Couch potatoes: New York plants go to the movies
Sebastian Smith
From “Avatar” to “Lord of the Rings” plants are no strangers to
playing big movie roles, but no one’s ever shot a film the plants
themselves can watch. Until now.
In a New York art gallery, seven house plants have spent the last
seven weeks watching “Strange Skies,” probably the first travel
documentary for a vegetable audience.
The movie by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats consists of idyllic
Italian skies recorded over a two-month period and condensed into a
six-minute dawn-to-dawn span.
Sitting attentively in cinema-like rows a majesty palm partially
blocking the view of rubber plants behind the potted audience basks in
an electric version of Italian sunshine.
Keats who previously used footage of bees pollinating flowers to make
pornography for plants says an aspiring film maker can’t compete with
the likes of “Avatar” director James Cameron.
“But then I realized there’s a much larger audience there are many
more plants than people that were not being serviced,” he said. “I
wanted basically to provide plants with what companies such as Disney or
MGM provide humans.”
In the film, projected onto a fluttering white cloth, clear dawn
gives way to high cirrus, the occasional airplane trail, a fleeting
cameo fly-by of a bird, then dusk.
At night, beams from a romantic quarter moon hit the trunk of one of
the ficus trees.
The movie has no sound and the plants, of course, do not applaud.
Other than an alarming loss of leaves among the ficuses there is no
discernible reaction.
But Stephen Squibb, a fellow at the AC Institute, which hosted the
installation in a Chelsea gallery, said these viewers are unusually
riveted: photosynthesis, or the process of turning light into energy,
means the movie keeps them alive.
“This is how they eat,” Squibb said. The New York natives even get a
taste of Italy. “They’re literally changing their diet.”
Keats sees lessons for visiting humans, who can survey the scene from
two minimalist white benches.
“Clearly this is an imperfect representation of place and that’s for
me part of what the work deals with. How do we experience the world and
how reliable is it?” he asked. “So much of the world we get on screens.
By watching the plants watching the sky there’s something a bit sad and
sordid.”
One visitor, artist Rob Tarbell, enjoyed seeing plants center stage.
“It’s good to see a respectful inclusion of something live,
capitalizing on what they benefit from rather than having any aspect of
cruelty or a freak show,” Tarbell said.
Another visitor, photographer Abbas Ebrahimi, also expressed
admiration for the green audience. “Plants are better than us. We die
and go, while in spring they come back each time.”
But after contemplating the installation for a few minutes, he
declared: “It doesn’t mean anything to me at all. It’s just trees and
light.”
“For some people it might mean something. Maybe if they smoke grass,”
he allowed.
Keats, currently doing a residency at upstate New York’s Yaddo artist
colony, is intent on furthering his exploration of plant sensibilities.
He plans a “restaurant for plants” at a California museum.
AFP
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