Navigation

Can a Field be Art?

Illustration by Ryan Miller.

ESSAY

Defining what is and what isn’t art sorta bothers me. To admit outright as a sworn dirtball, what passes for art in general strikes me as a tad tedious, and an even more complex sense when combined with the visceral feeling that what is art is art because somebody says it’s art. A pedigree I find confusing.

I go to gun shows for the sake of art, despite I hate guns because guns cheat at death. Seems only fair if you want somebody or something dead you should darn well have to work at it. Guys with monster heads on their den walls the result of a furniture-grade Weatherby at twice the speed of sound isn’t the same sport as a spear with equal chance the sport-guy will end up with his head on the wall. Killing a person with poison requires a modicum of chemical skill, at the very least some diligent botany. Stabbing someone to death takes good hand/eye coordination and a tough stomach because the end result isn’t nice. The Glock pistol is famous for its five pounds of trigger pull and the bullet acting like a snowplow does the rest. This is how much I hate guns, five pounds of pissed-off shouldn’t do that much damage.

Still guns are among the neatest shape this side of a Marlene Dietrich’s legs. Something about that curve, how wood grain embraces a piece of pipe such that the end result is pretty and has been ever since the matchlock. Guns look like chocolate tastes, yet to include that some think gunpowder might make a bracing aftershave, same for saddle soap, nitro solvent and WD-40.

Given my natal circumstance it is that I find barns artful. Even should that barn be falling down, a barn that is half gravity, half decay is still artful. To admit also that I can look at fields the longest time, same for wood piles, silos, snow drifts, telephone poles, bad weather, calico cats, wet dogs, women in overalls, and work gloves piled under the refrigerator vent, all of these strike me as art. Seldom does the Whitney or the Guggenheim concur with what I think is art. As soon as something is supposed to be art little alarm bells inside my head go off, knowing extra zeroes soon to be added to the sum worth of whatever, because it’s art. Why a fifty-year-old de Kooning is worth more than a fifty-year-old stovetop popcorn popper with genuine crank handle is beyond me.

As soon as someone signs that something in the lower right hand corner, the value of that something immediately becomes artful, this direct correlation arouses my farmboy instinct. I know of hill farmers who, when they are done planting corn, should sign their field in the lower southwest corner because it’s art. Which is what bothers me about GPS auto-steering becoming an agricultural standard. I have heard the good arguments: planting accuracy, no over-spray, no weird guest rows. With auto-steer you can align a twelve-row planter with an eight-row combine, dead-on. Otherwise you gotta stay real sober, no dosing off, no watching birds, and don’t you dare lose the marker in the dust, which is an art in itself and so is the resulting field.

Auto-steer fields end up looking robotic with nothing red-blooded attached; they are too straight, these fields aren’t owned they are managed, tractors lose their skill level, auto-steer doesn’t leave room in the equation for a tree, going around a wet spot isn’t part of auto-steer. My suspicion is somebody or something out there doesn’t want a field to have a soul.

I have seen fields deserving of the Guggenheim, fields that ought to be hung on a wall guarded by velvet ropes and visitors told to be quiet, connoisseurs soon to follow speculating whether it’s five figures or six. Maybe someday we’ll figure out this art thing and how it attaches to agriculture. Someday maybe even the marketplace will figure this out and my hunch is it’s not about having that designer label called ‘organic.’ The difference between craft agriculture and factory agriculture is how the field and the landscape get woven into a humane-looking fabric. Which is not to say both the field and the landscape are obligated to do the real math, feeding people a lot cheaper than they deserve to be fed. Food in America after all is cheaper than health care, food is cheaper than our cars and homes, food is cheaper than a trip to Hawaii.

Growing up in an age of agriculture before center pivots I secretly mourn those fields, mourn a neighborhood ample with barns and the quilt made of forty acre fields. Which is not to say the center pivot cannot be done artfully but it takes a Wyeth, a Rembrandt, a Remington to try. Someday perhaps another farmkid may mourn pivots when they too pass, which is the way art works.