Thread before the Gardening Thread: Art, Not Gardening [KT]

Okay, a pile of dirt is involved, but this does not qualify as urban gardening. It is called 'Resistencia'. Video below the fold. David Thompson posted a longer video of a similar performance here. You might like to take a look through the comments.

You see, Ms Lopez describes her mission as nothing less than "expanding the consciousness of human beings." As will doubtless become clear.

She seems to like the pose above. Dirt, water, who knows which medium will inspire her, and us, next? You may need to scroll past some other works of art to reach her interaction with water.

By way of contrast, in case you missed it earlier, VDH discusses the history of The Good Populism in ancient Greece and beyond. (H/T Maggie's Farm) He notes the importance of middle class agrarians to the emergence of democracy. Agrarians who produced something more tangible than the art featured today. When nature cooperated, anyway. Farmers, gardeners, those types.

The mesoi, or "middle guys," both predated and remained somewhat at odds with contemporary radical Athenian democracy. Yet these agrarian property-owning classes were also originally responsible for the Greek city-state and thus for Western civilization itself. The Jeffersonian idea of preserving ownership of a family plot, and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws and property rights, were the themes of the constitutions of the early polis. The citizen--neither a peasant nor a subject--remained rooted to a particular plot of ground, and thereby enjoyed the tripartite rights of citizenship: military service, voting rights in the assembly, and the ability to be self-supporting and autonomous. The mesoi, then, lent stability to otherwise often volatile consensual politics.

Back to today's Art.

And here's the video where Roger Kimball introduces VDH, who discusses The Good Populism, among other things. His grandmother understood something. The Q and A is interesting.

Hope you have a great weekend. Hope your life does not imitate today's art.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:45 AM

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