Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with artists about their project Untidy Objects, on view outdoors at adjacent to the Logan Center for the Arts. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability.
Just south of Hyde Park’s Logan Center for the Arts, an acre of land hosts Untidy Objects, a dynamic multispecies community sculpture with plantings, enriched soil, a pond, and two bioswales that filter polluted groundwater. Benefitting from these artist-led interventions are insects, animals, fungi, and plants who subsequently come to reside on-site. Created by four collaborating artists who maintain the habitat with support from the Gray Center, Logan Center, and Neubauer Collegium, Untidy Objects was first conceived in 2019, set its first plantings in 2021, and is introducing a VR component to make the site’s biodiversity more accessible to human visitors. In the following interview, Black, Downie, Frost, and Ginsburg discuss their cooperative sculpture.
“Towards the end of the 20th century, the boundary between art object and its field was untidy; object and field were considered coextensive.
“With Untidy Objects, we try to understand and somehow capture the relationship between a living subject and its world—that subject is conceived as living and engaging the world as a living being.
“What Untidy Objects demonstrates in its untidiness, through the porosity and mutual constitution across named entities, is that these two states—freedom and obligation—are also fully enmeshed.
“All of the biozones in Untidy Objects thrive and perish in 18 inches of soil that were added atop a field of rubble from deconstructed buildings. We have restored that soil to living, but it is not deeper. This is an example of flourishing despite the disturbed, even damaged landscape. It’s incredible how much thriving happens from within this thin band of soil.
“Stuff moves, blows in, and settles. Oftentimes there are surprises, like the baby gingko trees coming up that had been planted by the squirrels and the pond full of aquatic snails that we humans did not introduce. Did they come in as eggs on the toes of a songbird? Huh, must have.
“When environmental art aims to depict the complex systems affected by disastrous industrialization, it often does so via isolating particularities, bringing to the fore specific wonders, curiosities, or horrors. Untidy Objects gestures to such work with its focus on ecological interdependencies and its use of native plant species to facilitate land restoration. But rather than situating humans as agents of ruin acting on the environment, Untidy Objects foregrounds the idea that humans are, and have always been, partial constituents of an evolving life field that is material, relational, and interspecies.”
Learn more about Untidy Objects at graycenter.uchicago.edu/fellowships/untidy-objects.
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