Mediated Environments: Gardens and Landscape
June 1, 2010, CJ 4-240, 3 – 4:30 p.m., Loyola Campus, Hall Building
Public 41: Gardens, edited by Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon
While widely appreciated, gardens and other kinds of designed landscape often slip easily into the background of both everyday life and socio-political analysis. In this context however, they serve an important mediating function between people and their environments. As John Dixon Hunt has put it, the making of gardens and landscapes constitutes an ‘art of milieu’ where “milieu is not just objective, physical surroundings, but involves the inscription on that site of how an individual or a society conceives of its environment.” While Hunt is specifically concerned with the representation of relations between human beings and nature, the papers in this panel conceive of ‘environment’ more broadly – in terms of social and political as well as natural influences. They explore some of the ways in which gardens and landscapes work, in various contexts, to either affirm or challenge our perception of the world around us: via not only our relation to place, but also to other people, and to history.
Convened on the occasion of the launch of the journal Public, issue #41, entitled “Gardens”, this panel explores a terrain of study rich for making connections between different communication-oriented disciplines. Drawing on scholarship in soundscape studies, contemporary art practice and landscape theory, these papers demonstrate the kinds of insight the study of gardens and landscape can yield in relation to a variety of pressing cultural and political questions. In addition to three paper presentations, the panel will include a brief discussion by the respondent, of connections between the themes addressed by the authors, and selected artist projects featured in Public: Gardens.
In Greater Perfections (2000), John Dixon Hunt identifies some thirty-two gardens including rose gardens, vegetable gardens, landscape gardens, cloister gardens, bog gardens, therapeutic gardens, container gardens, and corpse gardens. Contributors to Public 41: Gardens add even more types. In the 24 contributions to this issue, there are the “botanicuratorial” museum gardens discussed by J. Keri Cronin; the school gardens analyzed by Kai Wood Mah; and the special form of allotment garden such as the Alex Wilson Community Garden, animated by Richard Brault. Gina Badger critiques the ‘seed bomb’ by guerilla gardeners; Jill Didur comments on Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers; and there are two new texts from French garden designer Gilles Clément, whose gardens have been influential (and controversial) in the worlds of ecological garden design, landscape theory, and garden studies.
