Surrealist Gardens - art3idea.psu.edu

Surrealist Gardens 1

Surrealist Gardens:

The Uncanny as a Model for a Pedagogy of Performance

Donald Kunze Penn State University, Nadine Carter Russell Endowed Chair, Spring 2008

Kevin Benham Director of Landscape Architecture Foundational Studies, Boston Architectural College

Abstract. In the Spring of 2008, Kevin Benham and Donald Kunze co-directed a graduate

studio at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, LSU. Kunze, as the Nadine Carter

Russell Endowed Chair in Art and Design, was invited to propose a study theme, which he

drew from his general interest in the boundary conditions used by landscapes, architecture,

film, literature, and painting. “The Surrealist Garden” aimed to draw from the traditions of the

uncanny, a theme resurrected by Sigmund Freud early in his career and carried further by

Jacques Lacan in his thematic of “the extimate.” This paper focuses on the scholarly and

theoretical aspects of the Surrealist Garden studio.

Marcel Duchamp stated it simply: our culture is built around the production and consumption of objects

whose utility falls outside the domain of needs for shelter, food, and security. This surplus is sustained by

desire, but even more important is the structure of desire that, despite failures, gaps, misapplications, and

breakdowns creates a zone materialized by the imagination to influence events in every domain of life.

There are two directions to follow: (1) the study of specific cases where technology demands our specific

response and extends this demand to social structure and thought — interpellation, the technological

critique of Jacques Ellul, ‘appliance theory’; and (2) the study of the uncanny, which attempts to isolate

terms but then blurs that separation — a practice we learn primarily ‘at the movies’ but neglect in our

theories, books, and schools. This neglect is ‘structural’ and based on the nature of the uncanny itself, so

the remedy of the neglect must take into account the ‘necessity of neglect’ as well as the strategic

centrality of the uncanny at all levels of life — behavior, social life, perception, and thought.

When Demand Exceeds Need

The case of demand surpassing need is clear from the story of the Garden of Eden. In the ideal precinct

created for the satisfaction of need, there is a surplus element, the Tree of Life, guarded by the serpent

who provides the surplus information to Eve that God has left out something in this attempt to supply

Adam and Eve with all they need. The materialization of this lack is the fruit, whose very form (the toroid


of the apple) some have suggested indicates the secret nature of this lack and its relation to self-

reference.

The excessive demand of Eden suggests the general structure of excessive demand elsewhere: in lan-

guage, this excess is the ‘voice’, where phonemic meanings are surpassed by an element that cannot be

assimilated. The voice has an uncanny relationship to speech. It is the excess, the unaccountable element

of ventriloquism, the part that does not belong in the body. The voice’s uncanniness is not an accident. It

is a co-effect and possibly consequence of the topological results of the excess of demand over need,

where the primary example of Eden becomes extremely informative. The walled garden surrounded by

wilderness are not two separate spaces separated by a wall but one space with an interior split, a

permanent internal division that is ‘set against itself’. This structure is made evident by the presence of

the Tree of Life and serpent, and additionally by God’s invisibility (that is later in the story exchanged for

blindness). The problem is not so much one of interdiction and violation but of the ‘impossible choice’ of

the divine command not to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Life in the first place.

Robert Graves’ controversial view, that Genesis was written from Sumerian tablets arranged in a ‘boustro-

phodon’ (lines are read in a back-and-forth motion), where Hebrew scribes read all lines from right to left,

creating backward sequences and gaps with every new line, takes the structure of Eden to the text itself,

where the interpellation of holy text as the ‘word of God’ that cannot be altered is not the literal story but,

instead, the interpolation required by the practices of misreading the ‘typical’ cosmogenical myth typical of

the cultures of the Levant. The Genesis text is, on this account, precisely more sacred because it perma-

nently preserves not just an account of origins but a re-enactment translated in terms of misreading.

Apparatus Theory

One direction that this topology of the excess leads is towards the ideas of Althusser, Lacan, Metz, and

others that the very ‘apparatus’ of the camera is in itself sufficient to make film an ideological medium.

