Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From:
Introduction: Lines of Work
John Beardsley
Dig into the projects presented in this book—which effectively constitutes a midcareer retrospective of Ken Smith's work—and you may find yourself wondering: What on earth does he think he is up to? Is he a landscape architect or an installation artist? A public servant or a provocateur? An elite gardener or a populist? A careful site sculptor or an in-your-face simulator? The perplexing truth is that Ken Smith is unapologetically all of these things—and others as well. In the space of two short decades, he has worked on an astonishing array of projects, from public parks in Toronto, Santa Fe, and Orange County, California, to private gardens in posh communities like Sagaponack, New York; from over-the-top art installations of glowing topiary, artificial stone, and plastic flowers to serene urban plazas in Manhattan, a colorful public schoolyard in Queens, and a community garden in Brooklyn. All of which prompts yet another question: How on earth are we to make sense of this?
It might help to know that Smith regards his practice as in some ways analogous to a fashion house, with different product lines for different market niches. Just as a clothing designer might produce both haute couture and prêt-à-porter, Smith responds to various client demands, from private to public, from high-end to pro bono. He also likens his training to that of a budding fashion designer, someone who works in another shop—in his case, the various offices of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz—before taking a distinctive silhouette and starting his own house. While analogies between fashion and landscape architecture might seem a stretch, Smith is quick to point to the efforts of curators and writers like Richard Martin and Harold Koda to present fashion as a sophisticated art with its own cultural histories, whether in the service of elite or popular culture. Their attention to their subject as social phenomenon as well as medium and craft suggests that an equally careful interrogation of the modes, meanings, and cultural uses of landscape is possible—which is very much what Ken Smith is about. Whatever the intended audience for his work and however much humor or provocation it might express, Smith wants to be sure you know he takes his work seriously—and he wants you to take it seriously too.
It might also help to know that Smith came of age as a designer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the discourses of art were dominated by questions of representation, especially ideas around the appropriation and redeployment of found objects along with imagery and materials from mass culture. Smith was no stranger to these questions: as a precocious kid growing up in Iowa in the 1960s and 1970s, he was a regular visitor to the Des Moines Art Center, then amassing a significant collection of pop art by figures including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. His interest in representation was later honed by reading the work of the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, whose essays in the book Simulacra and Simulation suggested that an attachment to the "real" was being replaced by an affection for the copy, and that simulations in any event were being supplanted by wholly invented environments—simulacra—for which no precedent exists in the real world: think Disney, where space and time are collapsed into landscapes that bear little relation to history or geography as once we thought we knew them.
Smith's engagement with appropriation and simulation was reinforced in his earliest work with Martha Schwartz. He joined the Office of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz in time to do "some lowly production work" on Schwartz's Splice Garden for the roof of the Whitehead Research Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1986). The garden featured two zones of plastic shrubs and Astroturf, one suggestive of a Japanese garden, the other of formal French parterres; the two zones were "spliced" together to evoke the genetic research pursued at the institute. Appropriation and simulation continue to be central to Smith's work, particularly in his use of gaudy artificial flowers for the Hotel Eden and Cooper-Hewitt Triennial WallFlowers installations, or fake rocks and plastic boxwoods for his rooftop "camouflage garden" for the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Smith's strategies confirm his engagement with the notion that nature in our time is entirely constructed: even climate, as Bill McKibben argues in his depressing book The End of Nature, is a product of culture.
