The projects that are discussed in this edition range from Philip Howard’s research into Organic Industry Structure, a revealing take on the surprising status of organic brands, to Amy Franchesini’s Shepherding Sovereignty project, which confronts us with how the U.S. occupation in Iraq has had an enormously detrimental impact on the agricultural heritage of Iraq.

While diverse and wide reaching, what characterizes the artists and projects in this edition is the commitment to utilize the transformative power of art to effect social change. The artists deploy strategies to develop an art engaged in social processes, such as grass-roots cultural activism (as in Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates project, which proposes “the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape”), to working in the community and building alliances between artists and non-artists (such as Temescal Amity Works, a project in the Temescal neighborhood in Oakland facilitating the exchange of backyard produce), to working in schools (such as Amanda Matles’s project at The Heritage School in East Harlem: Chew on This), and in the landscape (as in Lisa Tucker’s Santa Ana River Trail Native Food Project, which involves planting gardens of native edibles and trees along an arid bike trail in San Bernardino County, California).

The startling revelations about the nature of agribusiness and food production are completely shocking. The accompanying essays by Claire Pentecost and Ron Graziani emphasize the artist’s imperative here: “an expression of a desire to be part of something larger than art” (Pentecost) and the needs to re-frame art within a social/political/environmental context (Graziani):

More and more, artists have been developing a personal feel for esthetics in social terms, an art engaged to the social process. Refusing the a-esthetic versions practiced in the fine art idea, many artists are now pursuing esthetics within the logic of a social enactment.

Agri-ART represents a relational model for art that repositions art practice and redefines its purpose. Thank you to Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis for guest-editing this thought-provoking edition of Media-N.

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agriArt is an attempt to highlight other possibilities for the consideration and development of bio art. As an exhibition, it brought together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption as a specific site of biopolitics. In essence, our concern was to step back from the assumption that bio art needs to start at the line drawn by industrial capitalism, and look at the work of artists investigating other intersections of the biological and social. The questions they pose are not exercises in philosophico-ethical deliberations that take for granted a given industrial paradigm as the most productive site of action. Instead, they practice a relation between the biological and the social that is pragmatically opposed to the instrumentalization of life that Critical Art Ensemble has termed the molecular invasion. While this opposition sometimes takes the form of reaction and protest, it just as frequently chooses to perform in ways that refuse the instrumental separation of the social and the biological. Our questions are simply: What is gained or lost as we shift scales from the molecular to the social, and vice versa? Can we expect our interventions into the molecular to resolve problems created at the scale of the social?

Images from the agriART exhibition at George Mason University

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