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Darren Sylvester.

I was the Last in the Carpenter’s Garden.

2008.

Multi-channel video.

Midway through reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, I visited Darren Sylvester’s solo exhibition at the NGV – and gardens were already on my mind. The garden as anti-culture, the garden as an interface between nature & culture, the garden as a purely cultural construct; all of these contradictory models hold some power. Haraway argues in her text, that as cyborgs we no longer need dream of returning to that pristine garden, and more than that – in becoming cyborgs we have learnt that this garden never existed to begin with! The shabby artifice of Sylvester’s garden would seem to support this view and it’s unlikely the original Carpenter’s version, with its hodgepodge of spiritual tokens and tacky water features would be much different. All this is useful to me in considering that relationship between artifice, virtuality and the constructed self.

Sylvester. D. (2008). I was the Last in the Carpenter’s Garden [Artwork]. Melbourne, Australia.

Categories: Making Worlds