presentation of artists and their words—not to mention their art—was vital to the politicization of the alternative art scene in the ‘70s.”6 In its first issue, co-editor (with Liza Béar) Willoughby Sharp asked Robert Smithson to comment on his notion of documentation, which the artist referred to as “non-site,” and he noted: There’s a central focus point which is the non-site; the site is the unfocused fringe where your mind loses its boundaries and a sense of the oceanic pervades. . . The interesting thing about the site is that, unlike the non-site, it throws you out on the fringes. . . One might even say that the place is absconded or been lost. . . This is a map that will take you somewhere, but when you get there you won’t really know where you are. In a sense the non-site is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or the edge.7 With a proliferation of research, documentation, correspondence, and books traveling with her, Holten’s working methodology is cumulative and expanding, and seeks to restructure “non-sites” that respond to specific, local concerns and, like her drawn and crocheted works that radiate outwards, spread from there. Such practices are mirrored, as well, in related curatorial enterprises, such as her ongoing traveling exhibition, CLUSTER (pages 82-83), which has grown from a one-night event at a pub in Dublin, to a flyer distributed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, to its present residence in a FreshDirect8 box that recently traveled from New York to Mexico City. It’s still growing. Containing works by over sixty artists, writers, small publishers, environmental activists, as well as an astrophysicist, an architect, and a horticulturalist, it represents a range of research, concerns, and thoughts shared by Holten and her myriad colleagues and friends. Occasions to unpack the box are inevitably social, and, like the gathering of works themselves (via emails, special delivery packages, and correspondence sent in the mail), they tend to encourage digressions, unexpected arrivals, and the continuing proliferation of contents. As is the case with Holten’s diversity of work, certain logics become legible amid seeming disarray—an interconnectedness shaped by the artist’s embrace of the fragmented, the tangential, and the communal. A founding member of several interdisciplinary art collectives, perhaps Holten’s Laboratorio della Vigna, a project for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 (pages 76-81), provides a microcosm of her evolving process-based anthropologies. Amid the prescribed hierarchy of nationalities, pavilions, and disciplines, Holten structured a temporary headquarters for a variety of collaborative and individual research, spawning works (and non-works) in sound, performance, and the accumulated proposals of others, showing “the whole process of the researched failures and successes like the detritus of a frenzied stream of thought positioned beside its distilled, crystal-clear idea.”9

Gwen Allen, “In on the Ground Floor: Avalanche and the SoHo Art Scene, 1970-1976,” ARTFORUM, XLIV, No.3, November 2005: 216.

Ibid.

FreshDirect is an online grocery store serving the New York metropolitan area.

Regina Gleeson, “Art Practice on the Move: Katie Holten’s Work Unplugged,” Visual Artists’ News Sheet, Dublin, January 2004.

Tree, 2006, cardboard, wood, newspaper, and wire, approx. 16.4 x 12.5 x 9.8 feet. Private collection.

Like a transient footnote that continues to take temporary residence, the migration of CLUSTER and the format of Laboratorio della Vigna in Venice reflect the artist’s travels and find shape through Holten’s research in the natural world. From botany to the science of networks, her work touches upon notions of displacement and transplantation—issues that she considers in forms ranging from the re-location of indigenous plant-life to various diagrams for parallel universes, drawn on paper or in space. Holten’s “forceful collapsing of distinctions between nature and culture, between ‘high’ art and lowly plant life, between aesthetic beauty and the botanically unbeautiful, between timeless art object and the transient weed, between the elevated and the everyday, is as salutary as it is momentarily disconcerting.”10 Drawing equally from the ubiquitous and the remote, the minute and the infinite, Holten’s practice renders connections via models of scientific as well as social networking. Traveling with her, CLUSTER is a project that is at once transient and at home. Its contents represent a long study—alone and together with others—of mounting ecological concerns through such lenses as recycling, collectivity, and sociability. Living in the US for a while, it has been noted that Holten’s “current investigations incorporate scientific theories of parallel universes and place her practice in polemical opposition to prevailing US policies increasingly underpinned by notions of ‘intelligent design’ and creationism.”11 Linking political imperatives with strategies associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, Holten has perhaps adapted what could be described as “strategies of existence.”12 Like her walks, CLUSTER, spreads through acquaintances, stories, and sites that become available. Readings, performances, radio broadcasts, and a tiny sculpture living in an interior corner of the box—solicited and collected by Holten over time—all come out at

Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, “Related Matters,” Katie Holten and others: Drawings, Instances, Collaborations + Texts, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and Tûp Institute, Dublin 2002: 20.

Denna Jones, “Doodling in Super Space,” exhibition booklet, A New Universe, March 12 – April 10, 2005, LMAKprojects, Brooklyn, New York: unpaginated.

