Excavating Modernist Myths in Glass House

Last spring, David Hart unveiled a “Flower Garden,” a dense circle of flowers on the lower lawn of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, planted with flowers found in still lifes by a nineteenth-century black artist named Charles Ethan Porter. This year, the blooms are back, accompanied by a neo-mythological film at Johnson’s self-proclaimed porter-visitor center and, down the hill, a Porters installation in Johnson’s personal trefoil gallery. It’s still the house that modernism built—the architect’s taste for Arcadia sits alongside his Nazi sympathies—but, Hart says, Johnson’s myths aren’t the only myths that live there.

PARTNER OF PHILIP JOHNSON, David Whitney was a keen gardener. He would make these abundant gardens throughout the Glass House grounds, while Johnson and Whitney recalibrated the landscape to fit a more austere, controlled aesthetic. This erasure of Whitney and his authorship on the ground held the clues to what I could add to the site without deviating too much from its history.

The landscape suggests an Arcadian ideal. There is a fact that this is New Canaan. There is the Poussin landscape painting that Johnson owned, Phocion’s funeral, 1648, exhibited in the house. But I didn’t want to deal only with what was present. Researching for earlier work, I came across Charles Ethan Porter, a Connecticut-based African-American still life painter active in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also painted landscapes. I was interested in understanding Johnson’s reasoning through his eyes.

I looked at as many Porters as I could find and took inventory of all the flowers. I then mapped these flowers so Flower-garden will be in continuous bloom from early spring to late fall, starting with peonies, then through daisies and chrysanthemums, and ending with zinnias. The size and shape of the lower lawn garden was informed by the circular swimming pool and Donald Judd’s circular concrete sculpture on the site. The flower arrangement overlaps so that you have a full field at any time, although it grows and changes, like any good garden.

A chick Phocion’s funeral became key to understanding Jonson’s reference to unspoiled, slightly wild landscapes where one might perhaps imagine the wanderings of a shepherd. In many ways Jonson projected himself on this character of Faucion, this stoic, noble general and politician. Johnson used the painting, perhaps to burnish his legacy and reputation. The preservation of a historic house museum like this is also a kind of inscription in the landscape, turning a personal mythology into a public one.

The most powerful mythologies help us navigate the present. About the video And I’m in Arcadia, I wanted to remake characters from classical and modern mythology. Another painting by Poussin depicts Orion being led to the sun by Sedalion – this beautiful, beautiful picture of the blind giant with these Greek gods hovering. I reimagined Orion as a black woman. I also wanted to imagine other bodies inhabiting the house and occupying the space. Thinking about other mythologies with which Johnson was associated led me to Oskar Schlemmer. Johnson donated his 1932 Bauhaus staircase painting for MoMA, which was important in terms of bringing the legacy of Bauhaus and German modernism to America. This coincided with Schlemmer’s cultural exile in Germany under the Nazis. There’s this incredible ambiguity about his relationship with Johnson. What did it mean for Schlemmer to have his legacy embraced by fascist sympathizers while at the same time being persecuted?

In his costume design for Triad ballet, Schlemmer refers to E. T. A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman,” merging man and machine. I imagined Hoffman’s character Olympia, again as a black woman, in Johnson’s glass house, wearing what looked like the armor of a Greek goddess, but also the exoskeleton of an automaton. Her mask is based on one of Schlemmer’s designs. It’s a device that Olympia can put on and take off depending on the role she wants to play. The mask also sits on the dining room table, where it is sometimes used as a vase for cuttings from the garden. One could just as easily imagine it as Philip Johnson’s mask.

The film follows Olympia, played by cellist Tomeka Reid, as she gets up in the morning, writes music, makes tea and goes back to writing music. She then goes into the living room and records the music, then goes for a walk in the garden. She goes to the pavilion on the lake and plugs the record into this huge Jamaican sound system and serenades the giant that walks the grounds. The sun in Greek myth is replaced by a highway signal. It is a signal for help, but it is also associated with protest. It is a symbol of activism, of occupying the street, its restoration.

In the picture gallery, each of the walls revolves around one of the three columns like leaves in a book. There are another half dozen walls behind each of the three pairs of walls that the viewer can see, and they contain works by Frank Stella, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, and other artists that Johnson and Whitney have collected. All these works are still in the room. But instead, I made Porter’s work visible. Its scale is dramatically different. You’re thinking of a huge Stella – the picture gallery is really made to take on that kind of work. I think hanging something as delicate and compact as Porter’s still lifes there is both beautiful and subversive.

I’m not interested in deleting Johnson. I’m interested in the emergence of these other narrative possibilities in the same space. Using the metaphor of the garden, when you till the soil you are trying to increase its health and productivity, but you are also bringing to the surface what is buried.

“As told to Travis Dill.”