| Susan Hiller |
What Every Gardener Knows 2003/06 Exhibition
Akademie der Künste am Hanseatenweg Klanginstallation im Außenraum
Thank to Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, and Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin.
Akademie der Künste am Hanseatenweg Klanginstallation im Außenraum
Thank to Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, and Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin.
What Every Gardener Knows
is the title of an audio work I composed in 2003 for a sculpture commission
in Germany. (Stadpark Lahr, »Genius Locii«) I based the piece
on Gregor Mendel’s theory of the transmission of inherited traits [1],
which I »translated« into a musical carillon that plays every
hour, half-hour and quarter-hour in a 12 or 24-hour cycle.
Unlike all my other works using sound, What Every Gardner Knows is invisible. The piece is designed for an outdoor or garden setting, using waterproof audio equipment appropriate for this purpose. Ideally the two loudspeakers are concealed on each side of a path or hidden amongst shrubs. When nicely installed in a garden environment, the hardware is completely hidden and the sound of my carillon resonates over a wide area like the music of church bells or the call to prayer from mosques.
What Every Gardener Knows was selected for the international exhibition »Art of the Garden« at Tate Britain in 2004, and for the curated outdoor sculpture section of »Frieze« (summer (2005). It has also been exhibited at the Rhodes & Mann Gallery in London (2004).
[1] Simple Mendelian genetics, known to all gardeners, is the basis of my outdoor carillon. Transposing Mendel's system into sound was feasible because his work proposes a series of elements in binary combinations that combine and recombine into further binaries, which I have expressed as basic chords.
Every garden is an attempt to create a perfectly controlled, predictable plant population bred according to Mendel's laws of inherited characteristics. The ghosts of dead weeds haunt every garden; weeds are simply plants that gardeners dislike and that botanists characterize by anthropomorphic terms such as invasive, aggressive, opportunistic and foreign. When Mendel made plant breeding a science, gardeners were enabled to produce internally consistent plant populations. This meant they could do more than merely eliminate weeds, they could also seek out weed-like (e.g., undesirable) traits existing within garden species, and attempt to eliminate them as well.
Mendel's system, lovingly constructed, by extension has been the basis not just of genetics but also of eugenics, the 'science' of breeding a perfect and uniform human population. My garden carillon, in contrast, plays out the Mendelian system controlling the distribution of inherited characteristics as an affirmation of diversity. What Every Gardener Knows celebrates patterns of sameness and difference, dominants and recessives, in a more profound and complicated way than at first may be appreciated, emphasizing the way Mendel’s system accounts for the transmission of invisible characteristics leading to the possibility of combining and recombining traits in complex and surprising ways. In that sense, in contrast to what could be heard as the exclusive address of church bells or the call of the muezzin, my carillon sings out to everyone, since all of us, plants and humans, are composite patterns of inherited traits – weeds and other »undesirable« or alien elements included.
Unlike all my other works using sound, What Every Gardner Knows is invisible. The piece is designed for an outdoor or garden setting, using waterproof audio equipment appropriate for this purpose. Ideally the two loudspeakers are concealed on each side of a path or hidden amongst shrubs. When nicely installed in a garden environment, the hardware is completely hidden and the sound of my carillon resonates over a wide area like the music of church bells or the call to prayer from mosques.
What Every Gardener Knows was selected for the international exhibition »Art of the Garden« at Tate Britain in 2004, and for the curated outdoor sculpture section of »Frieze« (summer (2005). It has also been exhibited at the Rhodes & Mann Gallery in London (2004).
[1] Simple Mendelian genetics, known to all gardeners, is the basis of my outdoor carillon. Transposing Mendel's system into sound was feasible because his work proposes a series of elements in binary combinations that combine and recombine into further binaries, which I have expressed as basic chords.
Every garden is an attempt to create a perfectly controlled, predictable plant population bred according to Mendel's laws of inherited characteristics. The ghosts of dead weeds haunt every garden; weeds are simply plants that gardeners dislike and that botanists characterize by anthropomorphic terms such as invasive, aggressive, opportunistic and foreign. When Mendel made plant breeding a science, gardeners were enabled to produce internally consistent plant populations. This meant they could do more than merely eliminate weeds, they could also seek out weed-like (e.g., undesirable) traits existing within garden species, and attempt to eliminate them as well.
Mendel's system, lovingly constructed, by extension has been the basis not just of genetics but also of eugenics, the 'science' of breeding a perfect and uniform human population. My garden carillon, in contrast, plays out the Mendelian system controlling the distribution of inherited characteristics as an affirmation of diversity. What Every Gardener Knows celebrates patterns of sameness and difference, dominants and recessives, in a more profound and complicated way than at first may be appreciated, emphasizing the way Mendel’s system accounts for the transmission of invisible characteristics leading to the possibility of combining and recombining traits in complex and surprising ways. In that sense, in contrast to what could be heard as the exclusive address of church bells or the call of the muezzin, my carillon sings out to everyone, since all of us, plants and humans, are composite patterns of inherited traits – weeds and other »undesirable« or alien elements included.
