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IMPROVISATION - PRAGMATISM, ART, KITSCH  

Naive improvisation cannot achieve a form that has no task to guide it - if it becomes craft its correlation with the immediate practical task it was serving to satisfy will no longer be its form's sufficient (and temporary) limit, and any result less than art (an object that is a complete and independent experience) will be kitsch. Improvisation produces perfect objects which never reach a conclusion - never, like art, singular, isolated, finished. Like clouds they are always in formation - as perfect as the inevitablity of their means. An improvised object cannot be copied, it is a Gestalt formed of a practical response to a need in the context of the easiest and most immediate means. If its consequent vitality of intelligence and action is admired as appearence, if its initiator stops making as an act of 'practical-play' and begins to make from an admiration of 'creativity' and beauty, s/he will loose the 'innocence' necessary to form perfection with minimum effort, and to regain initiative must aspire to complete the object for its own sake as art - to do this (like the cost of the Little Mermaid's possession of legs) s/he must work on resolving a unique and permanent form beyond admiration, preference, judgment. However this is rare in societies which depend on mass-marketed products, where individual intelligence and practical experience is usually applied to choosing/buying rather than scavanging/improvising (let alone solving ones own products as unique art-works); in fact as soon as object-making becomes 'self-conscious' most people decant their innate inventiveness/impulses/talents into choosing mass-aesthetic 'fossil' (kitsch) forms.

Improvisation depends, not so much on 'raw' materials, as discarded parts of manufactured objects: the debris of demolished buildings and broken machines and the primary materials of fabrication trades: boards, sheets, fabrics, containers, formed-wood and metal. A fundamental absurdity [1] of manufacturing/commercial societies is their destruction of these means of improvisational re-use - instead of offering these processed/fabricated materials to resourceful individuals they are dumped out of reach in land fills or reduced by incineration all the way back to their least-differentiated, most-basic raw forms: ash (used in road-surfacing material) and heat (used for power generation).

NOTE :

1. Not 'absurd' of course to the sellers of newly finished products of manufacture. In "advanced" manufacturing/commercial societies the needs and power of sellers absurdly: in terms of absolute waste of resources from raw to fabricated, dictates destruction (on a vast scale!) of materials that are reusable via resourceful intelligence.

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ALLOTMENTS - CONTENT LIMITS
[Written: from 5-2009]

In the UK, improvisatory freedom (unless endorsed as 'art') is legal and tolerated only in very limited types of collectively-utilised publically-visible places. 'Allotments' are such venues - where structures resulting from individuals' improvisatory initiatives can be viewed by strangers, however such structures are required to pertain only to the mantenance of a small patch of horticultural endeavour, limited in size, functional complexity and content to sub-dwelling functions - mainly storage (of the tools of gardening); simple workshop tasks (such as plant propagation); the construction of plant habitats; marginal self-referencing social activities (tiny fragments of 'home', like making tea, having a sitdown rest, admiring ones work). Within such limits UK allotments are places where on one hand the virtue and abilities of practical seriousness is admired, and on the other there is no 'aesthetic' control (except perhaps pragmatism) on invented structures (such as that exercised over the exterior of our homes by officials and 'concerned' neighbours through council planners and via commercially originated conditioning [1]).

NOTE :

1. It seems that as soon as a structure's functional catagory expands to 'home', individual freedom is curtailed. For example, on the edge of Amsterdam (and other Netherlands cities) there are allotment-like fenced and gated areas that host and display mini estates of small dacha-like 'leisure-cottages', each in its fenced plot of garden-land, that provide for the city's flat-dwellers a toyland experience of detached-house living. Because the location is relatively isolated from the city-public's complex and serious requirements and critiques, it could be a collectively maintained area for individuals' free inventions, however it seems that the functional level of a 'home' (which presumably includes its potential sale price) subjects all the individual dwellings to a collective scrutiny and control similar in type and degree to that exercised in 'leafy city suburbs' - most of the structures are stilted, mass-kitsch 'models' of mass-concepts of 'home', stylised panderings to commercialised mass-taste - all the users of this facility seem subjected to the whole panoply of social-neighbourhood interaction: privacy, gossip, wealth/taste display, aesthetic and behavoural 'neighbourly' control. It's as if the rigidity objectivity and standardisation of the pre-assigned environment - starting with measured/divided plots served by pedestrian/bike circulation routes and utility services - automatically catagorizes this escapist 'free-living' creative opportunity as bourgeois suburbia; it's as if, at the level and type of functional complexity defined as 'home', there is no general acceptence of the objective and experiential value of individual personal inventions (on any level from finance to fulfillment) - only of individual choices exercised within the mass-market and thus endorsed by the communality of commercial and familiar products.
   

