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 ÒhighÓ 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.
The first group of posters presents an internal critique the practice of landscape architecture as a profession.
1 raises a blatant call to think and design beyond the dogmatic, pastoral tradition of comrade Olmsted and his "design with nature" decedents who hold factions of landscape architecture hostage today.
2 reminds that the spaces landscape architects design have social repercussions and carry cultural significances. To continue "designing complicitly with oppressive social policies could place landscape architects "up against a wall" as progressive social movements grow stronger and see no relevance to their identities in the hostile profession.
3 and 4 combine various historical sources to challenge landscape architectureÕs pretensions to a utopian totality (borrowed from architecture) based on formal manipulation. 3 paraphrases and illustrates Jean Francois LyotardÕs call for a postmodern fragmentation of modern Totalities with the destruction of Pruit Igoe, a grouping of imposing housing units considered a ÒtriumphÓ of progressive modern architecture. 4 answers Le CorbusierÕs call for architecture as the salvation of society with the answer that perhaps revolution, represented in the resident-approved destruction of Pruit Igoe, is not only necessary, but is critical for social change. Neither architecture nor environmental design will save the planet.
5 evokes and questions several major figures in the tradition of landscape architecture and the force they still exert in the canon of the discipline. Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and Ian McHarg may not even be visually recognizable to most students, though their rote teachings probably are.
The second group of posters addresses the associations between gender and sexuality and their impact on the landscape.
6 and 7 visibly remind the viewer of marginalized identities within landscapes and landscape architecture. The strong presence of gay males in design emerges forcibly in 6 while 7 celebrates the critical and overlooked presence of women, namely Marian Coffin, in landscape architectural history and the development of the profession.
8 and 9 suggest the sexism inherent in the formation of landscapes by patriarchally-dominated institutions of power and authority intent on control and exploitation of the land and of people, namely women. 9 attacks a specific "tool of the patriarchy," Landscape Architecture Magazine, the mouthpiece of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).
Group three probes the underlying issues concealed within the popular "native plant" movement, difficult and embarrassing issues that these elements of landscape architecture ignore or suppress in their zeal to achieve ecological salvation. When practitioners seek to restore the landscape to its pre-European condition they forget to remove themselves and their culture from the landscape. These are the true "invasive exotics" against which even kudzu appears restrained in comparison.
10 plays upon the ambiguity of the word "native" as well as the popular exhortation to "use natives" as if this act were some new and unheard of idea.
11, though camp, alludes to the imperial zealotry with which the native dogma is crusaded in certain circles, presenting, like the Hollywood epic, a distraction from the "real" issues.
12 evokes the memory of the indigenous peoples (natives) brutally "removed" by the same institutions that seek to restore only the native vegetation, while ignoring the native peoples who remain marginalized and disempowered.
13 sums up the profession of landscape architecture as re inscribing the European conquest in its hostile occupations of, and on the land.
The fourth block explores the nature of Nature as (re)presented by American culture. They all indicate that Nature, instead of embodying a sublime presence outside of human culture, is actually generated by cultural production of signs of Nature that circulate in economies of fashion and politics--in other words, in systems of power.
15 connects the objectification and aestheticization of the land and the woman into commodities to be controlled and exploited.
14, itself a simulation of calls for "green" thoughts and actions, reminds the viewer that "this is not a tree," and that the images of Nature in films and books are often mistaken for the reality of Nature. Nature serves to disguise the political operations of cultural power that operate as "absolutes," unquestionable because of their association with an eternal Nature.
16 and 17 compare the manipulation of the signs of Nature to the manipulation of the signs of gender in drag. As the mad scientist cum transvestite Dr. Frankenfurter of Rocky Horror and the disco diva drag queen Divine suggest, one's identity or nature is open to simulation and subversive inversion. Both play on fashion and the artifice of supposedly inherent and immutable "natures." There is "nothing like the real thing" precisely because the "real" has vanished.
The fifth series employs modified clichŽs drawn from advertising to create pointed one-liners that find often ominous associations with landscape actions and treatments.
18 encourages the viewer to take some sort of action, emphasizing the use of the landscape as an arena of often revolutionary "street" action and activism. The what that is to be saved remains undefined.
19 comments upon the strong connection in America between self- identity and the automobile, and by extension, the suburb and the government subsidized freeway system which generated the "American Dream" accessible only to certain class and race identities.
20 literalizes the landscape as a stage on which actions unfold, often with destructive results. The anxiety of acting and establishing a cultural identity on and through the landscape emerges as a source of conflict and violence.
21 evokes the exploitive actuality of a consumer culture while suggesting the jealously-inducing inequalities between those who "have" and "have not" access to landscape resources.
Block six critiques the unique landscape of suburbia in the United States. This landscape derives from a complex interaction of racial, class, political, economic, and ecological systems. All the posters attempt to suggest the inequalities and exploitations seething beneath the verdure of the "bourgeois utopia".
22 accuses the suburban resident and designer of acutely blinding narcissism. Seeing only their own reflection in the landscape they assume that no other ways of life or social structuring are possible or even desirable. The whitewash is tinged with the greens of a domesticated and exclusionary "Nature".
23 exposes the factors that parade beneath the rosy pleasantries of the suburban facade, and exhorts designers to remove their culturally affixed blinders.
24 and 25 play upon terms from cultural studies as they relate to particular landscape manifestations. The connections made demonstrate the formal expression of relations of power and its impact on the landscape.
The seventh section confronts the role of aesthetics in the creation of various forms and tastes in environmental design. The popular as well as the ÒhighÓ elements of taste and fashion influence the disciplines of landscape architecture and historic preservation.
26 hints at Martha Schwartz's borrowings from "high art" and her arguably facile applications to landscape design. Claiming an interdisciplinary influence, Schwartz seems to exhibit more of a wanna-be posturing in some of her work, imitating art and threatening to entangle landscape architecture in the intellectual and political economies of the gallery (a space S.A.L.A.D. currently employs, ironically enough, for its own agenda).
27 suggests a parallel operation in the popular work of the "Other Martha", Martha Stewart. Stewart's multimedia empire of domestic fashion and bliss mixes gardening, decorating, and cooking among other pursuits in an intertextual buffet. Consumption of the resulting cultural smorgasbord promises an unattainable suburban apotheosis. Reminiscent of Downing, good decorating can lead to a moral cleansing of the nation.
28 and 29 tie the aesthetic and cultural experimental project of modern aesthetics (evoked by the abstract and self-referential Mondrian "tree" painting) to the project of forward thinking social policy (evoked by the abstract and self-referential form suburbinization). Here the modernist cultural forces that led to a desire for a rational and purified aesthetic influence the modern landscape composition.
The final pair of posters, 30 and 31, relate to the practice of historic preservation. 30 provides a rare example of S.A.L.A.D. addressing a local and specific injustice. The poster, a simulation of the original movie one-sheet, disfavorably and justifiably compares the devouring expansion of UGA to the amorphous Blob. Again, the automobile is indicted for its negative role in the landscape. 31 literalizes the connection between "boys and their toys" and "boys playing with their own toys" in contests of power and demonstrations of strength that devastate the landscape but inflate flaccid, male egos.
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.
Questions and discussion of poster content should be directed to
Tres Fromme, c/o Longwood Gardens Inc., P. O. Box 501, Kennett Square, PA 19348-0501
This site designed and maintained by Mike Landers.
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