The Seedbed Project

Information is easy, ideas are hard

The Seedbed Project. baled grasses, bamboo, manure, clay, topsoil, sisal, and marigolds. 180 x 180 x 150

In 1995 the World Wide Web was barely four years old, the idea of WYSIWYG web browsers was brand new, search engines were virtually unknown, and the concept of “viral” referred to a sickness. Yet that year I created an artwork that articulated the concept of “viral” as we now use it and also attempted to implement the concept, albeit in the physical world rather than the virtual world.

The idea of a seedbed is dear to the heart of artists; the possibility of seeding a small measure of joy that could resonate with hundreds of people, or beyond that, planting an idea in the culture by the simple act of creating an artwork. Maybe a seedbed was the inspiration for the concept of viral multiplication back when people paid attention to the teachings of the natural world. Certainly, it was the source of my own inspiration, my idealistic postulation. One seed creates a plant that grows twenty blooms with two thousand seeds. Those two thousand seeds, planted and nurtured and brought to fruition, have the potential to create four million seeds. From one seed to four million in two generations.

So that spring I planted a few dozen marigold seeds against the south-facing wall of the lovely Normandy-style barn built in 1930, where the sun-warmed earth was friable and black from the passage of horses and Holsteins over many years. The garden, sheltered on two sides, benefitted from rain caught and drained by the roof. As senior staff members, my wife and I were required to live on the VCCA grounds and were given an apartment that had been created in what was designed in 1933 as a dual-bay carriage house and an adjacent tack-room. So this south-facing wall was the outside wall of our bedroom and the garden was just outside our back door. I enlisted my children to help tend it.

Marigolds are easy to grow and I love the combination of burnt reds and bright oranges and the slim tufted seeds fading from beige to umber. Garden lore says they repel pests, too, so they found a home in my garden. I don’t remember if I planted these marigolds in anticipation of my teaching gig at Penland School the next summer or if the profusion of marigolds themselves inspired the piece I was conceptualizing, but by autumn the idea for the Seedbed Project was in place and I harvested hundreds of seed heads, each containing eight or ten dozen seeds, and I began organizing my mailing list of contacts, which came to about three hundred people. (I asked that the seeds be planted, nurtured and sent on to become part of a larger piece, a new idea. )*

The idea of exponential spread is an appealing one, but it’s not the way things played out. So many things conspire to prevent fruition; so much can go awry, life is so very fragile. …Of the three hundred seedheads I sent, only one person actually managed to bring the plants to fruition and mail them to me at Penland School*…. At the end of the next summer, I copped to this fact and the fact that I had to supplement the plants myself and I put my naiveté out there for my own network to see – in an even more dated viral format: a postcard, which was how we communicated in 1996. The image is above, the text below. *

It might appear this project is about the very idea of communication, about the idea of the transmission of ideas. Or maybe it interrogates the assumption, now firmly held, of something “going viral;” or perhaps it mocks the artist’s efforts to influence the culture. At the time, I asserted “information is easy and ideas are hard,” and in fact every day offers more evidence that ideas that move virally are simple ideas, easily digested ideas, stupid ideas, and hate. The Seedbed Project sought to spread something more difficult: attention to nature, nurturing, communitarian action; things more aligned with love. Why is it possible to make hate go viral but not possible to make love go viral? Is it because love requires time, investment, intimate knowledge, and hate has no need of these? Hate is often instantaneous. Love is never instantaneous. Hate is contagious but love is not. Even the connotation of the word contagious is tied to the sickness and disease embedded in the concept of viral.

On the other hand, you might think the lesson here is that in 299 out of 300 tries, you will fail to plant the idea. Or more optimistically, in one time in every three hundred tries you will succeed! Or perhaps the truer message is, if you really want something to succeed, you just have to fucking do it yourself. The process for this artwork required my friends and contacts to join with me. They were asked to take the seeds and plant them, to get the marigolds up to viability, and then to box them up and mail them to me at Penland School in the mountains of North Carolina. As the text of the postcard suggests, there were many places for this process to go awry, beginning with the decision of whether to participate at all. And of course, those who did participate were implicitly asked to communicate with me. Many did, mostly explaining their excuses, failures, and accidents. Somewhere I still have all the correspondence. Yes, one person actually did knock their flat of plants off a fourth-floor windowsill. The wonderful staff at Penland was indispensable, mowing a field of wild grasses and having it baled and waiting for my students and me; the director commandeering a tractor himself to provide the topsoil needed to hold the flowers. My students, while creating their own outdoor projects, pitched in with the heavy lifting for this project. So, no, I could not have done this project by myself.