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ALLOTMENTS - CONTENT TANGENTS & POTENTIALS

Established for the industrial poor or wartime food growing, traditional allotments are understood to be practical agri-enterprises for cultivating vegetables and fruit rather than decorative flowering plants, let alone 'aesthetic' layouts and ornamental garden-like adornments of the plot. However in these times of easily available food and surplus of energy and time, one sees erosion of the strictly pragmatic principle along tangents of sterility or inventiveness:

Many allotment plots now include within their rectangular boundary (in addition to a practical seat for resting after work) a patch that signals 'leisure' - quite common is a 'quaint' group of log-seats that seem to declare a 'rustic' discussion-forum; some have a patch of mown lawn, a lily pool, an arbour; a very few completely transcend the practical and aspire to the artifice of a 'fully-furnished' garden, converting their plot into a sterile mass-culture 'model' with bought in (or neatly copied) 'no-garden-should-be-without' commercial-kitsch 'features' - an extremity of leisure inclusion that obliterates the allotment raison d'etre ... fortunately rare, in this last preserve of (scope-limited but) free inventiveness.

Free inventiveness, socially sanctioned by 'practicality', nevetheless sometimes exceeds the strictly practical economy of an allotment's purpose and elaborates pragmatism into 'play'. The latter is characteristic of people who enjoy the experience//game of inventive improvising as much as growing vegetables, who, without devolving into 'craft', gratuitously invent horticultural uses for arbitary objects and/or elaborate their practical constructions via wit.

Allotments are rich in practical and gratutious inventions below the scale of homes, offering a plethora of structures and form-conjunctions that are uncommon outside horticulture: forms that are containing and protective, light and heat collecting, growth-guiding - as if 'sketches' and 'models' of possible town-scale architecture. They present a myriad invented and chance ("rubbish") objects that provoke one to examine the junction between practical improvisation and art.

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ALLOTMENT - EG1: "ONE-TREE-HILL", LONDON     ... in process  

 

ONE-TREE-HILL: PLOTS & HUTS (pic 1-3-09 / to WWS)
ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - PLOT FROM ENTRY (pic [1/10] 9-8-09 / to N) x	ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - GREENHOUSE-1 (pic [2/10] 28-6-09 / to S) x
ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - GREENHOUSE-2 (pic [3/10] 28-6-09 / to S) x	ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT ENTRY FACE (paste-up 2-pics [4/10] 28-6-09 / to N) Here the 'vague' construction of the hut's rear sides is focussed through more differentiated uses and is inevitably more controlled.
ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT ENTRY - INTERIOR (paste-up 2-pics [5/10] 9-8-09 / to NW) x	ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - SW CORNER (pic [6/10] 9-8-09 / to WWN) x
ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT REAR (pic [7/10] 1-3-09 / to SW) An astonishingly 'loose' agglomeration of disparate unit-parts that almost as if by chance, group themselves as 'hut'. The seemingly manically flung together parts and the undisguised immediacy of the acts of decision assembly and fixing, can be subliminally interpreted as alive movement or decisive potential.	ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT REAR  (pic [8/10] 16-4-09 / to SW) In the six and a half weeks since the first pic there have been many small non-structural changes.
ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT REAR  (pic [9/10] 9-8-09 / to SW) In the sixteen weeks since the second pic there have been many more small non-structural changes - this type of change does'nt add, it simply cycles.	ONE-TREE-HILL: IRIS - HUT REAR  (pic [10/10] 1-3-09 / to S)
ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - GREENHOUSE & STORE HUT (pic [##] 16-4-09 / to NW) x	ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - GREENHOUSE & STORE HUT (pic [##] 28-6-09 / to N) x
ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - SOCIAL SIT PLACE (pic [##] 16-4-09 / to W) x	ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - SOCIAL SIT PLACE (pic [##] 28-6-09 / to EES) x
ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - SOCIAL SIT PLACE (paste-up 2-pics [##] 28-6-09 / to N) x	ONE TREE HILL: DENIS - SOCIAL SIT PLACE (pic [##] 28-6-09 / to E) x

