© 2024 Cristina Rüesch
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THE GARDEN
I would like to tell you something about the garden today. Not my garden, I don't have a garden. I want to talk about the garden as a concept, about the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Delights, about gardening, about Monet's garden. About the Garden of Death.
Monet loved his garden very much and he loved gardening. I don't want one myself. I have one plant on the windowsill and that's enough for me, and it dries up the poor thing and looks sadly out of the window as it rains outside.
„I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.“ That's what Monet said about his garden. He gardened and painted. And that sounds wonderful: gardening and painting and painting in the garden. Monet spent years transforming his garden into a living en plein air painting. Planting thousands of flowers in straight-lined patterns. Monet painted snapshots, fleeting moments, atmospheric time lapses of his garden. In art history lessons, I was told that in order to understand what the Impressionists wanted to achieve, you should look at your surroundings with half-closed eyes. The shapes are undefined, details no longer play a role. Where light falls and where shadow is, it becomes all the clearer.
Monet's garden was a living en plein air-painting and he contributed to the development of outdoor painting. Him along the invention of tube paints.
„The Artist's Garden at Giverny“ (1900): Take a look at the purple flowers, the fertile soil painted with terra di Siena and vermilion, and the impressionistic light shimmering through the various shades of green in the leaves. I want to lie down, flat on the ground in this garden - in this painting! The playful brushstrokes tickle my ears, the brushstrokes that are like leaves, blades of grass, flowers or flickering light. he Impressionists aimed to capture fleeting, ephemeral moments of light. In response, I think of Marxist art historian T. J. Clark's statement: “Painting is material. Materialism, for it, is not one view of the nature of the world among others, but the view - the felt reality - it cannot help but inhabit.”
By thinking of the materiality of painting, it occurs to me that painting and gardening are not so different after all. The painter lets the vegetation grow. Brushstroke by brushstroke. He chooses which flowers and which tree should grow in what corner. He adds material to material, takes it away again, digs holes to fill them anew with more and more material.
I would like to step into Monet's painted garden. Is this the place of longing that everyone talks about? The garden is considered a refuge, a place where humans and what we call nature meet under certain rules, far from the dangers of forests and steppes. Are gardens safe places? Is the need for the garden a need to bring the supposed safety of the inside to the outside? And to what extent can it be considered outside if there is a fence separating the garden from another outside? An outside-outside.
Safety is a wish and not guaranteed. I remember as a child playing in my parents' garden, there were “safe areas” where the grass wasn't too long and lots of clover grew. I would walk barefoot, roll on the ground and eat the flowers. And then, there were the "dangerous areas“. One was under a plum tree, the ripe fruit fell to the ground and was immediately attacked by hordes of wasps. I didn't dare get too close, the wasps were very loud. And then, there was the area around the compost heap, where nature ran riot. The friendly and moderate lawn and clover gave way to huge stinging nettle bushes. The compost heap made me feel uneasy; worms, slugs and many large flying beetles came together there. Once I ran into a snake and my sister claims to have seen rats.
What seemed threatening to me at the time, I now observe with admiration. If you look inside the compost, all you see is a bustle of efficient, voracious, consuming and producing little cooperating creatures. A lived socialist utopia.
The bio-waste is thrown into the greedy mouth of the compost bin. Down at the bottom, the bin, seems to fall apart as if it had exploded from the inside, and brown, juicy soil seeps out of all the openings. I imagine the bin is a belly and inside are the guts. And when I look at Arcimboldo's painting “The Vegetable Gardener” (1587–1590) , I think of Donna Haraway's saying “We are no humanists, we are compostists” and how I myself have done my part to create this fertile compost by throwing the potato peelings onto the heap. Every helping hand is needed to keep the machinery of composting running.
Whether the garden is a safe place remains to be doubted, but the unrestrained planting in the Schrebergärten is probably always in danger of being wiped out by tidy and rule-loving hobby gardeners. During my research I came across a photo by Fischli & Weiß from 1990 entitled “Garden”. It shows a wide view of Swiss Schrebergärten, whose rich vegetation is restrained by strict bedding regulations. The inventor of the Schrebergarten, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, was the father of Daniel Paul Schreber, who became famous through Freud's book "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia“ (1911). Freud explains the paranoia of Schreber's son by, among other things, his repressed homosexuality and love-hate relationship with his father. The obligatory gardening and daily gymnastics introduced by the father were part of a regime of enforced heterosexuality to which his son was subjected. Any uncontrolled sexuality was punished in the same way as rampant plants and weeds in the Schrebergarten.
