Plant-Art: The Virtual and the Vegetal in Contemporary Performance and Installation Art

Abstract

Whether as paintings, sketches, textiles, or craftwork, plants have been integral to Western art through the ages. Florilegia, herbals, botanical illustrations, pressings, and other renderings of whole plants and, very often, of their flowers comprise part of the tradition of plants in art. Closely related to these visual forms are tactile and sensory practices engaging plant materialities and involving, for example, natural dyes from roots, resins turned into adhesives, figurines sculpted from fine wood, and leaves incorporated into the texture of an artwork. A third dimension of the plants-as-art tradition regards the vegetal (the tree, herb, orchid, flower, trunk) as an intrinsically living work of art—a complete botanical form not requiring visual rendering or material manipulation by humans to become an artwork. As such, a plant is a priori a paragon of natural beauty and an expression of harmony, symmetry, color, and other aesthetic qualities in itself. This latter aspect involves the appreciation of botanical nature on its own terms-in its raw state-without the intervention of an artist. These three elements of the tradition of plants in art-let us call them 'visual plant art,' 'tactile plant art,' and 'plants-as-art'- have been transformed by the introduction of digital technologies into creative practices since the 1990s. Hence, there is presently a need to articulate a fourth element of the plants-and-art tradition-the subject of this article-which I will call 'plant-art,' with a conjoining hyphen signifying the inseparability of the two terms. Here, living plants-not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing ones-are involved fundamentally as agents, actants, and cocreators in digitally based works.