Alice Waters

Alice Waters is a fabulous woman. She's basically responsible for the way I think about food and agriculture.

Well, her and my mother.

She's the Vice President of the Slow Foods movement, and has been a voice for local, organic, sustainable growing practices for decades. Those are all words I hate, by the way, they sound so political and trite these days. So I'll try it again: her work has carved out space for people to eat food that was grown near them, without poison, in a seasonal, practical way.

There.

I'm reading an interview with her about her work as an educator and a restauranteur. She founded a restaurant in Berkeley, CA called Chez Panisse, and also developed the Edible Schoolyard (link to a 2 minute video) at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.

This project is completely wonderful. It's relatively self-descriptive, but basically they transformed a schoolyard into a garden that the students participate in growing and maintaining. I won't be able to do it justice in this post, but I will write more about her and her work another time.

She said:

"We all eat. We all eat every day. And if we're eating with intention, and we're eating real food, and we're connecting with where that food comes from, and we're involved in the process of making it and offering it to our classmates, cooking for our classmates, and gathering around the table, then these ideas of community just emerge very naturally. It's about giving and receiving. 'I'm dependent on you for my nourishment.' That's a deep message. It's about generosity."

She also said:

"When you're pulled away from that beauty and meaning, the rhythm of life - the life and death of a garden - you're really deprived of the most important thing in life, which is that ability to feel connected to the bigger world outside yourself. You're not just your own little person who has to figure out how to live on the planet."

Okay.

So.

When I started writing down my thoughts on the intersection of art and agriculture and its place in this town, I wasn't sure I'd know what to say.

And I wasn't exactly sure where I was going.

But as I've started putting my thoughts on paper, and by that I mean putting my thoughts on my computer and then into the vast nothingness that is the interwebs, I've started to understand what I hope for this work

I hope to provide people with a doorway, a portal of sorts: a way to connect with and enter a large and complicated system. The whole network that produces our food is quite vast, and generally speaking we (myself included) are disconnected from the land and the people who grow what we eat.

This connection can begin by making a mark on a map.

My map.

At the Provo Farmers Market.

It will develop through conversations and interactions with people.

This project is intended to gather information about our system, our town. But the act of collecting data is just practice; it's just rehearsal. The grand finale, the real triumphant culmination to all of this, is what we will do with this information.

In the end, the process of describing the world around us is just a way of defining ourselves. The process of defining what's around us really only illustrates where we are, and ultimately what we are because of that location.

And I think what we'll find as we define and describe and collect, is that we are part of vibrant, beautiful, mighty community.

We are just so lucky.

The Hunt

I'm completely obsessed.

I don't think I'll be able to rest until I find asparagus.

No, this is not an image of wild asparagus. I did not pick these lovely green stalks. They're from Costco. From COSTCO.

And yet they grow, or so I've heard, like weeds.

Brent and Ralph, the guys who sell eggs at the Provo Farmers Market, also sell wild asparagus that they pick in Spanish Fork.

They refuse to tell me where.

They say it grows in ditches and along rail road tracks and old gravel roads. It's planted by birds (you know, when birds eat seeds, they, like, deposit them), and it grows where there's not a lot of disturbance and a ton of water.

So I did my research about what asparagus looks like, and then went on an adventure with some friends.

There are railroad tracks several blocks from my house.

In fact, sometimes, in the summer, when my windows are open, I can hear the trains.

It's a surprisingly pleasant sound.

There is a ditch that runs parallel to the tracks as far as the eye can see. The water looks like it gets diverted to several of the fields along the rail road.

I thought it was bound to be full of lovely feathery asparagus plants.

Nope.

The ditch was really pretty. But no asparagus. My friend talked to one of the people who lives near the tracks, who said he hasn't seen any asparagus there.

I guess they call it asparagus hunting for a reason.

And so, the search continues...

Relations, Aesthetics

Contemporary art is constantly evolving.

This is no surprise.

The field of art seems to be in a constant state of expansion. It continuously opens its doors to new materials, methods, and theories. We used to talk about art in terms of how it looked and what it was made of and how much it sold for. We still use that language, but there are other ways of looking at work that see art from completely different angles: What does it do? What is its context? How does it relate to art, and what does it mean on a broader scale?

