If you find yourself at London’s Temple tube station there’s every reason to follow the signs and walk up a set of steps to the Artist’s Garden which is ‘an open-air public space for art by women artists.’ So maybe it should be 'Artists' Garden'?
The current exhibition is by Holly Hendry and titled Slackwater, a sprawling installation chiefly made of industrial ducting. The contrast of the curved shiny metal of the art with the solid straight masonry of the buildings behind it, is spectacular, and of course on the other side you have the Thames.
There was also this by Annabel Tennyson-Davies who’s artist in residence at the garden.
I’ve been up there once or twice and it’s never been busy with people, although I did see one visitor who’d found it a great place to have a kip.
If you walk down the stairs when you’re finished you can then go into what you might call the non-artists' garden, or in fact the Victoria Embankment Garden, with a sign directing you to the Middle Temple Gardens, the end point of the City of Westminster Fitness Route, which is apparently a thing, though when you think about it, isn’t the whole world a fitness route if you want it to be?
In fact I was only in those parts because I was on the way to see a ‘site specific and participatory installation’ by Zheng Bo in the center of the Somerset House courtyard.
The artwork’s title was ‘Bamboo as Method’ which according to the online artspeak ‘pays homage to the Ming Dynasty thinker and scholar, Wang Yangming. Wang’s pursuit of enlightenment through the practice of gewu zhizhi (the acquisition of knowledge through the investigation of the nature of things) is encapsulated in Zheng Bo’s profound reference.’ There’s also a board up in the courtyard telling visitors that Zheng Bo is ‘eco-queer.’
But none of that was obvious from seeing the work itself. In fact it looked as though Mr. Bo had done a tour of quite a few garden centres, bought up all their bamboo and arranged it in planters to provide what was really a very interesting environment in which to walk.
I like bamboo a lot ,without being any kind of expert, but I understand there are over 1,400 known species in 115 genera. Zheng Bo had managed to round up 10 different types.
The participation wasn’t the walking, or even the looking, but visitors were invited to draw the bamboo, or I suppose draw anything else they fancied, - pencils and paper were provided – and then drop the result in a box.
But one participant hadn’t made a drawing. He or she had made a paper plane and dropped it on the ground. Of course I found myself thinking about Harry Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker anthropologist, and collector of ‘lost’ paper planes.
As discussed elsewhere in this blog Harry Smith used to walk the streets of Manhattan in the late 60s to early 80s, finding discarded paper planes wherever he went, picking them up, then annotating and cataloguing them to form a ‘proper’ anthropological collection.
But this was the first time I can ever recall seeing a paper airplane lying on the ground when I was walking. Obviously I swooped on it. Do I feel an anthropological collection coming on? No, but the plane has gone straight into the archive of ‘things found while walking,’ which is a form of participation.
