#split rocker

Jeff Koons Split-Rocker, 2000 stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, internal irrigation system, and live flowering plants 37 x 39 x 36 feet (1128 x 1189 x 1097 cm) © Jeff Koons

Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Jeff Koons Split-Rocker, 2000 stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, internal irrigation system, and live flowering plants 37 x 39 x 36 feet (1128 x 1189 x 1097 cm) © Jeff Koons 

Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Jeff Koons’s flowering sculpture Split-Rocker, at once imposing and adorable, has cast a spell on New York City’s Rockefeller Center. How difficult was it to get flowers to grow in that shape? Derek Blasberg interviews Matt Donham, Koons’s landscape designer on the project, to find out.  

Derek Blasberg: What do you think is the most unexpected thing about Split-Rocker?

Matt Donham: The sheer quantity of plants. It’s staggering. And the fact that they are alive.

DB: What are the numbers?

MD: Fifty thousand flowers. One hundred cubic yards of soil. There’s an internal drip irrigation system which is zoned based on sun orientation and the slope of the soil, forty zones in total, each tweaked to a different part of the sculpture’s watering needs. You need a little water here, a lot over there, no water there.

DB: Is that the most difficult part of the installation?

MD: Aside from erecting the sculpture, balancing moisture is the toughest part. Don’t forget, we have plants growing upside down and sideways, and they are living things that need to be kept alive and growing.

DB: That’s an important point: This isn’t a big vase. The plants are growing up there!

MD: Yes, they are. Split-Rocker is a garden and the Rockefeller Center gardeners will be carefully tending to it all summer. The plants will grow substantially: the plugs that are now a few inches tall could grow a foot or more in height.

DB: But if they die—

MD: We will replace some of them, and others will be subsumed by their neighbors; the stronger plants will crowd out the weaker ones. Jeff is really interested in the order-to-chaos that happens over the life of the installation. Right now, the image and form of the sculpture are very distinct, but as we move toward the end of the summer it will become wilder.