Mr and Mrs Ivan Morison / Gertrude Jekyll and Hyde
Morgan Falconer

George Elliot once remarked that she considered Darwin’s The Origin of Species to be ‘ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts’. That’s unfortunate, given the regard in which it is now held. Her preference was for Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a volume originally published anonymously in 1844, by the Scottish polymath Robert Chambers. And that’s also unfortunate given that that book is now almost forgotten.

Roberts Chambers was not a scientist by training. He left school at sixteen and ran a bookstall for a time before setting up a publishing company with his brother and together they scored an enormous success with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a lively pot pourri of science, literature, history and self-help. But turning to scholarship in the 1830s, Chambers began to study geology then immersed himself in the now discredited would-be science of phrenology, whereby a person’s character was assessed according to protuberances on the skull. Finally, in the 1850s, at a still further reach from reality, he came to believe in spiritualism. Spiritualism however, never really caused any conflict with Chambers’ scientific enthusiasms, as his picture of creation was one in which everything - the solar system, the natural world, and mind and morals - was equally subject to universal laws, laws which were ordained by a rational Creator whose plan was evolutionary progress. One senses also that a kind of poetry had a part to play in Chambers’ grand scheme. Vestiges is a very lyrical story of creation, beginning in far-flung regions with ‘Bodies in Space’, coming earthbound with the ‘Era of the Primary Rocks’, he goes into detail on the ‘Era of the Old Red Sandstone: Fishes Abundant’, and on the ‘Era of the Oolite: Commencement of Mammalia’ and concludes with speculations on the ‘Purpose and General Condition of the Animated Creation’. This was ambrosia to the Victorians. It offered a broad cosmology that unified theories of astronomy, geology, natural history, and moral science. If Darwin’s theories implicitly undermined religious faith, Chambers’ work was harmonious with a certain strand of eighteenth century theology. Hence it sold well, in fact it went through six editions in ten years, and had sold 20,000 copies by 1860.

Today, Chambers’ book is little regarded, but the controversy that surrounded it is still remembered. Professional scientists deluged him with criticism. His theories were said to be dubious and his methods questionable. By the standards of modern science they no doubt were, but Chambers’ appeal for the public lay, in part at least, in the fact that he avoided the delimited horizons of the emerging field of science. Chambers was an amateur; an amateur in the great age of amateurs; and an amateur working in a field that was a stronghold of amateurs, natural history. For him, the defence of Vestiges was a defence of the private citizen’s right to enquire, and his or her right to contribute to scientific debate. Throughout the Victorian period, figures such as the biologist T.H.Huxley sought to transform new sciences such as biology into formal bodies of knowledge. They strived to submerge masses of empirical data into larger conceptual schemes - schemes such as Darwin’s theory of evolution - whose worth were solidly tested by experiment. Natural history however, remained hugely popular with the lay person - with the country squire, the village parson, and the rambler. Anyone could don the mantle of a naturalist, sally forth with boots and notepad, and document the variety of the natural world. Victorians of all classes and sexes did just that, discovering passions for beetles, shells, fossils, flowers and ferns. In fact ferns became the subjects of a bizarre craze in the 1840s, linked to the gothic revival. Their observations certainly furthered science in some measure, but the appreciation of the natural world that all the hunting engendered became an end in itself. It was, as one writer has put it, ‘aesthetic science’; the world was appreciated for its multiplicity, particularity, beauty and evocativeness. Thoughts about these pleasures in the natural world moulded an entire outlook, one, which saw the natural world as composed of infinite material facts or particularities, as a vast museum, as a microcosm accessible to keen vision.

The Victorians have left an indelible stamp on the past-time of collecting, such that its practices and paraphernalia all have a hint of the nineteenth century. It is no accident, therefore, that the fiction of ‘Mr and Mrs Ivan Morison, amateur gardeners’, has a ring of the nineteenth century as well. The Morisons have many voices, from that of separate individuals - Ivan Morison, Heather Peak - to that of a conventional artistic collaboration, but when they step into the guise of ‘Mr and Mrs’, and start collecting and cataloguing, they seem to age a hundred years. Their work often has the quality of a kind of ‘aesthetic science’: it blends emotion with observation, dispassionate systems with florid metaphors and yet the precision of their work, the vast labour they sink into creating their work, seems to insist on its validity alongside the observations of conventional science. If they do have a measure of validity, poetry comes a lot higher on it than factual accuracy.

They evoke the period also in their posture of amateurism: by recovering something of the nineteenth century sense of amateurism they have found the means to re-enchant knowledge and to recover it from the territorial claws of professional specialism. Theirs is the outlook of Victorian polymaths like Robert Chambers, and the multi-talented gardener, designer and photographer Gertrude Jekyll, for whom the vision as a whole seems more important than mastery of any one individual skill.