Extending this theory, any apparatuses — cars, televisions, household appliances, garden tools, etc. —

come with their own implicit instructions that transform not only the user but the culture that produces

and uses them. The broader theory can be traced to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which

makes the point that any technology actively transforms the user and involves unknown interpellation that

causes society to adopt to the tool, rather than adopting the tool to society. The saying that summarizes

this view is: ‘If the hammer is your only tool, the world quickly becomes made of nails’. The

machine/gadget/apparatus interpellates the user, calling him/her to a specific place and giving him/her

specific duties and mandates. This interpellation is converted to interpolation as the context of the

machine/gadget/apparatus is itself transformed according to the ‘problematic’ of technology. Privation

(what the tool cannot do) is converted into prohibition (what one should not do with the tool, as a

rhetorical position, an ‘ought’ that is extended by language, customs, and legal provisions). Apparatus

theory plays out the political aspects of desire without necessarily having to refer to the structure of desire

itself, but at any point (cultural theory, ideology analysis, social group theory, etc.) the issue of desire can

be re-introduced.

Apparatus theory can by itself lead to a ‘screen theory’ because of the involvement of dimensionality,

placement, space-time structures, and other modifications of perception and use of social space created

by the structure of desire and the interpellation of the machine/gadget/apparatus. There are many


examples where the screen condition of anamorphosis is set up in an almost literal self-evident manner:

the interior of an SUV, for example, where between the windshield and driver lie innumerable distractions

— cup-holders, GPS devices, CD players, instruments to control children’s DVD enjoyment in the back

seats — each with its own ideology of use and ability to transform images.

The other approach to apparatus theory involves film theory, the original ‘home’, to analyze the impact of

the ‘inside frame’ on thought and life. Even a purely diagrammatic analysis reveals that the phenomenon

of suture corresponds to what in mathematics is treated as the problem of self-reference (recursion,

short-circuit, Gödel’s theorem, etc.). The inside-out action of suture requires some version of the Möbius

band analogy, since there is no ‘extrinsic dimension’ that can frame the independent effects of the inside

frame. Within the calculus of George Spencer-Brown, this is the case of the closed-curved surface, where

any division of space can be both enclosed and enclosing, inclusive and exclusive. This eventually returns

to Lacan’s idea of the ‘extimate’ (extimité) and, hence, the general themes of the uncanny.

The Uncanny

The other direction generated by the topology of excess is the uncanny. This is the topic that has been (1)

concealed by Enlightenment-related dichotomies such as subject-object, mind-body, etc.; (2) discovered

but then forgotten by Freud; (3) rediscovered but then de-emphasized by Lacan; (4) resurrected

numerous times but always re-subsumed within some ‘traditional study’, such as Vidler’s recalibration of

the uncanny as a symptom of modernism. In short, with all these discoveries followed by denial or

neglect, it is precisely the element of self-cancellation that should be the issue! ‘The Uncanny’ is the prize

recipient who always refuses the award, the guest who does not show up, the missing ingredient of the

intellectual recipe. Why is neglect and denial seemingly built in to the idea of the uncanny?

The answer lies in language, specifically where Freud and (more forcefully) Lacan argue that ‘the

unconscious is structured like a language’. This means on one level what the most popular interpretation

says it means: that signifiers’ relationship to each other, and to the place of the signified (representation),

is the secret structure of the mind, specifically in its need to suppress knowledge through various

strategies (ideology, dream, fantasy, authoritarianism, etc.). The other and considerably more obvious

interpretation is simple-minded at first glance: the very fact that language involves a speaker and a

listener/audience, and that the dialectic implied by the simple existence of any ‘word’ engages an ‘idiotic

symmetry’’, where the chain of signifiers is also grounded within the networks of symbolic relationships

that are, in turn, sustained by the structure of desire, which itself allows for gaps, variations, missing

pieces, and breakdowns.

The condition of language is, like the cinema screen, an inside frame. Communication engenders a

‘dimensional’ explanation based on the metaphor of linear flow, temporalized by the diachrony of the acts

of speech. Whereas meaning is fundamentally ‘syntactical’, speech is unavoidable sequential and

diachronic. Meaning of the beginning is unstable until the end, or rather it is the case that the stability

created in the beginning is always subject to being destabilized by what comes only at the end. Even the

concepts of beginning and end are artifacts of the metaphor of flow and reduce models of communication

to lines, chains, channels, etc.


Language as exchange is not just dialectical, it involves an ‘idiotic symmetry’ where the fantasy

projections of the interlocutors create four ‘persons’ for any two actual interlocutors. In the case of the

stage and screen, the listener is the audience, whose silent reception of the ‘speech’ of the actor on stage

is framed in the logic of the classical rhetorical syllogism, the ‘enthymeme’. Here, the middle term (the

one that facilitates conjunction of the major and minor premise) does not appear in the conclusion and is

‘silent’ both in the literal sense that the audience is required to more or less be quiet during a performance

and in the sense that the audience’s presence and reception is the ‘anonymous connector’ that works to

hold the causes and effects of the performance together. Any actor who does not recognize the audience’s

silent assent cannot sustain a convincing performance, since the audience can easily recognize that it has

inadvertently become a collection of voyeurs.

