Our new fortnightly series opens with a response to the heatwave: a look at the artist who planted a rural idyll right beside the towering symbols of capitalism and the patriarchy
orty years ago, in the summer of 1982, Agnes Denes was two months into tending to her two-acre wheatfield, which she had grown in one of the busiest, most urban, and most expensive corners of the world: Battery Park landfill in Manhattan. Even back then, the trash-filled ground that lay underneath the field was valued at $4.5bn.Wheatfield – A Confrontation
The photographs that remain are remarkable. In one, we see the artist tending to her wheat, dressed in a striped shirt with high-waisted blue jeans, starkly contrasting to the grey, stocky skyscrapers of Wall Street in the background. In another, we see the Statue of Liberty looming in the distance. From a different angle, we see that the glittering landscape is set in the shadow of the twin towers.
By situating the wheatfield between the pillars of capitalism and patriarchy, a stone’s throw from Wall Street, the work called into question some of the most striking social, economic and ecological concerns. It represented, the artist said, “food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics” and referred to “mismanagement, waste, world hunger”.
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