Basically what I'm saying is this: everyone is comfortable with a painting and a sculpture being art. No one would really question it, and everyone would like one or two for their homes.

But people become less comfortable with art when it expands out of black frames and off of pedestals and out of galleries.

And then, even less comfortable when it overflows out of the safety of a physical object, existing instead on a conceptual, ephemeral level.

And then, when it no longer has a price tag, we loose our grasp completely.

If art isn't something, and you can't always see it, and you can no longer buy it, what is it?

Welcome to the expanding field of contemporary art.

I am constantly asked why my work is art. This is not a stupid question; not even close. Even my professors and the chair of my department ask me this question.

This blog is partly a vehicle for my work, and partly an explanation of my work.

I want you to understand that my booth at the farmers market, and the meals I host, and the assignments I'll have you do, and the maps we make together are not just part of a social experiment, or a research project.

They are art.

A good place to start explaining my work is with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.

It's pronounced Rick-rit Teer-a-von-it.

Good luck with that.

That's him.

He was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada, educated in Chicago and New York, and works in Berlin, New York, and Chiang Mai.

What a guy.

He started out cooking Pad Thai in galleries for people. He'd take over galleries, really up-scale, well-known galleries, too, and he'd cook for people. For free. Anyone could come in and eat and chop vegetables and talk to him.

According to his way of thinking, what was important about a work of art was not what you see, but "what takes place between people." With that in mind, he changed the gallery space from a place where objects were displayed, to a place where interactions occurred.

He reorganized galleries into temporary kitchens, into dining rooms, even into a full scale replica of his New York apartment. For a summer, his gallery-turned-apartment was open to the public 24/7. People could stop by any time, night or day, for a cup of tea, to read a book, or to chat. People literally lived and ate and worked in this space.

Talk about an expanding field.

We have photographs of these events.

And if we were there, we could have experienced it.

But the question is this: what is the art? Where is the art in all of this?

Tiravanija's work is categorized under the term Relational Aesthetics, coined by French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. (the link goes to excerpts from his book Relational Aesthetics, which I have if you'd like to borrow it. Yes, it is translated from French. And yes, it's terrible because of it.)

Relational Aesthetics is "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

Basically, the material and the subject and location of the work are all human interactions. The work creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. The audience is seen as a community, and instead of the artwork being encountered between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Meaning is created collectively.

Instead of a person looking at an object, the artist's work causes people to interact with each other.

Kind of fun.

So, Tiravanija's work is a gesture. His work shifted the transactions that happen within a gallery. The work was not made by an artist and viewed by a patron. In the case of Pad Thai (where he cooked in galleries for people), the art was not just what they ate, or the tables and chairs that they ate at. The work was the interactions between people. Viewers came to realize that the art was in them.

His work set the stage, and offered an opportunity for interaction and participation.

I am also engaged in building a structure and setting a stage.

And my work is also a gesture.

I am not creating objects for individuals to contemplate, but instead creating an environment where participation and interaction can take place. Meaning will be made by our collective actions.

Nicolas Bourriaud wrote in Relational Aesthetics that

"the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist."

I've chosen the scale. I'm asking the questions. And I'm constructing models of action.

And though I'm not concerned with creating a beautiful, precious object, I'll just say that what we are creating, and what we will continue to create, is indeed beautiful and precious.

for the love

Success.

I had several friends over for dinner on Sunday.

We wanted to see how much food we could find locally. Ingredients were used from the Provo Farmers Market, the BYU Creamery, Winder Farms, Lehi Roller Mills, one person's family's farm, and from Brent.

Brent (on the right) and Ralph sell eggs at the Provo Farmers Market. You may have seen them there. They haven't missed a Saturday in years.

Their eggs are beautiful, and the two are a treat.

I was in charge of the main dish for this meal, and I thought it be would nice to roast a chicken. I'm not sure you could ever go wrong with delicious, tender, well seasoned chicken.

So I went to Payson, where Brent keeps his chickens.

This is not what I was expecting.

Okay, so I have chickens. I haven't had them for very long, and I'm certainly no expert, but I thought I knew more than I did.

I was wrong.

This kind of chicken is called a naked neck.

Yeah.

It is one ugly bird. I mean, it is really nasty looking. But, according to Brent, they lay really well.

