Land Matters
If Tree Pants Are the Answer, What Is the Question?

Just when I assumed they’d thought of everything, along it comes—a tree wearing a pair of pants.

It might have seemed, at first glance, to be some sort of bizarre stunt. But no, Tree Pants is Art. That’s right—it’s a site-specific installation by Brooklyn-based artist Peter Coffin at the Wanas Sculpture Park in Malmö, Sweden. Fame of the installation has crossed the Atlantic: The Horticultural Society of New York was so smitten with it that it featured photos of Tree Pants as part of an exhibit on art and botany.

And the pants themselves? They were custom tailored for the tree by Levi Strauss & Co.

Given that Tree Pants is Art, are we simply to admire its form, color, and texture? Again, no—this installation has a Message. Artist Coffin has issued this statement: Tree Pants highlights “the absurdity of the common human tendency to project human character and personality on things in the world.”

Call me slow on the uptake, but I would have sworn that Coffin was the leading offender in any tendency to anthropomorphize things. More bothersome, however, is what this piece suggests about the insularity of the art world. Tree Pants, to me, is the epitome of an inside joke that’s funny only to the artist’s cronies and to curators who smile thinly while exchanging approving comments to show that they, too, understand.

One outdoor art installation that reached out to a mass audience was Christo’s The Gates. Some who visited The Gates say it helped them to see Central Park with fresh eyes. Do you think pants on a tree in your favorite park or woodland would do that for you?

I’m tempted to compare Tree Pants with my favorite environmental art site, Little Sparta in Scotland by the late poet/artist/garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay (see “Land Matters,” December 2005). Little Sparta differs from Tree Pants in a couple of important ways. Although Finlay’s famous inscriptions and other art pieces are admittedly inscrutable, they seem to have an internal consistency as fragments of the artist’s autobiography. And they are sited in an extraordinary garden largely built with the artist’s own hands. Need I point out that building a beautiful garden takes a lot more sweat, persistence, and love than ordering an oversized pair of Levi’s?

Environmental art has an honorable tradition with many wonderful examples: Harvey Fite’s Opus 40, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli, Herbert Bayer’s Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks—and let’s not forget Patrick Dougherty’s fine twig sculptures, one installation of which is discussed in this issue. Within such a rich tradition, where does Tree Pants fit?
Maybe Tree Pants is the herald of a new trend in horticultural art. Trees will inevitably be dressed up in thongs, bustiers, even leisure suits. Avant-garde landscape architects will vie to create the latest arboreal fashions.

When that happens, will LAM be there to comment? You can bet your blue jeans it will.

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org