A Hole in the Park

Can we dig a hole in a public park? The modern urban park carries the legacy of the Olmstedian picturesque, a tradition that descends from landscape painting: the countryside was aestheticized by painting out the people whose labor and care made it. Entering the park as a work of land art, this project proposes a pit and a mound on ground left bare by the footings of a sculpture installed the year before.

The land art suspends mowing on ground that is supposed to be lawn. Where the maintenance regime pauses, something else begins, and the lawn starts showing what else it could become. What grows back is weedy and unauthored, and one plant is poisonous enough that the Parks Department asks for its removal. Landscape as a mischievous practice, one that decolonizes the normative care of the urban realm: it puts labor back into the picture, and asks whose care, under whose watch, decides what a park is allowed to become.