#rewinding

…According to moral standards of the Enlightenment, the sophistication of one’s own education and manners should be reflected in the refinement of material possessions. Maintaining a smooth and lush lawn therefore signalled virtue, since it affirmed the essential role that discipline plays in the mastering of life itself.

Beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological problems that over time have become naturalised. In practice, a lawn is hard to maintain. It is perennially thirsty. Fertilisers and weedkillers pollute and poison. Mowers and blowers are costly, noisy and damaging to the environment. And, crucially, lawns are the grave of biodiversity. Wildlife has little to feed on and nowhere to hide.

As climate change provides dramatic proof of our unsustainable relationship with nature, artificial turf has become a popular alternative to grass in countries that now routinely experience severe droughts. However, laying green plastic carpets made of recycled car tires over already compromised ecosystems is far from the kind of solution we need. It is becoming apparent that the lawn is a manifestation of our deep disconnect with nature: the materialisation of our lack of understanding, or care, for the complex relationships woven across plants, soil and our cultural histories.

Just as during the Enlightenment art instilled our love affair with the lawn, today’s artists are determined to untangle the complex aesthetic, ideological and ecological knots that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we’d be better off without it.

Martin Roth’s installations of Persian carpets sown with grass seeds question our desire to control nature on the grounds of our cultural conceptions and, ultimately, to disregard the natural ebbs and flows that characterise organic life. In different but related ways, Amsterdam-based artist Diana Scherer grows grass roots into patterned moulds to challenge the nature/culture dichotomy. “What does the term “natural” mean in the Anthropocene?” the artist asks through her installations and photographs. Scherer’s work reveals grasses as complex organisms whose networked existence is defined by time and space in ways that often remain invisible to us.

Pointing to ecological sustainability, in 1997 Lois Weinbergerplanted a meadow of plants that grew freely among disused train tracks in Kassel, Germany. Almost two decades later, Australian artist Linda Tegg grew a meadow of native grasses and other indigenous plants outside the State Library Victoria in Melbourne. Her project attracted wildlife to an otherwise sterile, paved urban area and envisioned a landscape in which ecological and cultural balance are two sides of the same coin.

Artists are also inviting us to rethink our relationship with the lawn from the ground up by prioritising biology over aesthetics. In Revival Field Mel Chin filled a swath of land with grasses and other plants to test their ability to absorb pollutants from soil compromised by industrial activities. In a similar vein, Frances Whitehead’s Slow Cleanup project, which ran between 2008 and 2012 in Chicago, enlisted the help of plants to regenerate the polluted soil around abandoned gas stations. Petroleum and other pollutants can be absorbed by soil microbes attracted to phenols and sugars exuded by the roots of some plants. Rather than simply providing recreational spaces, Whitehead’s new urban gardens actively engaged communities to learn about plants and ecology.

Whether addressing the implicit meaning of lawn aesthetics, foregrounding the complexity of plant life, inviting us to reconsider the importance of biodiversity in our gardens, or educating us about the regenerative properties of plants, artists (often in collaboration with scientists) have sparked our curiosity and, most importantly, demonstrated that our responsibility to care for our gardens extends beyond the wellbeing of our families. The pollinators, the water, the soil, the air, and the invisible networks of fungi and bacteria that support life on this planet matter now more than ever. No garden is too small to make a difference; it’s never too late to rewild.

So Wasp called Bulkhead and Bumblebee numbnodes.

But they ARE robots, numbnuts technically could've worked, right? Idk maybe I just REALLY want a transformer to swear. Also fuck off Wasp.