other sights

Art for Eat’s Sake:

Artists are explor­ing the sus­tain­abil­ity of our food sys­tems with hands-on, inter­ven­tion­ist projects

by Joseph Hart, PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 23 NO. 2 • ISSUE 46

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Last sum­mer, res­i­dents of Vancouver’s South­east False Creek neigh­bor­hood were drawn into an unusual artis­tic exper­i­ment. On a vacant lot lit­tered with the rusty rem­nants of the neighborhood’s indus­trial past, artist Holly Schmidt led vol­un­teers in design­ing, build­ing, planting,and har­vest­ing a thriv­ing con­tainer garden.

“I’m not a great gar­dener; I’m just aver­age,” says Schmidt. “So it wasn’t so much me being an ‘expert.’” Instead, she invited passers-by to join in the work of cre­at­ing the gar­den. The idea, she explained, was that folks “would come in and help out and learn from each other.” A wide vari­ety of peo­ple got their hands dirty. Mas­ter gar­den­ers and design­ers col­lab­o­rated on the site plan. Artists con­tributed their own projects. Meaghen Buck­ley, for instance, wove hand­made nets onto an old indus­trial struc­ture to serve as a cre­ative climb­ing gym for run­ner beans.

Other vol­un­teers just hap­pened onto the project while strolling nearby walk­ing paths. One curi­ous elderly res­i­dent dropped by to offer a flat of tomato plants. “She ended up help­ing out through­out the whole project,” Schmidt says. And her toma­toes thrived.

A Critique—and Solutions

Schmidt’s project, Grow, is one of an increas­ing num­ber of inno­v­a­tive, artist-led exper­i­ments that explore urban farm­ing or attempt—in a prac­ti­cal way—to clar­ify and decode the notion of sus­tain­abil­ity, espe­cially as it relates to our food.

In large part, projects like Schmidt’s reflect recent changes in our rela­tion­ship to what we eat. In the past 20 years, our food sys­tem has come under increas­ing scrutiny. Books like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma have advanced a cri­tique of indus­trial agri­cul­ture that is becom­ing embraced by the Amer­i­can mainstream.

In short, this cri­tique focuses on the “green” (read: chem­i­cal) rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s. Since then, farms have become larger and less diverse, with severe con­se­quences for farm­ers, our envi­ron­ment, and our health. Today, just 12 per­cent of the nation’s farms pro­duce 84 per­cent of our food (and receive bil­lions in fed­eral sub­si­dies), accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA). The other 88 per­cent rely on off-farm income. Not sur­pris­ingly, few young peo­ple are inter­ested in farm­ing; the fastest-growing age group in farm­ing is peo­ple over 65. Mono-cropping wears out soil, with petro­chem­i­cals mak­ing up for the deple­tion. Cen­tral­ized food sys­tems also require vast carbon-dioxide-spewing trans­porta­tion net­works. Mean­while, processed foods are linked to a range of con­di­tions, from obe­sity and dia­betes to pesticide-related cancer.

Responses to this cri­tique rep­re­sent a range of efforts, includ­ing calls for bet­ter food label­ing and food secu­rity, attempts to main­tain and improve the USDA’s organic stan­dards, and lob­by­ing to reform the polit­i­cal land­scape that cur­rently favors indus­trial farming.

More recently—and most interestingly—come the efforts of food activists: farm­ers, enlight­ened con­sumers, and artists like Schmidt who encour­age us to attend to our per­sonal rela­tion­ship to our food and its pro­duc­tion. The rapid growth of farm­ers’ mar­kets and community-supported agri­cul­ture, as well as the loca­vore move­ment, which encour­ages us to eat sea­son­ally and locally, all come under this umbrella.