Although apparatus theory analyzes the same ‘inside frame’ conditions as the uncanny, the uncanny

brings to bear its three traditional themes: anamorphosis (involvement of optics and visuality, the ‘voice’

in its uncanny role in language (as in the audience’s dark ‘silence’), and the creation of ‘partial objects’,

another specifically Lacanian thematic that enables us to realize that the inside frame, itself a partial

object, is expanded through the logic of its genre to countless other objects and structures that don’t

resemble screens or stages at all: the organ that seems to ‘act on its own’, such as the spasmodically

saluting arm of the ex-Nazi scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

The uncanny reveals its centrality to psychoanalysis (and everything else) by focusing on the place of

representation as more significant than the alleged signifieds of representation. This place structured by

desire, undermined by the anamorphic action of fantasy, and simultaneously structuring and de-

constructing the authority of the desire of the Other, is the place of ‘contingency’ where we encounter the

Real. Privation (the limits of the senses, of logic, of language, etc.) becomes prohibition. ‘Noise’ (the

suppressed artifact created by the production of meaning) becomes ‘voice’, ignorance becomes secret,

silence becomes conspiracy, and time folds back on itself to create retroactive meanings. What’s even

more important for those who specifically study human spaces and places, this ‘place of the

representation’ and all its inside-frame quirks is the actual structure of the real places we encounter in the

everyday, whose normalcy requires the suppression of these ‘uncanny’ effects. What film enables us to

do, and the reason that film study is essential in ANY study of space/place, is to see clearly how the

‘apparatus’ of the camera explicitly states the implicit ideological/concealed nature of the inside frame

that, in every spatial condition, makes a view into a theory about views, a thought into a conversation, a

field into a domain, and a limit of the senses into a no-trespassing sign.

Raymond Roussel’s Three Tricks

Raymond Roussel revealed his compositional method in a striking exposé, How I Wrote Certain of my

Books (Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, 1935). His method, called his procédé, began with a

word or phrase that was reworked, with puns or re-associations of letters making different words, into a

word or phrase that ended the book. The two different readings formed a problem that the narrative

endeavored to resolve. Some works, however, made use of different techniques. In one, Roussel advised

a different order of reading a novel, and in a series of three poems collected under the title of La Vue

involved a multiplication of descriptive detail revealed by imaginative entry into extremely small images,

one a jewel in a souvenir pen-holder, another a label on a bottle of mineral water, still another the scene


used on hotel guest stationary. In each of the three poems, time is suspended during an extensive

inventory of details that seem impossible to observe even in ordinary circumstances.

the procédé

When Michel Foucault turned

unexpected attention to

Roussel in his book, Death

and the Labyrinth (1963,

English 1986), he emphasized

the technique called the

procédé. In his youth,

Roussel’s family made regular

visits to Nice during carnival.

Festivals in that city included

large floats and papier mâché

effigies of political figures, called têtes de carton, accompanied by captions involving witty puns and plays

on words with subversive intent. A bald (chauve) man singing the Marseillaise is captioned: Je suis

chauve, hein! (Chauvin meaning chauvanist). In a story, ‘Parmi les noires’, Roussel uses a phrase and its

punned inverse to generate a story (texte genèse): ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard …’

initiate a story created by changing one letter: billard to pillard (the phrase les bandes du vieux pillard

then becomes ‘the hordes of the old plunderer’).

The principle here is a kind of verbal anamorphosis: within the conventional meaning of an expression lies

a subversive antipodal meaning that, when mapped, creates a landscape in between that can be filled with

narrative, a journey 180º around the ‘globe’ conceptualized around a minimal shift of meaning. The

procédé also anticipates an idea central to artificial intelligence theory, the ‘minimal definition of thinking’

that is actually employed by physicians treating brain-damage victims. A phrase is spoken to the patient

as brain activity is measured. The phrase involves a word with a ‘normal’ context that is reversed by the

end of the expression. Mental activity that registers this change is regarded as evidence of thought. Like

Alan Turing’s famous test, this ‘minimalist’ test is

based on a difference rather than a positive

expression. Turing realized that a computer could

be programed to respond to any variety of

questions or responses, but that a subject would

judge computer response to be ‘real thought’

only if it were capable of reversing an expected

meaning, a reversal capable of indicating a

different context.

