Amber Waves of Grime

So, if a tree grows in Brooklyn, why not wheat in Manhattan?

New Yorkers with an urge to keep the concrete at bay usually settle for sooty geraniums on a windowsill. Not Agnes Denes, 43, a New York conceptual artist. Her creation, only six blocks from the bustle of the World Trade Center, is a two-acre wheatfield. Shifting and shimmering as the sun and harbor breezes play across it, the minifarm lends an improbable air of Manhattan, Kans., to lower Manhattan.

Last May, Denes with the help of about 60 paid and volunteer assistants, and financed by a $10,000 grant from the Public Art Fund, a private foundation that aids civic art projects, began hauling rocks off the site, which is a landfill intended for a development of offices and apartments called Battery Park City. They laid down 700 cu. yds. of topsoil in a 2-in. layer and hand dug 285 furrows. Then they sowed 6 bu. of hard, red spring wheat donated by the North Dakota Wheat Commission. While office workers watched skeptically from nearby towers or paid lunchtime visits in three-piece suits, Denes and her friends weeded and watered.

The idea behind the project, Denes says, was to devise "an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world's richest real estate. To grow a wheatfield on it, seemingly such a waste of precious space, is to create a powerful paradox: the congestion of the city of competence, sophistication and crime against the open fields and unspoiled farm lands."

This is not Denes' first tilt with environmental art. In 1979 at Artpark, a cultural complex in Lewiston, N.Y., she sowed a rice field, wrapped chains around a grove of trees, and near by buried a time capsule containing 40 existential questions. Samples: "Which do you think will prove ultimately more important to mankind--science or love?" "Do you believe mankind will become extinct one day?" In similar performances at a private site in 1968 and at Artpark in 1977, she buried samples of her haiku and other writings.

The Manhattan wheatfield has created its own environment. Says Denes: "We have praying mantises, spiders that change color to resemble the wheat--Day-Glo yellow and brown--fireflies and a sweet country smell." They also have a harvest of problems. The wheat contracted a blight called wheat smut, plus mildew from the early summer rains. John Ameroso, a Cornell University agronomist who is Denes' horticultural adviser, says the crop is "distressed" and must be harvested early.

Then what? "I'd like to have time to think about that," Denes says. One idea she favors is to turn her wheat into bread and distribute it to the poor. She has also received some 30 other suggestions, among them proposals to send the wheat to a needy country like Cambodia or auction it off at the New York Stock Exchange, just down the street.

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