Thomas Struth: The Dandelion Room

Rating:
Summary: An Obscure Route To The Psychology Of The Sick-Bed
Review: Entering The Dandelion Room is just the slightest bit like being on jungle safari. There is a wild, overgrown quality to Thomas Struth's photographs of flowering plants, a strong sense of obscenity at the heart of floral life at its most voluptuous. But intimations of perishability are absolutely implicit within visual fields that are so healthy and vibrant, you think you smell a redolent bouquet wafting off the reproductions. Counterpoised to the visual feast of floral imagery, Struth composes landscape tableaux that are sparse and unfulfilled, often of dormant agricultural settings which await human intercession were they to return to active production. Thus these almost empty country scenes hint at what might still be possible should benign intervention ensue. But they also speak cogently, perhaps nostalgically, to what has already been, indirectly suggesting a sentimental reminiscence of youth; of a happier, less complex time.

The Dandelion Room photographs were made in direct response to a commission to 'decorate' newly constructed patient rooms in a hospital just outside Zurich, Switzerland. Struth was given free reign for the project and decided upon a scheme to situate landscape art on the wall in front of thirty-seven separate sick-beds and floral portraiture on the wall above the head of each bed. Some care was given to combinations of floral and landscape art for each room and this work has been documented with interesting results at the back of the volume. It is useful to think about how the immediate environment influences a person's experience of their stay in hospital, it seems to me. Struth certainly takes seriously that his images will have an impact, and not an insignificant one at that! Lest why would he have gone to such lengths to produce a collection which is seemingly so simple in its subject matter yet so emotionally powerful and poignant in its lasting psychological effect?