Their work has its roots in the Victorian period, since it has been moulded by the allotment they acquired in Edgbaston in 2001, which lies on ground that was once a Victorian pleasure garden. They initially took it on when they needed somewhere to install their miniature version of Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home, Prospect Cottage, but they soon found themselves entranced. Ivan would come home with tales of his struggles in the shrubbery or his haphazard planting schemes - something one inevitably finds oneself becoming more emotionally involved with that one feels is really becoming - and all of this began to seem like subject matter. A body of expert knowledge met with individual enthusiasm and this was expressed in printed card texts, which began to be issued from the garden. Thus, in the card I received last week, news of Ivan’s joy at his bedding schemes for summer 2004 (modestly and simply relayed): "Geranium Black Jubilee, Marigold Striped Marvel, Begonia Rose Petticoat, Salpiglossis Royale Chocolate, Fuschia Firecracker, Zinnia Peppermint Stick, Hibiscus Red Ace, Petunia Frilly Tunic Burgundy, Salvia Phoenix Bright Lilac..."

But Ivan and Heather Morison also combine this with reportage from the human world. One might say that the roots of this are also in the garden, since the natural life of the garden also coexists with the humanity that impinges on its borders, humanity which often keeps itself invisible to the weekend gardener, and only reveals its work when you turn up and find everything has been pinched. Strimmers disappear from sheds; lines of valuable moulded Victorian edging are lifted from the earth in the middle of the night and, on one occasion, a bottle of cheap Ukranian vodka turned up in the shed. The garden has a secret life that is part of the lives of unknown others. It has a second secret life of the imagination which revolves around the sculptures that have come to litter the overgrown garden: John F. Kennedy sits under the garden seat, Marilyn Monroe is lost and presumed dead under the collapsed apple tree and an entire "lost" tribe reside beneath the tangled gooseberry bush. It is the universe of 1950s Life magazine colliding with a suburban allotment. Garden 114, Westbourne Road Pleasure Gardens, is a place of the mind, an irregular shape of fertile land on which to cultivate a fantasy.

Human life is entangled closely with natural life in the Morison’s work; they often seem to have equal value, rather like the creation sketched in Chamber’s Vestiges, indeed everything in the Morison’s world seems to subject to the same forces, being the ordering or disordering. Hence, their documenting of the natural world co-exists with anecdotes from life. In the Chinese Arboretum series (2003-4), the titles of the pictures record events which occurred in the vicinity of the trees. No. 57 shows a small, perhaps fruit-laden tree, giving shade to a small houses and comes with these words: "Lau Chung Hang and his cockerel watch the still running legs of the now upside down chicken that he beheaded some time ago". No. 67 depicts soaring ferns crowding a misty road, and is accompanied by these words: "As Sherry Liu watches as the traffic lights count down from 60 the rain drips through her cheap umbrella and soaks up her trouser legs." The lasting sturdiness of the trees becomes a foil to the invisible moment of the human event, one that seems all the more fragile for its rendering in concise, detached language.

Occasionally human life alone attracts their attention; and once again high drama is communicated in a matter-of-fact report. Hence this printed card text drawn from a news story in Mongolia’s most popular newspaper: ‘Chinese man stabs wife: A Chinese citizen living in the Songinokhairkhan district strangled himself with a silk thread after killing his wife on July 30. The 45-year-old Chinese woman was stabbed twice by her 52-year-old husband. The couple had been living in Mongolia for many years breeding pigs. They didn't have any other occupation. The police of the district, who found a two-page letter in Chinese, are investigating the case." In presenting this work, the Morisons don’t always make it clear whether this peculiar event really occurred, whether its oddity derives simply from the peculiar phrasing or whether they placed the story themselves in the first place. The point is that there is beauty in some of the ugliest human life; the place for art becomes ambiguous.

The couple’s work has increasingly departed from the garden in recent times, but it seems to have carried with it the same preoccupations, whilst also demonstrating that nature, land, places, aren’t the anchor of their interests by any means. In 2003 they undertook a roaming residency with the media arts organisation Vivid, which was known as Global Survey. It was a ‘modern expedition’, a journey of discovery and documentary, but one that was led, with more than a little randomness, by people rather than places. Obviously, practicalities dictated some of the stop-offs, but the principle of the trip was to allow chance suggestions to lead the way. So, when they met someone who suggested they ‘must see the Siberian larches in Russia’ - just as one always says, half seriously, "you really must see the whatevers in whatever" - that is just what they did. However, when they arrived they found that all the trees were being cut down, and so, responding as they often do to a shock, they issue a brief communication: "Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Morison do not understand it. Why are they cutting down all the Siberian larches? Arkhangelsk, Russia". Along the way they made field recordings, and sent printed cards and messages back documenting the people they met and their observations along the road.

One might have expected this project to occasion their earlier work, to flower into global, environmental concerns. Instead they seem more preoccupied by the fact that one man’s jewel is another man’s rubbish. In 2003, whilst staying in Beijing, the couple completed a series of pieces about various experiences they had when they bought a pair of Java sparrows. The last experience was recorded in the text of one of their printed cards: "Heather Morison is haunted by the horrific death of her two beautiful Java Sparrows. Whilst in the care of Mr Han they were left on the floor, where a yellow weasel chewed through the bars of their cage and ate the terrified pair. Didn’t Mr Han realise how precious they were? Ivan is not so upset. Beijing, China". If one was tempted to think that there is an environmentalist agenda to the Morisons’ love of the natural world - even an implicit one - then this convinces otherwise. What they are interested in above all is a clash of values. Heather’s sentimentality towards the birds led her to value them; Mr. Han’s familiarity with them led him to disregard them; Ivan was simply ambivalent.

