Sited in the disused former Chatham County jailhouse, a building located in the midst of the historic district of Savannah, Georgia, Julia Barton’s Resurrection is a work that opens up the interior of this fascinating ruin in an attempt to reclaim a lost part of that city’s history. It reminds the viewer that the utopian ideals of Savannah’s founders are destined to remain just that and that such idealism caters to but few of the members of society. With its use of indigenous plants in tandem with industrial structures and materials alongside the ruins, remnants and vegetation that litter the floor of the site we are brought into the presence of the uncanny tension between life untamed and the stark materiality of the structures of incarceration.
Although a whole block of cells on three levels remains along the west side of the building, this is a modern addition and Barton’s work chooses to focus its formal configuration on the original floor plan of the jailhouse. On the floor of eighteen ‘cells’ constructed from scaffolding and wire mesh screens are separate plantings of a number of the species that have colonized the site following the decommissioning of the jailhouse in 1979. Opposite this, the east block is indicated by a gap in the raised floor of the scaffolding that reveals debris and wild plants. Now owned by the Savannah College of Art and Design and renamed Habersham Hall, the building retains its exterior structure and awaits reconstruction with a different function yet to be decided upon. The title, therefore, does not refer to the reconstruction of the building but to the resurrection fern, a native of the region that possesses remarkable tenacity against heat and drought and which has become one of the new ‘inmates’ of the site.
Barton’s use of industrial components such as scaffolding, wire and metal screens utilize the vernacular language of penal institutions that, in the Victorian model are bold and impressive externally but stripped down, perfunctory and mechanical internally. At the former Chatham County jailhouse metal bars, bolts and chains lie within impressive façades and ornamental masonry. This aesthetic brutalizes the human lives that they are intended to confine just as the proud exterior whose minaret juts up into the Savannah skyline in close proximity to the twin spires of St John the Baptist immediately to the west is an attempt to belie their existence. The ornamentation of Habersham Hall’s minaret disguises its actual function as an observation tower – its conceit is to reach toward the celestial realm in a rather presumptuous and chunky imitation of its neighbor.
Barton’s pristine minimalist rendering of this aesthetic combines poignantly with the remaining twentieth century cells with their riveted metal walls, cheap aluminum fixtures and the remainders of the sawn off bars and the frames to which they were once attached. As the viewer walks through the space tantalizing glimpses can be caught of graffiti made by inmates during their stay in the remaining cells. Like the plants that are celebrated in Resurrection, these traces of living presences are remarkable points of dissonance, ones that reveal the impossibility of suppressing the life force.
Barton has described her practice, surely with a hint of humor, as horti-sculpture. Her use of plants as an intrinsic part of her practice is a relatively new trajectory and is one that allows her to embed the work into the context of the site in a way that is both ancient and contemporary. On the one hand Barton’s work draws upon traditions in domestic landscape gardening. Artistic precedents for this work, however, lie in the areas of land and environmental art, such as the work of Hélio Oiticica, whose installation Tropicália of 1967 attempts, through the use of crude industrial structures and plants, to reflect upon the home-made dwellings found in the poor areas of large cities in his native Brazil. As a work responding to native vegetation, Resurrection has its most immediate parallel in Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape a work begun in 1965. In taking over a vacant lot in downtown Manhattan and filling it with indigenous plants from that area Sonfist, like Barton, is alluding to the different time scales upon which the built and the natural environments exist. While flora and fauna are perpetual and regenerative if left untended, buildings are temporary and subject to entropic forces, to constant decay and, ultimately, to destruction. In the context of the regularity of urban design or the architecture of incarceration, plants perform a kind of biological Situationism, working against the grain, transgressing the norms of simplified geometry and ergonomics. Resurrection enacts the utopian dream of consistency and uniformity whilst pointing out the impossibility of such a strategy being successful.
June 2005
David Jeffrey PHD
Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD)
Department of Art History
Savannah