WELCOME TO PARADISE: GARDEN, DOCUMENTATION, DINNER

Exploring the meaning of art in our current social situation and its nutritional value – with all the phrase connotes – brings up a number of topics: the economic status of art as it relates to other statuses (personal, social, ideological) as well as its possible non-status or outside-status. The impetus for this exploration was a typical debate on a web forum begun with the rather predictable question: “Why should I go to the theatre if I don’t have enough money to buy bread?” The debate moved in the direction of condemning art as having no useful value, that nobody needs it in times of crisis, and that it is a drain on taxpayers’ money. This sort of commonsense approach triggers fundamental questions not only about the meaning of art and culture, but also about basic human values and the principles of a given society.

It opens questions about the sense and meaning of art that have become more urgent in the time of crisis, the economic crisis also being a crisis of values. What is art’s function in society? Is it an engine of society or redundant excess value? Even if it encounters repression – ideological and financial – it must endure. It must develop strategies of survival, not only for itself, but also for the whole of society. Society not only emerged out of culture, but is a culture. At a time when society perceives marginalia (money) as its essence, and therefore sees its existence as marginal, society is undergoing a process of disintegration and transforming into its antithesis. When everyone in society (even art itself in the frame of cultural capitalism) is focused on the idea of art’s reduced usefulness, when the circulation of desire that produces surplus value is justified only by bare needs, we find ourselves in a state of war, a state of plundering, each man for himself.

Two tasks emerged from the above questions: the first task was to maintain art’s surplus value in the most concrete way possible, and at the same time make it accessible and communicative; the second task was to test ways in which art could reflect its own conditions of production and how it could be to some extent liberated from them.

From this starting point, it wasn’t far to the idea of a garden. The most primary way of producing food is the cultivation of plants, which is in itself a gesture of culture. A group of artists created a garden on public-private space and thus literally became cultivators (cultural workers) while at the same time creating public good. In addition, they posed question about the surplus value of art – it if exists at all – and what separates art from skills. How does the art of gardening differ from art that gardens? Does art even need this kind of self-definition, which on one hand seeks a concept of virtuosity, and on the hand that romantic “something else”? Does it require the modernist self-sufficiency of the Artist and the Artifact, or does it exist somewhere in-between, somewhere beyond definition? 

In a time when the production of food (and seeds) has become increasingly privatized, potentially jeopardizing the self-sufficiency of individuals and whole societies, and when art is dismissed by some as a useless appendage to be thrown overboard in times of crisis, a group of artists set out to find the intersection of ideas underpinning these two phenomena. During the research, certain artistic approaches evolved based on the artists’ own socio-economic situation in which a two-fold undernourishment surfaced – physical and spiritual (intellectual). The trans-art action communicated with the public and triggered reflection on certain topics: the life of a garden vs. the life of art; a garden as a lost/paradise; a garden – work or pleasure.

During the research project a collective was formed that worked from May to November 2012 out of the theatrical institute Maska Ljubljana. Its members included Bara Kolenc, Teja Reba, Loup Abramovici, and Rado Jaušovec.