Anonymous, anti-capitalist and aweinspiring: were crop circles actually great art?
As the sun rose over Wiltshire, Hampshire and Gloucestershire in the summer of 1989, farmers discovered that their swaying fields of barley, wheat and oats had been used to host a new phenomenon: crop circles. They reached their apotheosis during those balmy months, thanks to a sudden proliferation and blanket mainstream media coverage, but the narrative was dominated by discussions of possible alien visitation or just the wilful vandalism of it all. At the time, few people thought to judge crop circles on their artistic merit but, three decades on, the time may have come for such a reappraisal.
Britain in the 1980s was a country lacking in mystery, magic and enchantment. Then, as now, it was a time of conflict, division and ideological battles – free market v unionised labour; police state v workers – all overseen by the cold pragmatism of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, as she ruthlessly pursued war on distant soil and the “managed decline” of industries such as coalmining and shipbuilding.
From Auf Wiedersehen, Pet to Boys from the Blackstuff and Brideshead Revisited, much of enduring TV drama reflected a politicised country controlled by class, or increasingly obsessed by the financial accumulation of the individual. The seminal Freeze exhibition of 1988 set Damien Hirst on the path to becoming the world’s wealthiest artist, someone defined by price rather than content, and even the decade’s salient moment in pop, Live Aid, was concerned with addressing a byproduct of capitalism: poverty in the developing world. The times they had a-changed.
The potency of crop circles lay less in the who and how and more in the why.And the answer seemed to be: just because. These strange flattenings of crops were made simply for spectacle, their anonymous creators’ sole ambition to evoke a sense of awe lacking in British daily life.
Their scale was certainly staggering: at their largest, some designs measured 900ft across, almost as long as the Eiffel
Tower is tall. If these were intended as art, or regarded as such, no price tag could be attached. Instead, they were a gift to the nation, a series of stunning distractions designed to raise questions rather than offer answers.
Aside from a few enterprising farmers and aerial photographers, there was no real profit to be had from crop circles. This, by their very nature, made them anticapitalist, completely at odds with the messages being relayed from the twin powers of Westminster and the City: profit at all costs. It was precisely because their creators were unknown, and their work had no intrinsic economic value, that made their moment in the spotlight an important chapter in the evolution of indigenous British folk art.
It is this idea of art for the people – rather than the more mundane practicalities of the endeavour (spoiler: crop circles were made by pranksters using ropes and planks) – that I explore in my new novel, The Perfect Golden Circle,a fictionalised attempt to celebrate the scale of these landscape artworks, and the type of individuals who might visualise them in the first place. The esoteric designs represented freedom, trespass and never asking permission, which is why their makers were highly criticised – even though their respectfully executed nocturnal missions left a farmer’s yield undamaged as the stalks slowly sprang back to their former height.
The real winners were the news media, who had a story that could run and run, filling large pages during the fallow summer months. A photograph and a few sentences could make a spread. Nevertheless, the message sent by their makers remained an entirely subversive one. These works asked the crucial question: who really owns the land?
My novel frames crop circles within a longstanding tradition of pranksters, peasant revolutionaries and landscape dissidents, such as the 17th-century activist Gerrard Winstanley, who published searing treatises about the question of class and led the dissident Diggers in occupying common land during the time of the enclosures.
Winstanley was fighting a reformatory system that led to the carved up country of today in which, according to author Guy Shrubsole in his 2019 book Who Owns England?,half is owned by less than 1% of its population, and 67% is owned by a mixture of aristocrats, corporations, the crown, the church and oligarchs – the last particularly prescient given the role of Russia’s wealthy elite in the rise of Vladimir Putin (and Britain’s complicity in their overseas investments).
But we don’t even need to look far into the past to appreciate the importance of crop circles in the summer of 1989, which saw the culmination of several summers of rural unrest. In 1985, Wiltshire police had prevented several hundred people travelling in convoy to Stonehenge; there were beatings and 537 arrests (21 travellers were later awarded compensation for false imprisonment and wrongful arrest). It was one more example of the same heavy-handed police tactics that had defined the miners’ strike and the Wapping disputes of 1986, as well as the part that police ineptitude played during the
Hillsborough disaster that April in 1989.
The Public Order Act of 1986 had given police greater control over public gatherings, but also resulted in new age travellers squatting at several sites close to Wiltshire’s A303 over subsequent summers. Further police clashes culminated, on 22 June 1989, in 260 arrests of those attempting to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge (the next spring would also see the poll tax riots, undertaken in the same spirit of revolt against power).
It was also the second summer of love, at a time when acid house raves were held, much to the chagrin of the authorities and the outrage of the tabloid press. The parties were merely the modern iteration of various ritualised pagan practices that had been enjoyed for millennia: dancing, revelling, communing.
In among the convoys, camper vans and sound systems, the crop circlers covertly went about their business, part of this new age traveller culture, yet unseen and unnamed, always maintaining a code of silence that was mafialike in its resolve: an omertà of the grassy downs and chalk plains. Theirs was a symbolic act of rebellion against a backdrop of state repression.
But the circles themselves also reached a level of artistic purity that was impossible to achieve by artists who enter the commercial marketplace of exhibitions, dealers and collectors. Crop circles could never be commodified but should rightfully be recognised as works of equal value and importance to those created by such British landscape artists as Andy Goldsworthyand Richard Long,whose work utilises natural resources on miniature and epic scale.
American sculptor Robert Smithson’s 1,500ft-long earthwork Spiral Jetty, or Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield: A Confrontation, in which two acres of a vacant New York lot were filled with wheat, could also be seen as forerunners to crop circles. Even Banksy, for all his attempts at anonymity, has accumulated great wealth from his public art, whereas crop circlers operated at a deeper level of subterfuge. They bypassed all commercial concerns by making work impossible to either move or monetise. Like a portrait rendered in disappearing ink, their works soon vanished.
I have chosen to depict a series of fictionalised crop circles and the two characters who make them: a taciturn Falklands veteran recovering from injury and trauma, and a semiferal punk with an innate ability to design increasingly intricate patterns. “Patterns” is a preferable term here, as “circles” does a disservice to the more ambitious creations that incorporated such design features as locks, clock parts, ribbons, dolphins, whirlpools, mandalas and much more.
The novel is written in the spirit of crop circle pioneers such as Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who came forward in 1991 to dispel the many conspiracy theories when they casually confessed that they had been responsible for making more than 200 circles since 1978 (with another 1,000 or so created by unknown others).
The unassuming Englishness of Bower and Chorley, and the modesty of their revelation, made them even more heroic to many. They didn’t need to point out that the many crackpots theorists, cereologists (experts on the paranormal explanation for crop circles), frothing journalists and random tinfoil hat-wearing oddballs attracted to the fields of Wiltshire were just wrong. They were simply artists, operating on a different literal plane. Today we should salute them and their valuable work, and say their names alongside those of English greats such as Blake and Bacon, Constable and Turner, Moore and Hepworth.
• The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury on 12 May.