Organized by the Queens Museum of Art, Down The Garden Path: The Artist's Garden After Modernism (26 June - 9 October 2005) examines the contested terrain of the garden, offering a selection of divergent positions taken both from lived experience and scholarship.
“Gardens are a relatively young subject for academic study. They have often been subsumed by art history and considered lower still than landscape architecture, which has only recently gained its own independence as a sub-field of architecture. This is not surprising when traditionally the emphasis has been placed on garden design, strangely divorced from meaning. The idea that gardens have an ideology is a contentious point for garden historians, creating a divide between scholars who know gardens to be cultural constructs that must be seen in a broader sociological and political perspective, and those who consider gardens as neutral or pure, devoid of political or professional interests.”
Read also Ken Johnson's review of the exhibition in the New York Times. “This big, messy, uneven, but - for patient and interested viewers - intellectually stimulating show at the Queens Museum of Art is about how contemporary artists have cultivated gardens in fantasy and reality.” But watch out for his liberal use of the word ”traditionally” and whatever comes after that. Well, it was used only twice, but twice too many. The idea and form of the garden is anything but fixed.
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