Nicola Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland), les Presses du Reel, Dijon, France, 2002: 100.

the opening. A number of pieces employ the form of books, zines, and documentation of collaborative projects taking place in numerous cities. “Works included can expand and grow over the long-term, and the resemblance to an organic, living structure is intentional. [. . .] Some works are invisible, or inhabit other spaces such as rumors, posters, rooftops, holes, instructions, stories, objects, t-shirts, pubs, and gardens.”13 With her relocation to a temporary studio in New York in 2004, Holten inherited hundreds of FreshDirect boxes. “FreshDirect delivers [. . .] keeps the house and officebound fed and watered. The left over boxes pile up.”14 Holten made use of one box to house this special collection that she intended to deploy as instigation for a winter gathering. “It is no coincidence that CLUSTER resembles the refuge of a ramshackle community. . . ”15 In addition, she began re-fashioning the boxes into numerous receptacles for plants, which led to the making of other objects from discarded materials. As the artist has noted in a recent interview: “I’ve been using the word ‘object’ while thinking of it as a noun, referring to material ‘things,’ things that cast shadows. But it’s nice that you’ve thrown in this question, as the first objects I started making (containers for plants made from FreshDirect cardboard boxes) were definitely ‘objecting to’ something. I was interested in questioning the ideology, the waste, the state of things, the piles and piles of boxes accumulating. . . ”16 Similarly, her repetitive renderings of maps of the world drawn from memory have since taken shape on globes made from shredded newspapers—a transformative practice the artist quietly enjoys. Holten continues to note: “. . . the ‘globes’ are useless. The maps of the world are drawn from memory—whole countries are forgotten, obliterated, while others are drawn too large, or too small. For me personally these globes object to lots of things.”17 In Holten’s work, such objections form and mount quietly, and may emanate from mundane everyday experiences: yarn webs crocheted on the subway or on airplanes; a topographic drawing instigated by a phrase heard on the radio, Trembling on the Edge of Reprisal (pages 62-63); or her numerous drawings of Found Continents (pages 102-104) and Reconstituted Lands (pages 108 and 109) that began from observations of the shapes formed by her chipped black fingernail polish. At times resembling bruises or stains, the process of these markings, as well, starts small and, over time, begins to cast a certain darkness, which is more formally outlined in botanic renderings such as Bush (shadow) (page 60), or Ghost Forest (page 20) showing the spread of roots, branches, and shadows. And, like all her trees and objects, these drawings are black, existing in states of potential obsolescence. Holten’s persistence, however, as demonstrated in these drawn works, sketches, and texts, also seems to imply that systems and connections exist, even when they go unnoticed. Through her social manifestations of these ideas (such as CLUSTER), Holten instigates real life engagements that incorporate disparate interests, follow lines of tangents, and insist upon presence. Like her unrelenting weeds, such unexpected gatherings demonstrate the mutability and tenacity of ideas, and sometimes, as is the case with Excavated Tree: Missouri Tree (Flowering Dogwood), unite to transform the seemingly insignificant and redundant into necessary, monumental action. 13

CLUSTER, press release, PARTICIPANT INC, New York, January 27, 2006.

Katie Holten, email correspondence with the author, June 2006.

CLUSTER, press release.

Sally O’Reilly and Katie Holten, “A Discussion of Substance,” GRAN BAZAAR, Tûp Institute and m o s t r a, Mexico City, 2006: unpaginated.

Ibid.: unpaginated.

following pages: New York Trees, 2006, ink on paper, 30 x 22 inches. Private collections.

WATERMARK: Can southern Louisiana be saved? Elizabeth Kolbert Once the Mississippi River’s main outlet, Bayou Lafourche—pronounced “la-foosh”—is now a channel barely wide enough to accommodate two shrimp boats heading in opposite directions. Its waters are slack and brown and salty, so much so that people who drink them—and many who live along the bayou do—complain that they sometimes taste like baking soda. The bayou wends its way south and east from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, through Thibodaux and Lockport and Cut Off, past citrus groves and shotgun houses and subdivisions eating into the sugarcane fields. Eventually, it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Follow it almost to the end and you get to Leeville, a town that has spent most of the past century disappearing. Leeville was settled by refugees, or, to use a less contested term, flood victims. On October 1, 1893, a hurricane wiped out the area’s main settlement, Caminadaville, which sat on a spit of land bordered on three sides by the Gulf and on the fourth by swamp. Nearly half of Caminadaville’s inhabitants perished in the storm, most by drowning, some when the buildings they had taken refuge in collapsed. Father Pierre Grimaux, the local parish priest, who rode out the disaster in the upper story of the presbytery, reported that “out of two hundred and fifty houses, only four remained.” Survivors sailed up the bayou in their damaged canots and began buying land from an orange-grower named Peter Lee, who was selling plots for $12.50 each. For sixteen years, they fished, planted rice, and held fais do-do dancing parties in homes with covered verandas. Then, in 1909, the Leeville Hurricane struck. (A contemporary newspaper account described survivors of that storm subsisting on drowned rabbit.) Six years later, a third hurricane forced residents to flee north once more. According to local legend, the storm surge carried one house from Leeville nine miles inland. The owner simply bought the plot underneath it and moved back in. In the nineteen-thirties, Leeville rebounded briefly. Oil was discovered in the area, and by the end of the decade there were ninety-eight producing wells in town. The pay was good and regulation nonexistent. Blowouts routinely rained sulfur and brine onto the houses, into the cisterns, over the trees. Tin roofs corroded and vegetable gardens shrivelled up. When the wells ran dry, oil production moved offshore and Leeville was again deserted. There were no more jobs, and the town itself had begun to wash away. Where once men in straw hats picked oranges and harvested rice, today there is mostly open water. A few months ago, I went to visit the remains of Leeville with Windell Curole, the director of the South Lafourche Levee District. Curole, as it happens, is a descendant of Peter Lee, and also a member of a swamp pop group that calls itself the Hurricane Levee Band. He is a trim man of fifty-four, with thick gray hair and dark, deep-set eyes. Seven of his eight great-grandparents grew up in Caminadaville, and three of his four grandparents lived in Leeville. Curole and his wife are raising their two children in Cut Off, thirty-five miles from the coast. “That movement of my family reflects the communities of southern Louisiana,” he told me. It was a dull autumn day, threatening rain that never came. “We have retreated, and we continue to retreat.” As we made our way south along the bayou, Curole kept pointing out landmarks from his childhood. “That’s where my grandfather’s trapping camp was,” he said, gesturing toward a stretch of boggy marsh. “When I was a baby, I could sit down in the front yard and not get my pants wet. When my mama was a kid, you had oak trees.” 20

