I went to the South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula the other day. A friend told me about the current installation of Thomas Dambo's "TROLLS: Save the Humans" — six large trolls made of reclaimed material. The garden's website says they're here to help:
You see, hundreds of trolls came together at "Trolliefolkyfest" to discuss their favorite topic — us humans. While they know we mean well, we keep failing them by making questionable choices, like cutting down forests, emptying rivers, and putting humans — and them — in danger. While most of the trolls think we are past saving, these SIX think they can help us.
The trolls are adorable. Despite their size, they're closer in spirit to the troll dolls with the upswept multi-colored hair than to Tom, Bert and William, the trolls who didn't eat Bilbo Baggins and his Dwarf companions in The Hobbit only because, egged on by Gandalf in the dark, they argued too long about the cooking method before the rising sun turned them to stone. Dambo's trolls are similarly large, but they bear gentle messages encouraging us to become good stewards of the Earth. Dambo's website provides the backstory: these six trolls want to save humanity from the majority of the trolls, whose solution to humanity's insistence on despoiling the planet is to eat us, which is more in line with my expectations. Hungry, misanthropic trolls, unfortunately, don't seem to be represented in Dambo's work. I suspect their message would be more likely to make us change our ways.
I love going to the Huntington Botanical Gardens and the LA County Arboretum; I hoped to have similar experiences closer to home. I would have liked the trolls a lot more without the faux childlike narrative surrounding them, and the South Coast Botanic Garden doesn't seem to have the organization or the set pieces the other gardens do. I thought perhaps this was to make it feel more wild, but it's a garden, not a wilderness, so it just felt a bit random by comparison to the Huntington and the Arboretum.
But then I stumbled across far more powerful installations — abstract sculptures placed at various points in the garden. Most are on long-term loan from the LA County Museum of Art; "long-term" here means fixed upon concrete pads and surrounded by substantial plantings. After noticing a couple of them, I learned from the garden's website where the rest are located and marked them all on the map I'd been given that showed where to find the trolls. And here were the set pieces I'd been looking for. A few examples:
Firestone, by Peter Voulkos
Trace, by Nancy Graves
Teha, by Mark di Suvero
Teha says, "Now this is Art!" I don't think art has to look like it might shoot something, but I do appreciate the mystery of these pieces. The garden frames six of the eight sculptures with plants and invents no story to explain their presence. They're just here. They just exist. That's all I want.
© 2023 Ruth Warkentin