"The Matrix" -- with Broccoli, Instead of Keanu
In the Spring 2011 issue of Gastronomica -- "the journal of food and culture" -- Eric LeMay introduces the sculptor Phil Ross, and his living sculpture, Junior Return -- a "hydroponic environment" in which a broccoli seedling is kept alive indefinitely, in a state of arrested development. "Most broccoli goes from seed to edible plant in two months," LeMay explains; this broccoli has remained a seedling "for almost three years." Artificial lights and a small pump on a timer provide it with just enough light and air to keep it alive. According to Ross, "The system keeps its enclosed plant in a dwarf state by supplying only enough resources to survive but not thrive."
Philip Ross's Junior Return.
The sculpture's name, LeMay writes, evokes both "the strapping, home-grown, corn-fed, archetypically all-American son who represents our collective future" and the horror-movie creepiness of Return of the Living Dead. The original Junior Return was made in 2005; since then, Ross has made a whole "clone army" of juniors. There are now eighteen of them, drawing power from an array of car batteries.
"The seedling becomes symbolic," LeMay writes, "a mirror that throws back at us an image of our own existence and asks us whether all of the human systems in which we live our everyday lives -- the schools, offices, marriages, and, most evidently, supermarkets in which we buy our broccoli -- might be designed so we survive, but [don't] thrive."
