A Queer Bend in the Botanical Turn

Inda Peralortega: Lexicon
Deptford X, London
18.03.16 – 14.05.16

In the language of art criticism ‘turns’ appear to have replaced ‘isms’ as the principle terminology for gathering diverse practices into more or less intelligible trends. If the tag ‘The Botanical Turn’ has not yet been coined, the growing interest of artists and curators in exploring various ways of incorporating non-human living matter into exhibition spaces suggests it may soon become prevalent. Compelled in part by the need to address society’s impact on the ecosystems that support us, the art world has become increasingly concerned with ‘culture’s’ relationship to ‘nature’, resulting in plants popping up in a multitude of white cubes and museums throughout the international art scene. In comparison to Abraham Cruzvillegas’ installation, Empty Lot, at Tate Modern, probably 2015–16’s most ambitious and large-scale attempt to repurpose the gallery as greenhouse, Lexicon, the first solo show of recent Goldsmiths graduate Inda Peralortega, was a remarkably humble, but strangely moving affair. In Deptford X’s new street-level vitrine-style gallery, twenty young Conifer brabantia pine trees hung upside down in the glare of grow lights for the two months’ duration of the exhibition, while a lone sibling, or clone, stood at one end of the space, proudly upright on a small Perspex box.

Since it is in the nature of nature to exist in a state of perpetual change, and for vegetation this flux is notably unhurried, the inclusion of living plants in exhibitions inevitably induces a decelerated fascination with flora’s slow theatrics. In order to attune to variations occurring at this speed, viewers ( at least this one ) are coaxed into a kind of temporal dilation, a certain style of meditative wonderment; displaced from the digitally conditioned immediacy of contemporary life we are required to pause, then forced to wait. In this predicament, questions abound. If the uncertainty around if, when and what might grow accompanied viewing the myriad triangular containers in the Hyundai-commissioned Tate Modern show, Lexicon elicited attention by triggering a less taxonomic curiosity: not a question of what, but one of how will these trees grow? And, if the eventual emergence of a few weeds in the vast Turbine Hall was something of an anticlimax, perhaps this indicates that the ‘what?’ of things has been somewhat exhausted, and Tino Sehgal is prescient when he posits: ‘I think the twenty-first century will hopefully be more guided by “how” questions…’ Approaching the botanical turn with this insight we may choose to ask, not ‘What grows in your garden?’ so much as, in the words of the popular English nursery rhyme, ‘How does your garden grow?’

As an instance of this new art-verdure, Peralortega’s rotating and framing of twenty trees behind a bank of glass on a busy street staged a fertile intervention into the fabric of the city. The initial visual impact offered by the spectacle of hanging conifers was, while arresting, but a precursor to further rumination, as the work, like all good art, rewarded sustained attention. Over the course of the eight weeks on show, the upended saplings in Lexicon, fed and watered daily, continued to grow and, eventually displayed a curious, though not completely unexpected movement: they began to bend. With their ‘natural’ orientation reversed, roots directed skyward, green tips pointing down, the evergreens, in their own leisurely measure, gently turned. This was a subtle and slow, but unmistakably queer, performance. And how strange, and quite contrary it was! As contemporary city dwellers we are used to passing a variety of plants in the urban environment without much thought as to what they might be able to tell us, so what an uncanny experience to feel addressed by these conifers, to have the sense that these mute trees have something to say. As consumers of art, we are primed to probe images, objects and experiences for meaning. Even so, in encountering the work this viewer was unprepared for the unsettling awareness of being performed to by something as apparently familiar and dumb as a row of trees.

So what to make of this upside-down, collective bow and its disturbance of Cartesian axes? If we take the title of the exhibition as a guide, this deviation from straightness is presented as operating within a particular kind of vocabulary. But clearly, since the trees cannot speak, and the exhibition offered no accompanying text, here the vernacular is not a catalogue of linguistic signs so much as a gesture in the lexicon of bodies. Beside and between the dominant semantic discourse, queerness communicates in the artful comportment of soma. Despite being inserted into something like a white cube, a privileged site in the production of concepts, these life forms remained fundamentally bound to the corporeal logics of light, nutrition and gravity. And our ability to relate to them reminds us ( in my case, inducing a certain shiver of surprise ) that this is how it should be. These trees-as-work-of-art appeal, not simply to be ‘read’ conceptually, but to be experienced by our own sensual bearing and movement in physical space. Observed from the pavement in this way, the green shapes behind glass appeared more suggestive, the sound of traffic more musical, and the extravagant motion of the city relentlessly alive.

Encompassing the sounds and swing of the street, the locality and its architecture thus played a crucial role. Housed on the ground floor of a new and typically insensitive, flat, grey apartment building, Deptford X’s space functioned as an antithetic enclosure for the organic matter inside, the strict grid arcade acting as formal backdrop for the swerve of green. Somewhere between gallery and public site the vitrine allows for a particular manner of viewing: twenty-four hours a day, anyone can look. A spectacle presented in this fashion is available equally to denizens of the art world and casual passers-by. Lexicon, however, due to the eloquence of its durational inflection, addressed itself most directly and intimately to regular users of the street, the gradual bending of the trees unfolding most apparently to those frequently walking or driving by on their way to and from school, home or work. Overturning the particular and persistent whiff of elitism and exclusivity that surrounds much contemporary art is no mean feat, and this levelling manoeuvre echoed loudly in the single, and singular, performance Peralortega staged to accompany the exhibition. Over several hours on a grey afternoon, dressed in sharp business suit and patent leather shoes, the artist proceeded carefully to clean the gallery’s long swathe of glass with squeegee, bucket and toothbrush. Without publicity or fanfare, this odd worker appeared anomalously like a slightly deranged, but curiously diligent, executive: a banker, perhaps, reduced by circumstance or choice ( who could tell? ) to the role of humble window cleaner. As Bakhtin writes of the lost tradition of carnival: ‘Everything here is inverted in relation to the outside world. All who are highest are debased, all who are lowest are crowned.’ With this peculiar act interposed into a prosaic road in south-east London the scene was suffused with an odd conflation of mundanity and theatre, a specific strain of deeply contemporary and demented normality. And the cars passed endlessly by, coughing out carbon.

Lexicon is not the first time trees have been upturned in the name of contemporary art. In 2009 Gustav Metzger realised Flailing Trees, a major public commission, as part of the Manchester International Festival. The work consisted of twenty-one ( curiously, the same number as in Lexicon ) willows, planted in several tons of cement, with their roots helplessly exposed and scrawled in the air, like a threat. Scrutinising the differences between the two installations perhaps gives us clues as to a crucial shift in attitude percolating through contemporary theory and practice. Metzger’s trees, dead, static and interred in a cubic block of modernist concrete, appear most plainly, and somewhat didactically perhaps, as a comment on society’s effects on the natural world. In contrast, Lexicon, nourished by questions of how we orientate ourselves in relation to extra-human life, rather than what damage we might do to it, seems to confer potential for other, possibly queerer, entanglements of human and non-human bio-politics. The revelation of life’s ingrained capacity to divert from the norm suggests often hard-to-imagine futures. Here the trees are inverted, but still vital, sensing light and performing a slow turn in the hectic, hyper-modern metropolis; an invitation to rethink the familiar, to suspend the rush of thought in sensation, and perhaps bend too.