When invited to devise a project as part of the ‘reclamation’ of the mountainous Hiriya Dump in Israel, an 8000-acre rubbish tip outside Tel Aviv, Lois Weinberger simply proposed a transparent walkway penetrating down into the sedimented layers of history, and to otherwise leave the site untouched. Referring to Weinberger’s radical aesthetic as a kind of ‘politics/poetics’, the curator Catherine David has written, “nature in the post-industrial era is a secondary nature, a second-hand nature, a post-cultural nature – and a post-history nature, the ‘dopo storia’ that Pasolini evokes in his texts in the 1970s – ‘ruins’ (vacant lots, post-industrial wasteland, waste dumps, etc).” 11 Indeed the contexts he chooses to privilege are thoroughly ‘cultured’ – man-made places in which the untamed weed struggles to survive, in marginal spaces on the edge of the city, thriving on the waste products of human society. Weinberger’s ruderal plants grow as relentlessly on the post-industrial wastelands and on the margins of urban existence as they do in the imaginary wilderness that lies beyond the city. There is no sense of retrieving a ‘lost paradise’ from the ravages of human culture. It is important to emphasize that this is not an idealised or romanticised vision of ‘primary nature’. Into this temporary interruption of the smooth surface of the city, Weinberger introduced ruderal plants, describing the project as “an energy field … symptomatic of an area of spontaneous chaos which gives way to a precise botanical system.” 10 In an earlier work, Burning and Walking (1993) (subsequently re-enacted in various cities around the world), the tarmac of a public thoroughfare in Salzburg was roughly broken up so as to reveal the earth below, but here the enclosure took the form of a taped-off area to keep pedestrians out. The resulting enclave, described by the artist as “a gap within urban space” 7, was then abandoned and its “re-forestation left to the wind / the birds / the seeds already existing in the earth” 8, combining with the “waste of civilisation” which would accumulate as “an integrated component of time.” 9 Inside this inverted cage made from tightly spaced steel bars, excluding human entry, the concrete of the university forecourt was torn up and replaced with a thin layer of earth (the depth of which was dictated by the underground car park below). In front of the newly built Social Science centre at the University of Innsbruck, in 1998, Weinberger constructed a 37-metre long enclosure for ‘ruderals’ (the wild plants, or ‘weeds’, that grow on wasteland and rubbish tips), entitled Garden – a poetic fieldwork. The artist has declared, “The best gardeners are those / who abandon the garden.” 4 With “precise indifference” 5, Weinberger creates a framework in which it is the plants themselves that perform the work of art, as a kind of living theatre, and we as viewers find ourselves implicated in this time-based process, “IN THE COMPLEXITY OF THE UNDETERMINED.” 6 Weinberger has described his practice as being “against the aesthetics of the Pure and the True, against the ordering forces.” 1 He is a champion of “PLACE / WHERE THE LIVING REVEALS ITSELF ABOVE THE ORDERLY.” 2 The ‘living’ is in a permanent state of transition, it is a dynamic principle of flux, and Weinberger’s interventions, sometimes referred to as ‘gardens’, simply take the form of a “perfectly provisional area” 3 where greenness is left to enact its inexorable cycle of growth and decay, heedless of human society. If the persistence of their insurgency represents the irrepressible life force that drives the growth of plants, often in direct confrontation with the fantasy of order and stability imposed by human society, then this is the same radical, de-stabilizing energy that flows through the work of Lois Weinberger. They are the ever-present underclass of the plant world, the ‘multitude’ constantly threatening to rise up and disrupt the orderly regime of the city. We know these vegetable subversives all too well. The urgency of growth, of reaching up to the sun, has driven these humble botanic insurgents up through the solid surface of the city, tilting and cracking the concrete cap imposed upon them like some inconsequential crust. There is a photograph by Lois Weinberger of a typical run-down area of urban space – an abandoned parking lot perhaps – in which the rectangular concrete slabs that were once employed to flatten and ‘subdue’ the earth have been split apart and bisected by a long line of wild plants, vigorous and healthy-looking, in full flower.
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