Learning and discovering have a beauty, which is sufficient unto itself in the Morisons’ work. Grappling with the internal laws of expert knowledge, its nomenclature and practices offers ways to unlock the creativity that has been lavished on its construction. The Victorians found large metaphors in the pursuit of natural history and their devotion to the subject is surely attested to by the elaborate nomenclature they affixed to flora and fauna. Similarly, the Morisons find metaphors in a variety of often arcane pursuits and in the outlooks of those who pursue them. In their recording of Albert Jones of Richmond, New Zealand, talking about the cosmos through his 1948 telescope, he lights up at Heather’s enthusiasm: "You’re looking at a globular cluster," he exclaims. "It’s a cluster of stars just like a swarm of bees. There’s thousands and thousands." The cosmos is like a beehive. Or there is Professor Peder Tigerstedt talking about the ‘sex scandal’ among the trees in an arboretum: evolution is compared to bed hopping. As the Morisons’ field recordings suggest, emotion often bursts from the enthusiasts when talking about their creations. In Helsinki, for instance, they became involved in an amusing struggle with Marina Pimenoff when they requested to see her garden. She was keen to tour them around it, but being early spring, there were few signs of life and she was reluctant to show them only cold earth. Eventually she relented, but in the recording they made of their tour she almost seems to come to tears: "Those horrible rabbits have eaten all of my peonies! Even those roses, which I brought up from seed... You can’t imagine that all of these are lilies. Look! Here is something coming up! But usually there is so much at this time."

There’s poetry in all those metaphors that rise out the arcana of different pursuits, and something moving in the way people get drawn in to their minuatae. But such things are never regarded as art; instead, art is meant to be the purveyor of beautiful metaphors. Peter Bürger has argued that the sensuousness and the beauty, we look for in art, developed as a consequence of art’s removal from the praxis of life. Art became an arena cut-off from the means to an end rationality of daily existence, a place where beauty could grow unhindered. Hence it was that Matisse’s businessman might return home and collapse into art like a ‘comfortable chair’, to replenish himself. However, avant-garde art, Bürger argues, attempts to reverse that equation such that art - and the sensuousness of it - floods back into the clockwork life from which it has been erased, replenishing the whole of everyday life. If traditional bourgeois art is a critique of everyday life, avant-garde art is a critique both of everyday life and of the convention of art. The ephemeral media the Morisons employ in their work obviously has an avant-garde pedigree. Its parameters are never set; their artistry is typically dispersed across a range of activities. But the other way in which the Morisons’ work seems to be distinctly and consciously avant-gardist, is in their attraction to amateurs and amateurism. Rejecting the professional calling of the artist - the job of creating some neatly tended discrete beauty - they step across boundaries into the fields of expertise of others, finding beauty there instead. The position of the amateur thus becomes a place from which to critique the discrete, territorialised ordering of professional disciplines, to critique modern life and, inevitably, to critique modern art. Gilbert and George did something similar when they decided to adopt the demeanour of sober and suited professionals. Artists posing as businessmen, they spoofed the stereotype of the artist as man-on-the-margins, torn by volcanic passions, and with that they called art’s rhetoric into question. The Morisons are a heterosexual, horticultural, inverse Gilbert and George: they are a couple, often with an ambiguous, ironic voice, but inverting the manners of the older pair, they adopt the position of amateurs in order to look back at all that is professionalised.

Amateurism and avant-gardism didn’t meet in the minds of Victorians; they had separate histories. Robert Chambers would surely have been offended to think that his contributions placed him at the margins of society - he sought to be upstanding at its centre. Gertrude Jekyll, who I invoked in the title of this essay, would no doubt have felt similar: visitors to her famous garden at Munstead Woods might have raised an eyebrow at her ankle-revealing skirts, but you probably had to do more to threaten Victorian Britain than wear sensible clothes in the garden. The twentieth century has erased personalities like Jekyll, and few could now conceive of indulging a range of interests that included garden design, painting, embroidery, carving, gilding, photography and flower arranging. The modern world has split all these facets of home-making apart and professionalised them. It is only to be hoped that the efforts of avant-garde art, the field that has protested most at being expelled from the practice of life, might make some progress towards reuniting them again - if only, at least, in the mind. To remind one of a figure like Gertrude Jekyll, a provincial, domestic, inoffensive type, Ivan and Heather Morison have to be doing something particularly rich and strange. Perhaps they reinvent her with an imaginative, occasionally dark twist - something of Jekyll and Hyde, maybe - but reinvent her they do.

Foundation and Empire, Article Press, 2004