Cultivating Hinterland: What Lies Behind Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield?

In 1982, the artist Agnes Denes and several volunteers grew two acres of wheat near Manhattan’s financial district, titling the project, Wheatfield: A Confrontation. Denes had undeniably eco-ethical intentions, and her work was celebrated as environmentalist. But did Wheatfield’s pastoral aesthetic confront the capitalist power structures Denes hoped to critique, or offer urban elites a picturesque spectacle? The notion of hinterland—literally, land behind a city that provides natural resources and labour power—guides this chapter’s inquiry into ideas and ideologies that lay behind Wheatfield. As the climate emergency exacerbates polarisations between urban and rural contexts, studying Wheatfield yields important clues for how contemporary ecopolitical art might disrupt ecologically and socially unjust systems, cultivate alternatives, and avoid compromise, complicity, or appropriation.