On another level you could say the artwork raises questions about exactly what an artwork is. Is it the object left in place or the changes the object undergoes as time passes or is it the postcard and short essay sent out later? Or is the artwork the “event,” the act of planting the seeds, of sending the request for participation, the care others gave freely in the growing of the seeds, the harvesting and baling of the grasses, the mixing of the adobe, the tractoring of topsoil: the relational aesthetics? Or, perhaps the real artwork is this essay. Maybe it’s all of the above, and of course, a tweak of the nose of my hero Vito Acconci, whose 1972 Seedbed was a seminal mind-blowing artwork for the next generation. Look it up.

In 1995 the real idea I most wanted to move through the culture had little to do with inbred thoughts about the nature of art. Even the theory of viral communication was secondary. The marigolds were merely the window dressing here. The real idea was sitting there, obtrusively, under the alizarin blossoms. What is this thing anyway? If it is sculpture, it isn’t like any sculpture I’ve encountered before. You can go inside, it’s more like architecture, but not. Is it a ziggurat? A reference to mound builders? A stand-in for domicile, a metaphorical house?

Seedbed. interior view

My artwork for the preceding few years, while living on the Lower East Side, had focused first on the problem of homelessness, then on the resourcefulness of the homeless, and by the mid-nineties, living in Virginia, on the way housing has been created over millennia by vernacular builders. Earlier that spring, walking along a dried-up marsh flat, I discovered that as the lake dried it had left behind remarkable chunks of mud, deeply cracked into brick-like blocks. Taking those as material, I simply lifted them from the ground and stacked them into a corbeled structure using sticks to stabilize and accent the form. I had made other sculptures using dozens of corrugated cigarette cartons from a Gauloises factory in Marseilles, or huge pieces of felt in tent-like forms, or cattails woven into walls as the indigenous people of coastal Virginia might have done, or reclaimed tin cans, flattened and hammered into shelter forms. Seedbed, like other sculptures I was making at the time, pointed to an idea developed out of creative necessity in the prairies of the Midwest in the 1930s, a brilliant homespun solution to the problem of housing: straw bale construction – using bales of straw like oversized bricks and stacking them into walls. Sometimes the bales were plastered with adobe made from clay and manure mixed with straw.

So, yes, I wanted to believe in the concept of a seedbed, an idea that grows exponentially, and yes, I was interested in what happens when you engage other people in your creative process. But the main idea I wanted to plant was this: housing does not have to be prohibitively expensive; humans have created homes for themselves with their own hands and little else for thousands of years; it is possible to acquire the materials needed to build a domicile from things at hand, even from mere seeds. I wanted people to question received ideas about what a house is, about what a house is made from, about who is allowed to build a house. I suspected we needed to re-imagine housing in this country and possibly the most elegant solution could be something simple sitting just outside the box. Maybe we should forget everyone and focus on someone, forget the seedbed and focus on the seed. Maybe small really is beautiful and if we posit the idea of small simple dwellings often and creatively enough, people will listen.

Go out and plant that idea and see what comes up.

*the postcard text:

This spring I asked three hundred people to play a game with me, to become metaphorical transfer points for an important idea.

I didn't tell them they were metaphors, however. I merely sent each a seedhead full of marigold seeds, and asked that the seeds be planted, nurtured and sent on to become part of a larger piece, a new idea. I was thinking of the way ideas can be transferred from one person to ten and from ten to one hundred. The process was a wonderful metaphor for the transfer of ideas in a culture; it's just that I forgot (or never understood) that good ideas do not move geometrically through the culture. Some ideas and seeds are simply not viable to begin with. Of those that are, some will go astray before they reach their intended destination. More often, the intended recipient simply isn't interested in the idea and it is ignored, or the intended receives the seed of an idea and cannot manage to plant the idea in him/herself well enough to allow it to grow and flower. Even when all of those steps have been successful, there is the wayward accident that knocks the flat of surviving plants off the fourth-floor windowsill. Finally, all other things having been successful and the seed brought to flower, the last step (which could become the first step) does not succeed and the flower does not live to make the transfer.

Of the three hundred seedheads I sent, only one person actually managed to bring the plants to fruition and mail them to me at Penland School. Those thirty plants would not have created the critical mass necessary to complete the piece– the larger idea, then, would have failed.

Being committed to the idea, however, I planted one thousand seeds myself in my own backyard. Five hundred of those plants survived and were taken to Penland to become part of the larger piece, which you see here. These five hundred plants will each produce several hundred seedheads containing several thousand marigold seeds. With luck and cooperative winters, the piece will become a true seedbed–re-seeding itself each year, offering tender plants to passersby–until one day it is dismantled to make room for another idea.

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The Seedbed Project, Penland School, Penland, NC. baled grasses, bamboo, manure, clay, topsoil, sisal, and marigolds. November 1995 – November 1996, 120” x 180” x 140”