Project Titles

Means of Production

undeveloped site early 2002

evolving site summer 2010

Means of Production is a public land art project located at North China Creek Park in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.

I conceived the project as a botanical intervention to demonstrate techniques of community-scale ecoforestry in a low-income, inner city neighbourhood, as well as to frame questions about the loss of the notion of the 'commons' in the North American landscape.

Means of Production was intially implemented by me and members of the Environmental Youth Alliance with financial support from the Art & The Environment initiative of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver as well as the Vancouver Parks Board.

Work at the Means of Production site commenced in the fall of 2002 and is ongoing. The landscape is constantly changing as the plantings of heritage basket willow, Paulownia, bamboo, hazel, ash, iris and hollyhock are harvested and new growth cycles start up and various on-site artistic interventions ebb and flow through time. The harvested materials form the basis of social practice initiatives led by various artists with people from the surrounding neighbourhood. I continuing to document each layer as it continues to aggregate into an ever richer palimpsest of human and botanical activity.

In keeping with the open source intention of the the project, the Means of Production Raw Resource Collective has formed and they now co-manage the site. They have instigated the Grow Art program that puts on workshops using the materials grown on site as well as offering many other interactive and educational programs throughout the year.

We would be pleased to have you visit Means of Production, which is open to the public every day.

The Means of Production Manifesto:

With its explicitly utilitarian didacticism and naturalistic horticultural arrangements, one might well ask:

“What makes The Means of Production a work of art?”

Clearly the project facilitates the production of art by directly furnishing materials for art making but is it itself a work of art?

At first glance, the plantings are quite pleasing to the eye, the bright varicoloured stems of willows and bamboo contrasting with the dark sculptured shapes of the coppiced trees.

In addition, Means of Production is paradigmatic; a working model of inner city forestry and neighbourhood self-sufficiency, an homage to arcadian tradition and ecological agit prop. But this is only part of the aesthetic equation.

In my previous land art work, (Cottonwood Gardens, Healing the Cut- Bridging the Gap, Memory Trees etc.), I have adopted what the late Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys called “the homeopathic role." Here, the artist, and by extension the work, become covert agents of social change.

Beuys, despite his stated aspirations, was himself extremely overt, caught up in the overblown celebrity culture of the twentieth century avant-garde. Yet some of his later works, notably Stadtverwaldung statt Staatverwaltung (also known as Seven Thousand Oaks) pointed out a way toward a new, more subtle artistic mandate.

Considering urban reforestation as art, moves us away from the pervasive banality of the artist as stylish maker of branded fetish objects, purveyed to an ever-shrinking audience of cognoscenti; the kind of art that can at best evoke some small frisson, or a knowing, ironic wink.

Means of Production abandons this game. There is no more secret handshake, no more “Fifteen minutes of fame.”
I succeed only when the viewers of my work forget about me and any cleverness of artifice and begin to experience the work completely as ambiance. Then, they might start asking the questions that I want them to ask. After numerous cycles of harvest and regrowth, any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have disappeared. It will no longer matter.

That is when it gets interesting . . .

Because then the artwork will have receded into what Walter Benjamin called the optical subconscious – the artist’s unseen hand. The work no longer screams out, “ART”, but becomes part of the infrastructure, part of our assumptions, an internalized component of the urban visual field. In short: The new normal.