The Feral Garden Of The More-Than-Panorama Museum

Abstract

This essay relates the story of a panorama museum’s care and response to Los Angeles’ multi-layered urban development and surplus materials from its most understudied space :the back garden. Connected to the rear of LA’s Union Theatre, which houses the nineteenth-century Euro-American style Velaslavasay Panorama (VP), is a garden of thick, entangled plants, with stone paths snaking beneath string lights. As the visitor traverses the ‘jungle’, she glimpses architecture like the Pavilion of the Verdant Dream with a wooden door and ornamental lattices, and the green hexagonal Arulent Gazebo with a copper-tiled roof. The garden instantiates the ‘feral’ DIY LA art that the VP curators practice, transporting thevisitor from a site of virtual travel to a site of ‘rootedness’ in the moment. Centering on the concept of ‘feral’, this essay presents the Velaslavasay garden as an organic experimental part of the more-than-panorama museum.

Keywords: Feral art, painted panorama, heterotopia, neighbourhood, Los Angeles