ALLOTMENT - EG2: "GUN-SITE", LONDON

PLOTS
ARCHITECTURE FOR GROWING & PROTECTING PLANTS
STORES, STORE-BOXES, STORE-PLACES, STORE-SHELTERS 
LITTER-STORES 
SIT-PLACES & SIT-SHELTERS

NEXUS 

GARDENS
AESTHETIC CONSTRUCTS / IMPROVISATION AS PRAGMATIC PLAY

ODD OBJECTS

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PLOTS

The basic allotment form - a naked plot, stripped of natural growth for cultivation, and sometimes conserved: wrapped to prevent the growth of weed seeds - inevitably divides into two main zones: the largest for growing plants, the smaller for storing the means of cultivation; both these zones differentiate further, the first into patches adapted for plants with different life needs, the second subdivides for tool-storage, construction-material storage, germinating plants, making, resting. The growing zone is structurally, visually, 'architecturally' simple, predicated on the needs of plants - here human initiative is only visible in the isolation of plant types and provision of artificial environments that model each type's natural growth needs. The second zone's complexity grows in step with the discoveries, crafts, satisfactions of the plot's human initiator - distilling and seperating basic work-needs, from physical tools to invention, fantasy, rest.

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ARCHITECTURE FOR GROWING AND PROTECTING PLANTS

Architecture for plants is a very simple kind - structures whose purpose is to nurture, protect and sustain their growth (mimic natural habitat features), that can be made easily from common debris materials: all sorts of miscellaneous grids, sticks, bamboo, plastic sheeting, nets, skipped carpets, plastic tubing, demolition wood, pallets, bottles and cans.

 

GUN-SITE: TRELLIS & HOOPED CLOCHE (pic 19-5-09 / to NNW) x	GUN-SITE: FRANK - TRELLIS ROWS OF METAL-TUBE, CANE, BEER-CANS (paste-up 2-pics 1-6-09 / to N) x
GUN-SITE: STEEL & CORD BEAN-FRAME (pic [1/2] 1-6-09 / to SW) x	GUN-SITE:  STEEL & CORD BEAN-FRAME (pic [2/2] 25-8-09 / to S) x
GUN-SITE: STEEL & WOOD BEAN-FRAME (pic 29-5-09 / to NW) x	GUN-SITE: ALIVE CONICAL TRELLIS (pic 29-5-09 / to NW) x
GUN-SITE: PLASTIC-BOTTLE CLOCHES (pic 31-5-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: PLANT-POSTS WITH NET SUPPORTING POTS (pic 31-5-09 / to #) x
GUN-SITE: TUNNEL NETS (pic 7-6-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: HOOPED NETS (pic 31-5-09 / to #) x
GUN-SITE: NET ENCLOSED TREE (pic 7-6-09 / to N) x	GUN-SITE: PINK-NET ENCLOSED TREE (pic 1-6-09 / to SSW) x
GUN-SITE: NET ENCASED PLOT (pic 1-6-09 / to S) x	GUN-SITE: STEEL-MESH & NET ENCASED PLOT (pic 25-8-09 / to NNE) x

 

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STORES, STORE-BOXES, STORE-PLACES, STORE-SHELTERS

 

A 'store' is an orderly-accumulation of materials/objects for foreseen use. Stores range from a simple 'heap' or open box to a complex of ordered heaps, boxes, shelters. Some of the stored objects (eg pallets) may serve to contain others. The most developed stores resemble small commercial yards: including space for crafting as well as storing materials. 

A store is functionally the most various part of an allotment: the source of tools and materials; sometimes a place for inventing/making necessary horticultural structures; also potentially suggestive of ancillary activities beyond the needs of plants [see below: brick path making] [1].