Ghost Forest, 2007, ink on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches.

Curole receives checks for an oil lease on a plot that he inherited from his grandparents. The plot is now submerged. In Leeville, we passed a bait shop, a gas station, and a cluster of mobile homes perched, like birds’ nests, on narrow wooden pilings. We wandered down to a dock, which had a view of one of the last remnants of the old town—a cemetery. Leeville’s dead had not been buried but entombed in vaults. Waves lapped at the caved-in bricks. A porpoise jumped out of the water, then slipped back in. Five thousand years ago, much of southern Louisiana did not exist. A hundred years from now, it is unclear how much of it will remain. The region, it is often observed, is losing land at the rate of a football field every thirty-eight minutes. Alternatively, it is said, the area is shrinking by a large desktop’s worth of ground every second, or a tennis court’s worth every thirteen seconds, or twenty-five square miles a year. Between 1930 and 2000, some 1.2 million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, disappeared. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita stripped away an estimated seventy-five thousand acres—a loss as big as Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. The US Geological Survey has published a map illustrating the process. Areas that have already vanished appear in red, and areas that are expected to vanish by 2050 in yellow. On the map, the southern coast looks as if it were on fire. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “The rate at which Louisiana’s land is converting to water is probably the fastest in the world.” The signs of this impermanence are most obvious at the ends of the bayous, where the border between land and sea is changing so quickly that no one really bothers to keep track of it anymore. But, once you start looking, those signs can be found just about everywhere. All across southern Louisiana, there are groves of dead cypress trees, known as ghost forests, which have been killed off by encroaching salt water. On the eastern edge of New Orleans, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal—MR-GO (“Mister Go”) for short— provides a shortcut for shipping. When it was completed, in 1965, it was five hundred feet across; now it is more than three times as wide. Then, of course, there’s the city itself. Those neighborhoods, like Lakeview and the Lower Ninth Ward, which lie several feet below sea level are still essentially deserted.

Over the years, a great many plans have been drawn up to protect the Louisiana coast; these range from building up barrier islands with pumped sand to digging an alternative route for the Mississippi River—the so-called Third Delta Conveyance Channel. Katrina and Rita have inspired a whole new generation of proposals. Curole, who since the hurricanes has made several trips to Washington to testify before Congress, has, for example, been advocating a series of thirteen-foot levees that would loop around from the Lake Pontchartrain basin through Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes to Morgan City, stretching more than a hundred miles. All of these plans rest on the same assumption, which is that something can be done to halt, or at least dramatically slow, land loss. If this can be accomplished, there are many possible futures for southern Louisiana. If it can’t, there is only one. Roy Dokka is a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He is a large man, with a wide face and wavy dark hair. By training, he is a structural geologist, and in the early part of his career, at the University of Southern California, he spent a lot of time mapping earthquake faults, including the ones that run near Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, where the federal government would later propose storing high-level nuclear waste. About ten years ago, Dokka became interested in using G.P.S. technology to study how the earth’s surface is moving. This project led him to undertake a study of elevations in southern Louisiana, which yielded some unexpected—and, in many circles, unwelcome—results. On a hot, bright-blue day a few weeks after Katrina, I went with Dokka to attend a meeting with officials in Plaquemines Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. There was heavy traffic—since the hurricanes, the roads that are still functioning have been carrying nearly twice as many cars—so we were late getting to the parish-council office, in the town of Belle Chasse. As we arrived, helicopters carrying sandbags were thumping overhead. In the parking lot, we met the parish president, Benny Rousselle, who was walking in the opposite direction. He pulled Dokka aside. “Let me ask you, this is not going to affect my rebuilding by more than a foot?” he said. His tone suggested that he was not so much asking as telling. “I can live with a foot or so.” Dokka nodded silently, then, when Rousselle was out of earshot, muttered, “You wouldn’t have to live with it, but your people might die from it.” We headed into the building, which was faced with wooden planks, like a Western saloon. A half-dozen people were sitting at computers in a makeshift command center. Water was dripping from the ceiling into an orange plastic bowl. A six-hundred-and-sixty-six-pound blue marlin was mounted on the wall, next to a satellite photograph of the parish: a long, skinny leg of land twisting out into the Gulf of Mexico. The photograph was pasted with fifteen little red triangles marking the spots where the parish’s levees had been breached. After Katrina, many of the breaches had been sealed, only to be reopened by Rita. Dokka’s study, which he published in July, 2004, under the title “Rates of Vertical Displacement at Benchmarks in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Northern Gulf Coast,” showed that for decades elevations in coastal Louisiana had been systematically overstated. Heights had been calculated on the basis of “benchmarks” that were supposedly stable but which, it turned out, were themselves subsiding. Dokka’s calculations showed that the fastest-sinking areas, among them the southern part of Plaquemines Parish, were losing elevation at the rate of more than an inch a year. Official elevation figures are issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through its National Geodetic Survey office. At first, NOAA resisted Dokka’s findings; then it embraced them. Since elevation is a crucial factor in construction in southern Louisiana—among other things, it determines whether a home or a business qualifies for federally backed flood insurance—this shift is likely to affect practically every rebuilding project in the area. In the weeks after Katrina, NOAA officials raced around the state, trying to get out the message that the old elevation numbers were invalid. Several 22

