Monsieur Plant Lets Nature Take Its Course
Christophe Guinet, a French artist also known as Monsieur
Plant, takes "Think Different" to another level. He has created
a body of work that integrates life-giving plant matter with
life-altering technology.
His “Plant Your Mac” photo series depicts discarded
Macs that have been transformed into carefully composed
terrariums with a diverse array of lush greenery, including
cacti and other succulents. Even an old mouse features a
sprig of budding greenery.
While aesthetically pleasing, Guinet’s work also reflects
his anxieties about industrialization, commercialization, and
overconsumption.
Guinet grew up between the city and the countryside,
so nature and urban life pulled on him with equal force. He
was collecting orchids by age 15 and, when he moved to the
city, took delight in making plants grow in unlikely places.
This became the basis of Guinet’s urban art.
His use of plants — as when he covers headphones
in moss and integrates Nike shoes with bark, flowers, and
ornamental grass (“Just Grow It!”) — reflects the life cycle
played out in the natural world.
In the “Plant Your Mac” series, Guinet aims to remind
people of nature’s lasting power. “I started the project three
years ago by retrieving old Macs from my agency [that]
were no longer working,” he said. “At the time, I did not
have a final idea yet.” He chose Macs to represent technol-
ogy because he’d used Apple computers for many years
and knew them well.
“I like to play with the opposition and use capitalist
symbols to give them a natural and ethical twist, as if to say
that nature will always triumph over man and his modes of
consumption,” he said.
Each piece in the series took about three days to com-
plete. After gutting the electronics, Guinet equipped each Mac
with an automatic irrigation system, and the plants thrived.
The resulting art pieces were put on display at the creative
agency where Guinet works.
Guinet even turned a friendly blue iMac G3 into a
death trap for small insects called the Macarnivor, a terrar-
ium that includes Venus flytraps. Another old Macintosh
became a pedestal for a bonsai tree, its root base filling the
screen and seeming to spill out of the disk drive.
Guinet sees himself as a “contemplative and passion-
ate aesthete of the plant world” who tries to create art that
has a meditative pull on the viewer.
He also “expresses the idea that plants do not think;
they live day to day in a haphazard way,” his biography reads.
“It is in this spirit of the moment that he creates, with meticu-
lous detail and patience, his unique plant compositions.”
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