Gardens in the Sky

I grew up in Manhattan, and one thing that used to strike my imagination was the tops of the buildings. Usually, this is where architects allowed their fantasies to run away with them. The older buildings have very strange shapes at the top. I don’t just mean pinnacles, but odd shapes. It looks like there’s something special up there. I used to fantasise about them when I was a kid.

When you’re walking in New York City, especially uptown, you’re often walking in the shade. I thought it would be wonderful if you could walk along the tops of the buildings, going from one to the other. What I wanted to do was to create a kind of imaginary landscape there. That’s what you can see in Floating Gardens of Rock City 1970 (pictured here). I thought that I might be able to create these spaces using holography, but this project was never realised.

I thought that it was necessary to get more trees and gardens into cities that are made of concrete. In fact, New York has changed since the 1970s – there is a lot more greenery now.

One fantastic thing about collage is its instantaneous quality. Just by cutting images out of magazines or books and putting them against other images, you can arrive at completely new views. And sometimes new ideas or concepts – fresh ways of looking at things. With these collages, I wanted to give the city more life! To allow people’s imaginations to generate fantasy, lightness of spirit. People walking in some- thing like this would feel happy.

That is one thing art can do, and I think it should. We live in such a problematic world; life is tough for everybody. There will always be illness and death. God knows what people go through. And life is also made up of illusions. So why not create some more crazy illusions, some more fantastical illusions?

^{Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive, Tate St Ives, until 2 November.}

^{Liliane Lijn is an artist who lives in London.}

^{Supported by the Liliane Lijn Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Americas Foundation and Tate Members. Organised by Haus der Kunst München and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, in collaboration with Tate St Ives.}