The pictures from “Agro-Art” are both documentation and an invitation. As documentation, they are very much in line with a trend in contemporary art to prepare creative processes for reproduction. As an invitation, they are related to the intention of many artists to change our habits of perception.
The decisive moment for me was when I realized that the land around us, everything that is advertised to us as nature, is a cultural landscape, that it is totally designed. At the center of this year-round changing design are machines, which in their form reveal man’s desire for design and at the same time reflect something of the landscape that depends on them. Agricultural machines are kinetic sculptures of landscape design. They create useful beauty and are themselves beautiful. While kinetic sculptures have not always existed, agricultural machines have always been moved. The designers, the farmers, know nothing of this. But the cathedrals were also built by craftsmen, and it was art history that turned them into artists. In the medieval system and world view, the craftsmen who created the cathedrals were on an equal footing with the farmers. Only the successful emancipation of the fine arts from ars mechanicae to ars liberates, which agriculture did not follow, created a distance.
from: Thomas Zaunschirm, FOTOHOF Info, issue 2/1984