Biographical essay by Martha Schwartz

meltyUID: 202495

这篇文章是我手打出来的。仅以此篇献给所有用右脑思考的，即将赴美学习景观的GTERS。当然我觉得这篇文章对于想要申请Landscape的同学写作Personal Statement也会有不小的启迪。
Biographical essay by Martha Schwartz

I come from a right-brained background, a characteristic which has run through my family for generations. Both of my great grandfathers, who came to this country from Russia and Romania at the turn of the twentieth century, were tailors. Their grandchildren (my parent’s generation) were the first generation to have access to university, and several used their education to move from tailoring to architecture; my father, sister, uncle, cousin and son are architects. My husband is an architect, and many of my closest friends are architects. The rest of my family are an assortment of graphic designers, painters and engineers—with a few psychologists thrown into the mix.

As a young man, my father, Milton Schwartz, had taught under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, later going on to establish a large office and designing high-rise housing projects. I grew up playing with dried-out magic markers on the floor of my father’s office. The broken toilet templates I was given to play with and the Sweet’s Catalogue (particularly the details of door and window jambs) almost completely dissuaded me from ever becoming an architect. Having early intimate experience with architectural practice, with its attention to detail and the protracted timeline of building projects, I didn’t feel I had the temperament to be an architect. As much as I liked looking at buildings and was schlepped from pillar to post on family “field trips,” I grew aware as a little girl that I needed a loose, less structured arena. In short, I needed to become an artist.

Growing up in Philadelphia allowed me to spend every Saturday morning in the basement of the Philadelphia Art Museum taking children’s art courses, my preferred activity being to leave classes early and wander into the interior installations. My favorite by far was the Japanese tea house in its garden setting, curiously situated within the bowels of the museum, induced a calm, trance-like feeling that drew us in every weekend. There were other such fantasy-space I loved as a child: the greenhouse environments at Longwood Gardens, on the Dupont Estate, South-east of Philadelphia. The great greenhouses were like giant formal living rooms made from such natural materials as grass, flowers and hedges. The ambiguity of indoor and outdoor was full of wonder for me. I fantasized about living in a house, with my bed set out on a huge carpet of lawn that would allow me to step upon fresh grass first thing in the morning. The idea of living in an environment made out of nature still intrigues me. It’s why I love gardens, the very spaces where civilization meets nature.

I enrolled as an art student at the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan and majored in printmaking. During school I paid close attention to the earthworks artists, such as Robert Smithson, Walter DeMaria, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss and Richard Long. Breaking free from the traditions of the studio and the commercial New York gallery scene by venturing out into the wilderness, they introduced the notion that a piece of sculpture could be derived from and be responsive to a specific site. They created monumental, landscape-inspired sculpture that could not be contained in a gallery or sold for profit, and in the process they ushered in a new wave of environmental awareness. Art was reinstated as part of our environment, not an isolated event accessible only to an effete few.

I was especially taken by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. I loved the heroic quality of the piece, the romance of the setting and the articulation it gave to a burgeoning environmental awareness. I’m not sure that “site-specific” had been coined as a term yet, but it was evident that the piece resonated with its environment and introduced the idea of time and process into art. It was a living work of art, which, even more heroically, could not be chopped up and sold as an artifact in the New York art market of the late sixties. It was pure. From making discreet landscape objects to shaping the landscape as an integrated artwork and space seemed to me a completely logical sequence.

At the time there where no courses offered in art school on environmental or site-specific art, so after discussions with all kinds of people I decided to try the department of landscape architecture, where I could learn at least about the technical aspects of constructing landscape art pieces. I began the three year landscape architecture program at the University of Michigan and found that in a class of some twenty students, there was only on other student who had an art background. Most, it seemed, had come to school with a religious fervor to save the environment, while I was there to learn how to make big art. Although I too felt that saving the world was a worthy cause, my model for doing so was the Robert Smithson one as opposed to the lan McHarg model. We may have all shared the same desire to make the world a better place to live, but our ways of achieving it were quite different and mutually misunderstood. When I asked permission to take additional art courses as part of my landscape curriculum, the chairman could not imagine what art had to do with anything, and my request was denied.

My saving grace came when I met Peter Walker in the summer of 1973, when I went out to San Francisco to be a summer-school student at the SWA Group, the office he founded and directed. When the students were invited to his house for dinner, I came across one of Frank Stella’s “protractor” paintings. I was completely dumbfounded that a landscape architect would know how anything about contemporary art—and Minimalism to boot. He was the first landscape architect I had met who made my connection to the art world. And, given his stature in the profession, his opinion that art was somehow related to landscape architecture greatly reassured me that perhaps I might find a home within the profession. It was a relief to find a like-minded person in what I considered to be a professional wilderness. His interest in art was a true inspiration to me and kept me going forward in school and ultimately in the profession of landscape architecture.

In school I was also attracted to the works of Minimalist artists, such as Robert Irwin, Robert Morris and Donald Judd, artists who work with the description and manipulation of space through seriality. As landscape encompasses a much greater scale that either painting or sculpture, this effect must be accomplished with economy of means. In their ability to command large spaces with few gestures and materials, the work of the Minimalist artists has much to teach landscape architecture: Richard Long joins a huge valley using only a simple bulldozed line, collapsing the vast space by connecting the viewer with the far side of the mesa; Carl Andre describes a column of space above a perfectly flat plane with plates of industrially discarded metal. In floor pieces by DeMaria and Barry Le Va, the repetition of objects set on a floor mystically elevates the objects while focusing our attention on the visual potential of the flat plane.

In their use of geometry and color, artists such as Leon Polk Smith, Frank Stella, Robert Mangold and Dan Flavin are of particular interest to me. They explore a range of ideas and emotions produced by abstract relationships and delve into the mysticism and symbolism inherent in geometry. The Pop artists—Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg — influence me in their preoccupations with banal, everyday objects and common materials. Insightful, poignant and Sympathetic to our common culture, they feed upon its energy and rawness. I respond positively to he hard-edge humor with which they illuminate the stuff of our everyday lives. More recent works, by people like Peter Halley, Richard Artschwager, james Turrel, Dennis Oppenheim, Gary Rieveschi, Philip Taaffe and Damien Hirst, continue to intrigue me.

In addition to the visual inspiration I get from art, I am also attracted to ideas conveyed by art. Idea must be challenged to prove their viability in a culture. Much art—such as that produced by Kenney Scharf, Jeff Koons and Gordon Matta-Clark and others such as Vito Acconci and Jenny Holzer—may be important only in that it creates discussion and, in the end, critical self-evaluation. That every work of art or landscape be a timeless masterpiece is ultimately not the question. More importantly, provocative art and design foster an atmosphere of growth through questioning and challenging established standards.

My exposure, education and love of art have taught me that landscape is a fine art and a means of personal expression. It is not enough that the landscape perform as a functional, interstitial fabric flowing under heroic Modernist high-rises, as a mere respite from everyday life, a decoration around some building or a pleasant place to be. Like other art forms, it must provide stimulus for the heart, mind and soul if it is to contribute anything to the culture. It can be an expression of contemporary life and made from a contemporary vocabulary. The landscape can be a medium, as art and architecture, whereby ideas can flower and evolve. In this way, we can develop a meaningful language about our own place, culture and time.

musunUID: 2442158

赞！！！
辛苦~~~

liwenjingUID: 2126164

哈哈，我也是，只是没想过要写出来

lastdreamUID: 2635132

版主真是好人，提供的资料，受益匪浅，他日美国当面拜谢:)