Bagels, Frogs, and Neco Gardens: Criticism or Mythification

Contemporary criticism of landscape architectural design is often superficial and barely evaluative. The technical aspects, aesthetic qualities and visual experience of the site, and the design’s relationship with its surroundings are continually judged for their merits. Such cursory assessments of the designed landscape perpetuate our complacence with prevailing ideological constructs. Martha Schwartz’s work is a step toward a renewed criticism – one that seeks to critique contemporary design using her landscapes as the medium for such discourse. However, her "return to language” fails to critique the larger ideological constructs of our time. Instead, Martha Schwartz’s landscapes become mythified – landscapes expressing a (her) fetishistic obsession with materials.

Much of the work of Martha Schwartz does succeed on a purely visual level. By abstracting traditional forms and manipulating their composition and materiality, her designs demand the attention of those within proximity to them. However, we cannot know whether society, outside of the design professions, is able to decipher the metaphorical references she presents. At the very least, she succeeds at soliciting a visual response and moment of curiosity. Landscapes such as the County Jail Plaza in Seattle evoke a strong visceral response. Such potent imagery is often the foundation upon which cultural memory is produced. But beyond a self-absorbed experimentation with materials to create 'visible' landscapes, Schwartz’s work arguably provides little but a running commentary on the nature of landscape architecture as a “product of culture”.

As the Architect and theoretical critic Jorge Silvetti (GSD) states in "The Beauty of Shadows" (1977), it is “not the simple manipulation of known codes” that elicits criticism from within. The true test is one in which the landscape becomes a work of learning, “a discovering in the object latent properties that were not perceived in the initial context”. Schwartz manipulates the ideological constructs of contemporary society; the codes of traditional landscape architectural design. It is her obsession with the materiality of her landscapes, however, that leads to their transparency. Susan Herrington - "Strange Scenes within the Landscape" - suggests that “transgression of materials shows us that physical forms, natural or representative of nature, need not be dictators of meaning and metaphor in landscape architecture”. She continues by citing Martha Schwartz’s criticism of the types of materials landscape architects habitually use in her repetitive use of unconventional materials. Is Scwartz’s use of “commercialized language”, in fact, perpetuating this dictatorship of meaning and metaphor in contemporary landscape architecture? As the 18th and 19th century societies reified a hyper-naturalized image of nature in order to comprehend life, Martha Schwartz continues the process of mythification by attempting to subvert the products of our contemporary culture.

The prevailing ideology of progress in modern day society lies at the heart of the work of Martha Schwartz. Conforming to this ideology, she succeeds at marking an era; an era of technological expediency. In her attempts to articulate space in ways previously unimagined, Schwartz ironically finds herself creating an illusion – “one into which one can only look, can travel through only with the eye” (Greenberg, "Modernist Painting"). Arguably, much like the architecture of Hejduk or Gehry, Schwartz’s landscapes are “devoid of any metaphorical or representative value except that of itself . . . - a mask which points to itself”  (Silvetti, "The Beauty of Shadows").