the touch gallery

this will be my 70th post, since October 2008.

on the Friday I was in Chicago, I had my day all figured out.  since the tour I was going to take as part of the ASLA conference was cancelled due to low enrollment (surely there are other people besides me interested in the cemeteries and memorial sites of Chicago??)  …I opted instead to flake off for the day and see Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I didn’t really realize until I stopped by the convention center for the schedule that I was, by so doing, flaking off on a full day’s worth of educational sessions.  it appears, owing to the compressed schedule of the conference this year, that things overlapped quite a bit more than usual.  but I stuck to my original plan, and was glad I did, since I got a day of nice weather for my urban wanderings.

in fact, a little more nice than I’d bargained for.  as I trudged up Michigan Avenue from the conference center I got hotter and hotter, and more and more in need of a cold drink.  I finally found one, at the shop at Columbia College, which gave off the unmistakable aura of an arts institution, and was emitting students with tripods and huge box cameras as I passed by,

Columbia College, Chicago

I didn’t even really stop to admire the lakefront park land, though there were a few moments that caught my eye..

..so intent was I on my goal, the Art Institute and Dan Kiley’s South Garden, a project I’ve seen pictures of, but never exactly the pictures I wanted, and besides, pictures are never enough.

it is one thing to take an analytic distance from a work of landscape architecture one admires (or thinks one admires, on the basis of pictures and plans); and another to suddenly come upon it on a very warm day in September, after a long walk in excessively warm socks, and experience the temperature gradient from the sunny street to the dense and dappled shade at noon, and see the sprinklers being dragged around during maintenance (always a strange sight to those of us trained in Southern California, where there is *always* an irrigation system built-in, and we don’t drag sprinklers around unless something is seriously wrong.)

South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley

when I try to explain the phenomenology of landscape architecture, I could really do little better than to describe having woolly socks on after a long walk, and finding myself here, using this landscape as it was intended to be used, in the company of others doing the same thing.

South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley

and to explain landscape architecture *as* architecture, this would be a good place to start, within a disciplined grid of hawthorn trees,  trained to a low canopy – ceiling, columns, and ground plane.

South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley

having been heated and cooled thus rapidly, and probably expanded and contracted in the process, I was a little befuddled and possibly a little more nonlinear than usual in my approach to the Art Institute, once I got inside.  I knew from the outset I would not have time to see it all, and didn’t intend to.  the sensory overload set in very quickly, and with it, perhaps a little more vulnerability to the emotional impact of the art.

there was nothing too gut-wrenching about this lovely display of architectural details, which seemed so characteristic of Chicago -  a city that apparently has liked to decorate itself with ever more elaborate moldings, friezes, medallions, capitals, corbels, quoins…like the engraving around a dollar bill, letting you know the ceremonial value of every temple of commerce.

and, on that future trip to Chicago that I fully intend to take, I know I’ll spend some time going around this massive and ornamented architecture that they’ve grown there, and I’ll admire it, and it won’t choke me up much.  not the way this did.

"The Solitude of the Soul", Lorado Taft, Chicago Art Institute

now, when I look at the photos here, safely at home, the sculpture seems a little overwrought, a little obvious, a little too on-the-nose as a comment on whatever I might have been feeling that day.  the label contains the comment of the artist: “The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances…we are unknown to each other.”

so, no, it doesn’t work quite the same way here and now as it did on that day, what with the wooly socks, the fatigue, and the sensory overload.  you will just have to take my word for it: in the moment, it almost knocked me over.

moving on, stumbling across some famous works quite by accident, and not even really taking the time to contemplate any of them properly:  but I observed that “Night Hawks” has such clean and glossy streets and such tidy countertops, how orderly and sinister it really is in person.  and “American Gothic,” how elaborately constructed the rusticity of it is, even down to the rough-hewn frame, when all along we know how thoroughly the thing is a construct, and that the farmer was really Grant Wood’s dentist, and these hands really weren’t that sort of working hands at all.

