Agnes Denes, Alan Sonfist and Joseph Beuys saw the city as their canvas, but were then clever enough to use their positions as artists to negotiate the access, knowledge and politicking required to realise their visions. Most importantly, these three artists used their art to challenge others to see the city in a new way: to think about the relationships between culture and nature, between economy and ecology, between past and future, and between permanence and impermanence. Others have come after them to also blur the boundaries and create hybrid spaces with an in-built social commentary. Their work develops some of the central tenets of land art and gives them form in a way that advances our options for installed park-like places. Louis G. le Roy is a garden artist who began working on his 4 ha site in the 1970s. Since then he has been engaged in a continual, self-described ‘battle’ between himself, space and time. The result is a hybrid space that le Roy calls Ecokathedraal, and the battle is at once simple and complex. Various plants introduced to the site by le Roy have become well established, and they compete vigorously with the structures he assembles. These are painstakingly created by piecing together bricks, stones, pieces of concrete and other elements from among the truckloads of construction debris dumped on the site each year in an agreement struck by le Roy with the local authority. Since le Roy began work 2500 ten-ton trucks have dumped the region’s building waste on the site.239 Through this annual procession the northern Dutch town of Mildam becomes part of Ecokathedraal and part of the story of time for visitors to the project. Not only do they experience the constant change in vegetation and the continually evolving built structures, the project can only proceed as quickly or as slowly as Mildam recreates itself.
264
1.
2.