Animal Estates: 5.0 Portland, Oregon
2008
Installation view
Commissioned by The Douglas F. Cooley
Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College
Photo: Shawn Records, courtesy of the artist

A January gray sky makes the chartreuse door of Fritz Haeg's geodesic dome sing in concert with the rain-soaked flora on his hillside lot. Haeg, a Los Angeles resident for a decade, has maintained a busy travel schedule in the years since his inclusion at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, but much of his earlier work on the West Coast was centered here at his unique home in Glassell Park. The Sundown Salon, replaced by the Sundown Schoolhouse in 2006, presented a diverse series of lectures, happenings and performances that featured artists including Anna Sew Hoy, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Pae White, and Los Super Elegantes, among many others.

While Haeg's recent projects, including Edible Estates and Animal Estates, have
a broad national focus there is continuity between the earlier salon projects and his current work. He explains, "I'm interested in small recreations of my ideal world, playing out what I see as my perfect world." Trained as an architect, Haeg describes most of his artistic forays--from gardening and animals to dance and movement--as amateurish, in that he has no formal training in these subjects. But each of his projects represent something of his ideal world, which, he describes laughingly, is "a world where there are animals in the cities and there are gardens on the streets and we're all dancing."

Haeg's installation in the sculpture court at the Whitney, entitled Animal Estate 1.0: New York, New York, was inspired by Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta Project, a reimagining of the island of Manhattan at the moment of European contact. Haeg described twelve of the animal species displaced by development as his new "clients" and constructed homes for them. At the Whitney he installed, among other things, a ten foot eagle's nest, a series of purple martin gourd homes, and a beaver pond and lodge.

The Edible Estates project transformed eight American front yards into vegetable gardens. Starting in Salina, Kansas, Haeg has set out to provoke a public dialogue about the meaning of the front yard in America. "All of my work exists in some threshold between private and public space," he says. "The front yard is clearly private property, but it's some of the most public space you can imagine. The Edible Estates projects question how we use land and engage with others. So, the project is really a social engineering project disguised as a gardening and food project." He adds, "It's kind of the first wedge into inviting individuals to question how we're living. It may start with growing food where most people have lawns but hopefully this will start to unravel the entire structure of the city." An expanded second edition of Haeg's book, "Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn," which documents the completed gardens, will be available this spring from Metropolis Books.

From the kitchen of Haeg's home, a panoramic bank of windows overlooks a wide swath of the Glendale Freeway. Myriad houses stacked on even the steepest slopes aptly illustrate Haeg's description of the complicated negotiations between public and private space in the city. Reflecting on his entire body of work Haeg insists, "My work is both celebratory and tragic. At the same time that you imagine a complete restructuring of society, you also realize that it's impossible." He stops abruptly, thinking. Then he suggests with a shrug, "Or not. That's what my work is all about--that moment where the realization that it’s impossible meets the hope that it can still happen." He advises that everyone considers these questions, asking, "What is your ideal? And what if everyone did that? What a crazy thing to imagine the whole world becoming your fantasy. It's a tragic, sad thing to realize that it's impossible, but it's still a hopeful, completely ecstatic and pleasurable idea to entertain."

"Fritz Haeg: Something for Everyone," opens this summer at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and runs from June 27, 2010 – January 2, 2011. Haeg's work can also be seen in "Contemplating the Void," a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which runs from February 12 – April 28, 2010.