of them met us at the command center. We all trooped into the parish engineer’s office, where some local public-works officials were waiting. A NOAA official named Ronnie Taylor handed out a two-page Xerox. On one page was a map of the parish, marked at intervals with codes, like D 194 and C 195. Each represented a benchmark. On the other, there were columns for the benchmarks’ “old” elevations, the “new” elevations, and the difference between the two. All of the benchmarks had lost elevation, and while none had been lowered by more than a foot, some had come close: C 195, near the town of Port Sulphur, had lost nearly nine inches; A 152, near the town of Myrtle Grove, had lost eight. The revisions had brought several of the benchmarks down to sea level, or lower. EMPIRE AZMK 2 was now listed at minus half an inch. J 370, in the southernmost reaches of the parish, was now minus four feet. “These heights that we’re providing, we would recommend very highly that those would be the only ones that you would use for reconstruction or rebuilding,” Taylor told the men around the table. They looked glum. “You need to specify, ‘Thou shalt only use these numbers,’ ” Dokka emphasized. Taylor went on to note that the new elevations, which were based on 2004 data, were probably themselves already out of date, as most of the benchmarks had continued to subside. Dokka suggested that the figures be thought of as having expiration dates, like milk cartons. In a few years, new “new” elevations would be issued. “I don’t want to be the person who pulled the rug out from under southern Louisiana,” Dokka said later, as we walked back to the car. “But ultimately it’s going to get so bad over here—in fifty to a hundred years, maybe sooner—that this is going to go under water.” . . . Plaquemines Parish is one of the youngest parts of Louisiana, and has sections that are so new they do not show up on nineteenth-century maps. The parish is bisected by the Mississippi, and at its tip the river finally ends its 2,350-mile journey, splaying out into a formation that resembles the toes of a chicken and is called the Birdfoot. Highway 23 follows the contours of the river along its west bank. The road is protected by levees on both sides, but during Katrina water came in from all directions. Just beyond Myrtle Grove, we came to a spot where two barges that had been lifted by the storm surge were sitting on top of a river levee. Piles of dead fish lay on the grass. We passed a grove of citrus trees, which were turning brown from saltwater exposure, and a mobile home that had been deposited on top of a minivan. . . In some spots, the floodwaters had receded, or been pumped out, but in others back yards and pastureland were still submerged, and water lapped at the shoulder of the highway. As we continued south, the destruction grew more complete. In Port Sulphur, so named for its now abandoned sulfur mines, most houses had been reduced to construction debris. The few buildings still standing had lost their outer walls, so that you could look right through, into what had once been kitchens and living rooms and dens. The trees were draped with an astonishing assortment of household goods: jackets, tires, chairs, bicycles. It became something of a contest to see who could find the most amazing item in the branches. Except for an occasional Humvee full of National Guard members and some Spanishspeaking workers, we were the only people in the area. It was eerily still. . . Near the town of Empire, two fishing boats, the Sea Falcon and the Sea Wolf, both a hundred and fifty feet long, had landed across all four lanes of Highway 23. . . “This area is living on borrowed time,” Dokka said. “I mean, it is.” . . . Start to dig in Plaquemines Parish, or almost anywhere in southern Louisiana, and you will pull up peaty mud; the consistency of the region’s soil has been compared to warm jello. Pretty soon, your hole will fill with water. (This makes it hard to keep things like caskets underground, which is why the dead are, as a rule, stored in vaults.) If you keep digging, eventually you will reach sand and clay. If you go on, you will reach more clay and 23

