During our three-month residency at the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation in the summer of 2015, the ballet of covert but essential systems providing upkeep of the iconic parcel of green life became the inspiration, subject, and medium of a public landscape intervention. Working as an interdisciplinary team, we\u200a\u2014\u200aartist Chlo\u00e9 Roubert and architect Gemma Savio\u200a\u2014\u200adisrupted the lawn\u2019s maintenance cycle for two months and appropriated the mowing exercise by creating an uncanny spectacle as we, two inconspicuously dressed women, manually mowed our statement and the title of the project, It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look,<\/em> into eight weeks\u2019 growth of colourful vegetation. This process and the final result were visible from the large bay windows and canteen terrace of the Bauhaus building. As a whole, the work subverted the ideological position of the UNESCO monument by redirecting the visitor\u2019s gaze away from the edifice and toward the surrounding landscape: a lawn, a subtler modern metabolism on the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea that humans are autonomous from nature is fundamental to modernity. This notion is attributed chiefly to French philosopher Ren\u00e9 Descartes, whose argument was that the living could be categorized within a hierarchy, with nature at the bottom (exterior and unchanging), and the human at the top (cultured and capable of progress). This epistemological shift ushered Western nations into modernity, a state that Hilde Heynen defines as \u201ca condition of living imposed upon individuals by the socioeconomic process of modernization.\u201d\u2009<\/sup>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 2.<\/span> Following from this statement, our project suggests that the Bauhaus\u2019s modernity, which supported mass production, standardization, and post-war domesticity, foreshadowed the contemporary version of modernity, one that hinges on the resource-draining trade of goods and services originating from the competitive labour market. In short, we define today\u2019s manifestation of modernity as an echo of the Bauhaus mandate and as synonymous with cap\u00aditalism. Contradicting the Cartesian paradigm, however, we follow Marx and his notion that under capitalism the human and the organic are inherently linked by their shared exploitation: \u201cCapitalist production\u2026 only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth\u200a\u2014\u200athe soil and the worker.\u201d\u2009<\/sup>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy<\/em>, trans. Ben Fowkes(London: Penguin Group, 1990), 638.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n This exploitation by the capitalist system can be mapped from colonialism through to the current era of late capitalism, which social critics refer to as neoliberalism. In their study of the guano trade and the expansion of capitalism during the nineteenth century, historians Clark and Foster show how the British colonizers mined Peruvian guano to fertilize their own fields: \u201cDistant lands and ecosystems became mere appendages to the growth requirements of the advanced capitalist center.\u201d\u2009<\/sup>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, \u201cEcological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift: Unequal Exchange and the Guano\/Nitrates Trade,\u201d International Journal of Comparative Sociology <\/em>50 (2009): 314.<\/span> Based on this analysis, Clark and Foster argue that with modernity, a category of human has evolved that stands apart from the majority and is dominant over all facets of the living\u200a\u2014\u200anot only the economic but the social, domestic, political, and cultural ideology that shapes the way the world is perceived by humanity. Within this system, disenfranchised organisms, be they human or other, are at the mercy of the dominant \u201canthro\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, the capitalist. This challenges the idea that all humans are equally responsible for the planet\u2019s unprecedented ecological destruction and rearranging of its mineral crust, and suggests that we have entered the geological epoch not of the Anthropocene, but of the Capitalocene.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Today, the mining of coltan, a mineral found in the Congo and used in electronics, functions on a dynamic similar to the one created by the guano trade. The trading of coltan further enriches wealthy multinationals while devastating the African country\u2019s environment, promoting abhorrent labour conditions, and, peripherally financing a civil war. Just as the coltan and the Congolese miners are invisible and absolutely essential to Western lifestyles, the lawn\u2019s survival depends on a multitude of concealed resources and labour networks. Our work makes visible this lawn, its forty plant species, its human labourers, and its machines, and transforms the Bauhaus\u2019s landscape into a billboard from which to announce the contemporary capitalistic condition as an affliction that occludes the powers and processes, landscapes and humans, that shape our everyday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artwork draws attention to the land\u00adscape to reveal the hidden practices that shape our daily lives globally but also illustrates the impact that modernity has had on micro-topographies such as the shaping of the city of Dessau and, consequently, of the Bauhaus School building. Tracing a history of the lawn offered a radical shift in the historiography of the Bauhaus as a site of significance. Fifteen kilometres from the Bauhaus School is the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-W\u00f6rlitz, a horticultural commission made in 1765 by Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau. The prince\u2019s legacy is still visible from the