Tube Farm

Published on Monday, February 11, 2008, by nicholassday / Edit Post

I’m sure it means something that the locavore movement is being co-opted by contemporary art, but I’m not sure quite what: MoMA’s P.S. 1—everyone’s favorite modern art museum in Queens—is letting a couple of clever architects turn its courtyard into a farm. Well, a farmlike thing: As New York magazine’s Vulture blog describes it, by summer’s end the architects will have stood “dozens of giant cardboard tubes on one end, filled them with dirt, and used them as planters for cabbages, lettuce, tomatoes, and herbs.”

Among other things, the plan is to grow fresh tomatoes for Bloody Marys “and barley and hops, so we can make P.S. 1 beer by October,” according to Dan Wood, the husband of the husband-wife duo Work Architecture. In the couple’s presentation before MoMA, Wood donned “a pouffy green gardening skirt with specially designed pockets for his trowel and gardening gloves.” He says there’s the possibility of combining the ecoinstallation with an actual farmers’ market.

Plus, you know, that way those farmers would get to see what art looks like.

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  • I think the point is that the farmers and farming become the art. These sorts of activities are an aesthete's route to re-connecting the urban and the rural. Problem is that they're effete. And rather than further mercantilize farming and its produce, it would be good to find a way in which folks visiting MOMA might genuinely contribute to the farming economy, rather than just appreciate it as an...+READ

    I think the point is that the farmers and farming become the art. These sorts of activities are an aesthete's route to re-connecting the urban and the rural. Problem is that they're effete. And rather than further mercantilize farming and its produce, it would be good to find a way in which folks visiting MOMA might genuinely contribute to the farming economy, rather than just appreciate it as an installation. Where's the politics? And where's the economics?

    Readers might be interested in an urban farming project I ran in the U.K. last year. More at http://tinyurl.com/2gcvot.-COLLAPSE