Mulligan’s Frog Hair Garden, 1996

Mulligan’s Frog Hair Garden, by Jim Dingilian and Alan Phelan
Public art project with website for daily events listing and documentation.
10 May – 30 June, 1996

Artist’s Garden Project
Highland Park, Rochester, New York

Presented by:
the Highland Park Conservancy
Co-sponsored by the Monroe County Parks Department
& the Lilac Festival Committee
Produced during the Lilac Festival, Rochester, New York

Statement about the project:

“Gardens are sites of recreation. Ours is a dysfunctional sporting arena, a picturesque court, a parallel course, a tactically social space.

The park and garden provide a space, a social space where nature can be viewed in a controlled and carefully tended environment. Our garden fuses assorted visual structures in celebration of parallel fields in which social activities are located. The precision and mechanistic perfection of sports mirror the aesthetic architecture or structure of high culture. In other words, the status or symbolic significance that golf and tennis, as cultural activities, embody.

We are confused whether to pacify or activate you, the viewer. We, however, enjoy the opportunity to widen the expected sphere of activity for (public) art.

The scheduled daily events allow conversation between audiences and an exploration of our ambivalent relationship to nature, culture and other things.

We want to dialogue with you.”

Website: http://alanphelan.com/Mulligan/index.html (opens in new window/tab)