MORE ON FARM PLUS ART

Hay Bales in the Bloom, Three Hay Bales, Four Hay Bales : three images from a suite of 21 farm landscapes - The Fable of the Hay Bales - all composed on recycled subway tickets.  Hay bales turn overgrowth into renewable energy as horse feed ; ticket art turns waste paper into substrates for art.

A farming family can live directly off its art and feed other people on the side.  The art-product of a farm is renewed energy – a tight model for living.  The artist is not in such a position.  A farmer uses kinetic energy to produce potential energy.  An artist uses kinetic energy to produce an expression of that kinesis but with little tangible potential of its own.  Art is probably dispensable in a way that food is not.

Nonetheless, like a traditional family farm, an artist’s living is related to his capacity for production, and to varying degrees this living can be enhanced by working efficiently.  The difference between the modern farm and the traditional farm only underscores the similarities between farms and artists.  On the modern farm, diversity and even direct utility have been stripped away.  Wendell Berry calls the modern farmer a “specialist.” “By the power of a model,” he writes, “the specialist turns the future into a greenhouse of fantasies” (43).  For example, the modern farmer will employ heating coils to produce asparagus in the winter.  Winter asparagus is true artifice.  More than ever, the farmer, or “specialist,” is an artist.  They apply their energies to foods that defy nature.  Moreover, these are often not even food, strictly speaking, but food bases – corn or soybeans, for commercial ingredients or animal feed – that cannot, by themselves, directly sustain the life of a small farmer.

In some ways art and farming have switched places over the centuries.  A medieval or early-modern European artist, if he was lucky enough to find a master and live through puberty, could survive as part of a guild, workshop or academy, and specialize.  He might learn to paint really nice wings in fresco for example.  He might even become “the wing man” and survive, constrained in a nook, but subsidized according to legal arrangements with monarchs.  Meanwhile his farmer contemporaries depended on risk, initiative and ability to survive, practicing extensive forms of sustainable agriculture, making their own decisions on how to live in the present and maintain the land’s long-term health into the future.  Today, an artist is much more able to do as he pleases, freed from the whims of popes, monarchs and guild masters, but with no guarantees of real subsistence.  Today’s farmer, on the other hand, often works under contract to supply a specific product for a guaranteed return.  The contract might provide the farmer with more security, but at the same time strips the farmer of the right to make her own farming decisions.

All of which is to say, art is like farming in that both employ minds and hands to make products, and both farmer and artist must be mindful of some of the same rules, but unlike farming, art is useless for survival, so there is no way to determine its market value, unless it goes to auction.  Therefore, the artist who chooses to live to make art must subsist on nothing but air.  It is practically suicidal, except for one hopeful sign, which is that throughout history and across cultures, human beings want, maybe even need art.