school\u2019s rooftop\u200a\u2014\u200acontrived floodplain meadows, groomed pastures, and bucolic fruit plantations\u200a\u2014\u200aas a remnant of the typical Enlightenment landscape design that was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s notion of the bon sauvage<\/em>. One hundred and sixty years later, Walter Gropius moved the Bauhaus school to Dessau, where an emerging group of industrialists saw his collective\u2019s creative talents and excitement about the future as an asset. Like the prince, Gropius aspired to combine philosophical knowledge with structural possibility in his design. Departing from the eighteenth-century rustic look for his structure\u2019s landscape, how\u00adever, Gropius endeavoured for nature to follow the form of its function. As a result, he removed local sediment from the site and replaced it with imported sand to create a promenade on one side and a playing field on the other. Often photographed but rarely operational, the playing field was too hard and wet for student use. After the Bauhaus School was closed, the lawns were cultivated as vegetable gardens by attendees of the women\u2019s school that replaced it. For most of the second half of the century, under the German Democratic Republic, the space was left as a bricolage <\/em>of lawn, bushes, and tall trees. In 2003, the landscape was redesigned according to the building\u2019s new function\u200a\u2014\u200aa tourist destination celebrating the aesthetics of a common modernity in a reunited Germany\u200a\u2014\u200aand as such in 2004 the trees that emasculated the focal point of the main event, the architecture, were cut down and replaced by the utmost incarnation of good suburban citizenship: a well-kept lawn. The lawn and the landscape thus become an integral element in asserting the monumentality of the building and the ideology that accompanies it.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Parts of this research were collated and distributed in a map and guided walk that was coordinated as a contribution to the Bauhaus International Summit on Domestic Affairs. The walk, titled It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look: Mapping the Modern Lawn<\/em>, provided an alternative landscape-based history of the Bauhaus site.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Drawing the visitor\u2019s gaze toward the lawn required the inscription of a provocation intentionally evocative of a number of interpretations. The expression we used, \u201cIt takes work to get the natural look,\u201d was inspired by a 1980s makeup tutorial in which a host reminded her audience that it takes work\u200a\u2014\u200atwenty minutes and an array of cosmetic products\u200a\u2014\u200ato achieve the natural look necessary to watch an outdoor tennis match. Feminists have pointed out that in Western discourses nature and landscapes have historically been gendered as feminine, in opposition to the masculine gaze and pursuit of truth: only through man\u2019s scientific and technological progress can Mother Nature be truly rendered useful and fully fertile. Early ecofeminist Fran\u00e7oise d\u2019Eaubonne argued that in the same way that the \u201cMale System\u201d was allowed to dominate and inseminate women\u2019s bodies, it mined, genetically modified, and contemptuously emitted pollution into nat\u00adure\u2019s landscapes.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Fran\u00e7oise d\u2019Eaubonne, Le f\u00e9minisme ou la mort<\/em> (Paris: P. Horay, 1974).<\/span> The lawn\u2019s inscription echoes these feminist critiques, but its source, context (the very logically controlled lawn), and makers (two women subtracting living matter or grooming this landscape) complicate, muddle, and invert these gendered dualisms and parallels with a certain tongue-in-cheek wit. It points to the blurry limits between nature and culture, femininity and masculinity, and to a contemporary modern condition in which the term \u201cnatural\u201d extends into the fetish character of commodity capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look<\/em> is an example of art that uses playful delivery methods to engage in theory and open up a dialogue with its audience about their position in a complex landscape. By rescaling the presence of labour, gender, and nature to the Bauhaus setting, our project asserts that the living is made up of all organisms whose survival is contingent on Earth\u2019s resources. We ask spectators to question the ivory tower of modernity from which they view the artwork and connect the consequences of achieving the natural look to their own condition. As the artwork was viewed over the time that it took for the surrounding flora to grow out and return the lawn to its original state, the work was photographed and shared across social media platforms, creating a subtle irony while also making use of these networks to share a narrative of augmented landscape through bourgeoning (virtual) topographies.<\/p>\n![\"88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It-Takes-Work-to-Get-the-Natural-Look-6.jpg\")
It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look<\/em>, 2015, installation views, Bauhaus, Dessau.
Photos : Gemma Savio, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It-Takes-Work-to-Get-the-Natural-Look3-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It-Takes-Work-to-Get-the-Natural-Look-5-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look<\/em>, 2015, installation view, Bauhaus, Dessau.
Photo : Gemma Savio, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It-Takes-Work-to-Get-the-Natural-Look-4-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look<\/em>, 2015, installation views, Bauhaus, Dessau.
Photos : Gemma Savio, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO05_Roubert-Savio_It-Takes-Work-to-Get-the-Natural-Look-2-scaled.jpg\")
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