as an outsider i also never really understood this project. when reading the blogs it always seemed as though these gardens went no where and nothing was really visibly done, with a few exceptions, but to me it seemed like these garden were just a lot of moss. i didnt really see any creativity in any of the plots. but please feel free to tell me if i am completely wrong on this observation

well, in defence of those who worked hard on this...how creative can you really get planting things? i think some of the groups made their spots look really nice...i just dont see what it had to do with liberal arts, place, or anything in general

oh, anonymous one [aka Jon Beauchamp] - where to begin?

It's unfortunate that you chose to not take part in the project, and I am assuming your having received a grade refelcting your lack of participation in the project is the motivation for this naive criticism of PLANT!.

In all honesty, I felt that this project offered endless possibilities - that any participant could continue to explore personal interests, while engaging new disciplines and try to better understand one's effect on their place, etc.

[see http://plant.g-rad.org: "... to better understand "place" in terms of geography, a concept, topography, history, community, science, botany, the environment, psychogeography, emotions, situations and any other way imaginable...]

The idea of using empty space as a garden was not about planting or agriculture necessarily, it was a prompt to get participants and audience thinking about a tangible way to engage these empty spaces and in return the relations between people it creates. Thinking about art in this way (beyond the object) can be considered postmodern - though I think your understanding and use of the word "postmodern" may need a little more clarity. It seems your main criticism of the project is that it was too "postmodern" and lacked direction. Your proposed solution to the problem of avoiding "postmodernism," would have been to recreate Super Mario World? What could be more nostalgic, ironic and self-referential than that? Clearly this project would have been postmodern.

There was plenty of oppurtunity for you to engage in this project, Jon - your interest in literature, etc. - though the projects nature of being off campus seemed to make you think you could get away without doing any work. Unfortunately that is one of the problems with this project - the fact that it takes place under the gaze of an instutition automatically defines its boundaries and willingness to participate. I wish you could have experienced PLANT! on your own, with little worry of grades etc.

To those that are interested in projects similar to PLANT!, there is a book titled "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicoolas Bourriaud which attempts to create a new language when talking about art and the relationships it creates.

Again, Jon, your personal jabs were taken lightly, no offense taken.

If there are any other questions about the the PLANT! project I would be happy to field them here, otherwise feel free to email me at ben@g-rad.org.

I would like to give credit to Splinters and the supporters for taking the Calvin art department out of the subterranean and off campus.

It makes students stretch a little, work harder, and relate to others.

This MUST happen if art has a chance of being anything more than rhetoric and pretty pictures.

new project... BEEF!

All I'll say is that with a class that has a loose structure, a lot of students struggle. This class wouldn't have been asking the right questions if no one ever questioned its value. It was very hard for me to take a class like civic studio, where the onus was really on me to make the class valuable. But in the end, I learned about a lot more than the history of public art.

while i respect anonymous dude's right to BEEF! (i find it to be neccessary and cathartic, sometimes). i knew this site was in trouble when the participants failed to realize that by gardening in this particular spot they had left eastown and were operating in entirely different neighborhood all together, east hills.

researching, getting to know, and getting involved with the area in which they were working is key to understanding how a "postmodern" project such as this can affect one's sense of "place." without this essential step, i agree, the work becomes shallow. and without putting forth the effort ahead of time, i can see how it would be difficult to be engaged by it.

anyhow, i believe moving a significant part of Calvin's art department downtown and their purchase of the ladies literary club signified a commitment to getting of campus and helping their students get experience relating to people in an urban environment. "engaging" the city seems a primary goal of that college, and it may be that you are enrolled at the wrong institution for you because it only seems as if this commitment will grow in the very near future.

also, i believe that joe post is very funny.

actually, anthony i think that is a really great point. and i think it is right for the author to challenge the class. (i hope they didn't take my previous comment as a too personal of a dig... it was an immediate reaction to something that bugged me.) but yeah, i totally feel your civic studio call. for the most part i feel like at the time i wasn't actually learning much of anything at all - and it is even know difficult to describe what "skill" i learned by taking that class. however by the end i came to realize that enrolling in civic studio was kind of a life changing experience, and caused me to completely reevaluate what i think about the ways cities work, and art's place in that structure.

in a "postmodern" class like this, you really do get what you give.

ugh, and now i am totally late to work.

