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Rejected Proposal for a Monument to
La Reunion, 2006

Proposal for a greenhouse, 2.5 x 2.5 x 5 m
Color print, 42 x 29.7 cm

In 2006, I responded to an open invitiation for failed or rejected proposals or never-realized projects to be printed in a book by Catherine Griffiths and Dan Rees under the title The Home for Lost Ideas. The project I submitted was a proposal I made to the Chinati foundation artist-in-residency program for a monument in the form of a greenhouse to La Reunion, a failed utopian socialist commune set up by French settlers in Texas during the nineteenth-century. The settlement failed largely as a result of bad land for agriculture and lack of knowledge in working the land.

My proposal—itself idealistic if not utopian—took the form of a greenhouse mimicking the dimensions of the fifteen concrete sculptures by Donald Judd on the foundation's property. Large hydroponic farms dot the West Texas landscape around the Chinati Foundation. The greenhouse would be built directly on the land and would attempt to coax the dormant wild flower seeds in the desert soil to grow by reproducing spring conditions within the shelter.

My proposal and layout were shown at General Public in Berlin in the book as it appeared in working process, but in 2008 I received a message from the organizers that the Rejected Proposal for a Monument to La Reunion had been rejected from the final version of the book.