Stream Garden

If one then turns to his Getty garden, one discovers that it no longer has an art gallery label title that calls attention to a concept. is simply 'the Central Garden', and its main components are simply 'the Stream Garden' and 'the Bowl Garden'.

The way it is experienced, too is different. Visitors enter it with the preconception that is a garden, so that they experience it, not as 'Art', but as a garden – that is, as place.

~

MARSHALL, David R., 2004. Gardens and the death of art: Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. 1 July 2004. Vol. 24, no. 3, p. 215–228. DOI 10.1080/14601176.2004.10435322.

It is with some trepidation that, as an art historian, I speak to the Australian Garden History Society. Art historians like to approach gardens through images, and such an approach to garden history is not always looked upon favourably. For example, Charles Quest-Ritson, in his recent The English Cardell: A Social History, asserts that: Garden history has been abducted by the art historians & too much garden histmy has been concerned with when gardens were nude, what they looked like, who made them and how they changed.