Artyufoo

I apologize to art scholars if I'm abusing the terminology, but I'd like to argue that the agricultural art installations I'm seeing more and more suggest a swelling revival of the Bauhaus ethic, newly focused on food production.

My understanding of the Bauhaus movement is that it was an effort to make art out of functional objects. I'm excited by the thought because it resonates with Farmscape's mission. How better to combine farm and function than to turn your landscape into a food factory? Form and function, I meant to say, form and function. 

Airship greenhouses in France, Farmscraper mock-ups in New York, Las Vegas, or Dubai, Fritz Haig and his edible estates, the swelling permaculture movement, food forest designers and yes even Woolly Pockets. I see evidence all around that food production is at the center of a new Bauhaus movement for art and design. Farming has been modernist drab for too long, we are yearning for new form to couple with a newly demanded function -- food that is sustainable, healthy, and fresh. Such farming should somehow look sustainable, healthy, and fresh. The world now begs for a new farm aesthetic. 

Overall, we would like our food and food production to look a little more like we do -- organic, intentional, intelligent, artistic, local, and un-poisoned. A little bit futurist, a little bit pastoral -- and preferably it will be grown somewhere in our midst, where we can keep tabs on it. If it's out of sight, we worry that behind the agribusiness veil there must be foul play afoot. There has to be! Of course there is, because food shouldn't be so cheap. Somebody must be cheating somewhere. 

Better yet, more urban farming might offer us a winking reminder that broader, fertile truths underpin our artificially static urban and suburban surroundings. For example, I find it can be comforting to watch food crops change with the seasons. Even and especially if they're growing out of your radiator.