On this site (for some unfathomed reason) enclosed structures over one metre high are banned. Thus 'huts' - the usual solution for storage of vulnerable tools (and for temporary private/sheltered work or rest) are (almost) absent. Huts are completely enclosed doored lockable volumes, 'walk-in' minature 'dwellings' - on these allotments their storage and sitting functions are housed in their meanest analogue: a hut that lacks a front-wall: a mere 'shelter', and their secure-storage function is demoted to locked 'chests'. The hut restraint can provoke funny objects: occasionally a small hut is snuck into a store place, a 'chest' swells and acquires an upright door, a shelter's volume is almost closed; 'almost-huts' pose as climbing-plant frames; in at least one case a small bought hut blatently survives as a unit in a 'garden composition'.

 

NOTE:

1.  Note the role of its associated workshop in the making of an improvised home [ref especially SILO SQUAT].

 

GUN-SITE: STORE-BOX FOR CARPET (pic 1-6-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: STORE MOUNDS (pic 1-6-09 / to EES) x
GUN-SITE: STORE IN/OF PLASTIC-BINS (pic 15-6-09 / to SW) x	GUN-SITE: STORE PLUS COMPOST (pic 1-6-09 / to N(?)) x
GUN-SITE: STORE OF COMPOST & WOOD WITH TREE (pic 15-6-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: STORE & COMPOST BOXES (pic 7-6-09 / to E) x
GUN-SITE: STORE BOXES AND LOCKED 'CHESTS' (paste-up 2-pics 19-5-09 / to SE) x	GUN-SITE: STORE-PILE FENCED (pic 1-6-09 / to W) x
GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX (W-FACE) (pic [1/2] 1-6-09 / to EES) x	GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX (S-FACE) (pic [2/2] 1-6-09 / to NE) x
GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX WITH BAG-BOX (pic 15-6-09 / to SSW) x	GUN-SITE: STORE BOX HALF-HUT (paste-up 2-pics 15-6-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: STORE PLUS TANK (pic [1/3] 15-6-09 / to WWS) x	GUN-SITE: STORE PLUS TANK (pic [2/3] 15-6-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: STORE PLUS TANK & 'POND-BOWL' (pic [3/3] 15-6-09 / to SSE) x	GUN-SITE: STORE-DUMP COMPLEX (pic 7-6-09 / to E) x
GUN-SITE: STORE-DUMP COMPLEX - PALLETS / WOOD / DUMP (pic [1/2] 15-6-09 / to E) x	GUN-SITE: STORE-DUMP COMPLEX - PALLETS / WOOD / DUMP (paste-up 2-pics [2/2] 15-6-09 / to SSW) x
GUN-SITE: SMALL STORE COMPLEX (pic 15-6-09 / to N) x	GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX (S-FACE) (pic [1/3] 31-5-09 / to N) This complex of varied types of store-containers and an area for young plant care and preparing paving-bricks has accumulated across the width of a plot.
GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX (W-END) (pic [2/3] 31-5-09 / to EES)	GUN-SITE: STORE COMPLEX (E-END) (paste-up 2-pics [3/3] 31-5-09 / to WWN) x
GUN-SITE: VINE-COVERED STORE-PLACE (paste-up 2-pics [1/3] 31-5-09 / to N) A special case: a simple single-volume (albeit very large) open-sided store-shelter, serves a second function: as a frame for a climbing plant. [See below a 'garden-arbour' version of a 'vine-frame'.]	GUN-SITE: VINE-COVERED STORE-PLACE (pic [2/3] 19-5-09 / to WW N) x
GUN-SITE: VINE-COVERED STORE - INTERIOR (pic [3/3] 31-5-09 / to WWN) x

 

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LITTER-STORES

 

Cultivators' need nearby materials to respond to and support the needs and growth of plants. Allotments seem the only places where adults can make a mess with impunity - their reason/excuse is 'pragmatism', and its essential aspect/condition that all is in continual change is unchallangable! 

A 'litter-store' is little more organised than a dump, however as a source of improvisational materials it stores potentials. In allotment terms only an abandoned plot left for use by 'weeds' is pointlessly chaotic.  

