Marco and Polo present: April 2010

Right now I am doing lots of research into environmental art and I've come across something I just had to share.

In 1982 Agnes Denes, a Hungarian born, American land artist re-appropriated an abandoned block in New York City and used it to plant a field of wheat. Underneath the towers of the World Trade Centre, with the help of two assistants and a group of volunteers she cleaned up the city detritus, created an irrigation system and grew the wheat. She successfully created a pocket of countryside in the midst of one of the world's most urban environments.

Lady Liberty behind the field

In doing so, Denes reached that elusive moment in art: Creating an iconic and powerful image that became emblematic for a movement. The work is known as 'Wheatfield, Battery Park City - A confrontation.'

Agnes in her wheat field.

The work attempted to communicate messages regarding the management of resources and the scarcity of food in an ever more over populated world as well comment on the divisions of space that we have constructed in the modern age. I like the vibrancy of the work and the reclamation of apparently dead space. It draws attention to the potential of life in an environment that is often considered barren and unnatural. The wheat that she grew was given to the horses in the cavalry of the New York City Police. As well seeds from her crop travelled around the world in 'The International Show for the End of World Hunger.'

Harvest

The work was recreated in 2009 in conjunction with the Barbican show 'Radical Nature' on a disused railway line in Dalston, East London. This time it was accompanied by a mill and a bakery to turn the product of the work into bread to share. However, as Madeleine Bunting asks in her essay for the Royal Society of Arts, Art and Climate, the project was ambitious and possibly missed its mark. The project took place in a non-art space, yet still failed to reach widely beyond the scope of an art audience. Is it the prerogative of art in contemporary society to engage in community building? Bunting cites Tim Smit's project Big Lunch Project as more successful. Smit simply asks that neighbours sit down together to share food that they have grown and talk. This too, by encouraging home grown food, asks city dwellers to consider how the food that they have eaten comes about and to share that experience.

It is interesting to see how community participation and sustainability are being used as motifs in contemporary art. More to come.