Through Mn Artists, the Walker fosters dialogue with artists across the state of Minnesota and provides a platform for questioning what it means to make contemporary art in a rural context. Mn Artists Outreach Associate Nik Nerburn, who lives in Duluth and works throughout greater Minnesota, reframes common assumptions about pastoral and agricultural aesthetics through one ubiquitous feature of rural landscapes, the hay bale. The work of Jim Denomie, which is discussed below, is part of the Walker’s collection; untitled (2015) is currently on view in The Expressionist Figure: The Miriam and Erwin Kelen Collection of Drawings.
If you grew up in a city, hay bales might symbolize a kind of rural-ness, like a big red barn or an old-fashioned windmill. To city dwellers on a road trip, hay bales mean you’ve crossed into “the country.” They represent a nostalgia for the pioneer homestead; they’re pretty reliable stand-ins for rurality in photographs and paintings. Like rodeos, cattle auctions, or big loud trucks, hay bales belong in the country.
On the other hand, if you came of age in the country, you probably spent a lot of time looking at them. They’re everywhere: those cute little cylinders of bundled hay, spread out in a pasture like cookies on a pan, are so ubiquitous that they disappear. When was the last time you really looked at one?
You’ve seen them in hotel lobby photography and in simple paintings of rural scenes, where you also probably ignored them. They’re background noise. Hay bales, stylistically, are like the rainbows, galloping horses, flaming skulls, or flapping American flags you might find on a T-shirt at the Dollar General. Putting one in your landscape painting would seem nostalgic, not contemporary.
But does it have to be this way? Do hay bales always have to be a mere Kwik Trip-ism? Could these soft lumps on the landscape have more that they’re yearning to say?
For the most part, hay bales aren’t artistic expressions. They’re cow food. They nourish the cows that produce our milk, cheese, beef, and ice cream. Hay bales, themselves, are part of our own food system (the round bale’s shapely similarity to a round hamburger has some poetic resonance.) When we look into the center of the hay bale, we look into our own bellies. Spending time around hay bales means spending time around the massive system of food production that dominates our rural landscapes and makes urban life possible.
Baling, the act of rolling hay up to cure, is really just a result of logistics. Round hay bales sit snugly in place (often to be fed to cows on large industrial farms, like the ones we have here in the Midwest), while cubed bales are generally for export overseas (the cubes stack more neatly on trucks). As agriculture has changed, so have the ways farmers store hay, in piles, clumps, and small cubes. As farms got bigger and the agriculture economy scaled up to our current monoculture era, bigger round bales made sense. Materially, they’re part of the same landscape as industrial ag, fast food, and interstate trucking, which we may cringe at even as we depend on them for easy access to meat and dairy products.
But what type of visual landscape do they create? Have we overlooked their critical aesthetic possibilities? Up close, their arrangements can sometimes seem like a type of found art, like agriculture speaking to us in its own vernacular. They have a monumentality all their own, and to the discerning eye, spotting a new sculptural arrangement has a satisfaction similar to bird-watching.
Out on the pasture, they’re sometimes arranged in funny geometric patterns and stacks. The variations are subtle: Are all the bales in this field facing the same direction, or not? Is this single bale, distant from the rest, meant to symbolize something to the passerby? Is this pile of hay stacked with no intention, or was there a bigger plan? What if we thought of them as a secret conceptual art project within the industrial food system’s supply chain? High visual yield, so to speak—International Harvester style.
Art historically, hay bales themselves sit somewhere between found art, land art, and automation. Photographer Stephen Gill explores this type of incidental artwork in The Pillar, where a trail camera’s fixed position lends an enigmatic formalism, capturing motion-activated photographs of birds near Gill’s Swedish homestead. Artist Eric Oglander taps the strange current of automatic art found on Craigslist in his Craigslist Mirrors project, where simple photographs of mirrors for sale receive a Duchampian recontextualization. Similarly, the farmers and ranchers of America are engaged in an accidental, or incidental, aesthetic practice.
