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[ART REVIEW] CULTIVATE at BERKSHIRE BOTANICAL GARDENS
6.12.08
BERKSHIRE BOTANICAL GARDEN
Routes 102 and 183
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.3926
CULTIVATE
A site-specific installation of artworks; a collaboration with and companion to the BADLANDS exhibition currently at MASS MoCA.
by SETH ROGOVOY
(STOCKBRIDGE, Mass., June 8, 2008) -- The site-specific installation CULTIVATE at the Berkshire Botanical Garden running through the summer into the fall features works by twelve artists tailor-made to co-exist with the gardens and natural features surrounding them, including flowerbeds, trees, garden implements, and greenhouses.
The best of the installations, such as Lynn Koble's Vainglorious, are interactive with their settings and will change in both form and content as the natural season progresses, and flowers grow into the cluster of hand-mirror forms that Koble has installed in the seedbed.
Similarly, if Luke Stettner and Mac Carbonell's Tree of Heaven pans out according to plan, the huge rectangular block of concrete laid down in the garden, meant to represent a city sidewalk, will be overtaken by ailanthus, a Chinese tree noted for its toughness and powers of invasiveness, even in the face of the most hostile urban environments.
Other installations might be less interactive in terms of changing over time, but are no less resonant in their juxtaposition of the art and nature. Joseph Smolinski's Cell Tree, for example, is both a work of beauty and a cosmic joke. You've all seen those cellphone towers constructed atop fake trees. Smolinski reverses the process and puts a fake cell antenna atop a real tree. Who knows -- maybe the spotty cell reception in this notoriously underserved section of the Berkshires will improve?
Other pieces are sturdier and make their statement upon nature rather than with it, and are as much (political-)science fair projects as artworks of the type we've seen a lot of in recent years at MASS MoCA. Dutch artist Petra Groen, for example, installed scultpture of human organs stored in "organ houses" in fields of plants and greenhouses, some tethered to trees, functioning as umbilical cords suggesting a symbiotic link between the constructed body and the synthetic landscape.
There are other installations to discover. As is to be expected in a show like this, some boast aesthetic pleasures, most boast intellectual challenges, some tend toward the academic. It's an eclectic show, but one definitely worth visiting several times this summer to see how the changing environment affects the artwork -- something beyond the control of the artists' themselves.
Advance word is that MASS MoCA's companion exhibition, BADLANDS, is equally provocative and one of the best of its kind in years. Stay tuned for a report on that show in a few weeks.
Seth Rogovoy is editor-in-chief and critic-at-large at BERKSHIRE LIVING Magazine.
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