Wheat
Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982
Agnes Denes
Wheat, Soil, Farming materials
Battery Park, New York, New York
In the Summer of 1982, two acres of wheat where planted and harvested by artist Agnes Denes and her assistants on the Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. The 6-month project was supported by the Public Art Fund and took place just two blocks away from Wall Street and the World Trade Center. Denes and her team brought in two hundred truckloads of dirt and hand-dug 285 furrows, clearing the rocks and garbage, and then hand planting the seeds and covering the furrows. They maintained the field for four months, including setting up an irrigation system, weeding, fertilizing, and tackling pest control. On August 16th, Denes harvested the crop, yielding almost 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.
The Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept, representing food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. By planting and harvesting the wheat on land that cost then $4.5 billion was a power statement by underlying the mismanagement of waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. The grain then traveled to 28 cities around the world in an international exhibition called "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger", which was organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art. After the exhibition the seeds were carried away by people who then planted them in many parts of the globe.
The wheat crop is a common grass that has become is a staple food of millions of people. The cultivation of wheat can be traced back to southeast Turkey about 10,000 years ago, possibly known as the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BCE. It was called Einkorn with suggested records of it first growing in the Karacadag Mountains. However, as humans did cultivate it, they didn’t start storing or eating grains regularly until around 20,000 years ago.
There are many species of wheat, but the most common is known as “common wheat.” They also are categorized by growing season- winter or spring, hardness -hard or soft, and color- red or white. The wheat kernel is actually a type of fruit called caryopsis.
The cultivation of ancient wheat plant reached Greece, Cyprus and India by 6500 BCE. In 6000 BCE by Egypt, during which the early Egyptians developed baking bread using the oven, this created one of the first large-scale food production industries known to human. Then followed Germany and Spain by 5000 BCE. In 3000 BCE, the wheat crop known as Wheat Straw or thatch grew in the British Isles and Scandinavia that was used for roofing during the Bronze Age. Then a millennium later it reached China. By 1602 the first wheat was planted in the United States on an island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Wheat is widely cultivated as a cash crop, growing on more land than any other commercial crop. To this day it continues to be the most important food grain source for humans. So, for Denes, using a Wheatfield in Manhattan became a symbol of a concept that called attention to rethink our priorities about the importance of human values that used a product that humans’ value so highly.