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'Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn': Activism disguised as artSubmitted by Charles Frost on Wed, 02/27/2008 - 21:40.
'Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn': Activism disguised as art Unless you're a moron, morally blind, or possibly a Republican, it's easy to see, in both the microcosm and the macrocosm, that as a nation and a people we are becoming more and more isolated from one another and from the world. While the party line focuses on diversity and acceptance, anyone who has ever hung around the halls of a high school can tell you that those who differ from the norm are ridiculed and shut out. We don't know our neighbors, and if we do, we probably don't like them. And despite the sniggling innuendos of conservative editorialists, anyone with half a brain and the ability to sense changes in the weather knew the world was getting a lot hotter 10 and even 15 years ago. We're in denial, folks. We have been for a long time, and no landscape is more barren than the landscape of denial. In addition to the Arthouse exhibition, which will feature photographic and video documentation from the Edible Estates project, a series of workshops titled How to Eat Austin will be held every Saturday, 3-5pm, in a large geodesic tent inside Arthouse's main gallery space. The workshops will focus on subjects such as composting, planting, and caring for a garden; cooking the food you grow; and possibilities for selling what you grow. Haeg will attend the workshop on Jan. 26, as well as return to Austin for another of the workshops and, of course, the planting of the garden itself.
From: http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A584295
More.................................................................................... "What Is Wrong with an Edible Estate?" In 2005, Los Angeles architect and artist Fritz Haeg planted the first “edible estate” garden in Salina, Kansas—the geographic center of the United States. One front lawn at a time, the Edible Estate project is replacing the domestic front lawn with a highly productive, edible, organic garden landscape. Three more prototype gardens have since been created in California, New Jersey, and England, with two more Edible Estates forthcoming in Texas and Maryland. The publication of Haeg’s new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, marks the beginning of a concerted national campaign to dramatically overthrow an American institution, the front lawn. Gardens of food will be promoted to fill these toxic spaces that currently divide our neighborhoods, devour precious resources, and pollute our air and water. The Edible Estates project is at the nexus of many disciplines and current topics of interest: global/local food production, art as social action, radical gardening, urban agriculture, gardening as a public spectacle, food security, water and energy use, peak oil and the uncertain future of suburbia, the blurring of public and private in the front yard, community and neighbor relations, the phenomenon of the American front lawn, etc. However, this alternative project brings with it a new set of questions. A public debate with project creator Fritz Haeg; theater director, Peter Sellars; author and Yale professor of architecture, Dolores Hayden; author of A Short History of the American Stomach, Frederick Kaufman; 2008 Whitney Biennial curator, Shamim Momin; and director of LIVE from the NYPL, Paul Holdengräber will engage the audience in an open discussion with the question, “What is wrong with an Edible Estate?” A projection screen will alternately display the Edible Estates videos and time-lapse images depicting the removal of the front lawn and the planting and growth of the four Edible Estates gardens in Kansas, California, New Jersey, and London. EDIBLE ESTATES: Attack on the Front Lawn
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