You could imagine the farmers and ranchers of America working on their vast land art project in secret, responding to the history of land art work in subtle and complex ways. The use of negative space in placement. Response to the contours and variations of the landscape. The use of foreign materials inside the bale itself (alfalfa, for instance). A bale’s longevity could become a type of durational performance (sometimes a marathon one, sitting at the same bend in the road for years), and a well-situated bale near a billboard or campaign sign could become a wry social comment on current events, local politics, or economics. Finally, with the form firmly established in one’s head, a student can begin to pick up on regional variations, non-bales, and even conceptual baling.
What other contemporary artists are reflecting these systems of logistics and ideologies back to us? Certain artists skirt the property line of this specific pasture. Agnes Denes’s Wheat Field famously framed the aesthetic and financial implications of agricultural capitalism. The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s visual study of the incidental beauty of bombing ranges comes to mind, qualifying the formal qualities of the unplanned landscape. Jim Denomie’s indigenous dreamscapes, where the scenery pulses with sacred and profane mythos, provide a good counterpoint to the fundamentally dead landscapes that American industrial agriculture envisions. These artworks help us see our own landscapes with a plain view, teaching us to decode their systems and re-mystifying their ecology and culture.
Looking at a field dotted with bales is looking at a type of middle landscape. The author Leo Marx uses “middle landscape” to describe idealized American scenes that exist as both rural and industrialized, like in George Innes’s 1856 painting The Lackawanna Valley. In that painting of a romantic Pennsylvania valley, close inspection reveals a railroad roundhouse and a puffing train in the distance (no surprise, given that it was commissioned by the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad). This is a pastoral landscape, sure, but it’s also been mapped, harvested, and subjugated to the grim laws of capital and logistics. Its idealized qualities seem spoiled by the industry that intrudes upon it, yet without that industry, we wouldn’t see it as pastoral. Nature, as something out there and separate from our own civilization, exists in our mind’s eye because we live in a world created by industry. You don’t see rural life as quaint until you’ve lived in a city, so to speak.
It’s like Henry David Thoreau railing against the tranquility of Walden pond being interrupted by the shrill whistle of a passing train; in a middle landscape, we can recreate “nature” while stepping out of it when we’re done. Of course, underlying this American idea of an untouched landscape separated from our own human fate is a willful ignorance of generations of Indigenous stewardship of the land, as well as the genocides that are the foundation of America itself.
In The Lackawanna Valley,
The American landscape imaginary has always been a contradiction. This imagined rurality is meant to be nostalgic but untouched by history, teeming with natural life, while cultivated and economically productive. Nothing crystallizes this aesthetic desire more than the humble hay bale, whose visual endurance through the years shows how comforting this type of edenic landscape can be, whether we seek it out in a Grant Wood painting in a museum or in a mass-marketed decal on the side of a semi truck.
Can an artist simultaneously feel deeply engaged with their rural roots while being disgusted by the history of Native boarding schools, forced dislocation, slavery, sharecropping, enclosure, and pioneer vigilantism? How can artists reflect that ambivalence, rather than reflecting back reductive nostalgias or equally caricatured hick-scapes? Can artwork about rural landscapes contradict our assumptions, rather than just reinforce them?
Indigenous artists can speak these contradictions in plain language. In Denomie’s 2007 painting Attack on Fort Snelling Bar and Grill, an absurd panorama of Minnesota’s Fort Snelling teems with fantastical figures tussling over the land where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet. Denomie’s landscape is dense with historical and cultural references, rather than nostalgic ones. For those interested, there’s even a few direct allusions to agriculture; in one, a farmer in the upper left plows the plains while staring at a brown rear end hoisted high in the air, a parody of the Minnesota state seal.
Denomie even makes a direct reference to Grant Wood: in the lower left, a photographer with bubble gum–pink skin and cargo shorts photographs an Indigenous couple posing, deadpan, for his camera, in an imitation of Wood’s famous American Gothic. The reference begs comparison; both Denomie and Wood’s work share similarities in their bulbous hills, comic shapes, and goofy saturations. Denomie’s landscape, however, shows a place dense with contested histories that feels startling in comparison to the austerity of a Grant Wood scene. While Wood’s landscapes feel like an antique golden-hour vision of rural life, Denomie’s feel like grim and ambivalent noir. Denomie shows that the rural past is not suspended in amber, but follows along our own present moment in crude and monstrous ways. This landscape is anti-pastoral. There’s no yearning for glory days. There’s no nostalgic undercurrent. And there’s not a hay bale in sight.
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