more sand, and this process will repeat for hundreds—in some places thousands—of feet. There are no rocks in southern Louisiana, except for those that have been imported to, for example, shore up the sinking roads. The clay is imported, too, only on a different time scale. In some form or another, the Mississippi has been flowing for tens of millions of years, and all the while it has been carrying great loads of sediment—in the eighteen-hundreds, some four hundred million tons per year—which tended to settle out where the river, slowing, emptied into the sea. In this way, what is now the Louisiana Gulf Coast was formed out of bits and pieces of Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky and Iowa and Illinois and Minnesota. The buildup of southern Louisiana and its wasting away are flip sides of the same deltaic process. Over time, sediments naturally compact and consolidate—or dewater—with recent layers, which are wetter, losing volume more rapidly. Once enough sediment has been deposited, the load begins to depress the earth’s crust, a process known as down-warping. (Down-warping occurs so gradually that the earth is still responding to sediment deposited tens of thousands of years ago.) In areas where accretion exceeds subsidence, new land is created. But the process works against itself. When too much sediment builds up at its mouth, the river, seeking a faster route to the sea, switches course, like a hose flopping around in the grass. A new bulge of land, or delta lobe, starts to form, while the old one slowly continues to sink and compact under its own weight. In the past eight thousand years, the river has built five major lobes, some of them overlapping. Western Terrebonne Parish is what remains of the delta lobe built during the time of the Assyrians; Lafourche Parish is what’s left of the lobe laid down during the Roman Empire. Many still more ancient delta lobes are now submerged. The Mississippi fan, an enormous cone of sediment that was laid down during the ice ages, now lies under the Gulf of Mexico; it is larger than the entire state of Louisiana and in some places ten thousand feet thick. . . The fundamental problem of southern Louisiana—the fact that making the area suitable for permanent settlement also tends to make it that much more impermanent—has been understood for many decades. In the nineteen-twenties, Percy Viosca, a Louisiana naturalist, warned that flood-control and land-reclamation efforts were “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”; he advocated that the state adopt policies to re-establish the “natural conditions” conducive to healthy marshes. Instead, though, virtually all the practices that exacerbate land loss were allowed to continue and, in some cases, even encouraged. Swamps were drained to create agricultural fields and housing developments; this caused the peaty marsh soils to oxidize and shrink, like a drying sponge, resulting, in many instances, in new expanses of open water. Navigational channels like the Mississippi RiverGulf Outlet were dug; these carried salt water into what had been freshwater marshes, killing trees and grasses and inviting erosion. Thousands of miles of canals were cut into the wetlands to facilitate oil and natural gas exploration; much like the navigation channels, these canals wreaked havoc on the local hydrology. Where oil was found, the process of extraction caused some areas to slump—Louisiana “floats on oil like a drunkard’s teeth on whiskey,” A. J. Liebling once wrote—further contributing to subsidence. Meanwhile, efforts to reverse or merely forestall wetland loss have been halting. The history of the Caernarvon project illustrates the difficulties encountered even by what is, compared with the magnitude of the problem, a relatively modest endeavor. The project was approved by Congress beginning in 1965; owing to bureaucratic inertia and state budget cuts, it was not completed until 1991. Almost as soon as it began to operate, a new set of problems arose. Although almost no one lives in the wetlands affected by Caernarvon, some areas are leased to oyster farmers, who pay two dollars an acre for a claim that lasts fifteen years, and other areas are popular with shrimpers. In 1994, oyster farmers in the area filed a class-action suit against the state, alleging that the project had reduced the value of their leases. While the litigation dragged on, Caernarvon was operated at only a fraction of its capacity. In December, 2000, a Plaquemines Parish jury awarded five of the farmers damages 24

of forty-eight million dollars, a verdict that, applied across the entire class, added up to more than a billion dollars. This verdict was later overturned by Louisiana’s highest court, and then, with the help of Alan Dershowitz and his brother, Nathan, the reversal was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which last year finally put an end to the case by refusing to hear it. At the same time that the oyster-lease case was in litigation, shrimpers were complaining, often vociferously and to their representatives in Baton Rouge, that, because of the changes in salinity, the shrimp had stopped showing up. Chuck Villarrubia is the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources official who oversees Caernarvon’s day-to-day operations. I happened to be sharing an airboat with him. “We are trying as best we can to mitigate the conflicts,” he told me. “But there’s a lot of people yelling at us.” On more than one occasion, Villarrubia said, he has received Caernarvon-related death threats. There are many ways to go about wetland restoration. An area can be replanted, or built up, or enclosed to retain soil that would otherwise be washed away. New sediment can be brought in by barge, or pumped in through pipes. The Caernarvon project follows the simplest possible model: at times of high flow, the gates are opened and water floods the wetlands much as it would have before the river was contained. In addition to dumping sediment, the influx from the Mississippi pushes back salt water that is pressing up from Breton Sound. This, in turn, encourages the growth of reeds and marsh grasses, which, by dying and decaying, help build up the soil, allowing still more plants to grow, and so on. As we skittered along, Villarrubia pointed out stands of trees, mostly young willows, that hadn’t been there when he first began working on the project. . . The wetlands in the Caernarvon outfall district are dotted with monitoring stations. On our way to the first, we passed through a large, perfectly rectilinear lake, known as Big Mar. For a short time, it had been a farm; now it was an object lesson in futility. At the station—a white plastic tube sticking up out of the muck—we all clambered off the boats and onto the nearest semi-dry land. Greg Steyer, an ecologist with the U.S.G.S., grabbed hold of an auger that looked like a skinny torpedo and plunged it into the ground. It had a hollow chamber in the middle, and, when he twisted it, it gouged out a core. He pulled the auger up and opened the chamber. There was a layer of dirt, which had the consistency of gruel, and, beneath that, a six-inch layer of clay. Steyer tossed away that core and took a new one. The same clay layer appeared again. It had been laid down, he explained, during the great Mississippi flood of 1927. For the people who lived in and around Caernarvon—at that time a sleepy hamlet—the 1927 flood was an unprecedented disaster. During the spring of that year, extraordinarily heavy rainfall inundated some sixteen million acres of land in more than a half-dozen states. As the flood crest moved south, influential New Orleanians decided that the best way for the city to avoid catastrophe was to blow up the levee downriver—a decision that made little sense in terms of hydraulics but was nevertheless carried out. (The spot chosen for the dynamiting was just a few hundred yards from where the diversion project now stands.) In the ensuing rush of water, several thousand people—mostly trappers—lost their homes. By the perverse logic of the delta, this wholesale destruction of the human landscape sustained the natural one. Had the flood not occurred, the six-inch layer of clay would never have been deposited, in which case the land we were standing on might well no longer be there. . .

