What in the World is More Beautiful?
Until August 22; Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews Botanic Garden, St Andrews Preservation Trust

What in the world is more beautiful? That’s a seriously loaded question. Glasgow-based artists Susanne Nørregärd Nielsen and Gair Dunlop found it in an old book about the Picturesque Movement. It was fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries to make nature conform to the rules of landscape painting, rather than the other way around. Argument was fierce about whether beauty should be rough and sublime or cultivated and pretty.

That was then, and this is now, but the questions have not gone away; in fact there are more of them. In these postmodern days, art is as much about the creative process as the finished product. The same could be said of gardening, unless one is, for example, growing potatoes. In aesthetic terms, gardening is an ongoing collaboration between humans and nature to create new worlds. Boundaries have come down, and judging by this exhibition at St Andrews, along with Tate Britain’s current offering, the fence between art and gardening has been dismantled.

In St Andrews, Nielsen and Dunlop have brought together seven contemporary artists whose work relates to horticulture, and planted them in the Crawford Arts Centre, the Botanic Garden and the garden of a local museum. The artists have called on the expertise of all sorts of specialists, from beekeepers to park rangers. This continues a strong tradition at the Crawford Arts Centre of encouraging unusual collaborations, bringing in new audiences and challenging existing ones.

The idea of improving upon nature is tackled head on by Jennifer Beattie, whose two indoor trees are painted with garish gloss paint, their artificial leaves grafted onto real branches. It immediately recalls Marine Hugonnier’s artificially coloured vase of flowers currently on display at DCA, and in fact Hugonnier’s concerns are tightly bound with the issues explored in this show.

At the Botanic Gardens, Nielsen’s work is strangely attention-grabbing. Trained as an abstract painter, Nielsen is fascinated with the work of Piet Mondrian, a famous flower-hater. It’s often said that he would paint the stems of tulips white, because he hated green so much. Nielsen has unearthed Mondrian’s private fetish for flower painting, and planted a flower bed full of the flowers he depicted.

The flowerbed is not a Broadway Boogie-Woogie pattern but it still has something of Mondrian about it. The way the flowers stand so vertical, the way they’re planted in a grid which seems symmetrical without being so. Nielsen has flouted conventional planting rules and perhaps that’s why the work is so easy to spot. Perhaps that also explains how she successfully bridges the gap between Mondrian’s most famous paintings and the inspiration behind them.

Back in the gallery space there are three sculptures of ex-military buildings in Fife, by Cath Keay. The buildings are made of foundation wax, and have been in and out of beehives where the bees have made their own modifications. The once rigidly formal shapes have become organic and rounded, and these former tools of war have entered a land of milk and honey. What in the world is more beautiful?

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 25.07.04