Lawn

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement.

Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we'd be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature.

About the Author

Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae- The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture .

Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy- Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), and Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020).

He has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.