 

GUN-SITE: LITTER ON ABANDONED(?) PLOT (pic 15-6-09 / to NNW(?)) x	GUN-SITE: LITTER & PLOT IN PROCESS(?) (pic 1-6-09 / to SW(?)) x
GUN-SITE: LITTER-STORAGE AREA (pic 31-5-09 / to EES) x	GUN-SITE: LITTER-STORAGE CORNER WITH COVERED PLOT (paste-up 2-pics 31-5-09 / to N) x
GUN-SITE: LITTER-STORAGE AREA (pic [1/2] 31-5-09 / to EES) x	GUN-SITE: LITTER-STORAGE AREA - GROUP OF DISPIRATE ITEMS (paste-up 2-pics [2/2] 31-5-09 / to NNE) x
GUN-SITE: LITTER-DUMP & SIT-PLACE (pic [1/3] 15-6-09 / to EES) x	GUN-SITE: LITTER-DUMP & SIT-PLACE (pic [2/3] 15-6-09 / to S) x
GUN-SITE: LITTER-DUMP & SIT-PLACE (pic [3/3] 15-6-09 / to E) x

 

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SIT-PLACES & SIT-SHELTERS

 

There are six types of 'sitting-places': Fixed seating, 'rustic' (usually slices of tree), seemingly posing as a 'natural excrecence of its plot'; apparently for some open-air social meeting, evoking in plan and rustication a more or less formal convocation of dwarves. An association of an often single seat and pond (a conjunction that seems to connote 'contemplation'). A roofed seat: a one/two person rain shelter. An elaborated sitting area with leisure facilities of a 'home' garden. Formal 'garden' seating - having the air of a 'symbol' or an 'official facility': at bus stop or on palace parterre. A haphazard chair or two for inconsequential resting. 

 

GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('RUSTIC') (pic 7-6-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('RUSTIC') (pic 19-5-09 / to #) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('RUSTIC') (pic 1-6-09 / to NW) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('RUSTIC') - WITH ARBOUR (pic 19-5-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('RUSTIC') (pic [1/2] 29-5-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ( 'RUSTIC') - AS WORK NEXUS (pic [2/2] 1-6-09 / to #) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE & POND  (pic 1-6-09 / to #) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE & POND ('MINI-GARDEN') (pic 15-6-09 / to E) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE & POND  (pic [1/2] 15-6-09 / to SSW) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE & POND   (pic [2/2] 15-6-09 / to SW) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE IN TREES ('ORCHARD')  (pic 1-6-09 / to SE) x	GUN-SITE: SHELTER IN HEDGE (pic 15-6-09 / to EEN) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER IN HEDGE (pic 28-8-10 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER (pic 31-5-09 / to NE) x
GUN-SITE: SIT SHELTER  (paste-up 2-pics 15-6-09 / to NW) View from the bench in a tiny frontless wooden box with just enough roof-overhang to protect me from a downpour; at the hedge-end of an abandoned field-like plot.	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER (pic [1/2] 9-6-09 / to NW) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER BENCH (pic [2/2] 28-8-10 / to NW) x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER - HEDGE BEFORE BENCH (pic [3/2] 9-6-09 / to SSW) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE ('ARCADIAN RETREAT') (paste-up 2-pics [1/3] 19-5-09 / to NNW) An elaborated sitting area continuous with a garden. x	GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER ('ARCADIAN RETREAT') - SHELTER (pic 19-5-09 [2/3] / to NNE) Like a suburban sitting-room with a plasma tv the open rear of this shelter displays the antics of golfers. Here the idyllic 'isolation' of Gun-Site - a huge container of peace within its perimeter-screen of trees - is breeched, and so irrelated is the outside that it appears more easily as a 'display' than an alternative real place. (In their turn the golfers seem completely unaware of another place beside them.) x
GUN-SITE: SIT PLACE SHELTER ('ARCADIAN RETREAT') - CHAIR FEET (pic 19-5-09 [3/3] / to W) Plastic containers filled with plaster (yoghurt pots, etc.) shoe the legs of chairs to prevent them sinking. x	GUN-SITE: TEMPORARY SIT PLACE (pic 1-6-09 / to E) x
GUN-SITE: POSSIBLE SIT PLACE - SEMI-NATURAL ARBOUR (pic 15-6-09 / to NW) x	GUN-SITE: 'ARBOUR'  SIT PLACE - SEMI-NATURAL ARBOUR (pic 13-10-09 / to NW) x

 

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NEXUS

 

A 'nexus' is an ordered multifunctional complex, often comprising (at maximum) a store, sit-place, tools, plant-nursery, plot for cultivation. An aggregate of the facilities shown above.

