ALISA OCHOA

IN THE MIDST

Ben took me to visit one of his childhood playgrounds in Costa Mesa, California. This place would eventually broaden my concept of sculpture as a social space and inspire my Sunbeams of Health installation. The playground is a landscape that symbolizes the topographical diversity of California. The composition of these symbolic elements of Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario 1 creates a meditative space for refreshment and contemplation, bordered by two banal, glass office towers and blank walls of a parking garage. It’s a place for paper-pushers to eat lunch, for data-entry clerks to rest their eyes, for staff personnel to exchange gossip and for couples to make out.

The meaning of Noguchi’s abstract garden is fixed only by the imagination of the observer.

Some landscape environments are designed to be seen from one privileged vantage point, whereas others, like Noguchi’s California Scenario, are conceived of as a continuum, with the goal of establishing a particular set of experiences based on moving through that space. A heightened sense of spatial concentrations is achieved because an illusion is maintained as one walks throughout the garden. It depends on perception; everything is not revealed at once, which suggests that it continues indefinitely.2 This type of garden suggests a temporality that moves back and forth, between past and present (and occasionally the future), but never in a straight line of progress. California Scenario and most places creates a “midst” in which we see ourselves, places to be in.

There are all sorts of place-making, although not all landscape architecture, especially when it is inspired by the idea of the garden. 3 Gardens invent a place that many subjects can connect with, or access; most land art can be “entered”, however few scarcely fulfill that requirement. As interesting and often breathtaking as some creations by Earth artists can be, it is misleading to equate their work with place - making. For example, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty: rather than designing an environment, this work focuses our attention by means of a single insertion into a landscape not otherwise physically altered. Gardens, on the other hand, are typically organized exterior spaces for dwelling.

There is an expansive range of activities that are considered particularly human, yet many of those same activities can also be found in the animal world. For example, as an aid to courtship some animals use interior décor. While other species create surroundings by changing or rearranging existing conditions. The satin bowerbird courtship is perhaps the most extraordinary in the whole of the animal kingdom. The males build bower structures (a kind of arbor), that form the backdrop to a stage on which they perform courtship dances. The bower and stage are decorated with flowers, shells, beetles, and any bright objects the bird can find.

The bower spectacle echoes those of a Las Vegas dance revue, which makes the familiar (a human body) seem strange and mysterious. Feather headdresses, capes ornamented with fringes and tassels serve less to focus attention on the dancers’ physical attributes than to transform them into something fantastic, strange, and awe-inspiring. The model for such sensational plumage is the way plants and animals visually communicate, in particular the showy presentations that characterize rituals of mating and aggression.

I recall Siegfried and Roy’s magic show that I saw as a child. At the time, I was too overwhelmed to fully delight in the visual exuberance and excess. The showgirls, rare animals, flamboyant costumes, exaggerated gestures, and multicolored refracting lights could not keep my attention from wandering, and it wanders still. It was perhaps then I was drifting out into the blackness of the theatre; after studying the vibrating halos of the lights lining the aisle, I focused on a fixed beam of light from the back of the theatre and eventually followed that projection toward the stage. I then realized that the periphery and center stage are connected, part of the whole visual experience that interests me. At the end of the show, the bright light on Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers turned gray– ghosting the stage.

When I left Las Vegas for graduate school in Santa Barbara, California, I knew the transition would not be an easy one. So much of my work was informed by the interiors of casinos and the desert landscape. In the midst of Santa Barbara I felt displaced. Homesick and confused, I wandered toward a beach. It was an unusually clear summer afternoon, the Pacific Ocean glittered– purpled by a passing cloud– I sat watching it change colors. I remained there until dusk, searching for a more stimulating mode of production and inquiry in my art; I sought something a little less decadent and more tender. Recently, as I looked to the ocean again for answers, I realized there was a more general change in my work, which coincided with my interest in the spectacle. The surface glamour was replaced by a new, multiform and fluid kind of spectacle. The gradual changes of my work process were brought out more clearly, by means of more flexible and contemplative links between visual pleasure, enchantment, and reception beyond pop.

FOOTNOTES
1. The word scenario indicates a speculative vision.
2. Jorge Luis Borges. Garden of Forking Paths. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other writing. NY: New Directions, 1962. p. 19- 29. The main characters talk of a book, which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. A man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates others. In the fiction of Ts’ ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously— all of them. He creates in this way diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.
3. John Dixon Hunt. Greater Perfections: The Practice in Garden Theory. p. 21

© Alisa Ochoa 2010