Playing with Plants and Seeing Green
Playing with Plants by Courtney Ryan (2013)
Overview:
Courtney Ryan analyses the work of artist, Vaughn Bell through considering the relationship between human and plant through a modern lens. Ryan explores the ways in which plants while linked to humans and animals for live (p.337), have been reduced to nothing but blurred backdrops of urban human life. Despite the interdependency, humans have failed to recognise the symbiotic relationship but instead try to dominate the natural landscape. In the analysis of Portable Lawn, Ryan explores the ways in which nature is dominated by the prized suburban lawn surrounded by perfect white picket fences. Thus, Ryan observes that while humans recognise the beauty of the plant world, it is a superficial and materialistic appreciation reduced to aestheticisms. These lawns also symbolise the multilayered environmental injustices as working-class neighborhoods are often robbed from the flora and clean air. Instead, the clean-cut lawn represents a monocultural condition causing the lawn to be viewed as a cultural artifact and only when they are not well maintained they are taken out of their usual context.
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Interesting quotes:
- In theorising plant thinking. plants are voiceless, they just like humans, express themselves spatially”.p.337
- To describe the land as landscape is to privilege the visal over other more rounded and embodied ways of knowing the land. It is to suggest that th eland can be surveyed and encompassed… land can be owned, appropriated and privatised (p.345)
Overview:
Monica Gagliano argues that modern society has inherited a ‘plant blindness’ in which humans have categorised the natural world as a competitive and simple environment. Gagliano argues that plants on the contrary highlight how both competition and coexistence can take place. Within the plant world, plants coexist with each other attaining certain roles to protect themselves and other plants. Additionally, Gagliano highlights the ways in which nature is more than passive and insensitive organisms through her exploration of how plants function from sound, light and chemical protection.
I think this presents an interesting view in which we should not view plants as a passive environment but a complex network in which enables plants to survive. We shouldn’t look at nature as sole predator vs prey or survival of the fittest but a network in which while survival is at the top, nature is still a network of support.
Interesting quotes:
- “This myopia is reinforced by the misuse of concepts like ‘survival of the fittest’ as a synonym for the process of natural selection through competition” p. 153
- Indeed many plants literally help each other by improving growth. P. 153
