Means of Production

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

Conceived as a botanical intervention, Means of Production demonstrates techniques of community-scale, urban ecoforestry, in a low-income, inner city neighbourhood, as well as framing interesting questions about the loss of the commons in the urban North American landscape.

Means of Production began as a collaboration between artist Oliver Kellhammer and members of the Environmental Youth Alliance The project was made possible by funding through the Art & The Environment initiative of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver as well as by the Vancouver Parks Board

Work at the Means of Production site commenced in the fall of 2002 and is ongoing. Currently there are plantings of heritage basket willows, Paulownia, bamboo, hazel, ash, iris and hollyhock. These are being sustainably harvested at regular intervals and made into art projects by members of the community.

Things have been proceeding apace with this project and there have been several harvests of materials from the site in the intervening years. In keeping with the open source intention of the the project, the Means of Production Raw Resource Collective has been formed by a group of Vancouver artists including Sharon Kallis, Lois Klassen, and Lori Weidenhammer. This collective is now co-managing the site and instigating projects that use the materials produced by the plantation. We would be pleased to have you visit Means of Production, which is open to the public every day.

 

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 ambience. 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 internalised component of the urban visual field. In short: The new normal.

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