Hedging its bet
Posted on | April 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
Roman coin thought to have inspired a disgruntled Getty House gardener to adopt the name Mutunus Tutunus and begin carving obscene gestures and messages into local hedges.
Topiarist Mutunus Tutunus will be creating likenesses of shortlisted candidates for the general managership of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Friday night at the G2 Gallery in Venice. Outgoing temporary general manager David S. Freeman will also be honored in a work called “Hat.”
Typical of Tutunus, he refused to supply advance images. “Koons will just steal them,” he wrote to a gallery organizer. If Tutunus shows up, it will be a first. The former mayoral mansion groundsman turned artist is best known for pruning obscene forms into the hedges of Windsor Square residents after they mounted a letter-writing campaign to the mayor berating Tutunus for describing the neighborhood in a local gardening newsletter as Hancock Park, a far better-known, if less elite-sounding name for the area. Since then, Tutunus has only communicated through messages carved in Windsor Square privits.
Organizers of the G2 event warn that if box hedges cannot be found to Tutunus’s specifications, Los Angeles Times contributor Emily Green will be standing in with a lecture on the ecological impact of Southern California garden irrigation. Click here for details. This back-up plan is widely seen as insurance that Tutunus will show. Unlike Green, the topiarist believes that water should be pumped into hedges as fast as they can absorb it, thereby providing plenty of grist for his saw.
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April 14th, 2010 @ 9:36 pm
Hard to believe writing of this caliber has not yet garnered a Pulitzer. 🙂