Plan for the installation of Excavated Tree: Missouri Native (Flowering Dogwood), 2007, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ink on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches.

this page and opposite: Construction of Excavated Tree: Missouri Native (Flowering Dogwood), 2007, cardboard, newspaper, paper, wire, steel, PVC, and duct tape, approx. 18 x 14.75 x 14.5 feet.

opposite and above: The Black Tree, 2005-2007, cardboard, wood, wire, and duct tape, approx. 10.5 x 11.3 x 10.8 feet. Originally installed at VAN HORN, Düsseldorf, 2005. Installation views at Schürmann Berlin, January 19-March 24, 2007. Image courtesy Heins Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath.

Work in progress, newspaper and glue, 2006-2007.

Holtenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio in Paris, 2006-2007.

Paris Trees, 2006-2007, newspaper, glue, and acrylic, approx. 126 x 6 x 5 inches. Installation view of Re-trait at Fondation dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;entreprise Ricard, Paris, March 6-April 13, 2007. Paris Trees in foreground, other works by Detanico & Lain, Benoit Maire, Bojan Sarvecic, and Rainier Lericolais.

A Rare Psychedelic, 2005, acrylic on windows and walls with shadows, dimensions variable. Installation views at LOTS gallery, Bristol, UK, July 30-August 27, 2005.

Thoughts on Urban Prairies Scott F. Woodbury in conversation with Katie Holten via email. Katie Holten: hi Scott, I’m working with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the prairie project. Unfortunately we’re unable to go ahead with it. So many great people, such as yourself, were working with us on it and we were all excited to make it happen. I’d like to talk with you about why the prairie failed. Would you have the time to discuss what happened and what the implications are? Scott F. Woodbury: Sure Katie, I’d be happy to help explain what I can. KH: First of all I’d like to ask you about your previous experience with planting prairies. Can you tell me a little about that? Have they all been in St. Louis and what kind of areas have you planted? You mentioned that we should be aware that we would probably receive some negative feedback from locals—what has your experience been? SW: Well, long story short. I’ve been seeding and consulting on prairie seedings for 15 years, mostly in the St. Louis region and in particular at Shaw Nature Reserve. I’ve been directly involved recently with college and corporate campuses, public schools, highway intersections, churches, municipal parks, private homes, and larger agricultural areas. I recently wrote a landscape manual on prairie reconstruction. You can see it on our website at www.shawnature.org. My primary work however is at Shaw Nature Reserve where I’ve conducted over a dozen seedings. I’ve seen projects fail for a number of reasons. . . drought, debilitating weeds, poor maintenance, and the perception that prairie landscapes are weedy. They are weedy in the first two years. This is where the pressure builds. Boards get nervous, staff are questioned, the public complains, tempers rise, hasty measures are taken, prairie fails, etc. The two most important ingredients are patience and more patience and most people have difficulty with this. People prefer instant gratification. KH: The main reason that my prairie was stopped was because an individual in charge of the public grounds decided that it was ‘dangerous’. He told us that he felt ‘threatened’ by it. As I’m essentially a country girl, having grown up in rural Ireland, I find this horrifying—a fully-grown man feeling threatened by plants—wild flowers. You must have had to deal with this reaction before—do you have a standard response? I can understand that while it’s maturing the prairie could look weedy, but why should this cause fear? Manicured lawns and GM grass is scary (in my opinion), but indigenous plants—the most natural thing in the world. Is this what he’s scared of—the fact that they are natural and take over, without maintenance, without control? His fear implies that ‘bad things’ will happen in the prairie— in fact he told us that people would get mugged. Have you ever come across scenarios like this before? SW: Katie, there seems to be a lot of unwarranted fear in the US right now, especially in St. Louis. Our city was recently deemed the most dangerous city in the nation. I’ve only come across the fear thing once before on a college campus but it wasn’t grasses and flowers in that case but trees and shrubs. That is certainly a minority opinion and not worthy of much more comment. Sorry it had to end this way. July 29, 2006

opposite: Delightful Isolation (detail), 2005, mixed media on paper, 19 x 24 inches.

