Saw Michael Sebastian’s work recently on Lenscratch. Constructed Landscapes is a series on that now familiar theme, the manmade suburban/freeway landscape. The wider shots are suburban scenes that we have seen time and again, but when he gets up close to little details, his sense of color is great. He says in his statement (tweaked by me):
For the last six-odd years I’ve driven a 100-mile round trip to and from my practice – from my suburban home, along a busy stretch of interstate highway through central Kentucky, to my workplace in a small city, and back again at day’s end. I pass homes small and large, modest and palatial; truck stops, quarries, and industrial sites; rural hamlets and suburban shopping malls… a landscape of such manicured plastic faux-perfection that it discomfits with its suggestion of discontent among material abundance. The resulting images have provoked in me, variously, feelings of satisfaction, amusement, ambivalence, isolation, or even vague menace.
I felt pretty much the same thing a few weeks ago when I witnessed the ridiculous sight of three men painting the grass bright green at school in preparation for Alumni Weekend, not the least because apparently it takes two men to supervise one man with a spray nozzle. A large tent had been erected for an annual event in front of Hoover Tower, and when it was dismantled, the lawn looked yellow and trampled down. I can only hope that the this was a desperate one-off tactic in preparation for an important donor weekend, but come to think of it, I can’t recall that I’ve ever seen much yellow grass here. Now I am too freaked out to lie down in too-green grass to read or sleep. Ugh. And the saddest thing is that the poor squirrels and birds have to eat off of that tainted grass! If you suspect painted grass, look at any water fixtures in the lawn – if they have a strange greenish tint, presume the worst.
Incidentally, I love the green in Sebastian’s photos, but that painting the grass incident really places the series in a new, mildly dystopian light. Painting the damn grass, would you believe it!
I saw an ad in the paper for artificial grass, and googled it. There is an entire industry of fake grass. One of the more surreal choices for company names – Better Than Real Grass. Wow. Have we really gotten so divorced from the actual function of plants and natural systems that everything really is about the perfect appearance?! I suppose this isn’t all that surprising considering the ornamental nature of lawns in the first place. But really, wow. What happened to lying in some cool grass in the shade in summertime? I bet you that artificial turf gets warm in summer since it lacks the natural evaporative cooling effect of respiring plants. And isn’t cleaning pet waste off artificial grass kind of a sanitary hazard without the decomposition that happens naturally over time in real grass?
I hope not, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time before entire housing subdivisions are outfitted with Better Than Real Grass. How long before everything is so infused with synthetic materials that we don’t have any daily contact with purely natural materials? Craziness. But maybe it’s already pretty much happened for many people. To take myself as an example, I walk on concrete, use computers and pens, eat some packaged foods, wear clothes and sleep on fabrics that are blends of polyester, use all sorts of plastic and metal things… yeah, aside from the organic produce I buy half the time, it’s pretty much happened.
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Frightening! Actual grass can no longer compete with the IDEA of grass. . . Like apples have to be red and eggs have to be brown. . . Never heard of painted grass before. Hope I never hear of it again.
Make a good series of photos though. . .
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