 

GUN-SITE: NEXUS - PLOT & STORE  (paste-up 2-pics [1/7] 19-5-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - PLOT & STORE  (pic 19-5-09 [2/7] / to N) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - STORE  (paste-up 2-pics [3/7] 19-5-09 / to E) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - STORE: E-END DETAIL (pic [4/7] 19-5-09 / to N) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - REAR PATH (pic [5/7] 19-5-09 / to SE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - REAR STORE-SHELTER & SIT-PLACE (pic [6/7] 7-6-09 / to NNE) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - REAR SIT-PLACE (pic [7/7] 19-5-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT-SHELTER-TENT / STORE (paste-up 2-pics 1-6-09 / to NW) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT PLACE / STORE / PLANT-NURSERY (pic [1/2] 1-6-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT PLACE / STORE / PLANT-NURSERY (pic [2/2] 1-6-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT PLACE / PLANT-NURSERY (pic 31-5-09 / to SE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT PLACE / STORE / PLANT-NURSERY (pic 31-5-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - SIT-SHELTER / POND / STORE (pic [1/2] 7-6-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - STORE BEHIND SIT-SHELTER (pic [2/2] 15-6-09 / to S) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS & PLOT (pic 1-6-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS (pic 29-6-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS (pic 31-5-09 / to NW) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - LINEAR WITH FLOWER-PATCH (pic 15-6-09 / to WWS) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS (pic [1/3] 15-6-09 / to E) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS (pic [2/3] 15-6-09 / to SE) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS (pic [3/3] 15-6-09 / to SSW) x	x

 

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GARDENS

 

A whole allotment plot may be a garden, or only a designated strip or patch. A 'garden' is recreational and aesthetic - if 'practical' vegetables are grown they may be excluded from the garden portion or planted in an aesthetically considered setting. ...in process

 

Firstly, a 'natural' garden where plants are allowed and helped to display and increase their beauty (grown for beauty not meaning) is a branch of practical nurture akin to that of vegetables for their taste - a beauty to be consumed. As an extension of the spectrum of human needs to a point inevitably attained by well-fed moderns it fits the pragmatic value of allotments (however profligate it would seem to their founding users - poor city dwellers).

 

Secondly, 'patterned' plots: aesthetic habits or motif memories creep into some, dictating patterned plans, as if just growing like a plant factory or on super-fertile wildland is not enough for human needs - the ground must be patterned to be posessed.

 

Thirdly, a 'garden of signs' - normally an extension of a house, a private exterior living-room fenced and individualised, a minature 'palace-park' of pride (or squalor) demonstrating the taste and means of tiny royalty within, via style and product choices that must be, in order to be judged at all, familiar and meaningful to the majority of its tribe. From a base aesthetic of visual precision and tidyness, such gardens select from 'motif-objects' proper to the grounds of palaces: beds of floral beauty, a pond with lilies golden-fish and fountain, sculptures of nymphs, rose-arbours and arches, rocks simulating the sublime, paths pretanaturally winding, terraces for reclining entertaining and dining ... all available in diminished sizes, various historical styles, real wood, plastic and cement, at local garden centres or individually crafted by craftsmen. A type of garden whose 'fantastic' character is amplified when transported into a setting of allotment-practicality - appears like a mirage, perfected and planned as if private walled, yet open and public as the vegetable plots around it; neat as a model of a dream of pretend beauty: a statement of a quality that dwells elsewhere than in copies of copies of mere memories of originals rich in meaning for their time and class. The opposite of naturalness - that unique human achievemant: a fake.

