Harvest Among the Houses
Summer’s come and gone, and with it a very different kind of artwork in Bozeman’s trendy brewery district. For a few warm months, the open plot forming the south end of Tinworks Art’s campus became a productive bit of agricultural ground, a celebration of open space, and an artistic statement on the ways we value place. Over the course of Montana’s short summer season, this patch of undeveloped land became a living artwork called Wheatfield—An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground. True to its name, the site was a live, growing wheat field and the fruition of the vision of conceptual artist Agnes Denes.
As we wrote in the Spring issue this year, Wheatfield is a continuation of Denes’ literally groundbreaking 1982 work Wheatfield—A Confrontation, grown in the twin shadows of the World Trade Center and one of the world’s great financial hubs. Like that work, Bozeman’s Wheatfield comments on the irony of giving over a few acres of ground to the purpose of feeding people rather than plowing it under toward more profitable ends. It’s an iteration of the meta-commentary present on the rest of Tinworks’ campus: once a working metal shop and grain mill, the buildings here now house different sorts of commodities and employ people plying new kinds of skills in service to their community.
And the ideas behind Wheatfield find their ways inside those buildings too, in the other exhibitions which Tinworks has curated under the collective title The Lay of the Land. Entering the indoor gallery space, visitors encounter a series of cinematic abstractions of landscape, rendered in the most literal of earth tones: Lucy Raven’s Depositions series. Made by recreating small-scale dam breaks, floods of water force sedimentary soil through large panels of stretched silk, the residue of which leave ghostly hints of monumental bluffs and coulees on these terribly fragile panes of white.
In an adjacent space Stephen Shore’s aerial photos attack the subject from above, commenting on the contradictions present in how we use the land: picturesque farmhouses nestled harmoniously among their surroundings in one image, newly-built trophy homes lording over theirs in the next. The sheer volume of human presence evident from a bird’s-eye view simply overwhelms the notion of Montana as pristine.
These and the other exhibitions that make up The Lay of the Land—James Castle’s staggering body of sketches drawn in woodstove soot on paper, cardboard, unfolded cartons, and every other scrap imaginable; Robbie Wing’s assemblage of railroad ties harvested from Tinworks’ grounds; Wills Brewer’s in-residence ceramic structure—all draw from place and comment on the availability and use of resources. The ways the earth’s been poked and prodded by successive civilizations, in the Big Sky and elsewhere, mark both our yearnings and limitations as a species: our desire to live amid beauty while putting it to use, often at a cost.
For Wheatfield’s contribution at least, it’s worth noting that checkerboards of farmland and cityscape are nothing new in this town that’s home to Montana’s land-grant university. Fields of corn and steers and hay have long greeted puzzled freshmen headed for high-rise dorms in the fall. It’s the symbolic deliberateness of Wheatfield, its context, that lends it power. And while some of that power draws from nostalgia for a time when we lived in closer harmony with nature, this small plot of orderly golden rows would have equally befuddled visitors during most of the time when we did. Imagine a party of Blackfeet riding by, working to make sense of this tidy rectangle where sage and bunch grass should grow. Even William Clark would’ve scratched his head, shepherding his share of the Corps of Discovery through in a mid-July long past.
In any event, Wheatfield has served its term. In early September the crop was harvested, both through internal combustion and a wood-and-steel scythe in a grad student’s hands. Milled on site, Wheatfield’s flour will find its way into bread and pizzas and satisfied bellies. This small plot of space returns to fallow, awaiting its next use in the shadow of inevitable apartment blocks rising across the way. A line of weathered metal mailboxes frames its southeast corner on what was once a country lane at the edge of a formerly little town. The last great age of glaciers didn’t reach quite this far, leaving this scant bit of acreage untracked. But who’s to say? If the uses we put to the earth don’t warm it beyond measure, in a far time to come this patch of little ground may slumber for an age, dreaming deep beneath the Bozeman Ice.
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