Ugress Studie, 2002, transplanted weeds, approx. 10 x 10 x 4 feet. Public art project commissioned by the Kunstbanken Hedmark in Hamar, Norway for Under Ă&#x2026;pon Himmel, August 18â&#x20AC;&#x201C;September 29, 2002.

Lament, 2006, a performance by Martha McDonald at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, July 29, 2006. Lament was a collaboration between McDonald and Holten as part of Holten’s project for the Soft Sites exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, April 21–July 30, 2006.

The Seed Collection, 2005-2006, replicas of native and non-native plant seeds made from clay and acrylic, dimensions variable. Installation views at Bartramâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Garden as part of the Soft Sites exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, April 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;July 30, 2006.

Growing Natives Andrea Zittel in conversation with Katie Holten in Andrea’s garden at A–Z West in Joshua Tree, California. Katie Holten: Can you show me around the garden? Andrea Zittel: Sure. . . I just planted all of these, so the orange ﬂags are so I’ll know what to water ‘cause they’re so little. And then the rabbits. . . that’s what this wire is for. . . the plants are still pretty vulnerable. KH: What are they? AZ: All kinds of different things—they’re all natives. I think that’s an Indigo bush. These are Smoke trees. They’re really beautiful, but they’re hard to grow. They don’t normally grow here— they usually grow 500 or 1,000 feet below this—so they don’t like the cold. And these are Jojoba, they grow naturally up in the hills, but in the seventies people planted a lot of Jojoba out here for oil. . . they’ll be nice when they ﬁll out.

A–Z West in Joshua Tree, with Mesquite trees.

KH: So you came out here a lot when you were growing up? AZ: My grandparents lived just south of here. I went out there a lot to visit them and we would just drive through here. And then I started coming out here when I was twenty I came out here to take photographs. . . and these are Mesquite trees. They’re really beautiful in the summer—super bright and they get really full. They’ll create shade and cool things down. . . hopefully! KH: The shadows are fantastic.

Andrea Zittel’s Regeneration Field in Joshua Tree.

AZ: Yeah, but I’m having a hard time to get the trees to grow up and I almost wonder if it’s because it’s so reﬂective in here [patio outside the studio] that they’re kind of confused. These seem to be growing down more than the ones up on the hill. March 17, 2006

View of the path leading to A–Z West.

following pages: River Delta, 2005, ink on paper, 22 x 30 inches.

Bog Grappa, 2002, water, bog plant, cork, and bottle, 13 x 2.5 x 2.5 inches. Private collection.

Edible Estates Fritz Haeg in conversation with Katie Holten over lunch in New York. Fritz Haeg: Control—it’s about absolute domination of the landscape and repressing anything that’s unfamiliar or unexpected—the same reason people want McDonalds and chain retail stores. Katie Holten: Yeah, a lot of people seem to feel threatened by the unfamiliar and it seems that that’s why my prairie failed to happen in St. Louis. What about your Edible Estates project—isn’t that imposing an unfamiliar landscape on suburban front lawns? FH: The Edible Estates project isn’t about convincing anyone of anything. We’re working with people and families who want to do it. The owners of the gardens are meant to be avid gardeners already—it’s not about converting those people. The garden becomes a spectacle. It’s propaganda to encourage other people to do it. A public spectacle of defiance. Demonstrating to people where their food comes from. It becomes a demonstration of how you have a choice about how you use your private land. The most basic thing as humans is growing our own food. Once we stop being nomadic the first symbol of that is to grow our own food. But it’s not just a political act, some eco-green, save-the-planet project. A lot of people assume it is, but it isn’t. It might sound really tired, but it’s true—I think the idea of it is beautiful. The very notion of that act is really beautiful and to me that’s enough. And that’s all I really need to see happen. And whatever spills out from that could be some revelation of the truth of the world that we’re living in, good or bad. And if nobody else does it because nobody has time—that’s a truth that we should look at, “oh, isn’t that interesting that we don’t have time to grow our own food but we have time to sit on the freeway for an hour, watch TV for 3 hours. . . ” KH: When did you start the Edible Estates project? FH: Well, you know the interesting story about it is that it all started with the presidential elections in 2004. I’d been doing a lot of ecology projects since 2001 and at the end of 2004 I shut down my life and I went to Australia to take some time off. And then after those elections—after looking at the red and blue states—I really felt very deeply that I wanted to do a project that wasn’t so insular. In the art and design world we’re so focused on these little worlds in New York and L.A. and we’re only talking to ourselves. I wanted to do a project that was for mainstream, middle America—the red states. I wanted to do a project for them. A project that would leap over conventional art audiences. So, I put out the word. I said that I wanted to do my next project in the geographic center of the country. A curator invited me to go do the project in an art center in Salina, Kansas, which is the center of the country, geographically. That’s also where the Land Institute is. And then I landed on the idea of the front lawn being the territory to work in. The first garden was done in 2005, right when I met you. KH: That’s interesting—I thought the ‘lawn’ was the starting point—I didn’t realise that it came from the elections. FH: The garden and the lawn were just vehicles to have a conversation that went outside these little, hermetic, art and design world settings. I think we both have the same feelings about that. We’re both drawn to scrappy, little spaces and places outside this highly commercial art-fair world. I’m really just interested in that basic idea of taking a space that was polluting, toxic, fake, isolating, useless, and hostile, and replacing it with something that’s the opposite of all those words. It’s gracious, welcoming, productive, healthy. . . KH: Sounds great! That’s why I wanted to include Edible Estates in CLUSTER—it’s such an optimistic and hands-on project. It seems to be more about just getting stuck in and doing what you and the people you end up working with want to do, rather than worrying 42

left and right: Fritz Haeg’s garden overlooking Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, 2006.