Michel Foucault regards Roussel’s word play as a

serious exploration of language’s interior self-

reference and self-negation, what we might play

out through the distinction of ‘representation’ and ‘artifact’ (Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth,

1986) The subject is ‘interpellated’ by a conventional meaning of a word or phrase, but then, through the


discovery of a double meaning, allowed to ‘interpolate’ between alternative meanings. The image in the

book, Parmi les noires, of the billiard table suggests the analogy of the frame (the bandes), upon which

are written letters in chalk (lettres du blanc), also ‘correspondence from the white man’ whose relation to

the pillard (African despot) and his tribe of outlaws (bandes) which not only creates the story line’s

antipodal points but specifies the linguistic theory by which the narrative depends.

Roussel typically composed in triads. La Doublure, La Vue, and Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique form a

triptych that Roussel claimed did not make use of the procédé. La Vue was in turn composed of three

poems, La Vue, Le Concert, and La Source. In the poem ‘La Vue’, a souvenir pen-holder is fitted with a

small lens placed over a printed view that could be seen by holding the eye close to the lens. Roussel

magnifies the potential of this small lens further, proposing that the viewer is able to journey into the

world of the scene and partake in impossibly small details: ‘Roussel describes not only the promenaders

on the beach, but a yacht and various small craft in the offing. We learn of a fisherman who is becalmed

out at sea that his jacket is tight under the arms and worn at the cuffs, that his beard is rather untidy and

that his left eyebrow is lightly shaggier than his right’ (Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of

Dreams, 2000, p. 84).

The logic of the view was developed later in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Aleph’, about the discovery

of a bright object hovering in the air beneath a cellar stairway, serving as a ‘hole through space’ through

which an observer might view the future and the past as well as any distant location in exquisite but

horrifying detail. This story is deepened and extended by ‘Funes the Memorious’, about a brain-damaged

youth who has gained perfect memory from his injury. The Borges stories show how Roussel’s pen-set and

bottle-label do not vary in their operational logic. Like the Aleph, these are small points of passage where

the viewer is given magic access by virtue of disembodiment. The same relation between the optics of

‘seeing the Truth’ and a small object serving as passageway is the subject of Rudyard Kipling’s short

story, ‘The Eye of Allah’. But, perhaps the ultimate precedent is Book VI of Vergil’s Æneid, where Æneas

stands before the gates of Hades, taking in the images engraved on the bronze doors left behind by

Dædalus, who took refuge at Cumæ after his disastrous escape from Crete. The images on the door

suggest but do not resolve the puzzle-story of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the theme that figures

again in Foucault’s reading of Parmi les noires.

The homology is between the situation of passage, the incidence of interruption, gazing, puzzling, and

subsequent travel into forbidden space. Where privation (the inability to see the ‘invisible’, either because

it is impossibly small or a part of the realm of the dead) becomes prohibition (the initial refusal of passage

and the subsequent granting of it), the ‘artifact’ of the concealed meaning comes to light. In a sense, the

‘passage into impossible detail’ that Roussel uses in La Vue amounts to the same idea as the procédé’s

more language-based technique.

Hopscotch In passing, it is worth mentioning that Roussel was recognized for prefiguring the technique used (and

named directly) by Julio Cortàzar in his novel Hopscotch (Rayuela), 1963. Cortàzar may have been looking

at Roussel as the most local source, but his ultimate precursor was Ramòn Llull, the Catalan mystic whose

combinatorial memory techniques involved fragmenting and recombining texts to create ‘alternative

stories within stories’, a kind of narrative mise-en-abîme that Roussel would have endorsed. Roussel’s


experiment is brief. He advises the readers of one novel that they might as well begin on an alternate

internal page and save the first section for later. But, clearly, his model of reading put forward by the

image of the billiard table is not only more in keeping with Llull’s memory magic, it provides a deeper

appreciation of what actually goes on in language when the alternative orders are created by openings in

the artifacts of homonyms and minor word distortions.

Hopscotch coupled with the ‘Aleph’ trick can then stand for the Rousselian magic act in its entirety. What

could be the ‘standard formula’, abstracted in its several steps, that might enable us to see other

variations in history, art, and literature? Foucault reminds us that it is important to see Roussel’s initial act

as a ‘split’ of a whole, a presumably ‘intact’ word that, once split through a slight shift of a letter here or a

meaning there, ‘divides itself in two, and produces new figures (It’s a proliferation of distance, a void

created in the wake of the double, a labyrinthine extension of corridors which seem similar and yet are

different)’. This involves a conversion of the apparently ‘straight line’ of words into a circular return to

origins. In this way, we, like the 18c. grammarians, discover the ‘marvelous property of language to

extract wealth from its own poverty’ (p. 15). Through privation turned into prohibition, also the

interpellation which concealed the ‘alternative meaning’ within the artifact of words and phrases, we have

the billiard-ball-style interpolation between alternatives, within a charged ‘domain’ of potentialities.

