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The Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is not just a collection
of plants but a complex sculpture by contemporary artist Robert Irwin. Set like
a jewel within the Getty Center's imposing promontory overlooking Los Angeles,
Irwin's work is a critical element in Getty's collection of contemporary art.
This year is the Center's - and the garden's - tenth anniversary year. It
should be high on any art-and-garden lover's list of places to visit in 2007.
This garden sculpture may well prove to be the signature piece of American
landscape art of the 21st-century in the manner that Fletcher Steele's 'Blue
Steps' at Naumkeag marked the 20th, and Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted's
Central Park delineated the 19th.
Most everything about this piece of art will subvert expectations. Let's start
with the artist himself. Irwin is not: a landscape architect, a garden designer,
or even a gardener. I've learned over the last year and a half (I have visited
this garden perhaps 50 times) that many (not all, of course) gardeners can be,
well, a bit reactionary. Even professional garden writers, horticulturists, and
garden historians (all of whom should know better) will dismiss this work of art
(after a 15-minute flying visit) on the grounds that "it isn't really a garden
in my definition," or "for heaven's sake, all those azaleas baking in the sun."
Irwin is, or has been, on the other hand: an early abstract expressionist; a
minimalist; a painter, a sculptor; an installation artist; and an artist of what
is called by some "the articulation of space and light." His life as a working
artist - some fifty-plus years, as he is in his eighties now - has been one of
constant personal and aesthetic reinvention. What he came to is this: Art is
pure perception. We, the experiencing viewers, are therefore implicated, and
included - if we abandon prejudice to clear the doors of our own perceptions.
Irwin may work at the Getty with Cor-Ten steel, and boulders, rocks, stone and
pebbles, brass and teak and water and plants, but it is up to us to shred our
preconceptions to enter into what is really not a place, or a garden, in a
conventional sense, but an ever-changing experience.
The Central Garden of the Getty Center is set among the white, unified
village of imposing, linear buildings designed by the internationally celebrated
architect Richard Meier. His geometry marks the definition of the Getty Center.
The high white travertine-clad village, a stunning addition to the architectural
treasure-trove of contemporary Los Angeles, can be seen for miles - well, on a
clear day.
The Central Garden is the counterpoint to the straight lines and rational
approach of Meier's cubes. The garden, in contrast, zigs and zags and curves and
circles, and even shocks with layered color and texture and form.
A walk through the garden is a kinesthetic and sensual experience. The
"sculpture" is essentially in three parts: the first is called the stream
garden, where a visitor begins walking down a slope to what looks like the
terminus of the garden and a sweeping vista of Los Angeles. The stream garden is
essentially a canyon of tumbling green chert boulders sliced by running water,
and punctuated with - now remember this is Los Angeles, USDA Zone 10 - large
deciduous London plane trees (Platanus x acerifolia ‘Yarwood'), employed as
almost abstract elements. (It's not that Irwin just "liked" these plane trees.
He studied how they looked lit in front and back; he considered their effect on
color in the garden, in leaf and bark - and also their density, and form.)
Visitors walk in a zigzag pattern down the canyon, on a stone path laid in
herringbone design. When the stream is crossed, teak planks repeat the
herringbone of the stone. This is not even to mention the plants, or the sound
of water, the smell of flower and leaf, or the boulders giving way to smaller
rocks and then to an elegant pattern of stone in the waterway.
The stream garden spills out to a second overlook, a transition space, or
plaza, marked by seating areas with umbrellas of bougainvillea and metal fifteen
feet overhead, the bougainvillea tumbling out of bouquets of the unexpected -
industrial rebar.
It's now that you see what you couldn't see before. Follow the sound of water
and peek over a carnelian granite wall to see the stream plunging 20 feet into a
pool of water surrounded by what is called the bowl garden. The oft-discussed
and controversial azalea maze is set into this pool (they do seem to bake in
summer, but never mind).
