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MLA students Tres Fromme and Bradley Nestor formed Transgressing Our Severely Stunted Environmental Design/Secret Association of Landscape Architects Deconstructing (T.O.S.S.E.D. S.A.L.A.D.) in January of 1994 to inject active dialogue and discussion into the complacent discourses of landscape architecture as manifested in the University of Georgia's School of Environmental Design. After six posters Nestor left for the "real world," and MHP student Michael Landers joined his computer art expertise with Fromme's ideas and rhetorical musings. This relationship proved to be dynamically collaborative and energizing, producing the thirty-one posters in the current show while further defining S.A.L.A.D's identity.
We believe that the current status of environmental design education fails to address many critical issues that influence not only the designs proper, but the designers themselves as socially-situated individuals. Criticism and theory, plundering the disciplines of Art and Ecology, myopically focus on the formal concerns of the object (design) and the ecological functionings and contexts of the design. Little of landscape architecture's thinking and energy has been dedicated to an internal criticism of the social creation and academic (re)production of the discipline itself. A rigorous interrogation of the many issues that have involved the time and energies of other disciplines has failed to surface within the discipline of environmental design. With few exceptions environmental designers have shied away from, if not intentionally avoided, confronting issues of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, anti-semitism and other forms of oppression as entangled within landscape design and historic preservation. Indeed, landscape architecture and historic preservation have almost completely failed to analyze the key terms of their disciplines which form the privileged realms of their expertise, Nature and Space in the former, History in the latter. We, as S.A.L.A.D., have found that the average environmental designer's concept of these socially constructed terms remains vestigially naive at the best, and rabidly narrow at the worst. Environmental design education generally fails to address the complex interactions of socio-political forces and agents that (in/re)form the landscape. It also fails to interrogate the very concepts of Nature and History, assuming them to be absolute essences external to culture. To question these foundational concepts might destabilize the complacency of environmental designers' professional practice and identities. These are oversights that we believe threaten the social relevance and vitality of landscape architects' and historic preservations' disciplinary futures. The S.A.L.A.D. Project seeks to rupture the silence and complacency that enshrouds current practice and scholarship of environmental design. In the tradition of the Agitation Propaganda (Agit-Prop) tactics of the Russian Constructivists, Barbara Kruger, ACT-UP, and Queer Nation, the posters offer slogans that immediately confront and challenge the viewers perceptions. Sometimes caustic, usually campily humorous, and occasionally obscure, the posters are always challenging. S.A.L.A.D. recognizes that environmental design exists at the dynamic intersection of multiple disciplines, economies, and culturally-generated institutions: art, architecture, gender, sexuality, class, politics, advertising, religion and the media among others. Mobilizing multiple texts and allusions in a pastiche of images and words (both plundered from popular and ̉highÓ culture as well as self-generated), S.A.L.A.D. calls into play complex and contradictory associations. The forces unleashed in the posters often threaten to destabilize the intended messages in the very act of communicating. However, the reverberations from such shock waves also tease the fissures that riddle the disciplinary surface of environmental design, causing faults that open new sites for exploration outside the status quo. S.A.L.A.D. seeks to actively and playfully subvert today for a better tomorrow. The posters in this show embody the collective effort and ideas of many people both inside and outside of the S.A.L.A.D. collective over the last three years. They respond directly or indirectly to specific issues S.A.L.A.D. identified as pertinently problematic within the context of the School of Environmental Design. The Project was not originally created for a gallery setting. The current exhibit attempts to collect and document the Project over the last three years. Originally the posters were generated as 8 1/2 x 11, gray scale images that could be cheaply and easily photocopied and disseminated throughout the School of Environmental Design's two buildings. S.A.L.A.D. posted the majority of the images before revising some and creating color versions for the current exhibit. The intent has always been to reach the faculty and staff through "guerrilla" use of the school's spaces, a fact not appreciated by all the members of the community. Through the Project, space itself became foreground as a contested arena of politics and prejudice. Reactions to the posters varied from the humorously sympathetic, to the indifferent, to the rapidly offended, to the proactive counter-postering of groups such as "B.B.Q." We have included brief notations on the posters in the show to spark certain sets of associations in the viewer. These descriptions do not exhaust the "meanings" which play across the posters but hopefully suggest openings for reflections we intended the posters to elicit. S.A.L.A.D. wishes to thank the following for their support: Leisa Baker, Kerry Dawson, Drew Dehel, Brian M. Green, David Koffman, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Claudia Levy, Julie Myers, Bradley Nestor, Teri Nye, SED Gallery, Gayle Shelden, Rene Shoemaker, Visiting Scholars Committee, W.Gary Smith, and all those who had a clue and a sense of humor. No thanks to the cowards who tore down our posters. We know who you are. S.A.L.A.D. also wishes to acknowledge our many sources of inspiration (check them out): Absolutely Fabulous, ACT-Up, Ansel Adams, the Pomo Trinity: George Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Ben Hur, The Blob, Bruce of Los Angeles, Edmunds Bunkse', Jacques Derrida, Divine, Umberto Eco, Peter Eisenman, El Lissitsky, Erasure, Neil Everenden, Michel Foucault, Bill Frederick, Peter Greenaway, Donna Haraway, Catherine Howett, J. B. Jackson, Charles Jencks, the imitable Barbara Kruger, Le Corbusier, Jean Francois Lyotard, Madonna, Metropolis, Darrel Morrison, Queer Nation, Queer Campus U.D., Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rodchenko, Andrew Ross, Carly Simon, V.& G. Stenberg, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi, Paul Virilio,Vogue, St. Oscar Wilde, Alexander Wilson, and Denis Woods. Special Thanks to: Dean Kerry Dawson of the School of Environmental Design. |