By contrast, in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490-1510), sexuality is lived out with pleasure. On the left side of this triptych is the Garden of Eden, on the the right, Hell. The middle picture portrays a peaceful and joyful get-together of naked people and human-animal creatures. This is the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. Some art historians consider the painting to be a warning message about worldly pleasures and the dangers of temptation. Here lies the danger: Those who have fun will go to hell (at least we will be in good company).
Yet this artwork is still subject of dispute: others view the depiction as an expression of ultimate sexual pleasure. It remains unclear what Bosch meant, the interpretation is up to the viewer. I choose the funnier version.
On the same street as my parents' house is a villa with a huge park that belongs to a rich family who use it as a vacation home. As children, we often broke into the park. It was easy, you just had to climb over a small wall and if there was no car parked in the driveway, it meant that the family wasn't there. It's a beautiful garden with lots of trees like weeping willows, maples and oaks. Stone sculptures are spread all over the park. One statue of a male nude had its penis cut off. That was a prank “by children when I was little and we used to climb into the park as a challenge”, my grandmother told me. So it seems that generations of children and teenagers used this park as a place where rules were meant to be broken. The first cigarettes and joints were smoked here, the first beers drunk, the first sexual experiences had. The fact that it is a private garden makes everything even more exciting. The plants, left to their own fate for three seasons of the year, sprout and flourish as they please.
Out of my childhood memories, this park reminds me of Nicolas Poussin's Garden of Eden. The Spring was the first in his series of paintings named Four Seasons (1660-1664).
The Garden of Eden was according to biblical narrative the first place after the creation where rules got broken. Eve takes advantage of the moment when God is floating cluelessly in the sky and is looking somewhere else. Strangely, there is no snake to be seen anywhere. “Why no serpent?”
This is the world before the Fall, a world in which Eve points to the Tree of Knowledge but does not yet reach for the fruit. Perhaps Poussin opted against the snake because Adam and Eve are two individuals capable of free choice. They chose knowledge and are prepared to disobey their Creator and even accept death in return. It is the story of personal development, of coming of age. By not depicting the biblical snake, Poussin portrays Adam and Eve as taking the entire responsibility, be it for good or for evil. They are creatures on the verge of a rebirth - transforming into living beings capable of a higher form of life.
Being able to grow means being alive.
As we know, taking care of the growing ones is part of the gardening process. You sow and water and weed and fertilize and hope that the little plants will develop as you had imagined and you mourn those who didn't make it.
Van Gogh's painting The Madhouse Garden at Saint-Rémy shows the garden of the psychiatric institution where he was hospitalized. The subject of the painting is a large pine tree, which Van Gogh himself described as a “gloomy giant” and a “proud defeated”. The tree was hit by lightning, after which its largest trunk was chopped off. The amputated trunk is the center of the painting and contrasts with the painter's lively and vibrant brushstrokes. Van Gogh made it in 1889, the first time he dared to leave the house after a psychotic episode when he tried to swallow poisonous paint. I read this panting as a plea for resilience.
He survived this suicide attempt. Father Death had to wait another year before he could collect his soul. For every human life, the gentle Death plants a flower in his raised bed - the Garden of Death (1896). The Finnish painter Hugo Simberg described gardens as “the place where the dead end up before going to Heaven”. I've always imagined limbo as a Kafkaesque waiting room in some administration office. Where time doesn't seem to pass, but paradoxically its getting later and later. I never thought about a garden.
Perhaps cemeteries, as we know them today, are inspired by this ancient idea of the “Garden of Death”. Places of peace and quiet, of flowers and tears. But also places where you can feel a kind of expectant tension. A waiting. Waiting for what? The flowers waiting to be watered and pruned, the dead to rise? Petals fading or new blossoms growing? Waiting for a new dead body to burry and seeds to be planted? Flesh to rot? The living ones to end up in the ground themselves next to their loved ones or in a lonely spot in the shadow. Waiting to be forgotten. Waiting for the wooden cross to be replaced with a gravestone.
A casual wanderer walks past during a beautiful sunny day, picks a little daisy from a grave, and plays “He loves me... he loves me not“.