Down and down a curving walkway into this lush garden
you go, for an intimate experience with thousands of plants. Irwin would hate
the analogy, but imagine cracking open a Faberge egg - that's the experience
of walking into the exploding color and texture of this curving garden.
I'm suggesting a winter visit. The idea of ‘winter' itself seems to subvert
the idea of ‘Los Angeles,' but Irwin has designed this garden to have four
seasons, an almost unheard of idea in a Mediterranean climate. The plane trees
are almost bare, and you will have the delight in seeing the obverse of the
Eastern-climate idea of annuals. In the bowl garden dormant winter-bright bare
twigs of salix and dogwoods are brought in as annuals - in pots and planted in
the garden - to spark the garden with startling color. Coral-bark maples stay
year-round and contribute too, along with the yellow-orange of the bright pencil
tree, Euphorbia tirucallii, ‘sticks of fire'.
During an early January visit, I overheard a tour guide describe the garden as
"down," which presupposes an idea of absence. It's all, though, a matter of
seeing. And what I saw, in terms of color, was the vibrancy, first of all, of
the golds - golden Monterey cypress; variegated hair grass; Japanese sweet
flag; a carpeting sedum, S. makina ‘ogon'; a sedge, Carex hachijoensis ‘evergold';
and golden twig dogwood. There were pinks and mauves and reds - the kalanchoes,
echiverias, red hook sedges, coleus - and even the white of the ghost bramble,
another obverse annual, this one from China, which returns to a nursery in
spring for its leafing and flowering, until it is allowed to shine once again in
the winter garden.
But don't get me wrong. Late spring sees an almost shocking explosion of riches
in this garden - and exuberance that borders on chaos contained within its
sharply defined structure.
Irwin's color sense has been honed over a half-century of observation and
experimentation. He takes into consideration hue, value, intensity, and
proximity. "[C]olor is above everything else a vibration, just as the eye before
everything else is a kind of infinitely nuanced vibration detector," Irwin says
in writer Lawrence Weschler's extended interviews with the artist about
the garden. "Color is one of the tools of the artist, and as an artist you fall
in love with Color . . . it's viscerally rich for you. And you don't have biases
about it . . . So you can't look at it and say, 'Well, I don't like orange
against blue'. It depends on what you want in that situation. Such people are
often just thinking of limited things: they don't like certain colors, so they
won't put it into their garden, they want to stick with the colors they think
they like. But look at Nature: she holds no such biases."
Robert Irwin has been working on this garden for some fifteen years, and,
according to Getty Center staff, continues to do so. One Sunday a month the
artist can be seen walking through the garden ordering up changes as he responds
to the garden's ever-evolving story. Recently, a guide mentioned that in the
bowl garden Irwin seems to have fallen in love with the idea of magenta.
The moment of alliums in this same bowl garden, though, in late February or
early March, is not to be missed. Rockets of pure blue explode throughout,
calling to mind Fra Angelico's blue - that clear blue of lapis lazuli ground
and mixed with egg yolk - still piercing hearts centuries after it left his
brush.
Irwin has famously inscribed his philosophy of this garden at the end of the
pathway where the stream garden gives way to the terrace: Ever Changing/Never
Less Than Whole. Whatever you end up thinking and feeling about this garden, at
least approach it with an open mind. As Irwin has said, and in this legions of
ancient Chinese philosophers and untold numbers of artists join him: "It comes
back to what people see when they look . . ."
This is what I saw in the stream garden in the darkness of a winter's early
evening, under pools of soft light, with water music falling over rocks -
articulated rivulets of silver.
Join Paula for her garden writing
workshop at the Getty Center, September 7 & 21
Paula Panich currently lives exiled from her
home in Western Massachusetts in Los Angeles. Her most recent book is
Cultivating Words:
The Guide to Writing about the Plants and Gardens You Love (Tryphon
Press, 2005).
This article was first published in
Berkshire Home Style, February, 2006
(Please note: For this article, Robert
Irwin’s quotes about the garden and the information about his vetting of the
London plane trees are taken from Robert Irwin Getty Garden.)
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