He has 7 different kinds of laying hens: Rhode Island Reds (seen above), Barred Plymouth Rocks, Naked Necks (yikes), Aracuanas, which can lay beautiful blue or green eggs, White Leg Horns, a black kind that I can't remember the name of, and...well, I didn't bring a pen. But on top of the egg-laying hens, he also raises meat hens, bantams, which are really small, doves, geese, and ducks.

Brent gave me a tour of his property, and I couldn't have learned more in an entire week of reading.

Chickens only lay eggs for a few years. I knew this, but wasn't sure how to tell when a hen is done laying. I asked him how he knew, and his answer was, "Because I know my chickens. I know them." He raises these hens from eggs, and keeps a really close watch on all of them. When a chicken starts chicken menopause, she molts, and then grows back a set of feathers that is pristine and beautiful. He can tell when she's done laying because she looks exquisite - not a feather out of place, and they are bright and soft and perfect. According to Brent, there's nothing more beautiful than a hen in her golden years.

I thought that was an interesting insight into aging. I don't think that we appreciate the elegance and grace of the process of aging. Just a thought.

These are meat hens. It's hard to get an idea for their size, but these girls are only 8 weeks old, and they are huge.

Here are my ladies at 8 weeks.

Okay, so maybe it's hard to get a sense of the scale, but just trust me when I tell you that those white chickens are ginormous. They are specifically raised because of how quickly they grow, and how much meat they put on.

Brent gives them feed that he buys in Spanish Fork. It's not certified organic, but he can go to the field and watch the grain grow, and he trusts that the farmer doesn't use pesticides or herbicides on his crop. He also gets grass clippings brought in from the area that the chickens love to eat, and that he leaves on the floor of the coops until he tills it all into his garden. It makes great compost.

Brent loves chickens. He speaks about them with passion, and told me that he's enjoyed birds since he was 3 or 4 years old. I had asked him how he got into the business, and he said he knew his whole life that this is what he wanted to do. He does it for the love.

He's developed a system for these birds that he's perfected over the years, that keeps the ladies happy and healthy without using things that are harmful.

He's a moderately gruff man, not the kind that you'd think of as super gentle.

But his love for his animals and the compassion with which he raises them are apparent in the way he takes care of his birds.

He doesn't use harmful chemicals to treat things like poultry lice. He just gets the coffee grounds from the local coffee shop where his daughter works and sprinkles them on the ground. The chickens roll around in them, and it cleans their feathers in a way that isn't toxic. Other remedies include a malathion bath and "liberal use" of a sulfur-based insecticide dust. Both of these products have sketchy effects on both birds and humans. He opts for a healthier remedy because he cares about his livestock, his land, and his customers.

Also, chickens only lay eggs for 3 or 4 years. In the winter, when there's less daylight, birds naturally lay less frequently. Many farmers keep UV lights on their birds year round to keep egg productivity high, but this will burn the chicken out in about 14 months. Brent gives his ladies a break in the winter, which lets them live for 2 or 3 years longer. His chickens are not pets, they lay eggs and will eventually be food. But he wants to give them a decent life, and letting the birds rest a little during the winter is just a small way that he does this.

Brent will freely sell his eggs and chicken to you.

He also has goose eggs, which are 3 or 4 times the size of a chicken egg and will last for months in the fridge, duck eggs, and dove eggs. His eggs are fresh, laid within the week. Eggs at the store have been sitting in trucks and on shelves for way longer than that.

And his prices are reasonable.

And he knows everything there is to know about the business. He will put up with your incessant chatting and question-asking. Or, I should say, my incessant chatting and question-asking. He let me talk to him to my heart's content.

He is a gentleman.

So go buy a chicken from him, and make some delicious soup.

And have one of these.

It's amazing what kind of information you'll find when you buy food from people, ask them questions, and get together to share.

The Gist and The Difference

Dear reader -

You may have been reading this blog for a while. I love you for that.

But you may also be reading this for the first time. Did I see you at the Farmers Market? Did I coerce you into reading my blog? Did you accept a slip of paper from me with this website on it?

A word of advice: never take candy, or teeny papers, from strangers.

(this image was shamelessly borrowed from Provo's own Startup Candy Co.)

Well, I'm glad you're here. It probably means that you love Provo. Or you love agriculture. Or you love art. Any way, I need you.