I found myself down in the lower level, the kids’ area of the museum, at a time when there were no kids to be seen there.  so when I wandered into the “touch gallery,” which has Actual Works of Sculpture which we are intended to touch, it took me a long time to overcome my properly instilled training in museum etiquette (which is even more heightened by having an art historian in the family) and actually lay my hands on the art.

you can also adjust the amount of light shining on Joan of Arc, in addition to getting a grip on her thorny crown.

how can this be OK?  I kept wondering, and finally learned from the labels that they’ve coated the busts with some kind of wax to protect them.  so, OK, I went all giddy and handled them all.

wow, I felt up the art!  I’ve never done that before!   I thought.

and, about a second later, realized that of course I have – many times.  because the rules are totally different for outdoor art.  just about every landscape with art in it that I’ve ever encountered is a touch gallery – including the cemeteries.

having completely overwhelmed myself, I had to take some recovery time sitting in the new Modern Wing,  by Renzo Piano, which is indeed as lovely and inviting as advertised, and leads to the most tantalizing views of my next objective, Millennium Park.  but first I sat for a long time on a bench in here, a space limited to art, however disturbing,

"The Flooded Grave," Jeff Wall, Chicago Art Institute

at least confines itself to the walls, and does not present itself to all the senses.  which nonetheless doesn’t keep it from causing pain.  some thorns are pretty sharp even if you don’t touch them.

(more Chicago soon.  I still haven’t made it into Millennium Park.  however sore my feet, I’ll get there, without regard to whether I drop in my tracks.)

bold plans, big dreams

Fountain of the Great Lakes, Lorado Taft, Art Institute of Chicago

chicago, as we all know, is the city of big shoulders; and is stormy, husky, brawling; alive and coarse and strong and cunning; building, breaking, rebuilding; and all those other things Carl Sandburg said.  I am ready to believe it all, even on the very thin evidence of just a couple days in Chicago, most of that time spent behind convention center walls in the company of the american society of landscape architects.

time spent in an over-chilled convention center, brooding on the future of the profession and the difficulties of re-imagining the urban environment, doesn’t really count toward having an experience of chicago.  I know that  in the few moments I escaped from the isolated island of McCormick Place, I got just the narrowest possible slice of Chicago; a trailer for the real visit I need to make someday.  apart from one rather unsuccessful prospective students’ weekend at the university of chicago when I was seventeen, this is one city I haven’t managed to get to, though it looms fairly large in my ancestral consciousness; to my Midwestern forebears, Chicago was the ultimate urban experience, the mythical emerald city.

Chicago has a different kind of mythical status for those of us in the landscape architectural profession.  because the political landscape there is so very different than it is in LA,  what the mayor decrees, tends to get done.  and Chicago happens to have a green-minded mayor with the last name “Daley”, and thus Chicago has by fiat implemented green roofs, permeable alleyways, tons of public planting and beautification, an ambitious Climate Action plan, tree planting, etc. etc., and of course the nearly half-billion dollar Millennium Park project.  which we tend to speak of in awed tones here in Los Angeles, where a couple million to fix up ball fields is so incredibly hard to come by, and the barriers to new “world-class park” construction seem so insurmountable.  in Chicago, they damn well did it.  apparently, because they are stormy and husky and brawling and all the rest of it.  but I needed to see the result for myself ; a million cute “bean” snapshots on Flickr don’t really tell me what I need to know.

lakefront condos under construction, Chicago

at the conference, among the landscape architects, though attendance is good and plenty is going on, the veneer of confidence and optimism can seem a little fragile.  too many people still out of work, too many projects still on hold.  we say to one another, cautiously, “things seem to be improving…”, but our fingers are crossed behind our backs and you can still see the whites of our eyes.

you wouldn’t know it, though, walking north along the lakefront toward the Loop, that times are hard and things are dicey out there.  in the september sunshine, this particular slice of Chicago seemed to be putting its most confident face toward the future.

it is the centennial of the Burnham Plan, and banners along Michigan Avenue declared a celebration: “Bold plans, big dreams, for the next 100 years.”    it’s a cheap shot at Los Angeles, to be sure, but I can’t help immediately thinking of the fate of the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for our own city – commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and then ruthlessly suppressed upon completion, in a good old-fashioned book burning.  it’s since been re-discovered, and re-published, and tearfully pored over by open space advocates in Los Angeles; meanwhile, in Chicago, they’ve got Daniel Burnham on t-shirts.

