Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield In Dalston

American artist Agnes Denes has installed a field of wheat on unused land in the London neighborhood of Dalston. Building off iconic work she produced in New York in 1982, The artist hope it will create a conversation about the use of land, our food and each other. The piece is part of a larger exhibit held called Radical Nature at the Barbican.

In the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting makes these observations in reaction to the piece:

At a time of growing anxiety about how we feed a crowded earth – food security was discussed at the G8 last week – her image of fertility and sustenance is even more poignant, and no longer outlandish. Such possibilities of food production in the city could be commonplace for our children. Havana, famously, learned to largely feed itself from within its city limits after imported Russian oil dried up in the 1990s.

The point about Denes’s work in Dalston – and the exhibition at the Barbican – is that it raises for a new generation the role art can play in shifting attitudes towards our natural environment.

…Can art succeed where science is proving insufficient to generate the will to act effectively on climate change? Scientists sound increasingly desperate as the evidence they are carefully accumulating stacks up but fails to prompt the urgency they insist it requires. Science seems only to create a panicked paralysis: a language of probabilities, statistics and numbers fails to gain traction on the public imagination.

Is this where artists have to step in to prompt understanding, to challenge what is taken for granted, to turn our ideas upside down?

[Imgs via Darrell Barrey and Tom]