Put in terms of the interrupted journey to the underworld and the ekphrasis of descriptive wonder, we

have as ancient an example as Virgil’s to consider, and the tradition of the katabasis to add to Roussel’s

kit of tricks.

The Crippled Cow Studio

Like Picasso’s method of reworking a canvas to conserve ideas beneath overpainted images, we employed

a pedagogy of layering ideas and strategies without providing connections. The aim was to reach a point

where, through a transference of responsibility, the studio began to organize itself and take responsibility

for the quality, presentation, and viability of their work.

We employed the fantasy that lost causes and missed opportunities in history of ideas could be recovered.

Jacques Lacan himself employed this technique when he ‘returned to Freud’ to rescue key ideas in the

formulation of his own work. Freud curious abandoned the idea of the uncanny, developed early in his

career. Had he continued it, it would have forged links between psychoanalysis, folklore and . and popular

culture. Lacan’s ideas of the ‘extimate’ (blurring between inside and outside) recover this lost idea and are

the basis of our archeology of the idea of Surrealism. The standard history of Surrealism, too, has its

missing pieces and lost opportunities. Although Surrealists ardently defended the plays of Raymond

Roussel against public outrage, claiming him to be the founder of Surrealism, his name is generally

forgotten as the movement was dominated by figures such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Tristan

Tzara. Rather than literature, emphasis was on painting, and the public remembers not the plays and

writings but the drooping clocks and melted landscapes of Salvadore Dali. Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and

Salvadore Dali excited the public with their provocative images and events. Here, the techniques —

outrage, distortion, fantasy — were evident.

Raymond Roussel’s work, a forerunner of Surrealism and in many ways a catalog of its main ideas, was

largely overlooked as Surrealism developed more salient public forms. Although Roussel’s novel, Locus


Solus, was the obvious place to start in a Landscape studio, we emphasized Roussel’s method, the

procédé, where scale, motility, and identity are disrupted by slight shifts of meaning and ‘impossible’ trips

inside small images. The gardens of Gabriel Guvrékian famously attempted to duplicate the Locus Solus

garden of Marshall Canterell, but neither Gurvrekian nor his historians mentioned the procédé. Other

sources were introduced to build up the case for using landscape designs as a means of understanding the

human world: Giambattista Vico, Ernst Cassirer, Maurice Merlea-Ponty, Slavoj Žižek, Jorge Luis Borges,

Alfred Hitchcock, Italo Calvino, Alan Turing, and even His Holiness the Dali Lama. The background for

development was, however, a special technique known as ‘boundary language’. This multidisciplinary

notation system employs the topological ideas of Jacques Lacan as a basis for the idea of allowing

designers to model the effects of construction and reception in a variety of media and settings. This

technique was developed through a grant from the Shogren Foundation in 1998 and through workshops at

U. Penn, Yale, Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and the Cleveland Urban Center. Also, we introduced many

critical theory ideas through films: scenography, narrative structure, the differences between metonymy

and metaphor, and the various roles of framing. Because Hitchcock’s and Lynch’s films symptomatically

return to the same motifs and techniques, we emphasized them but included such fantasy classics as

Dead of Night and the structurally complex and nearly silent films of Tati and Charlie Chaplin. The Five

Obstructions of Lars von Trier, universally despised by the students, was

a model of our teaching method, as they later discovered.

The first assignment was to design an imaginary instrument to measure

some invisible force operating in the landscape. The studio held an

exhibition rather than a review, and the objects and their (often feigned

but sometimes actual) results were on display. Students stood nearby to

hawk the virtues of their instruments.

The studio then investigated the ‘hidden properties’ of the LSU campus

itself. The strong axial design of Olmsted Brothers, who for unknown reasons were forced to relinquish the

project to Theodore Link, includes such anomalies as Indian burial mounds and dormitories disguised as a

football stadium. The center of the campus design is the cruciform complex of quads, blocked by a 1950s

intervention, the Middleton Library. Although our LSU colleague Van Cox was right when he argued that

the library gave a better scale to the open spaces of the remaining quadrangles, the position had

something of the nature of a curse for this quasi-ecclesiastical design. The plot thickened when some class

members discovered, in their archival research, that the axis of the cruciform plan worked as a regression

line, predicting the occurrence of violent and criminal acts. Was this punishment for the Middleton Library?

