For Amber Waves Of Grain

With the New York Yankees in town to play the Orioles, I got to thinking of a true New York oddity that goes back to the days in the early 1980s when the sadly ill-fated Twin Towers were new.

That part of Manhattan is now called Battery Park City, a land filled with high-rises, condos and financial centers. In 1982, it was just a landfill, and the Public Art Fund commissioned an artist named  Agnes Denes to create a work of public art. 

And what a work of art she came up with!

Listen, anyone can come up with a giant sculpture and say that "it depicts man's inhumanity to man" or some such. But Ms Denes planted a field of golden wheat, immediately next door (so to speak) to the silver towers. She used the dirt that had been excavated to build the Twin Towers in the first place, and now it's the foundation of Battery Park City.

Denes was a thoughtful artist, and felt that her “decision to plant a wheat field in Manhattan, instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of a long-standing concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.” The goal was to get people to rethink their priorities.

She used two assistants (and did not call them "farmhands") and a crew of volunteers to clean up the four acres and top it with 225 dumptruck loads of topsoil, and then plant 1.8 acres of wheat.  They even added irrigation pipes to help the wheat along.

By that summer, the field was verdant with wheat stalks that were golden amber by harvest time, when over 1000 pounds of wheat came in.

Now, you have to stop and think that this was purely artistic and symbolic. The value of this land was around 4.5 BILLION dollars, so bringing in half a ton of wheat every fall is not going to balance that scale. The wheatfield was a beautiful symbol, representing the basics of food supply, recalling our agrarian past, but art for art's sake only goes so far.

Organizers took the grain to 28 cities as part of an exhibition called The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger. To perpetuate the symbol, seeds were given to people in all of those cities, to be planted all over the world. Who knows? The bread for your sandwich might have sprung from one of those long-ago seeds!

Never at a loss for capsule comments, the New York Times sent a reporter who wrote, "To look across this wheat field is to see the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and boat traffic as in a surreal illusion."

 Denes had said her idea was for “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate”.

I love things that don't quite line up, like seeing a deer prance along the sidewalk around our county courthouse one time, but a wheatfield in Manhattan is something we may never see again.