 

GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE (pic [1/4] 31-5-09 / to WWN) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE (pic [2/4] 15-6-09 / to W) x
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE (pic [3/4] 15-6-09 / to SE) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE (paste-up 2-pics [4/4] 15-6-09 / to E) To evoke 'eden' (a pre-gardening place) the extravagant beauty of cultivated roses must be allowed to spread uncontrollably in order to assert the splendour of a 'wild' reality ... a natural super-abundence !
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-2: PATTERNED) - WITH ROSE-ARCH (pic [1/2] 1-6-09 / to SW) An example of a 'garden' type, but transitional between a relaxed pragmatism and kitsch formality. The plot has a gratuitous plan, cut by diagonal paths ornamented with rose arches, but the resulting triangular and diamond plots are casually used for vegetables and flowers.	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-2: PATTERNED) - WITH ROSE-ARCH (pic [2/2] 31-5-09 / to SW)
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - HUT & 'PATIO' (pic [1/10] 29-5-09 / to S) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE)- HUT & FLOWER-PLOTS  (pic [2/10] 29-5-09 / to NNW) x
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - 'LAWN' WITH FRUIT-TREES & POND (pic [3/10] 1-6-09 / to SW) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - 'LAWN' POND (pic [4/10] 1-6-09 / to W) x
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - 'LAWN' WITH SEAT / FLOWER BORDER / VINE ARBOUR (pic [5/10] 1-6-09 / to WWS) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - VINE ARBOUR (pic [6/10] 1-6-09 / to SE) x
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - VINE ARBOUR REAR (pic [7/10] 25-8-09 / to NE) x	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - VINE ARBOUR INTERIOR (pic [8/10] 29-5-09 / to EES) x
GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - PATIO WITH STORE-CHEST AT REAR OF VINE ARBOUR (pic [9/10] 1-6-09 / to SSE) The sinister is never far from kitsch - its resort to visual clarity as a sign and substitute for unity and subject definition, gives the impression that something is being hidden and stimulates paranoid associating.	GUN-SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - FLOWER BORDER & VINE ARBOUR IN EVENING SUN (pic [10/10] 1-6-09 / to SW) When the visual clarity of kitsch is softened and confused (as in this case by sun-glare and compositional chaos) paranoia is lulled and a dream such as 'romantic ruin' may emerge.
GUN-SITE: GARDEN-PATCH - FENCE & 'ENTRY-GATE' (pic [1/2] 1-6-09 / to NE) A narrow slice of an allotment plot is confined between 'garden-type' trellis-fences, one of which - with its (in this case useless and unused) central gate flanked by rose-bush 'hedges' - suggests the 'road-facing' fence of a suburban 'front-garden'. This brief signalling of symmetry dissolves 'within' into a desultory sprinkle of informal and formal (hanging-baskets) garden-type initiatives.	GUN-SITE: GARDEN-PATCH (pic [2/2] 1-6-09 / to E) x

 

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AESTHETIC  CONSTRUCTS / IMPROVISATION  AS PRAGMATIC PLAY      ... in process  

 

Improvisation is a mode of 'play' (usually buried under adult dignity) learnt in childhood when surrounding objects could be thought to stand for others: transformed via fantasy, adorned in mental riches, and later piled in constructions. Adult improvisation substitutes for the child's 'story' an external pragmatic purpose, and just as a child grabs what's in easy reach to mentally transform it into the furnishings and landscape of a story, the improviser sees a solution to an external need as a potential embodied in a transformation of random surrounding objects. 

It is the purest improvisations - the results of a purely pragmatic purpose: the most immediate, economic, insightful, and (ironically) untidied by aesthetic judgements - whose outcome is simultaneously beautiful, visually fascinating, and pragmatic. Their aesthetic aspect is compounded both of a mode of order analogous to the natural (and thus an image of perfection) and a fascinating collage of un-related objects forced into cooperation in the service of an overriding practical purpose (and thus a rich field of evocative conjunctions ).