about it being an ‘art project’. Same thing applies to the Sundown Salons that you organized in your home. I was sad that we didn’t have time to have CLUSTER Salon. FH: Edible Estates was a wonderful experience. The first one we did was in Salina, the second was in Lakewood, California, and the next one will be planted in New York. That’s going to be at the end of May. ABC news productions is really interested and they’re pitching it to cable networks. It’s interesting because the whole project grew out of wanting to do a profundly rigorous project that was for the broadstream American public. So, it’s actually. . . KH: Made for TV. . . FH: Yeah, in a way. It plays into a lot of TV models. I’ve come ‘round to the idea and ABC is really behind it. If the TV thing doesn’t happen then I’ll just produce it myself. KH: Do you think the TV show will really work—aren’t you worried that you could be misrepresented? FH: The TV show is a weird incarnation of the project. I can imagine that with some projects the TV show could ruin the whole premise. But with this I hope the TV show will make it more pronounced. Who knows? I hope so! Have you seen the documentary The Future of Food? It was an exposé on industrial food production, Monsanto in particular. KH: No. But it sounds like the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’m going to read with the book club in St. Louis. I heard Michael Pollan on NPR when the book came out. He was so coherent. FH: Yeah, I’m such a Michael Pollan fan. I’ve written him a fan email! I want him to contribute to the Edible Estates book. I think the interesting thing about him is that he’s a writer first. I think that’s really important. There are a lot of people interested in these issues but they can’t communicate them. . . Do you spend much time in Ireland? KH: Everytime I travel I pass through my mum’s house. It’s my base, I suppose—all my banking’s done from there! I love my mum’s garden and living on the edge of the bog, surrounded by fields. FH: That’s what I’ve enjoyed about L.A.—it’s a very watered-down suburban version of the ideal—having a garden, a quiet, productive life connected to the outdoor world while being a part of everything. I’m craving a life that’s much simpler, that doesn’t involve cars at all, which you can’t have in L.A. Or you can, but it takes a lot of work. There are people who don’t have cars in L.A. They bike everywhere. It’s a beautiful idea, but I’m super-efficient and I need to do everything super-speedy. There’s too much I want to do in a day and I couldn’t do it on a bike! 43

Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates in Lakewood, California, 2006.

KH: Yeah, I heard about cyclists when I was in L.A. but I never saw any! Okay, so as you don’t cycle, do you have time for your garden? FH: No—Katie you would be so depressed if you saw my garden! The irony is that the more time I spend on Edible Estates and everything else, the more my own garden just languishes. When I moved into my house I wanted to plant everything—so I planted a lot of things that need water and a lot of looking after. But now everything that needs help I’m letting go. I’m only going to plant natives and edibles. The fruit trees are staying. KH: Weeds, what do you think about weeds? FH: [Chuckle!], I guess I discriminate. Grass is my problem—not wild grasses, but lawn grass seed—that’s the one thing. My ideal garden would have some profound underlying structure in terms of organization and geometry and paths and spaces—highly structured with basic perennials, woody things, fruit trees, vines and things like that—that then is allowed to fall apart. So you can have wildflower seeds pop up in unexpected places. KH: Like an English wildflower garden? FH: I like a fusion of both—of hyper-controlled French and Italian lineal paths—that you then let fall apart in places! You’ve seen my garden—it has some of those things already. KH: Yeah—paths, pond, trees, and the view—the grand vista with the mountains on the horizon. It’s almost a classical garden. A fabulous location to hold your funky gatherings —the Sundown Salons and Sundown Schoolhouse—bringing a wild mixture of people to hang out up on the hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles. . . FH: The idea that always sticks with me is that 150 years ago, with the industrial revolution at the turn of the century, there was a period of 50-100 years where, basically, we threw out millenia of development in terms of how to build, how to plan, how to just be connected to where we are. With plate glass, air conditioning, steel, cars, cheap energy, we were given this little bubble of time where we felt like research possibilities were endless. We had the luxury, if you can call it a luxury, of not having to pay attention to specificity of place anymore. And that’s going to be a very short window as we realize that we can’t do it anymore. We just threw away thousands of years of understanding of place. It’s like a break in the line of communication in development. You look at animals developing over millenia, like termite towers—so much smarter than anything we could do. We’re starting all over again, in some ways. February 20. 2007 44

Containers, 2005. Installaton view of Bucolica at Wallspace, New York.

Weeding in New York, 2005.

Container, 2005, reconstituted cardboard box, plastic bag, duct tape, soil, transplanted weeds and other plants, approx. 21 x 21 x 6 inches (without plants). Installation view at a private residence in New York. Private collection.