Photo by Paris Tsitsos. Courtesy Martin Janda Gallery, Vienna

Lois and Franziska Weinberger, detail of "Home Voodoo I" (2004). Fifteen duratrans in lightboxes, each 13 x 17½ x 4¾ in.

October 2008 Field Guide

Firstenberg Curates California

Eugene Carchesio

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Rivane Neuenschwander

Franz West

Open

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From The Middle of The Globe

Nam June Paik Art Center

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

Lois Weinberger

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For Austrian artist couple Lois and Franziska Weinberger, whose three-decade career is surveyed this month, gardens are an ideal metaphor for society and its many polarities: the good and the bad, the local and foreign (invasive species), rot and sprout, the fragile and the resilient. Getting their hands dirty with landscape design, architecture, sculpture, sunlight, and H2O since the late 1970s, the Weinbergers have made interventions often comprising dirt, plants, and watering systems, such as a grid of colorful dirt-filled plastic buckets that gradually disappear beneath encroaching foliage and a tree covered in a riot of bright plastic bags. A notable example of how this artist duo uses gardens as cultural commentary is 1997’s What Is Beyond the Plants/ Is at One with Them. In this project, which took place during Documenta 10, the artists imported weeds from countries whose immigrants were considered “problematic” to the German city of Kassel, giving potent new meaning to the expression “not in my backyard.”

"Lois and Franziska Weinberger" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.