Guerrilla Flower Installations That Don’t Last Long at All

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/t-magazine/guerrilla-flower-flashes-installations.html

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Even the most ephemeral street art is not usually this fleeting: Minutes after the work is finished in the metallic glint of dawn, passers-by stop, stare — then carry bits of it away, until the whole thing collapses. The act of creation has been briefer than a spring shower; destruction comes even more swiftly. Soon, all that is left is a scattering of petals and twisted stems, curled on the ground like punctuation marks. Photos of the piece survive on social media, of course, as most things now do — a cascade of orchids and echinacea, nature sculpted into a gloriously unnatural state — but even the images are haunted by the specter of wilt; it’s built in.

Guerrilla flower “flashes” — such as those by the married Melbourne-based duo called Loose Leaf, whose giant wreaths appear suspended in air amid the city’s alleyways like portholes to another dimension, as well as those by the Manhattan florist Lewis Miller, who has, under cover of night, turned the city’s bedraggled mascots, the waist-high metal mesh garbage cans, into giant vases — are taking the most evanescent of the decorative arts into places it has rarely gone. Unlike graffiti, which is meant to leave its mark on mostly urban environments for as long as possible, these installations attempt not to defy but to chronicle nature’s mutability.

Fashion designers, including Alexander Wang, whose show last month was staged with impromptu aplomb from a tour bus that made stops in Manhattan and Brooklyn, have always sought to create a sense of spontaneity and surprise with their work, but clothing can never feel as deliciously impermanent as flowers. These short-lived botanical street installations seem both an embrace and a rebuke of earlier, earthier “happenings” wrought in quicksilver mediums. The 1960s Fluxus artists at least left behind a series of tiny attaché cases filled with objects (games, bottles with plastic droppers, custom-lettered cards, sets of rocks) to commemorate their events; at Carole Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food, the 1970s SoHo restaurant-cum-art installation, diners were once given a necklace made of their entrees’ scrubbed bones to wear home. But blossoms leave behind no trace.

Perhaps that is why flora is increasingly an expansive medium for artists; no other material so explicitly blurs the line between fine art and decoration that was created in the early 20th century, and which left floral art on one side of the divide and sculpture on the other. The latter got to call itself high art, fine art; the former had to settle for the diminutive label of “decorative.” These days, though, such distinctions seem quaint and out of touch. One has only to see the work of the London-based Rebecca Louise Law, who created an upside-down meadow floating from the ceiling of a structure at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2015, and that of Tokyo’s Azuma Makoto, who has made botanical sculptures suspended in ice for the likes of Dries Van Noten, to recognize this truth.

But the provocative beauty of such sculptural, large-scale creations tends to be confined to galleries or exclusive events — which is, to Geoffroy Mottart, a shame. Over the last two years, the artist has adorned more than 20 historical statues around Brussels with elaborate beards and wigs made completely of flowers, giving new life to monuments that may have become invisible in the landscape. He has made it his mission to use flowers as a “connection between people and their history.” Charlie Lawler and Wona Bae of Loose Leaf consider guerrilla installations a celebratory way to recycle leftover blooms from private floral commissions; they incorporate foraged materials, including sticks and roadside vines, into the wreaths as well. Tina Libby, a freelance florist in Philadelphia who has been adorning stone statues and garbage cans since April, uses donated surplus from local flower shops. But these works aren’t meant to merely delight: Earlier this year, the Iran-born, Brooklyn-based brothers who call themselves Icy and Sot wove blossoms into barbed wire atop a cement wall in Miami as a commentary on current immigration struggles.

For Miller, who is inspired by the superabundance of Rousseau’s paintings as well as by the linear juxtapositions of cubism, the flower flashes are simply “guttural.” The works — which he constructs with a three-person team in fewer than 15 minutes at first daylight in various downtown N.Y.C. locations, including the foot of the Washington Square Arch and near a traffic light on West 14th Street — force him to abandon the perfectionism endemic to his craft. It wasn’t an easy leap — when he began making his pop-up pieces in October 2016, his first impulse was to create a perfect arrangement in the studio and plop it into the cans. Then he realized that he had to get away from all that fussing, to transcend his workaday occupation of “making rich people’s lives more beautiful.” The point was to throw together an arrangement on the spot, on a street corner; to force a collage of compromises. Getting too fancy or self-conscious would annihilate the joy.

That those who wander by the renegade installations feel comfortable taking handfuls of blooms, thus destroying the effect, delights Miller. The works are, in some way, a twist on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s melancholic, often restaged “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991, in which gallery-goers are encouraged to take a piece of wrapped candy from a giant pile, enacting the wasting away of the artist’s partner from complications due to AIDS.

In this modern retelling — in yet another era when spontaneous beauty can remedy despair, if only briefly — a garbage pail becomes a geyser of roses, an explosion of dahlias, a shooting plume of lilies and irises. And in the blink of an eye, the cans once again hold only trash. As you walk away from the detritus, it hits you: The flowers are there to inspire the contemplation all art does — a reflection on the fragility of all things living, on the ending that awaits us all.