March 1st, 2008
Meanwhile, the LA-based artist, who’s in his late 30s, has transformed Arthouse into what the center calls a “community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and, finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation” with photographs and video from the artist’s previous works. Perhaps most intriguingly, it features “The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin,” a concept with a real-time base at the Arthouse in a geodesic tent.
“How to Eat Austin” hosts a weekly series of free workshops pertaining to the cycle of food production, from composting to cooking to crop selection, garden design and marketing the garden’s harvest.
The ongoing Sundown Schoolhouse project (which is directly related to Edible Estates series) is “a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts,” according to Arthouse. It was founded on “the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a dialogue extending to the outside world and which values public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place.”
The Edible Estates demonstration, in other words, has many facets, as Haeg explains: “It’s a practical food producing initiative; a place-responsive landscape design proposal; a scientific horticultural experiment; a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement; a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!”
It’s fitting that Haeg began his Edible Estates series on Independence Day, 2005 — with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in Salina, Kansas, which the artist points out is the geographic center of the United States.
As Arthouse curator Sue Graze observes, “The thing I like the most about Fritz Haeg’s artistic practice is its interdisciplinary nature. As an artist, Haeg works in the realms of fine art, aesthetics, architecture, landscape architecture, design, and social and cultural activism, among others. Because of the collaborative nature of his art, he engages audiences in new ways, outside traditional art venues.”
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