“Art farm­ers” whose projects and prac­tices focus on food issues range far and wide. They include, to name just a few, artists like Matthew Moore, a fourth-generation farmer who has trans­formed his fam­ily farm in Ari­zona into an artis­tic com­men­tary on encroach­ing sub­ur­bia, and who con­structs prac­ti­cal farm­ing inter­ven­tions like hang­ing portable veg­etable boxes. The Sloven­ian artist Mar­jet­ica Potrc has facil­i­tated sev­eral large-scale projects includ­ing water col­lec­tion devel­op­ments; a rooftop rice field in Anyang, South Korea; and a seed and plant bank in Paris. Fritz Haeg focuses on front-yard gar­dens with his Edi­ble Estates project.

Not only do these artists and projects advance a cri­tique of our indus­tri­al­ized food sys­tem, but they are also actively engaged in the search for solu­tions. Whether by demon­strat­ing more holis­tic tech­niques and sources of food pro­duc­tion or by explor­ing new, col­lab­o­ra­tive forms of com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion, they’re help­ing to define a new day for agriculture.

The Art of Growing

As a cura­tor and cofounder of ecoart­space NYC, Amy Lip­ton has worked with a num­ber of artists who are advanc­ing prac­ti­cal solu­tions to the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with indus­tri­al­ized agriculture.

In one 2009 project, Lip­ton gath­ered a group at Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Cen­ter for Envi­ron­men­tal Edu­ca­tion, which also runs a work­ing farm. Each par­tic­i­pant in the exhi­bi­tion Down to Earth: Artists Cre­ate Edi­ble Land­scapes built unique, liv­ing gar­dens with inven­tive struc­tures that ranged from a rain­wa­ter col­lec­tion sys­tem to a sculp­tural fence designed to keep deer in check.

Lipton’s inter­est is tied closely to her pas­sion for envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice. She ran a tra­di­tional New York gallery in the 1980s where, among oth­ers, she worked with artist Mel Chin. In 1990, Chin col­lab­o­rated with a USDA researcher on Revival Field, an art­work that used heavy metal–absorbing plants to clean up a brown­field in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“This work is in a new ter­ri­tory where it’s hard to put labels on it,” Lip­ton says. “Even among the artists, no one is super com­fort­able with terms like ‘eco-art’ or ‘land art.’ It’s not like min­i­mal­ism or cubism that sum up very easily.”

For Chin, this ambi­gu­ity had a con­crete con­se­quence: a grant he’d received from the National Endow­ment for the Arts was rescinded. “They were ques­tion­ing whether it was an art­work at all,” says Lip­ton. Chin fought the deci­sion and the grant was even­tu­ally reinstated.

Amy Franceschini’s Vic­tory Gar­den project in San Fran­cisco pro­vides a strik­ing con­trast. Launched in 2006 at the city’s Museum of Mod­ern Art, the pro­gram enlisted res­i­dents to plant back– and front-yard edi­ble land­scapes and pro­vided  work­shops and tours of par­tic­i­pat­ing gar­dens. Frances­chini, a founder of the col­lab­o­ra­tive group Future­farm­ers, also cre­ated a demon­stra­tion Vic­tory Gar­den in front of City Hall. The highly suc­cess­ful pro­gram has since become an ongo­ing, city­funded ini­tia­tive and a model for other urban agri­cul­ture projects around the country.

The idea, Frances­chini told the Los Ange­les Times in 2009, was to declare “a vic­tory of self-reliance, inde­pen­dence from the indus­trial food sys­tem, and com­mu­nity involvement.”

Today, she describes the impact of the project in even broader terms. “It addresses the dis­con­nec­tion we have with every­thing we con­sume,” she explains. “It’s a point of ini­ti­a­tion to a deeper con­nec­tion with food. As soon as peo­ple started farm­ing and real­iz­ing how dif­fi­cult it was, a lot of other ques­tions unfolded.” Ulti­mately, these ques­tions included the press­ing envi­ron­men­tal issues of the day, includ­ing cli­mate change, trans­porta­tion, and the chal­lenges of pop­u­la­tion increases.

