The Lawn Liberation Movement

I just read a really good New Yorker article, “Turf War” by Elizabeth Kolbert, about the history and future of lawns in America. (BTW, you can subscribe to The New Yorker via RSS, which I just did, although I came by this article by way of another RSS feed I use, http://pruned.blogspot.com--a blog about gardens, landscaping, etc.)

I was pleased and amused to learn that what I have is a “Freedom lawn”!

In “Redesigning the American Lawn” (1993), F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe dub such a lawn the Freedom Lawn. The Freedom Lawn consists of grass mixed with whatever else happens to seed itself, which, the authors note, might include: dandelion, violets, bluets, spurrey, chickweed, chrysanthemum, brown-eyed Susan, partridge berry, Canada mayflower, various clovers, plantains, evening primrose, rushes, and wood rush, as well as grasses not usually associated with the well-manicured lawn, such as broomsedge, sweet vernal grass, timothy, quack grass, oat grass, crabgrass, and foxtail grass.

The Freedom Lawn is still mowed—preferably with a push-mower—but it is watered infrequently, if at all, and receives no chemical “inputs.” If a brown spot develops, it is likely soon to be filled by what some might call weeds, but which Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe would rather refer to as “low growing broad-leaved plants.”

[End of quotation from the article]

I personally never water the damn thing. I never fertilize it. I apply no herbicide. I deserve thanks! As for the water, the article says:

In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the (NASA-funded) study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.

[End of quotation from the article]

The herbicides and pesticides seem ultimately always to be toxic, carcinogenic, and/or environmentally damaging, particularly deadly to environmentally sensitive creatures such as tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees, which, as we no know, are experiencing severe problems like colony collapse for the bees and genuine endangerment to many of the amphibians.

I am not such a radical as to dispense with my front lawn altogether, although on the side of my corner lot, where there are several tall pines, I have just let the needles form a mulch so that little lawn grows there. I still mow the front lawn with a gas-powed mower. But perhaps someday in the not-too-distant future we will be able to mow with solar powered robot mowers!



These Husqvarna solar-powered lawnmowers cost $4000 now, but that strikes me as being a price that, should they catch on, could come down well enough in not so long a time.

As I’ve said before, the Freedom Lawn is pretty much where most of my neighbors are at these days. There are still several who hire lawn care guys who just go apeshit with the chemicals, yielding the bright green, homogenous Fascist Lawn. Down with the Herbo-Fascists!



Scott Miracle-Gro ad

Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century

PBS had a pretty cool series called Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. It’s available on DVD and has a companion volume, as well. The series is worth watching. You see the artists (or sculptures, whatever they may be) at work, putting together a project, and they talk about it.

As for the companion volume, it turns out that the one I’ve had kicking about the house here, checked out from the library forever, is #2, whereas I guess the two episodes I saw on TV were from Part One.

Looking through the book was a lot like looking through one of my favorite magazines: Art in America. I’m like, crap, crap, crap, wow!, crap, crap, wow!, crap, crap.... It was mostly crap. But two artists stood out for me. The most interesting by far was Gabriel Orozco, who seems to be mostly a photographer, but who does some things you could call sculptures or something. Orozco says:

Another way is to deconstruct a cultural icon, because it is also a machine that has a function, and to remake it on its own logic.

Well, when Orozco deconstructs something, he does it literally, taking apart a Citroen, removing its center, and putting the two sides back together! This view, in particular, was striking:



There is a lot of thought behind his photographs, as when he creates a simple terra cotta sculpture, and then takes a two-part Cibachrome of it:



[My Hands are My Heart, 1991]

He does all sorts of stuff. Here, he adds a digital touch to a photograph:



[Light Through Leaves, detail, 1996]

Orozco:

A photograph might or might not become a work of art. In a way, it’s irrelevant because I think photograpy is a necessity for documentation....for memory. First it’s a necessity. Then, some of these photographs might generate enough thinking and contemplation to be exposed for consideration. But I don’t take photographs thinking they are going to be art. I take the photographs thinking that I need to keep the moment....



[Cats and Watermelons (detail)(1992, Cibachrome)]



[Cats and Watermelons (detail)(1992, Cibachrome)]

There is slideshow of Orozco’s works at:

http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=58

The other artist who caught my eye was Korean-born Do-Ho Suh, who does a variety of installations. I liked his sculpture composed of dog tags...



[Same/One, 2001]

and his description of the dream that led to it:

I walked slowly, but I went into the stadium on the ground level. And then I saw this reflecting surface and I realized I was stepping on these metal pieces that were military dog tags. And they were vibrating slightly, vibrating and touching each other.... I saw central figure in the center of the stadium. It tried to go out of the stadium but it couldn’t because the train of its garment, which was made of dog tags, was too big.

A begin being blog.