I truly miss discussions of this nature. When I was at Kendall I constantly questioned the value of each project I was assigned vs. the time and effort it took. There were great professors and weak professors, motivated students and lazy ones. It boils down to:

a) Some projects are a waste of time
b) There are always a few students who do a great job on these projects anyway
c) Some projects are incredibly interesting and meaningful
d) There are always a few students who don't put in much effort on these projects anyway
e) Students of each sort have trouble understanding the other
f) They're BOTH right

i am struck by how the success of this project is evident in this series of comments, as academic art now resides in the realm of discourse and language. the almost visceral reaction by john- (i love using the t-shirt to stain the deck as an act of defiance)- speaks to PLANT!'s effectiveness in terms of the class

it's true that i was openly favoring this project in the class voting time, and part of me fels like i should have remained more impartial. However, i still believe this was the strongest proposal with the most potential as a learning experience and the most relevant to the theme
by the way, that's liberal arts and "PLACE" not "SPACE"- this is a key difference, and not understanding this difference may be the source of your dismissal.

after all, from talking to students, i was not the only one who learned from this project, who was transformed by its own version of sculpture in the classroom, and who found it meaningful in terms of my relationship to Grand Rapids, the "place" where I live and work.

in tems of the critique of the project and the class's postmodernism, well- this is the ideological field in which we operate, our "age" using the terminology of our textbook, and there is an aspect of positioning built into the postmodern art world. Not only how we are positioned as citizens to our place, but how our work fits into the world of art and it's discourse, and again the strength of this project emerges: land art, site-specificity, minimalism, relational aesthetics, etc. this becomes one aspect of the project's politics. As discourse itself has become the "site" for artmaking, i find PLANT! refreshing and innovative as it situates that site as a certain simultaneous overlap with our neighborhoods. this is exciting for a liberal arts college that is sometimes thought of as an isolated entity.

Well it is true that Calvin can be a bit isolated. I never really minded that and in fact was quite comfortable with it, and maybe that was my biggest problem with plant.

i didnt really think too much about what kind of statement wearing the t-shirt just to dirty it up was making, but now that you point it out it does make a lot of sense. i'll have to wear it again when i go back to finish the deck ;)

i also understand that we are in the "age" of postmodernism, but i have never really been comfortable with it. to be honest when i signed up for the sculpture intro class i thought we would learn more about classical sculpture, which we did a little with the plaster casting (which was probably my favorite part of the course). i guess my biggest problem is that i'm really not inspired my modern art and such. like when i go to a museum i always spend the most time in the sections with medieval art and greek and roman art, although, on my last trip to the philly art museum i did go to check out the duchamp section to take a look at the pieces we talked about in class.

and, dear splinters, it doesnt really bother me that you openly supported your favorite, you're allowed to have an opinion too, but i think a secret ballot for the final round would have made it more fair. i dont think its too big of a deal since plant probably would have won anyway, but maybe not by such an embarrasingly huge margin.

and i guess i should address benner's rant, or counter-rant, whichever the case may be. i wasnt saying that Mario would have been more or less po-mo, but i do believe it would have been a lot more fun, mainly because it's nostaligic. i think it could have made a beautiful statement about how the pressures of society (liberal arts colleges included) push more and more children into the world of video games. even calvin has a pretty large if reclusive gaming community. however, i mainly supported mario over plant be cause i love old school mario games and am more or less indifferent to flora.