More recently, Future­farm­ers took up the issue of soil health in Soil Kitchen. Timed to coin­cide with the 2011 Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency’s National Brown­fields Con­fer­ence in Philadel­phia, the project took over an aban­doned build­ing, out­fit­ted it with a giant wind­mill, and turned it into a com­mu­nity gath­er­ing space.

The heart of Soil Kitchen was a test­ing project: Neigh­bors traded soil sam­ples from their yards for a bowl of soup. Like the Vic­tory Gar­den pro­gram and Schmidt’s Grow, the project included work­shops and hands-on demon­stra­tions on top­ics like sus­tain­abil­ity, com­post­ing, grass­roots com­mu­nity financ­ing, and alter­na­tive energy. The soil sam­ples were tested by EPA con­fer­ees, and the results were posted online. Res­i­dents with high con­t­a­m­i­na­tion worked with the EPA to gain more knowl­edge of reme­di­a­tion. The ini­tial project is over, but local res­i­dents plan to carry the pro­gram for­ward for another year with the bless­ings of the city.

The Social Dynam­ics of Food

Like Schmidt’s Grow, projects launched by Future­farm­ers raise aware­ness of local, home­grown alter­na­tives to the indus­trial food sys­tem. But they do a lot more than that. By cre­at­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive, infor­mal, grass­roots inter­ac­tion, they model an alter­na­tive social struc­ture as well.

For Schmidt, this inter­ac­tion is a key com­po­nent of her work. “Instead of being didac­tic and telling peo­ple ‘This is how it should be,’ I’m always look­ing at how we can come together and start build­ing some­thing inter­est­ing. How can we come together, ask ques­tions, and cre­ate a new practice?”

In other words, such artists are chal­leng­ing the social impli­ca­tions of out­sourc­ing our food pro­duc­tion to multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions and gigan­tic, cen­tral­ized, and largely invis­i­ble farms. They’re ques­tion­ing why the intri­cate, com­plex, some­times mad­den­ing, but entirely defin­ing expe­ri­ence of cul­ti­vat­ing, har­vest­ing, cook­ing, and enjoy­ing a meal is reduced to a series of imper­sonal finan­cial trans­ac­tions at the drive-through win­dow and check­out aisle.

When Frances­chini planted her Vic­tory Gar­den at San Francisco’s City Hall, an unan­tic­i­pated result was that as city work­ers and elected offi­cials came out to eat lunch in the gar­den, they came into con­tact with gar­den­ers and cit­i­zens in a new and dif­fer­ent way. “They would talk to peo­ple, and a lot of issues came out. Peo­ple became con­nected to the city,” she explains. “Break­ing these sorts of bar­ri­ers has become an impor­tant aspect of our work. We should think of the city as ‘ours,’ and we should know what’s in the soil around our homes, and we should be able to test it ourselves.”

In this con­text, and against the back­drop of our increas­ingly trou­bled world ecol­ogy, projects like Franceschini’s are chal­leng­ing not only the assump­tions of the par­tic­i­pants in their works, but the role of the artist. “It’s even hard for me to say I’m an artist some­times,” she says. “I’ve often called myself an edu­ca­tor or facil­i­ta­tor or pol­li­na­tor. Basi­cally I think it’s what­ever title you need to have to make hap­pen what you want to happen.”

In other words, one of the vital offer­ings that artists—especially pub­lic artists versed in the dynam­ics of com­mu­nity col­lab­o­ra­tion— can con­tribute to the food move­ment is a new social dynamic that tran­scends eco­nomic rela­tion­ships. Just as farm­ers learn to cul­ti­vate fer­tile, bio­di­verse farms, and food con­sumers learn to embrace a broader range of Earth’s edi­ble offer­ings, artists like Frances­chini can teach us to self-organize around our press­ing, com­mon inter­est in sus­tain­ing our­selves with a healthy diet.

Joseph Hart is asso­ciate edi­tor of Pub­lic Art Review and the direc­tor of the Viro­qua Har­vest Cel­e­bra­tion & Parade (www.facebook.com/viroquaharvest).