Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies Read Online Free PDF Page B

equivalents of war memorials. Such places would become monuments to vanished landscapes, places of reflection that record and remind us of “the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings.”
    Time Landscape
is designed to “be a reminder that the city was once a forest.” It is also a more personal reminder. Sonfist admitted in a recent interview with John Grande that much of his work “began in my childhood when I witnessed the destruction of the forest, walking in the Bronx.” Yet in its completed state
Time Landscape
poses some difficult questions about the defense of nature’s lost places. For
Time Landscape
is constantly being invaded by alien, post-Colonial weeds like morning glory and sow thistle. Sonfist said he is not bothered, arguing that “this is an open lab, not an enclosed landscape” and that he always meant there to be an interplay between species.
    Yet if that is the case, then
Time Landscape
is a rather hollow memorial. It is precisely its exacting evocation of the past that makes it different from any other bit of green space in the city. It’s no surprise that New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which now manages the site, is less blasé about alien weeds. All such invasive species are cleared out at intervals.
Time Landscape
has become a unique if rather low-key asset in the department’s program called Greenstreets, which it says is designed to convert “paved street properties, like triangles and malls, into green lawn.” The department wants to preserve
Time Landscape
as art. Thus it has become subject to another type of preservation, another attempt to stay the corruption of time.
    Removing the weeds from
Time Landscape
maintains it as past art. Without all that grubbing up, its temporal direction would get much harder to read: it would be less clear whether it was pointing backward or forward. Critics say
Time Landscape
has been “museumified,” that it’s now a dead place and of little public benefit. In fact, its layers of preservation have combined to make it ever more complex and disconcerting.
Time Landscape
has gotten weirder, for it now confronts us with an uncomfortable paradox: as we try to revere nature, it slips through our fingers, leaving us holding something we never expected, something unnatural.
    The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute. The weeds that infest
Time Landscape
’s sepulchral landscape are pulled up and stuffed into black plastic garbage bags and removed for incineration. They form their own kind of monument, off to the fires, our revenge on the revenge of nature, enacted again and again. The carefully maintained remnants of nature that remain are too anemic to evoke a fertile or meaningful past, even as they secure
Time Landscape
’s status as a memorial to both past nature and past art.
    Time Landscape
’s protocol of purity is echoed across countless parks and gardens but also in the kind of environmental or land art that tends to get commissioned in cities. A lot of land art creates disorientingly human places within large natural landscapes: a straight stone path amid a chaos of boulders, a spiral jetty thrust into a remote lake. But for artists working in cities the temptation to confront paved streets with pure nature seems irresistible. Apart from
Time Landscape
, the best-known work in this genre seen in New York was
Wheatfield—A Confrontation
, a two-acre vacant lot in downtown Manhattan that was planted with wheat by Agnes Denes in 1982. It was a more political piece than
Time Landscape
. The fertile field and the one thousand pounds of wheat yielded were symbolic of the hunger caused by Wall Street’s “misplaced priorities.” But the golden grain and the simple moral message were also designed to contrast with the corrupt and fallen city. This was another place