and like i said, i didnt totally blow off the project the whole time, we had a killer idea (i talked to splinters about it afterwards and he agreed that it would have been pretty cool.) my partner and i decided early on (while we were looking for a site) that appropriating elements from other sites would be cool. it would be a way to unite all the neighborhoods in a fashion as well as to bring plant together as a whole. i was pretty excited by this idea and actually created an alter ego to make it like a mystery story. my idea was to take a person who is seemingly hostile (aka Booster, yeah, that was me) to the idea of the project and have him flame on this site. then my partner and i would gradually take something from each site one at a time and this non-person would be to blame. it would seem like someone who didnt like the idea was just trying to mess with everyone. Then, on the day we presented the project everyone involved would find their missing item together with everyone elses in our site. my partner and i readied our site for planting, but due to our dreadfully conflicting schedules we were never really free the same nights (because such theivery can only be properly done at night). So we decided to just pull an all nighter the night before all the tours of the project and lift something from every site and put it on ours. unfortunatley my partner had a lacrosse game and was gone for pretty much the entire night (if i recall correctly). So in the end we only had a freshly weeded and mulch'd lot to show for ourselves. But more or less my entusiasm for the project waned as i realised that stealing plants wasnt really feasible.

so like i said, its not like i just decided that i hated the project and wouldnt do anything for it at all ever, it was more that my partner and i couldnt really do anything as a team and have no idea of how to get around GR to al lthe sites to steal the plants by myself. either way, if the plants were taken or no, i dont really think i would have learned anything about "place" or not.

finally, i almost hesitate to say it, almost. but Ben Schaafsma, i was giving my honest reaction to the project as a whole because i think that everyone's opinions are important to understanding it as a whole, not just the ones who loved it. (it was a nice bit of catharsis too, as George pointed out). i was doing my best not to come off like i was flaming the project. yes, there were a lot nastier things i could have said but i tried to keep it as neutral as possible. I really dont appreciate your overall tone and attitude. I'm just giving my retrospective thoughts on the project, you dont need to be a condescending asshole just because you disagree with them.

john - yes, I apologize for my antagonizing and condescending tone. it was very inappropriate. though your comments seemed to be aimed at individuals rather than a valid criticism of the project. i should not have fed this troll. because now i seem like a jerk. though your criticism of lack of direction, empathetically reiterated by George and Anthony, is right on. I found myself struggling with the same kinds of things.

as splinters has pointed out, this project can be seen as successful by the conversation that is taking place here; whether pointing out a projects strengths or weaknesses, this is criticism.

your idea for your site would have been so great, really. i considered something similar for our fulton/division site.

what did you think of Etant Donnes? I have never seen it myself, but seem to reference Duchamp's interpretation of the gaze often in the scultures and things that I make.

Also, you mentioned your interest in medieval and roman art and architecture - do you think that any of the pre-modern interest in material and ritual that was discussed in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, is connected to your interest in this era? Do you think that these ideas were represented in the PLANT! project at all?

Some of the problems that arose seem to be inevitable with all class projects. Overall I think PLANT! was great, but because it was happening during my last semester at Calvin while I prepared for my BFA show, i'm actually glad i didn't participate. while i think i could have made the best out of it and it would have been worthwhile, the body of work i was making would have suffered. there are only so many hours in a day. but that doesn't seem to be the same as John's complaint.

reading this just reinforces an idea i've had for a long time, that at least some level comtemporary art should be mandatory for all art students. the project was very connected to minimalism, process art, relational aesthetics, and art as political activism. but how many students in the class had a working knowledge of any of those things?

another thing that this discussion makes evident is the curious way that relational art pulls in all adjacent social forms, whether it wants to or not. PLANT! was a part of a class, so that social form was evident throughout. other features of a social landscape, cliques, jealousy, rivalry, and others also became a part of the piece. i think that the use of nicknames contributed to this. i'd read a blog by people that i knew, but the nicknames kept their identities hidden, creating a feeling of exclusivity. while this had an affect on the relational aspect of the work, i'm not sure if it was a positive one. then again, if simply affecting inter-human relations is the goal of realtional art, who says it needs to be positive?