There are others {such as example 1 below] whose makers persue practicality and art / ....  ... in process  

GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOOD & IRON COMPOSTER & SEAT-ENCLOSURE PLUS WOOD-STORES (paste-up 2-pics [1/#] 31-5-09 / to E) ... in process This extraordinary 'monument' conjoins practicality and gratutious form-invention. The agenda/motivation of its maker seem to go so far beyond a normal allotment's ad hoc accumulation of facilities for work and rest, that I felt it could not be catagorised as (merely) a 'Nexus'. It seems as if an overriding raison d'etre that is 'sculptural', subjective, monolithic directed its making. Encircling a quadrant of space at a plot's corner is a giant compost bin: a curved wooden trough, whose inner face, elaborated with 'found' wood and extraneous objects, backs a strip of seating facing a 'forecourt' edged by plants.  It seems made by someone whose horticultural practicality cannot overwhelm their aesthetic fascination with eroded wood, or their 'sculptural drive' to form a personally significant environment.	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOODEN COMPOSTER & SEAT-ENCLOSURE PLUS WOOD-STORES (pic [2/#] 29-5-09 / to EEN)
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOODEN COMPOSTER & SEAT-ENCLOSURE - FROM REAR PATH (pic [#] 29-5-09 / to W) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOODEN COMPOSTER & SEAT-ENCLOSURE PLUS  TREE-STORE - FROM REAR PATH (paste-up 2-pics [#] 31-5-09 / to NW) x
GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOODEN COMPOSTER / SEAT-ENCLOSURE / PLANK-STORE FROM REAR PATH (pic [#] 31-5-09 / to SSW) x	GUN-SITE: NEXUS - WOODEN COMPOSTER (pic [#] 29-5-09 / to SE) x
GUN-SITE: FRANK - CENTRE-PLOT FENCES ETC. (pic [1/4] 19-5-09 / to NW) This person does everything in a spirit of 'pragmatic-play', thus everything he makes (even with minimum attention) is simultaneously practical and aesthetic ... even the hose is held against the plot's perimeter in rhythmic waves across its background mesh of fence (like a gridded graph). Here [unlike the previous example] the 'aesthetic' aspect is in fact an inevitable ''value-added' consequence of the exercise of very pure improvisational practicality rather than an outcome of what is commonly called 'artistic talent'.	GUN-SITE: FRANK - JUNK-CAGE FOR PLANTS (pic [2/4] 1-6-09 / to NE) x
GUN-SITE: FRANK - SCARECROW & PLOT-JOINING ARCH (pic [3/4] 19-5-09 / to NNE) This spookily active scarecrow is moved around the plots, always placed in relation to objects that represent a possible task, always in mid-gesture, never a static statue [ref: pic below] and always holding a beer-can: "for authenticity".  Peripherally glimpsed, this crippled ghost must frighten humans more than birds - forming a phantasmagoric image for a different class of creatures must surely be mostly wishful thinking.	GUN-SITE: FRANK - SCARECROW (pic [4/4] 31-5-09 / to SE)
GUN-SITE: SCARECROW (pic 25-8-09 / to NW) x

 

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ODD OBJECTS

 

GUN-SITE: WATER-TANK (pic [1/2] 29-5-09 / to E) Via this image our inherent brain-geometry abstracts and displays an illusive spatial parallelogram ! (The string and the allotments' far boundary / the post and the pipe.)	GUN-SITE: WATER-TANK (pic [2/2] 29-5-09 / to EEN) An exquisitely 'natural-in-the-circumstances' solution to an annoying problem: the persistant springing of the tap's pipe outwards from the tank.  Note how such an un-elaborated solution unambiguously expresses and enables interpretation of its purpose. By leaving its components and their fabrication exposed to empathetic recognition and clearly demonstrating its mechanics via its form, it has become a specific lesson in some general principals and geometry of constructional mechanics and dynamics.
GUN-SITE: MESH CUBE (pic 1-6-09 / to S) The (by allotment standards) newness and perfection of this large cube, seemingly carlessly tossed like a lost ball, made its appearence seem 'sudden' !

 

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INDEX  
IMPROVISED-ARCH IN A'DAM SQUATS & COLLECTIVES  
IMPROVISATION - PUBLIC & LEGAL : ALLOTMENTS  
IMPROVISED VILLAGES - p1  
IMPROVISED VILLAGES - p2  
VERNACULAR & STYLE - BERDUN
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - FRANK'S CAFE - p1  
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - FRANK'S CAFE - p2 - DRAWINGS
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - SOUTHWARK LIDO p1  ... pending
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS 

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