In 2020, during the first Covid-19 year, I started focusing my attention on two groups of ornamental flowers: iris barbata and chrysanthemum. I have been an avid gardener since I was a child thanks to my grandmothers and I specialized predominantly in ornamental flowers and fruit trees. I also spent three months as a full-time employee in Binny nursery in Scotland in 2007. In 2012, I co-founded a local environmental group which started taking care of a municipal orchards and several grassland habitats in the vicinity of my hometown of Kyjov. Eventually, I was able to translate this gardening interest which I had hitherto practiced as a hobbyist into several collaborative artistic projects, some of which are outside the scope of this text, and a project of a conceptual garden dedicated to queerness which resulted in the outcome of my dissertation. Initially, my interest in irises and chrysanthemums was motivated by the fact that I wanted to broaden my collection which consisted only of a few varieties. I started researching the supply of iris barbata extensively and found out about a magnificent collection of about 2000 iris species and varieties in the Chotobuz Botanical Garden in Průhonice near Prague, about the existence of several Czech and Slovak iris barbata breeders, and about the fascinating history and culture associated with iris breeding both in Europe and especially in the USA. Finding out about the existence of Wiki Irises, a vast database documenting both heritage and modern varieties of different iris groups and species turned out to be a decisive moment in my artistic journey. Browsing through the database and through the offer of varieties provided by breeders, nurseries, and plant collections finally led me to an idea of an artwork.
Due to the vast array of iris varieties (irises are quick and easy to breed, more than 60 000 registered varieties existed as of 2010. breeders have to be inventive when naming a new one. The existing rules for inventing a variety name provide quite a free maneuvering space with words and the resulting names represent a fascinating array of potential narratives, cultural associations, and stereotypes. Many of the names reflect sexist or colonial stereotypes. Several dozen even referred to queerness (albeit in a neutral or even positive way). Gradually, an idea of making a garden that would be based on an approach from conceptual art deploying the method of coding, scripts, and ready-mades was born.
I decided to create flower beds which would be composed entirely of iris barbata varieties and be organized according to topics or even poems. The name of each variety functions as a basic conceptual building block, a Duchampian readymade of a sort. At the same time, many of the names have cultural connotations and associations which the breeders take into account intentionally. Many of them reflect clichés and petrified metaphors. I work with the principle of juxtaposition, in which the clichés and stereotypes are amplified by being clustered together. New associations are formed and the amplification through multiplication deconstructs the breeders’ original innocent intentions. There are several flower beds which work with sexist stereotypes.
Another one contains varieties which denote or associate with queerness:
Three beds represent variations of a love poem (see illustration).
In the recent years, attention has been paid by humanities scholars and artists to plants as agents and sentient beings; their position in Western philosophy and indigenous cultures has been analyzed or even new cosmologies have been proposed. This development goes in accord with new research in plant neurophysiology which demonstrates that like animals, plants are sentient beings. How plants have been represented in visual art has played an increasingly important question for art theory as well, notably in the writings of Giovanni Aloi. In an introductory chapter of an edited volume titled Why Look At Plants, Aloi examines the symbolic, metaphorical role plants have played in iconography since the middle ages well into popular culture of the 19th century. Whether depicted in herbaria which were instrumental in colonial bioextractivism or in Golden-Age Dutch still lives documenting the affluence of the rise of the first capitalist economies, representations of plants were instrumental and plants were objectified - a parallel that Aloi is drawing on the comparison with texts by John Berger, be they concerned with the passivity and helplessness in which we thrust animals in ZOOs, or with the chauvinistic fixing of women’s bodies images in the works of fine art. Throughout his writing, curatorial and editorial practice, Aloi is highlighting the importance of representation of plants which emphasize their autonomy by focusing on their physiological functions´or on their role and interactions in ecosystems: plants should not be used as stand-ins or as projection screens for our desires, but rather as companions which invite us to observe and speculate on radical alterity.
