Pogoshovels and Victory Gardens: Amy Franceschini at Gallery 16

The rhetoric of war loses meaning when the enemy's "last throes" are announced years before actual victory, and when the citizen "war effort" involves a presidential plea for more shopping.

So it's refreshing to see artists picking up the shells of apparently discarded terminology and refilling them. Case in point, Amy Franceschini's efforts to revive Victory Gardens, the citizen-maintained gardens of World War I and II that grew some eight billion pounds of food nationwide. On our last day in San Francisco this week, we dropped by Gallery 16 to see a show by Franceschini, a nice counterpoint to her work on view in SFMOMA's current 2006 SECA Art Award show.

A founding member of Free Soil and Future Farmers (she also contributed interviews to the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and collaborated on the follow-the-money website They Rule), Franceschini's work melds activism, graphic design and community organizing. And gardening. For her Victory Gardens 2007 project, she created a system for San Franciscans to seed their own gardens in backyards, rooftops, and vacant lots through the help of seed banks, training, materials, and the ancillary publicity her art can bring. (Her pogo shovel, a Duchamp-meets-Beuys symbol of the fun of gardening, could be seen as emblematic of the project's goal of connecting pragmatism and play.)

Like Beuys or Tiravanija, Franceschini's work is environmental but also inherently process-based, a fact former (and future?) Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez picked up on in a San Francisco Chronicle article (he helped Franceschini get the project off the ground). "Art is not all oil and canvas; it can be about the transformation of an idea," he said. "An artistic idea, which is like a political act, is now re-characterized as art."

Her G16 show features used (and restitched) gloves in pristine museum frames, seed bag labels, and a system the artist and Michael Swaine devised to recycle gray water and harvest rainwater for agricultural use (left). Her section of the SFMOMA show included the Bikebarrow, a flat-green bicycle fused with a wheelbarrow front, allegedly to be ridden by "secret gardeners."

The Victory Garden project has signed up gardeners at plots located in each of San Francisco's three microclimates (sun belt, fog belt, transition belt). Each garden team leader received a starter kit (delivered by a VG2007 tricycle), plus a lesson and follow-up instruction on harvesting and seed-saving. Three gardens is a great start, but well short of San Francisco's World War II Victory Garden production, when 200 gardens were maintained in Golden Gate Park alone.

But as VG2007 web site states, victory isn't about total domination but about connecting communities to each other and to their natural surroundings. It also defines "victory" in terms of "independence from corporate food systems," a definition of freedom presumably at odds with the one used by those prosecuting the war in Iraq.

Related: Practical propaganda: Amy Franceschini reinvents the Victory Garden

Corporate Guerilla: Adidas' green thumb?

To tout a new line of shoes, Adidas sponsors a guerrilla-gardening campaign and then -- apparently -- promotes it using billboards that the show floral shoes made out of plastic? While it smacks of greenwashing to me, Treehugger says that this spring, the company launched a line of shoes made from recycled and natural materials as well as a clothing from hemp and bamboo. My take: get your thrift-store Adidas and go make your own seed bombs. Adidas' video:

Related: The Greenwashing Index; see how green "green" ads really are.

Making public space "a little better"

Not sure if this is culture-jamming or an ad campaign, but this billboard shot by Giant Robot's Eric Nakamura shows a billboard hidden behind a grass-printed construction barrier. The board, aptly, reads "a little better."

In the "much better" category is this guerrilla gardening project by Netherlands-based interventionist Helmut Smits. He strategically plants trees so when they grow up they obstruct views of advertisements. (Via Guerrilla Innovation.)

Guerrilla flowerboxes

Street artist Posterchild takes on guerilla gardening in this project, in which flowerboxes filled with celosia plants were erected on telephone poles around Kensington Market in Toronto.

Poster pocket plants

Continuing the urban gardening theme around here (earlier: seed bombs, guerrilla flower boxes, tube gardens), here's a clever bit of green billboard reclamation, pointed out by Tyler Green. Toronto residents Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale have devised a way to cut advertising posterboards to make cone-shaped, in situ flowerpots. Martindale tells Torontoist that the duo is "activating public space," introducing nature "to the urban environment in ways that might encourage others to do the same, or to at least consider such possibilities." To that end, they've made the design of their templates available under Creative Commons license.

Bits: 04.06.10

Rudolf Stingel LIVE installed at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

• Photographer Noah Sheldon looks at the Arizona sustainability project Biosphere 2, 16 years after it closed. Via VBS.tv.

• SFMOMA launches the first museum iPad app, Rooftop Sculpture Garden.

• Dr. Adam Bradford, in a new book, claims that Jesus' dad, Joseph, was actually not a carpenter, as biblical stories say, but an architect.

• Minneapolis film: MCAD screens Shungu: The Resilience of a People April 8 at its "American academic premier" (1 pm at MCAD). Set in Zimbabwe, the documentary follows a "30-something metalsmith and opposition supporter running his small business while facing political violence, a middle-aged widow who is a staunch government supporter trying to run a farm she took over from a white farmer, a doctor working amid health care collapse while trying to maintain her middle-class lifestyle." Geotypografika shows the silkscreen process for the MCAD screening poster, which will be on sale Thursday.

• ROLU looks into Futurefarmers' Victory Gardens project and, continuing the gardening theme, 9999's installation for the 1973 MoMA show Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.

• Mexican town erects statue of boy who survived the H1N1 flu. Via @cmonstah.

• Speaking of strange boy sculptures, nobody at Reddit can explain what's going on with this one.

Urban tube-garden.

These soil loaves by Danish collective n55 allow for urban row gardening of all kinds. Dirt and compost are encased in a tube of semi-permeable plastic and a hose from a downspout can keep your impromptu plantings going all season long.

Organic culture-jamming

By dead of night, a group of "guerilla gardeners" in the UK are reclaiming urban wastelands, from a "huge shrubbery/urinal behind the bus stops on London Road" to a North London plot "filled with weeds, beer cans, and a pool of vomit," by clandestinely planting bulbs, bushes, and herbs. As it turns out, the London duo aren't pioneers, but part of a growing movement. Check out Pure Genius, Primal Seed, Wikipedia's entry on the topic, and Toronto's Guerilla Gardening site (sponsored by the city's Public Space Committee).

Via Sustainablog and Treehugger.