Reflections on reading the Introduction to WHY LOOK AT PLANTS by Giovanni Aloi.

I brought some personal baggage to my reading of this book. I don’t want to get too deep in the biographical weeds, but I will share some examples.  

For a college evolutionary strategies class, I wrote a paper about sexual reproduction in red algae. I remember no details of the science, but I clearly remember the feeling that I could just almost grasp something fundamental about the topic, but it remained vague and non-verbal. I did not get a good grade—my attempts to explain this near-epiphany failed miserably.  

Much later, in a graduate history class, I wanted to research the harvesting of chestnuts as a human ritual and activity repeated over centuries and over continents. I was told this was more of an “art” question than a “history” question.

Later still, I came to art and art history and I learned that this type of question was not welcomed there either. It was too specific. “What was I really talking about?” I was asked. Surely it was “repetition,” “time,” or some other broad concept that could be addressed in ways more abstract, more symbolic, and more appropriate to contemporary art than thinking about backs bent under chestnut trees century after century.

This is the background to my delight and to my gratitude upon reading the Introduction to Aloi’s “Why Look at Plants. He beautifully explains the difficulty of articulating and situating such thoughts about plants. He delineates the development of the dominant ways of thinking about plants:  

At this point in Western representation, we witness a peculiar bifurcation in the processes of objectification of animals and plants. On the one hand, the scientific herbaria of natural history objectified plants…by representationally isolating them against a plain background for observation purposes….[the] plant became a specimen….On the other hand, classical painting immersed plants (and animals) in complex anthropocentric/tableaus in which they featured as silent and yet eloquent narrative tools. (p.19-20)

More succinctly later, he sums up the two ways of looking at plants our culture has developed: “the scientific objectification and the metaphorical objectification.”(p. 26)

In contrast to these alternatives, he offers the example of his grandmother’s balcony and terrace, full of plants gifted from others or to be gifted, plants that “emerged through my childhood memories as a sociocultural agent situated in a specific local reality.” (p.31)

That’s where I want to be.