The Anti-garden

Crystallising in countless myths the principles of origin and universal mutation, the garden is the place where the rituals of metamorphosis are played out, where vital impulses emerge, where the distinction between the artificial and the natural is blurred, as are the boundaries between the plant, the mineral and the animal. A place of strangeness, licence and whimsy, the garden is defined as a place of ‘indistinction’ where the kingdoms merge. Starting from the intersection of literature and art history, this contrasting image of the garden is particularly prevalent in movements that turn reason on its head – such as Mannerism and Romanticism, or more recently with the experimental aesthetics of the 1960s or with postmodernism. In its hybrid nature, where physical and sensory immersion is intensified by symbolic stratifications, the garden is experienced as a place open to the disparate, the irregular, the chaotic and the unpredictable – which, beyond representations, allows us to experience an encounter with otherness – and to found an ‘art of experience’, which never ceases to resonate in contemporary art.