“My salad days, when I was green in judgment.

”
Shakespeare, 1606, Antony and Cleopatra, Act I

HoopHouse
The phrase salad days, traceable to Shakespeare, came to commonly mean, by the middle of
the 19th century, a period of youthful inexperience or indiscretion. This connection to “green”,
youthful and inexperienced is inflected by a sense of recklessness. The HoopHouse project
proposes an inversion of conventional urban practice, proposing an alternative vision to a new
recklessness and once again tying salad to youth, experience and critical reflection.

The importation of mesclun and other baby greens by high-end grocery stores is a completely
unsustainable practice. Yet the pleasurable, nutritious greens have grown into a fetish of the
organic, allowing us to participate vicariously in the embodied “organic” stewardship of the land
(in California not Chicago). The sophisticated material technology of the off-gassing "biobag"
that prevents decomposition during transit, and the agribusiness that has grown up around this
and like inventions, disappears to the consumer in favor of a representation of the “good earth”.
The tender young greens allow us to believe that we ourselves picked them out of our own
backyard minutes ago and that the cycle of production and consumption is as it should be, that
as “eaters” we are close to the land. We are driven by pleasure to participate in this fiction.

This project operates as a critique of the commodification of the organic. Rejecting this
fetishized model, reliant on gasoline fueled transportation, HoopHouse presents an alternative
model. In most parts of the US, we can grow our own lettuce most of the year with passive
solar heat. This project reminds that to be truly organic and sustainable we must grow locally
and forgo the all too invisible environmental costs of transportation. As an experiment in urban
agriculture, HoopHouse enacts a local cycle of production and consumption. It invites the SAIC
community to explore this cycle and offers the wider public the opportunity to consider that any
open space may find viable reuse with the inexpensive addition of a kit greenhouse.

Likewise, HoopHouse offers an alternative view of the art school, arts education, and the
museum. Placed in the school’s sculpture department courtyard, built for the fabrication and
viewing of late modern sculpture at SAIC (and other art school just like it), HoopHouse
questions what we might be doing in these spaces that go relatively underutilized as the context
for which they were built falls away. Further, what might a Sculpture curriculum look like? What
is the earthwork of 2005? Vermiculture? Oriented to the south to utilize the sun, the
HoopHouse takes advantage of the blank wall that conjoins the museum. This is perhaps the
best utilization of this architectural feature, as the museum was built to face inwardly onto itself,
focused on display, not the site of production.

HoopHouse presents a different form of art education and production, a rhetorical model of
studio as laboratory, and a new model of urban agri+culture, “infill” and creative reuse. It
reminds that site specificity includes the geographic and the climatic, and that production of art
(culture) might take place coincidentally as the cultivation of lettuce.

More than learning by doing, the curriculum of building the infrastructure and then actively
recycling cafeteria food waste for the production of “lunch” teaches a form of critical art
practice….that is, practice that is critical by nature, and also “doing” followed cyclically by critical
reflection. As such the curriculum will be to research, build and trial any and all types of
sustainable systems that might be possible on site, and in so doing, turn the salad days of the
next generation of artists into a proactive time of modeling an alternative agri+cultural future.
FW 2.25.05