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? Thats 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 Britains
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 Hugonniers artificially coloured vase of flowers currently
on display at DCA, and in fact Hugonniers concerns are tightly
bound with the issues explored in this show.
At the Botanic Gardens, Nielsens work is strangely attention-grabbing.
Trained as an abstract painter, Nielsen is fascinated with the work
of Piet Mondrian, a famous flower-hater. Its often said that
he would paint the stems of tulips white, because he hated green so
much. Nielsen has unearthed Mondrians 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 theyre planted in a grid which seems symmetrical without
being so. Nielsen has flouted conventional planting rules and perhaps
thats why the work is so easy to spot. Perhaps that also explains
how she successfully bridges the gap between Mondrians 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