Crop Circles – Messages in the Fields
During the 1980s, the British public began to become aware of a mysterious phenomenon taking place in the depths of the countryside. Farmers would start work only to find enormous, elaborate motifs, often tens of metres across, which seemingly had appeared overnight right in the middle of their fields of wheat, barley and oats, propelling them suddenly into the national spotlight via features on news programmes seen by millions. Proclaimed by many as certain evidence of the landing sites of alien spaceships, the ‘crop circles’ (as they came to be known) were concentrated in areas of England close to ancient archaeological sites like Stonehenge and the Avebury Stone Circle, as well as centres of alternative lifestyles such as Glastonbury.
Although the crops would always spring back intact to their previous position, puzzled farmers and landowners expressed great irritation at this unwanted invasion of their land and interference with their business, loudly criticising the perpetrators as infamous and demanding compensation for the inconvenience. Nor did they appreciate the sudden influx of UFO watchers camping and trampling on their fields, hoping to spot a spacecraft or even have a close encounter with an alien being.
For some ‘new-age travellers’ living in mobile homes in the South-West, crop circles provided a fleeting opportunity to cash in on the trend, and local radio stations, amateur scientists and astronomers all had their days in the sun. However, the beauty of the patterns and mystery about their origins provided the ideal opportunity for newspaper editors. They seized on the regular opportunities for writing extensive articles featuring stunning aerial photographs during summer months when, traditionally, news stories are scarce. The wilder theories about the phenomenon were dispelled in 1991 when Doug Bower and Dave Chorley became briefly famous after confessing to having created (with little more than a torch, a plank and some rope!) over 200 crop circles, starting in 1978. It can safely be assumed that they were not the only people taking part in this activity.
But as a subject for cultural commentators, the circles have a wider significance, appearing as they did in the England of the 1980s, a time of social unrest and discontent. Fields of wheat and corn had become arenas of conflict during the historic miners’ strike in the early part of the decade, then for several summers there were violent confrontations between police and new-age travellers celebrating Midsummer’s Day at Stonehenge. As the 1990s began, the rave culture of pop-up open-air dance parties was getting under way.
All these phenomena raised questions about who really owned the land and who should have access to it: questions that the crop circles silently articulated. These cheeky exploits, made by anonymous artists – seeking no reward and maintaining a code of silence as strict as that of the mafia – were eccentric expressions of resistance to the increasing concentration of English land in the hands of financiers and faceless capitalists, and can be seen as a further blossoming of land-based art by practitioners ranging from Andy Goldsworthy to Banksy.
The crop circles grew in complexity and expression and reached levels of artistic purity impossible for artists inhabiting the commercial world of buyers, sellers and the marketplace of galleries and museums. Their very short-lived work was created by trickery and hands unseen and was the expression of a handful of infamous artistic rebels dealing with themes of revolution, protest and land reform. It could never be monetised, and this is why as the associations of hippy caravans, alien conspiracies and the rave culture fade away, what remains is simply a tradition of great art.
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