Why This Artist Is Growing Desert Plants to Question U.S. Gun Policies

Once I was walking down Grand Street in Chinatown when a large fish landed at my feet. Instead of waiting patiently to be bought and butchered, it had launched itself from its shallow tub outside a grocer’s stall and onto the hot sidewalk, where it wiggled and flopped. The crowd pushed past, ignoring this little scene. “Excuse me?” I called feebly, unable to get the shopkeeper’s attention, yet incapable of walking away. “Is this your fish?”

I remembered that moment when I met Martin Roth, a soft-spoken Austrian-born artist whose sculptures and installations cast animals and plants in starring roles. Roth’s work calls attention to the often shifting divisions between wild and domesticated, natural and cultivated, animals we love and animals we eat. In other words, if Roth had been on Grand Street that day, I bet he would have saved the fish.

Now based in New York, Roth grew up in the countryside and spent the better part of his childhood wandering through fields and forests. “As a child I was super interested in the idea of de-domestication,” he told me. “I always dreamed that one day pets would intermingle with wildlife.” He liked to imagine a colony of white rabbits going feral in the woods or a flock of parrots taking up residence at the bottom of an Austrian garden. As an artist, his work blurs the same boundary. “Animals end up in my work for a period of time and then leave it to live in a zoo or sanctuary, a space that’s something between wild and domestic,” Roth noted.

The subjects in question are usually pets like parakeets, or laboratory stock like mice. A few narrowly escaped becoming dinner, like the bullfrogs he bought at a Chinatown market, then released into the lower level of the erstwhile Louis B. James Gallery, which he had flooded, transforming it into a shallow pond for the duration of the exhibition.

Intentionally or not, any work involving living things, from Anicka Yi’s high-tech ant farm to Pierre Huyghe’s painted dog, raises questions, both about what rights animals are accorded and the nature of our responsibilities for them. Recent controversies surrounding the use of animals in art (such as the Guggenheim’s decision to remove three animal works from the exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” last year) seem to intensify these questions without offering many satisfactory answers.

Roth, who once worked as an assistant in Huyghe’s studio, sees animals and plants as his collaborators rather than his medium. The activity of caring for them isn’t incidental, it’s the central premise of his work. While a graduate student at Hunter College, Roth bought seven ducklings from a game bird hatchery and raised them in his studio, which he had covered with leaves and outfitted with a small pond to simulate the ducks’ natural habitat. “The other students thought I was wasting my studio space and that the ducklings would prevent me from making work,” Roth said. “But for me, the work was caring for the ducklings.”

Roth’s attention was similarly occupied last week when the Berlin gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem presented his Untitled (Donald Judd II) (2016) at The Armory Show. At a glance, the nearly nine-foot sculpture is identical to Donald Judd’s signature stacks, except, of course, for the snails who call the metal and plexiglass boxes home. Roth tended to the sculpture’s residents each morning at 8:30 a.m. before the fair opened, cleaning the habitat, feeding the snails, and misting the interior of the sculpture with bottled water. The written instructions for the care and feeding of the snails run to three pages. Acquiring a piece by Roth is more akin to adopting a kitten than buying a painting. It means making a promise to nurture and protect.

Like his earlier work, Roth’s current project has a simple declarative title, one that sounds like the opening lines of a short story: In November 2017 I collected a plant from the garden of a mass shooter.

Last November, a month after 58 people were killed at a music festival on the Las Vegas strip in the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Roth traveled to the shooter’s home in a sleepy retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada. What he found there was a neglected garden with a few haphazard plantings. It seems fitting somehow that Roth, the obsessive nurturer, would stumble upon such an unloved place.

The only remarkable things in the garden were a painting easel and a small desert holly plant growing in the gravel. Desert holly is famously tough; it can survive in sandy soil, desert heat, and extreme drought. “Native Americans believe that the healing plant we need will grow nearby,” Roth said. In the spirit of this credo, he began to research the plant’s properties, in pursuit of the idea that it could serve as protection from, or an antidote to, gun violence.