Well, is it? The pastoral still has a hold in this country to the extent that one wonders why anything ever isn't pastoral, and that which isn't pastoral is modernist. These polite (ok, the modernist is insistently polite) landscapes still hold sway over the American practice of landscape architecture. Land art exists beside landscape, but when the two are formally introduced as one, well, divorce is in the air. Historical and cultural referents are few and dainty, and those that practice landscape in an insistent, impolite manner, don't "fit in". Take Martha Schwartz. She made a bagel garden. And forever that is what many landscape architects will remember her for. Perhaps in the hallowed halls of Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where she teaches, she's known for the body of her work, but elsewhere she garners a shrug.
Her work, and that of others who use non-traditional materials, make plants behave oddly, ignore or invest in the context of a place visibly, make shapes that owe more to "art" than to "nature", aren't afraid of paradigmatic shifts, bright colors, the language of social interaction, is something that has always existed on the fringe of landscape in the United States. These practioners who's work is more post modern than modern, not at all pastoral are dismissed here, while in Europe it is the norm. What is it about our heterogenous population that makes for homogenious landscapes?
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