I didn’t really have much of an agenda for myself in Chicago.  for the conference, just seeking the serendipity of whatever I could hear or pick up or whoever I ran across.  for the city, just the Art Institute and Millennium Park.  for my own future — bold plans and big dreams?  or just struggling to get by? I set myself a task of getting some thinking done about my own career, such as it is.

chicago seems to demand a level of energy and optimism that I am not sure I’ve got available, here in September of 2009, a confusing and sometimes dispiriting time. when I look at myself in the obligatory “bean” reflection pictures from Millennium Park (post coming soon), I just look extremely tired.  which I was … and I haven’t been well.

but I did come home with some odds and ends in my pockets that might turn out to be useful.  I heard Ken Smith give a few talks at the conference – he’s the arty landscape architect with the big arty glasses who won the competition to design 1,200 acres of the Orange County Great Park, the preview of which I saw earlier this year – and he’s got a nifty saying, which I’ve heard various versions of quoted before:  “big, little, skip the middle.”

you could interpret this in different ways; but I think it’s useful.  to me, it means: look for and try to understand the precision of the details; and try to grasp the big idea, the overarching vision.  one is a reflection of the other.  the rest, the stuff in between – maybe not so important.

more chicago soon.

a terrible beauty

9/1/09 – Tuesday.

the light slanting across our parking lot at the end of the day got the attention of the artists in the office.  “red gold underglow,” it was decided.  the sun was going down orange, and I felt around for my camera.

took one shot from the parking lot and headed west toward Venice Beach.  the cameras were out in force, from the real professional-looking numbers to the little digital snapshot cheapies like mine.  cameras never seem to have viewfinders any more; mine still does, but most of the snapshot cameras don’t, so I was surrounded by people peering down at their screens in the orange light, like presbyopes trying to read very small books.

but plenty of people still have cameras that lead you to adopt that intense squint that seems to denote the heartlessness of the true photographer, uninterested in exclaiming at the horror and destruction inherent in what they see;  completely focused on the image.  or, perhaps, on the girl in red.

so I joined the hordes of photographers, wandering up and down the beach and feeling the strange sense that I’d been here before.  not the same beach, not the same fire, but the same impulse; to capture a moment that will be gone long before you can fully realize it has arrived. 

don’t wait, I once was told by a little sticker on a park bench.  don’t wait, you may not have this chance again.  despite some efforts to persuade me, I am not interested in getting a tattoo: but if I did, that’s what it would say.  don’t wait.

I shared some pictures of sunset and smoke and a friend wrote:  Can I like the picture and un-like the cause? another wrote: a shame the price we pay for this.  everyone is very anxious to point out that they can’t really enjoy this beauty for itself.  they don’t seem to feel free to do so.  we must remind one another that the fire is a terrible thing, that it is destructive, that people have died and been hurt, that people have lost what they love.  were we in any danger of forgetting these things?

other pictures were sent to me and I wrote back: those are astoundingly beautiful.  the reply came:  I would have said, terrifying.  I replied: I see no contradiction.

9/2/09 – Wednesday.

the wife of a very important friend of the firm and the boss has died.  terrible news, though she had been ill a very long time and it is not unexpected.  we need flowers to bring for a condolence call.  without thinking, I said – what a great excuse to go to the orchid place!

for condolence, we decided, white orchids.  although the orchid place has many other fancy kinds, they don’t seem to suit the occasion.  white, so often the color of mourning.  is it for purity, for innocence, a desire for blankness in the face of pain?  conspicuous consumption, in ages before washing machines; or conspicuous plainness, in places and times when bright colors were coveted and costly?  someone told me recently that white is the color of mourning because it is the color of bone.  a reminder of our last end.  a memento mori.

normally it takes 24 hours notice to get an arrangement made up at the orchid place, but I prevailed upon them to do it right then.  and while I was waiting, I almost allowed myself to get seduced by some of the most indecent anthuriums I’ve ever seen.  I mean to say, anthuriums are never subtle about their intentions, but these had a dark, dark red to them that was particularly…flagrant.

orchids have a more alien kind of appeal,  more carefully calibrated to the interests of insects, and thus a little more ethereal. anthuriums, on the other hand…

I stood around waiting for my white orchids, thinking about flesh and bone, and the pressure exerted by each, their insistent demands.

the orchid arrangement made up, I pay and go to my car.  white ash is falling on my shirt and on the roof of my car.  but already the air is growing much more humid.  moist air is being pushed up from a hurricane to the south of us.  but the sun went down red again tonight, regardless.

