As in the story, a garden has the ability to displace, distort and even suspend time. Gardens fight with and against time, which gives them their radical anachrony and their vibrant heterochronic character. Certainly, as Lorette Coen states, \u201cgardens are the art of time.\u201d In a garden, linear temporality becomes broken: time unfolds, folds, and breaks. The garden as art<\/em>, as Javier Maderuelo proposes, is a place built by man to become a home, but at the same time it always retains a centrifugal character, inspiring the desire to inhabit a better world and our escapist fantasies. If Foucault defined the garden as a heterotopic space, a place outside of any place<\/em>, Jean Fisher expresses the powerful heterochrony and anachrony that runs through a garden, and affirms that it always \u201cis a time outside of time [\u2026] that momentary state of suspension, where the limitations of institutionalized thought dissolve and give way to the play of other imaginative and, until then, unimaginable possibilities, of the self, of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n Claude Monet, Les Nymph\u00e9as Blancs, 1899<\/p><\/div>\n Hand in hand with the garden, concerns of contemporary curatorship tend towards the search for a symbiotic interrelation between art works, and also between art work and the visitor: a shared time. In this way, heterochrony, when it occurs, comes to life as a meaning or experience of the common work, articulated between artist and viewer, like a garden that is always open and plural, like a garden to be discovered<\/em>. In this garden, one\u2019s identity is diluted and becomes part of the environment. The visitor merges and becomes confused with the trees and flowers, with the shadows that embrace him and the branches that intertwine with his body. He ceases to be the owner, for a time, of his time, of himself, and begins to live, as Horacio proposed, in a sweet deceit<\/em>.<\/p>\n Thus, it is not wrong to affirm that the garden is, or can become, that it must become<\/em>, a perpetually anachronistic, dislocated place, one which no longer fits in as a refuge<\/em>to return to, a<\/em>return home<\/em>, and also a space to inhabit in the most convoluted and exciting heterochrony, the cohabitation and confusion of multiple temporalities. Art can, it must<\/em>, play with this possibility in order to create powerful fictions where everything takes place under new space-time coordinates, where the individual becomes intertwined with the environment and is lost through time. Sometimes, though, this does happen, in which others only \u201cdress up as a garden\u201d to serve as decoration, to amuse and surprise the spectator who is passing through\u00a0<\/em>or who tries to enjoy an immersive experience<\/em>, under the guise of novelty.<\/p>\n The exhibition Teatro Jard\u00edn Bestiarium\u00a0(Theater Garden Bestiary,<\/em> 1989) comes to mind. Curated by Chris Dercon, it was installed with a desire to overcome the traditional notion of a group exhibition in which artists present works separately, in order to instead reinforce the permeability of the common, thus emphasizing the existence of a flexible and open nexus that would truly allow the viewer to participate in that garden to be discovered<\/em>. In this case, the garden as speculative fiction offered the possibility of generating an \u201cinvertebrate\u201d exhibition.<\/p>\n Antonio Pierre Monguin, Le curieux, 1823<\/p><\/div>\n But it\u00b4s not always like that. Many times, the garden weakens, with only its landscaped, colorful and bright appearance preserved. As Rosario Assunto criticizes in Ontolog\u00eda y teleolog\u00eda del jard\u00edn\u00a0(Ontology and Teleology of the Garden)<\/em>, blind utilitarianism ends up ruining and destroying gardens. Many times, in contemporary art, these pseudo-gardens\u00a0<\/em>proliferate, disguised as other spaces<\/em>, but which are only intended for consumption and entertainment. \u201cWho is the garden for when culture has already established itself as the great global park?\u201d asks Jorge Luis Marzo.<\/p>\n It is symptomatic to reread Est\u00e9tica relacional<\/em>(Relational Aesthetics, 1998) by Nicolas Bourriaud and see how, when a garden is alluded to, it is to refer to its ability to become decoration. Thus, he speaks of the garden to justify the premise that the exhibition has become the basic unit<\/em>, to the detriment of the individual work, and to argue the supposed change of paradigm from the \u201cexhibition-store\u201d to the \u201cexhibition-decoratiion.\u201d This is when he brings up the exhibition Jard\u00edn de invierno\u00a0<\/em>(Winter Garden, 1975) by Marcel Broodthaers, which the artist himself had conceived as an outline of the idea of \u200b\u200bdecoration<\/em>.<\/p>\n Actually, I only intend to point out the perverse nature that often involves \u201cinhabiting,\u201d \u201ccreating,\u201d \u201cactivating\u201d or \u201cclaiming\u201d the garden, whether by the artist or the curator on duty. In many cases, the heterochrony becomes blurred, flattened and extinguished, like that homogeneous and empty time\u00a0<\/em>that Benjamin spoke of, and the anachronism, the ability to escape from time, from the world, and return to the origin, becomes a fun experience<\/em>, which leaves us with a comforting aftertaste that lasts for a while, like a refreshing soft drink.<\/p>\n This new condition of the garden at the service of \u201cexperience\u201d denies the true ontology of the garden as a space-time where anything can happen and nothing is set a priori, and where linear time gets entangled and breaks down. When the garden appears as decoration and a fetish of nature, as an alienating simulacrum, it offers itself as an accomplice to a type of artistic proposal destined for solipsistic consumption. Under the careful tutelage of the relational artist\u00a0<\/em>that Bourriaud invoked, the cultivated garden unfortunately takes on the status of a police garden\u00a0<\/em>where, without the need to be made explicitly, the orders are always pre-set, like \u201ca place in which a gardener controls yours and weeds and directs growth towards pious and wonderful forms,\u201d as Martha Rosler points out. Against this police and spectacular garden<\/em>, as frequent as it is insubstantial, we can now imagine expressions or manifestations of that other garden that lies behind the white wall when we open the green door: the garden to be discovered<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Cover image: Isabel Villar, Tigre bebiendo,\u00a0<\/em>2020)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I will open this text as I would a door, with an image behind a threshold. Behind a white wall, through a green door, a lush garden, almost a forest,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2747,"featured_media":35366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6150],"tags":[],"coauthors":[6729],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Claude-Monet.jpg\")
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