Category Archives: public art

Henry Moore's sculpture in landscape and garden.

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Henry Moore said that “I would rather have a piece of sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in or on the most beautiful building I know.” He made a good point and when traveling by train I often think of his remark that one should not waste one’s time reading – because it is such a wonderful opportunity to look out of the window and think and think. Railway lines make a cleaner cut than roads, producing a cross-section through the land.

I very much like Moore’s sculpture in the landscape but I’m not so sure about putting it in gardens – they are are too close to ‘the most beautiful building I know’. The sculpture in Kew Gardens is a case in point. It looks right because it has a ‘landscape setting’

Post-modern Garden of Eden

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Post-modern Garden of Eden

Originally uploaded by allspice1

Christine writes that:

Claus Emmeche and Steven Sampson in ‘The Garden Machine’ describe the effect of Postmodernism on art and architecture (p59);

“Today’s postmodern art and architecture also transcend the modern idea of the creating artistic subject, who in a sovereign fashion generates originals by natural creativity (art as ‘poiesis’). Instead art becomes a simulation where copies enter into a combination of significations that are actually not new, but which respresent small games that can be transmitted onwards in a time infinity of circulating signs….these metaphorical demands on the image are dissolved in a series of rituals that organises the continued simulation of art in the universal media of mass society.”

While there is an overriding sense that the ‘original’ has been lost in the overwhelming proliferation of the simulacrum: this is not necessarily true.

Australian architect Richard Francis Thorpe has an interesting analysis of the problems of Post Modernism in design in his article ‘The [im]possibility of slowness’ in UME Magazine. http://www.umemagazine.com/scrollSpreads.aspx.