I am an artist. I was trained in printmaking at BYU, and am finishing up my MFA at the University of Utah in Community-Based Art Education. My artistic training has, more than anything, taught me to see the world vibrantly and with passion, and to do something about that vision.

Before, I made prints and hung them in black frames and sold them for money.

Now, I sit in a tent and talk to interesting people.

Both are reactions to the way I see the world.

And oh, it is a beautiful world.

The gist of my work this summer is this: I want us to take a good long look at our wonderful town, and see it.

Seeing is more than looking.

Specifically I'll ask you to take a look at the food you eat and the land that it comes from because I've observed something:

the way people treat their land

and their neighborhoods

is in many ways a reflection of

how they treat each other.

When we look at this land, we will see so much beauty.

We'll also see abundance: this land takes care of us really well.

And we'll see that we share this land with other people, who are pretty great. With our wide open eyes, we might see more beauty in them, too.

(This is a picture of the field behind my house. It shows my neighbors' backyards, as well as my own.

They are lovely, lovely people. We share.)

By looking, you'll have a lovely aesthetic experience. This place is completely stunning.

But by seeing, you'll take away more than the memory of a pretty moment. You'll recognize your place within this whole big system. You'll locate yourself inside the safety of our mountains and our lake; you'll find out how you fit.

This project will map land use and agriculture in Provo. It will identify where the food can be found, who's growing it, and how things like water and industrial machinery and backyard chickens fit within this large system of food production and consumption.

The map should be pretty great when it's done.

But a cool map is not what I'm after.

I'm after genuine connections, and a deeper sense of gratitude. I'm after better sight, and more caring. While you participate in making this map, I hope that you enjoy a little more of at least one of these things, if not all of them.

If you made a mark on the map today, thank you.

If you're interested in doing more, thank you x 2. Or maybe more like 2 million.

The assignment this week is about land use.

I want us to gather as much information as we can about how the land in our area is used. Pick a source of food that is near your home. Pick something that you can actually eat - yes, fungus on tree bark is edible, but it's not food.

First, determine whether the land it's on is private, public, or commercial. If you're not sure, ask these questions: who owns this land? What will the food be used for? Is there a No Trespassing sign? (I'm a terrible disregarder of these signs - I know I should be better, but I'm just so curious!) The private information will go on one map, and the public and commercial information will go on another map that will be made available to the community.

(the view from my backyard)

This week, take a picture of this location and email it to me, along with a description of what we're not seeing in the picture: what does this land mean to you? What is the story behind the land? What will it produce?

(This is a picture of the water that irrigates the apple orchard behind my house. The last two weeks have been a dream out there - it smells and sounds like what I imagine heaven to smell and sound like. The branches have been heavy with gigantic flowers, and the bees have been incessantly inspecting every blossom. I love it there.)

my email address is carlyn.lofgreen@gmail.com

I will post your responses on the blog this week.

Come to the market next Saturday and put the place you've chosen on the map.

Also, if you do this, you will most likely be invited to dinner. Seriously.

Also, I might start displaying your photographs in my booth, so you can show off your photographic skills to the whole town.

But while you're contemplating this place that will produce food, I want you to express gratitude in some way. Say thank you in any way you can think of.

This will make all the difference.

I look forward to seeing you next Saturday!

Animal Estates

I went to the Whitney Biennial in New York several years ago.

Everything was really big and impressive and unintelligible to me. There was just one piece that I found totally accessible and totally brilliant. It was Fritz Haeg’s Animal Estates.

I was thinking about his work while I was looking at bees this week, and contemplating ways to make art about it.

Haeg didn’t just make work about animals, he literally made work for them.

(The large wooden panel in this image was made for bees.)

The artist created habitats or homes for a dozen different animals that had lived 400 years earlier on the same block as the Whitney, which is on East 75^th and Madison Avenue.

The show didn’t actually include the animals, just the estates. But after the show, several pieces were donated to Swindler Cover Park on the northern tip of Manhatten.

These model homes were built for a bald eagle, barnowls, wood ducks, purple martins, big brown bats, mason bees, opossums, northern flying squirrels, a bobcat, eastern tiger salamanders, eastern mud turtles, and beavers.

Here’s a video of the artist talking about his work.