Seen Report: penile microplastics and shovelling shit

Earlier this month, scientists discovered the first cases of microplastics in the penis – they suspect this may be causing fertility rates to drop worldwide. Meanwhile, in the art world, it’s apparent that rural fantasies are gaining ground. Should we go back to the land? Can we?

At Art Basel, Agnes Denes presented Honouring Wheatfield, a version of her 1982 Wheatfield – A Confrontation, where Denes sowed and grew two acres of wheat on the wasteland (and prime real estate) of Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. That’s where all those a e s t h e t i c  photographs of a young woman walking through golden fields in front of the Twin Towers come from. Everyone talks about how beautiful and significant the wheatfield was, nobody talks about how toxic it must have been. Honouring Wheatfield, the version found at Art Basel, was a small collection of grow boxes on the concrete plaza of the Messeplatz – some honour. I can only hope that the version of the work currently showing at Bozeman, Montana, does the original justice.

Then there was Basel Social Club. The free-entry, non-profit fringe event started in 2022. Just don’t call it a fair. In previous years the event took place in central Basel, this year it was held in the farmland between the residential neighbourhood of Bruderholz and the hills of Baselland. The 70-or-so participating galleries were all keen to show off their environmentally-aware art, while the ‘club’ boasted that their farmer hosts were “active participants” in the programme. They were certainly prepared to offer their critical opinion. “Some of this art speaks to me, though at a certain point, it passes a threshold,” farmer Roman Mathis told the New York Times. So much for connecting art to the countryside.

Last week, in London, I visited ‘ROOTED’ at Berntson Bhattacharjee, a group show which brings together Georg Wilson, James Owen and Tom Bull to reveal the septic tank beneath the lush green grass of all rural idylls. At the back of the gallery, like stained glasses describing the lives and deeds of the landed gentry, are Tom Bull’s collaged panels of Country Life magazine covers. Here are a few headlines: ‘Battle of the Sexes: his and hers furniture’, ‘Avian Spitfires: return of the swallows’, ‘Heaven or Hell: pony club mothers’, ‘Lords vs Commons clay pigeon shoot’, ‘The Jubilee: wasn’t it wonderful’… War, peace, family and flag. Wasn‘t it wonderful?

In front of those works is one of Bull’s bitumen-coated plastic playhouses. For some years now, he’s been coating objects of peasant life – birdhouses, wood burners and farmhouse chairs – in mixtures of clay, expanding foam, straw and stinking pitch-black bitumen. He preserves these nostalgic images for the future and makes them toxic and ugly in the process. These are permanent monuments, unlike their organic counterparts they will never decay. They’ll just shed chemicals and microplastics into the environment, and everyone’s dicks. This is the 21st Century’s legacy.

This mixture of tradition, modernity and memory reminded me of some works I saw around this time last year: Jamie Fitzpatrick’s polystyrene and expanded foam sculptures in ‘Psycho Home-Counties’ at Vitrine. Three plinth-mounted sculptures depicted the Woodwose, the wild man of the woods, and Piers Shonks, a Hertfordshire folk hero. Like the crappy animatronics of local museums, Fitzpatrick’s sculptures sing folk songs, art forms that have almost entirely died out. What the works memorialise isn’t exactly clear: one sculpture shows a woodwose relaxing among hares, and another shows him being torn apart by black dogs. Perhaps it’s just a reminder that once you scratch the surface of rural life, you find some pretty complex, nasty stuff. As brutal as anything we build in the city, as vicious as any street brawl.

Stop me if I’m getting too Freudian, but the fantasies aren’t the problem, it’s how we act on them. I think it’s better to follow Bull and Fitzpatrick’s example and pull them apart and learn from them than to follow the Basel example and indulge them and act like Marie Antoinette at the Hameau de la Reine; playing farmer and activist and letting someone else shovel the shit.