Patricia Johanson and the Re‐Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958–2010 Xin Wu. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958-2010 Xin Wu. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.Owing to canon formation biases that often privilege market economics and ephemeral spectacle interventions, the artist Patrician Johanson is often relegated to a second-if not occasionally third-tier position among contemporary American artists by critics and historians of the period. Despite the monumental scale that her projects often take (e.g., Johanson's Endangered Garden (1987-1989) in San Francisco, in which the image of an endangered San Francisco Garter Snake structures a one third of a mile-long bay walk, tidal sculpture, and wildlife restoration habitat that also follows the path of a newly laid municipal sewer line), the collaborative development processes, civic mindedness, and "design" aspects of Johanson's projects, as well as her selfimposed isolation from mainstream midcentury art circles, have placed the artist in a marginalized position within the already marginalized field of public art studies within art history. This positioning of both the artist and discipline is more fully embraced by the fields of landscape design studies, built environment studies, and public history. Rather than shying away from these trans-disciplinary attachments, Xin Wu's recent study of Johanson explores the artist's work as negotiating between these multiple fields as well as meriting consideration within art historical chronologies. For Wu, Johanson's art constitutes a new-and relevant-form of contemporary public art practice.In her extensively illustrated recent study (the text includes sixty-four color plates and another forty-eight black and white images), Wu considers the artist's career from her early experiments with color and perception as an Bennington College undergraduate in the late 1950s and early 1960s to her recently realized total environmental constructions and reconstructions in the United States and internationally. Wu guides her study with the notion that "Creativity emerges from a path, not a myth" (9). She tracks this five-decade path chronologically yet mindful of how earlier discoveries are brought to bear on later projects, evaluating the lingering influence of the one hundred and fifty garden proposals (divided into seven new garden genres) Johanson developed for a 1969 commission from House and Garden magazine on the artist's more recently executed designs. In this respect, Wu's current study can be considered a companion study to her previous two-volume monographic catalogue devoted to these same proposals (Patricia Johanson's "House and Garden" Commission: Reconstruction of Modernity, 2008). The artist's gradual and continuous evolutionary development from such early creative gambits is presented alongside the artist's responses to the late 1960s New York art world pursuits of "the real," modern European landscape history, eastern philosophical thought, Native American art principles, and Chinese materialism and landscape design since the Song period. Wu contextualizes Johanson's arrival at a theory of public practice in recent years in which aesthetics are put in service of ethical goals as informed by contemporaneous discussions in the fields of American art, landscape theory, cultural theory, and ecological sustainability.The redefinition Wu identifies in Johanson's work is the end stage of a process of creative translation-or "visual translation"-of ideas from the domain of visual art to garden and landscape design and from gallery art to public art. The result is the creation of a new art genre: a "garden of art." The presence of nature rather than a representation of or in nature defines this new environmental art. Nature serves as a subject for an art in pursuit of "the real," an art form predicated not on aesthetic terms but on ethical ones, thus challenging traditional characterizations of art approaches set forth by late modern and contemporary art theorists (i. …