Category: Mainstream

While I bring a major rant on biodiversity and the media to the boil, here’s something that won’t be part of that mix. I’m sorry I missed it.

On Saturday, Aug. 16, at 3 p.m., the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park will host artist Leah Gauthier ((Leah Gauthier has an interesting web site, and is clearly into agricultural biodiversity as food and as art, so hats off to her and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.)) … The DeCordova Annual features Gauthier’s large installation entitled “Melon, 2008.” For this installation, Gauthier planted eight different types of heirloom melons on the Pollack Family Terrace. … This installation has grown throughout the exhibition, as the melons started as mere plantings and now have developed into mature fruit. In her Artist Talk and performance … Gauthier will harvest and prepare the melons with visitors. Taste is an essential element in this work, as is community building around food. By inviting viewers to have a unique and culinary experiences based on the richness of biodiversity, “Melon” will speak directly to the impoverishing influence of agricultural modernization. Gauthier’s work stems from the idea of social sculpture and the nourishing capacity of art as well as from a viewpoint of art as an action and not an object. … Gauthier’s work is … particularly interesting … because her installation is entirely organic. By placing agriculture in a specifically cultural context — the museum — Gauthier asks viewers to re-imagine the growing, harvesting, preparation, and consumption of food so that they may re-connect with some of humanity’s most fundamental activities.

And you know, it kinda sorta makes sense. You can try this sort of thing in a supermarket, and get quizzical looks. You can do it at a Farmers’ Market, but I suspect you would be preaching to the choir. Art lovers, though, could be a fertile audience. We’ve blogged about this sort of thing before — rice art and that bloke who used sorghum and wheat to mimic a housing development — mostly as an affectionate aside. But I wonder, maybe this really is the way to go to get the message across. After all, if a pickled shark can get everyone in a tizz, why not a frozen coconut?

Maybe I can get a Guggenheim to cultivate my garden? In any case, It’ll be fun to see how Gauthier’s Sharecropper thang works out.