I’ve got to stop tagging every post with “love and loss.”  might as well rename the whole blog.  from “the parsley” to “the love and loss blog.”  in every post, I will discuss how each thing we gain has inside of it the seed of its loss.  and a few people will read it, and they will get depressed.  but  that’s not my intention.

once in a while, I surprise myself with the realization that I’m actually free.  that is, free to see what I’m seeing, or feel what I’m feeling, without having to hold on so hard to the terrible cost of everything.  it doesn’t last, this realization; but then again, it shouldn’t.

hostages to fortune

8/29/09 – Saturday.

I can tell when the latest round of wildfires has made the national news because I start getting the “are you OK??” messages from certain family members.  never mind that I live, and have always lived in all my years in California, nowhere near a wildland that might burn.  when you see wildland fires on the national news they always look pretty comprehensively destructive.  burn, hollywood, burn.

and in fact this particular fire, the Station fire, is scary enough.  it’s been hot and dry and dusty and very still, so that the giant plume of smoke is mostly hanging in the air, only drifting seaward very slowly.  this is the view from the north 405 this afternoon.  windshield photos are always pretty dicey but this might at least give a sense of the massive scale of the smoke plume.  I see by the LA Times web site that officials would very much like it if people stopped calling 911 to report the smoke.  they are, in fact, aware of the  gigantic fire.

though musing on the metaphorical value of these fires is always interesting, there is more possibility of detachment when you have nothing personally at stake.  not menacing me or my home, check.  not menacing any family or close friends, hmm, it is menacing at least one online acquaintance that I know of, possibly others, so that’s slightly more personal.   not threatening any of our projects, check.  oh, that last one seemed cold-blooded, didn’t it?

but you know as designers we still talk about “our” projects even when they’re built and completely out of our hands.  we utterly fail at detachment.  when they look good,  when people are enjoying them, we beam with pride.  when they’re neglected or underused or being systematically killed by bad maintenance, it hurts.  just today I was lamenting with some colleagues about how hard it is to get the best possible pictures of a landscape project; we hire good photographers and try to run around and get things cleaned up,  but finding that magic moment, as the boss calls it, “after it’s grown in and before they kill it,” sometimes proves almost impossible.  it might have been five minutes, one April.  if you miss it, too bad.  there’s only so much you can do with photoshop.

8/30/09 – Sunday.

I went driving around to look for another photo opportunity.  wrong time of day, blazing noon, and so hazy you can’t entirely tell what you’re looking at.  nevertheless:

the internet is filling up fast with better photos and videos of the Station fire; it’s dramatically visible from all around the basin.  nevertheless, this is my view of it today, with the channelized Ballona creek in the foreground, taken from the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook.

there, interpretive materials in the visitor center explain many things about our local ecology, including what the levels of air quality alert mean.  this is where we’re at today, which means it’s an exceptionally poor day to be climbing three hundred feet on a dusty, blazing hillside at noon.  but then, when was I ever known for good sense.

I still haven’t made a proper visit to the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and taken the pictures I need to take, but I’ve now been up there briefly twice. and remarked to the friend I was with, the first time, that seeing the California State Parks logo, these days,  fills me with nothing but sorrow.  we got busted, that time,  for not paying our parking, and I hastily stuffed my money in the box, fighting the impulse to follow it with all the money in my wallet.  as if that would do much good.

we’re being gutted!  thanks for understanding!  enjoy your new State Park!

he that hath wife and children, wrote Francis Bacon, hath given hostages to fortune.

to love anything is to become vulnerable, to instantly fail the detachment test.  cities and parks and landscapes, as well as people.

when these grand pyrocumulus clouds appear on the horizon and the light turns those interesting colors, I heartlessly look for my camera, and heedlessly climb up hills.  it’s like a gigantic movie screen, and wouldn’t seem all that real, except you can smell it and taste it and it gives you headaches, even at this fairly considerable distance.    I try to explain to my family that los angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city (or 88, or a hundred, depending on who you ask) and there is really no immediacy for me in the fate of glendora or la canada flintridge, as sad and upsetting as it is to hear about all this destruction.  who is it that I’m really trying to convince?

as a single, childless person who owns very little and lives in the midst of the concrete, you’d think I have no hostages to fortune.  guess again.