While this thesis could not be supported fully by the ‘facts of the case’, the studio decided to make it the

center of a fantastic ‘lost history’ of the campus, something more in affinity with the Native American view

of the sacred valley of the Mississippi River Basin.


Site study: a diagram of the site showing ‘distractions’

Site study gave the studio a chance to step back and formulate their fantasy narratives in the context of

material details and weird spaces. The focus of their interest was a complex of small structures belonging

to the School of Art. The pottery shed in particular offered narrow passageways and a small, mostly

abandoned open yard that was the terminus of the ‘axis of evil’.

In the midst of their empirical documentation of the site, another Cartesian context gave support to a

fantasy about the antipode of the LSU campus. Although the real antipode lies somewhere in the Indian

Ocean, the drifting continents of the original land mass gave them a basis for re-locating the antipode in

the now-disappeared continent of ‘Lemuria’, a land that has an actual presence in Southeast Asian

folklore. The name comes from the fact that a once-existent land-bridge is the only explanation for the

distribution of species of Lemurs, a primate whose striking eyes afford a binocular vision and resulting

intelligence based on manipulation and motility. At this point the studio was entirely on its own. The magic

act of transference had taken place. We, the instructors, were frequently barred from entering the studio.

Our only role, it seemed was to supply the designers with unlimited cash.


Cartoons: the continent of Lemuria was elaborated through narratives and landscape maps.

The studio developed its ideas of Lemuria through the fantasized design for a ‘city of fire’, Patanga, where

the myths of the lost continent and lore of the Lemur were intensified. Artifacts from this lost civilization

were convincingly recreated, thanks to the artistry and calligraphy of Mikeila Nagura. This ancient book

contained details of the Patanga myth and complex script of the Lemurians, all painstakingly invented by

Mikeila.

The ‘axis of evil’ was re-annotated and reinterpreted using the idea of the antipode and notion that the

‘crime’ of the library’s misplacement could be corrected by the ‘vengeance’ of the City of Fire. A new

narrative was added about a drunken anthropologist-archaeologist whose affair with a college president’s

wife led to the mayhem of campus design and subsequent coverup. The modest pottery yard, after some

intense negotiations with Arts faculty, was transformed through an extensive combination of excavation

and artificial extension. Without our guidance or even consultation, the design was a choreography by

which the narrative would be discovered by the public in a series of quasi-ritualistic encounters, fueled by

images projected on scrims and computer-generated motion feedback loops (discovered with the help of

our own ‘Canterel’, Brad Cantrell).

What surprised us was that the project went beyond our wildest imaginations about what could be done,

and was ‘surreal’ on every level. It was an example of how art intensifies and goes beyond what life has to

offer, but also it taught us that programmatic insertions of ‘art’ can go only so far; at some point, art has

to live as art, not as a theme. The shortcomings of the installation were multiple, but its success was

singular. The studio created good will by reaching out to all those who helped, returning favors, offering a

well-catered reception, and sending thank-you messages. After all, LSU is the south.


Over 200 faculty, students, and interested members of the public attended the event.

The press reported details of the production and credited the students for their originality

autonomy and inventiveness.

The studio’s book documenting the development, production, and performance of the project, along with

critical essays, will be available at Lulu.com. A PDF version is now available at

http://arti3idea.psu.edu/locus/crippled_cow.pdf.

THANKS TO THE HEROIC STUDIO MEMBERS!!!!

Christopher Hall

Taizo Horikawa

Nicole Janic

Mickey Kleinhenz

Joan Long

Mikeila Nagura

Jack Milazzo

Narcisa Parrales

Spencer Rimes

Gretchen Trauth

Chris Ventre

Natalie Yates

Yuanman Zhong


Mickey Kleinhienz, Agent Provocateur

Additional thanks to:

Nadine Carter Russell, Endowment Founder and Patron

The Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, Elizabeth Mossup, Director

Louisiana State University College of Arts + Design, David Cronrath, Dean

LSU School of Art / Ceramics Department, Rod Parker and Mickey Walsh

The College of Arts & Architecture, Penn State University

The Schreyer Honors College, Penn State University

Department of Integrative Arts, Penn State

Department of Landscape Architecture, Penn State

Department of Architecture, Penn State

Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture

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