Can an artist's wheatfield in Hackney switch the mood on climate change?

Curators are searching for an iconic image that can smash indifference and succeed where science and statistics fall short

Madeleine Bunting
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 July 2009 19.30 BST

Something bizarre is happening in the area of Dalston, in London's Hackney, where I live. As I write, half a dozen men are hunched over planting half-grown wheat on derelict wasteland. Next to them, architects are building a windmill that will generate the energy to power two bread ovens. When it opens on Wednesday, it will host breadmaking, music, theatre and feasts for anyone who wants to step away from the noise of the shops and traffic-clogged nearby streets.
It's an installation linked to the Radical Nature exhibition, at the Barbican, in London, but it's evidence of an art that is penetrating some of the least hospitable places, very far from galleries, to open up conversations in unexpected ways around our relationship with land, food and each other. Can we think differently about the way we use land, produce food and relate to each other?
The origins of Dalston's wheatfield lie thousands of miles away, with Agnes Denes, one of a generation of American land artists who took art out of galleries and away from making objects to be bought and sold. In 1982 she planted wheat on two acres of wasteland on Battery Park, two blocks from Wall Street; her harvest was worth £158, produced on land valued at $4.5bn. The photos of waving golden wheat juxtaposed against the Manhattan skyline became an iconic image of environmental art. With her collaboration, her idea is now being recreated in Hackney.
At a time of growing anxiety about how we feed a crowded earth – food security was discussed at the G8 last week – her image of fertility and sustenance is even more poignant, and no longer outlandish. Such possibilities of food production in the city could be commonplace for our children. Havana, famously, learned to largely feed itself from within its city limits after imported Russian oil dried up in the 1990s.
The point about Denes's work in Dalston – and the exhibition at the Barbican – is that it raises for a new generation the role art can play in shifting attitudes towards our natural environment. With fortunate timing, Tate Britain also has a retrospective of another land art pioneer of Denes's generation, Richard Long. Or look north to Manchester's International Festival and Gustav Metzger's extraordinary uprooted, upended trees set into concrete. On every side, artists are putting their shoulder to the wheel, trying to prompt the revolution in values and attitudes required to deal with environmental crisis.
Can art succeed where science is proving insufficient to generate the will to act effectively on climate change? Scientists sound increasingly desperate as the evidence they are carefully accumulating stacks up but fails to prompt the urgency they insist it requires. Science seems only to create a panicked paralysis: a language of probabilities, statistics and numbers fails to gain traction on the public imagination.
Is this where artists have to step in to prompt understanding, to challenge what is taken for granted, to turn our ideas upside down? To that question, Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project, quotes CS Lewis: "Science can lead to truth, only the imagination can lead you towards meaning."
If this all sounds a little esoteric, think again. Peterborough council is at the beginning of fulfilling a huge ambition to make itself the environmental capital of Europe. It believes it probably has the largest number of environmental businesses on the continent. To re-orientate the city around sustainability, it plans to build art/culture into every step of the process. Devolving decisions to neighbourhood councils, the council's leader, Marco Cereste, sees art as vital to prompting that local engagement that can generate the sense of belonging crucial to environmental sustainability. "It's no good the council saying recycling is a brilliant idea and urging people to change from the top, it's got to come from the bottom up," he says. Art can initiate and broker the conversations, it can shift preconceptions, argues Michaela Crimmin whose Arts and Ecology programme at the Royal Society of Arts has been the quiet powerhouse facilitating projects all over the country.
But art can never be didactic, insists Smit. At the Eden Project the art can encourage people to "look anew, and transform their view. So many of us are skating so fast over the surface of so much," he says.
In Radical Nature, over 40 years of artists engaging with nature is crowded into a gallery. It doesn't fit, either literally – a tree chopped into metre lengths and bolted back together again is bumping into the roof – or metaphorically. It's overwhelmed by the powerful ideas it contains. Here is the story of a culture deeply disturbed by the impact it is having on the natural world, fearful of what it can salvage: the fragments that have ended up in the Barbican – a section of forest on its side, a floating island, vegetable beds – are like the flotsam of a dying civilisation. This is a howl of despair full of guilt, fear and anxiety. Metzger's Flailing Trees in Manchester are in the same vein; he admits he has used "brutality to expose brutality".
This is art the art world has not much cared for. It was deeply political, and not collectible or sellable; it never commanded Damien Hirst style headlines. The pioneers who began their careers in the 1960s and early 1970s – Metzger, Denes, Long and Joseph Beuys – never sought or acquired the status of big selling artists. They may have been prophets, but spawned only cult followings.
Perhaps their time has finally come; we need their thinking and sense of urgent political morality. The Barbican exhibition includes the resurrection of several iconic pieces of these pioneers, to help us connect back to a heady moment of environmental and political activism. Only in the late 1990s did a new generation of artists resume the preoccupation, but that 20-year lapse is a warning that environmental engagement seems to wax and wane. Will the current fascination prove simply a fashion of 2009 or an enduring obsession?
What some curators want is an iconic image that will smash through indifference and become the rallying cry for a generation. What others argue is that art is not a magic bullet; it can work at a much more intimate, local level, which is transformational. In Dalston's wheatfields something of that seems possible; a public space has been claimed that is not about people rushing through, but opens up the possibility to meet others and share knowledge. One of the architects busy making his windmill, Nicolas Henninger, admits he doesn't know how to make bread. He's hoping someone will turn up who does, and he can learn. The implicit message is that if he can learn, so can anyone else. This is not artist as celebrity genius producing a commodity but a much more modest, self-effacing facilitating of the creativity of the crowd.
Squeezed into the gaps between a supermarket and a shopping centre, this wasteland has flourished as a garden of buddleia, wild grasses and trees sprout out of the ruined houses – it's now a stage for a set of ideas about skill, craft, food, energy and conviviality. It's an ideal of reclamation that has more to say about us than about the land. It's brings to mind Raymond Williams's comment that "to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing".