Installation view of Julia Lohmann’s Cow Benches, London, 2005. Upholstery foam, leather, and wood, approx. 59 x 27½ x 29½ in. each.

Agrarian references abound in new works of art and design, cultivating fresh takes on eco-responsibility.

As the global pace of urbanization quickens and the world’s agricultural resources diminish, a new crop of artists and designers is turning to agrarian themes for inspiration. This trend plays at once to the millennialist quest for redemption in the Age of Global Warming and to the hipster appeal of camp. Consider the queasy furnishings created by Julia Lohmann, a young London-based designer who takes the idea of stuffed animals more literally than most. Lohmann stretches cowhides over a foam frame, recreating the animal’s torso, complete with ersatz ribs and musculature. These carcass-sofas, which she calls Cow Benches, could be trophies for followers of Michael Pollan, who has exposed the politics of agriculture in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among other works. Far from endangered, cows are now an endangering species, considering the amount of land necessary to grow the genetically modified corn they consume, the quantity of antibiotics with which they are injected, and the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Thus to lounge on a heifer that has been removed from the biosphere becomes an ethical position.

Lohmann’s exercises in taxidermy recall Renaissance banquets in which wild game was served stuffed with a mixture of its own cooked flesh. For the 1514 feast Pope Leo X gave to celebrate his brother’s and nephew’s induction as honorary citizens of Rome, the cooks paraded such reconstituted animals through the piazza of the Campidoglio for the delight of the guests. To eat a rivestito, as this delicacy was called, must have been an extraordinarily perverse pleasure, inspiring a sentiment toward the food chain opposite to that evoked by Lohmann’s cow loungers. Among contemporary artists, Damien Hirst achieved notoriety with his own version of rivestito. One of the top earners in the art world, Hirst kicked off his career with works in which he suspended a variety of beasts — including a whole sheep, a pig split in half lengthwise, and a cow and steer whose salamied sections he shuffled together — in a turquoise formaldehyde goo, creating what seemed like aquarium displays of freaks of nature. The animals became talismans, reminiscent of primordial sacrifices.

Hirst’s high-tech ex-votos bring out the vegetarian in most viewers. The Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma adopted a considerably less shocking tactic in Pig 05049, which addresses the vast extent to which we exploit swine. For this communications-design project, which resulted in a book (already in its second printing, by Flocks, 2007) and an exhibition at the Rotterdam Kunsthal in 2008, she painstakingly catalogued all the products made from a single hog, coming up with a startling 185, ranging from yogurt, dog snacks, auto paint, and heart valves to chewing gum, marshmallows, cosmetics, porcelain, and cigarette filters. Inspired by an interest in material culture, Meindertsma connected the dots between natural resources and human consumption.

The fact that the Netherlands is Europe’s largest exporter of pork may explain the recent Dutch obsession with things porcine. In 2001 the Rotterdam office of the architecture firm mvrdv designed Pig City as an 262-foot-high skyscraper solution for the problem of housing the 15 million of the titular animals currently inhabiting the country’s farms. The irony of proposing for pigs a building type usually associated with humans and thus equating the two should not obscure the provocative project’s quite rational goal. Holland has very little land left, so this porktopia would free up much-needed acreage. The tower would include play areas and a facility for transforming its residents’ waste into clean fuel. While partly satiric and entirely improbable, Pig City prompted serious discussions in several European countries, which already grow cash crops in greenhouse environments. Vertical farms could become venues for experimenting with the more humane treatment of livestock.

The interest in agriculture as a subject for art and design reflects a concern with correcting the planet’s ecological imbalance and improving society’s relationship to nature. The same concern has attracted many to the Slow Food movement, launched in Italy in 1989 by Carlo Petrini. Petrini’s ingenious contribution to eco-consciousness has been to convince people that eating local organically grown foods is the ultimate form of hedonism. Finally, environmentalism without sacrifice! Although urban dwellers have traditionally looked down on their country cousins, Slow Food organic farmers have become cultural heroes. One of the movement’s most visible triumphs is First Lady Michelle Obama’s "victory garden" on the White House lawn, which scored a major victory for urban farming, arguably the most important green trend of the past few years.

Vegetable plots appeared in 2008 at the 11th International Venice Architecture Biennale, in front of the U.S. Pavilion, modeled on Berkeley chef Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard project, and in the London-based landscape architecture firm’s Gustafson/Porter’s Toward Paradise, a full-blown garden of flowers, tomatoes, lettuce, and eggplants. At the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Joseph Grima, the former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture and new Domus editor, and Jeffrey Johnson, the founding director of the China Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, teamed with the architect José Esparza to install LandGrab City, a microcosmic farm — complete with pastures, rice fields, and vegetable plots — in a shopping plaza in Shenzhen, China’s sprawling extension of Hong Kong. Next to the miniplantation was a map of one of Shenzhen’s districts and an analysis of the amount of land required to feed the local population. The majority of Shenzhen’s inhabitants, being fresh off the farm, must have been shocked at this reminder of the life they had left behind and more than a little mystified by the authors’ message. One thing is certain, their farms never looked so neat. Representations of farming may include real growing elements, but they are always allegories.

Works incorporating aspects of farm life inevitably aestheticize it. This is evident in the creations of the most accomplished practitioner of urban agriculture as art, Fritz Haeg, a young Los Angeles-based artist and the author of Edible Estates: An Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008), which documents the planting of colorful vegetables in lovely patterns in place of monotonous expanses of grass, those symbols of suburban conformity. Behind such a project lurks a new conformity, however: political correctness, which moralizes about the appropriate use of land and an awareness of one’s carbon footprint. Haeg, who trained as an architect, helps city residents and institutions craft alternative urban landscapes. The book features eight homeowners who volunteered to have their front yards transformed into fanciful displays of squash, beans, and corn. In 2007, Haeg, in partnership the Tate Modern, worked with public-housing residents in London to do the same in their neighborhoods, wrapping bands of sheet metal into fluid patterns to create raised beds for flowers, spices, and vegetables.

Few, however, have surpassed the mastery of painting with vegetables demonstrated by the anonymous gardeners of the Château de Villandry, in the Loire Valley. Since 1906 they have transformed a large historic jardin composed of old boxwood-lined parterres into productive vegetable patches with intense coloristic effects. Drawing on more than 9,000 species, the palette ranges from deep-blue cabbages and lavender broccoli to scarlet beets and yellow mustard, arranged into varying tonalities and intensities. Another important landmark in gardening as art was Alan Sonfist’s 1978 Time Landscape, on Houston Street in New York, in which he planted a vacant lot with indigenous flora and fenced it off from human contact as a reminder of the land’s predevelopment character. Similar principles inspire the insurgent gardeners who have sprung up in several urban centers. Resuscitating the "seed grenade" concept of Liz Christie, who launched Green Guerrillas in New York in 1973 and sowed that city’s community-garden movement, Richard Reynolds organizes expeditions in London to surreptitiously plant flowers, trees, vegetables, and other greenery on empty sites, loosing their flower-power bombs with the lusty pleasure of youths scrawling graffiti on empty walls. In his book On Guerrilla Gardening (Bloomsbury, 2008), Reynolds instructs readers in saving the earth by spreading seeds wherever they go. The spontaneous energy of graffiti art greatly enriched the discourse of art in the 1980s, and perhaps guerrilla gardening will have a parallel effect in the worlds of urban and landscape design.

Environmentally aware gardening/landscape design/farming may well reach its artistic acme in Milan’s Expo 2015, whose theme is Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life. Charged with drafting the conceptual master plan for the fair are Stefano Boeri, the Italian architect and editor in chief of Abitare; the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog, of Herzog & de Meuron; Richard Burdett, professor in the cities department of the London School of Economics; and the eco-conscious American designer William McDonough. The team, advised by — who else? — Carlo Petrini, envisions an agropark composed of more than 50 orchard strips, the number of participating nations, which will be invited to grow their typical products for viewing and sampling. The orchards will be at once conscientious gestures and mystifications, grown in a foreign microclimate, with different soil and water conditions and in a far shorter time frame than normal, since, like all trade shows, expos are pulled together the night before they open. The current design for the orchards calls for dozens of long strips shaded by cloth pergolas. The result may instill in visitors a greater awareness of what they eat and how it is grown, but it also risks seeming like little more than a county fair.

Agriculturally inflected art and design can be seen as extensions of the vast body of work in which organic materials have been introduced to emphasize such themes as temporality, the fragility of nature, the randomness of life, the impermanence of everything. Andy Goldsworthy gave a new twist to Land art in the 1990s by composing with such ephemeral materials as leaves and icicles. The Emeryville, California-based Turkish artist Canan Tolon seeds her canvases with prairie grass, waters the plantings until they sprout, and then allows them to dry into shaggy golden bushes, recreating an entire life cycle in her works. In his large outdoor sculptures, the late Italian artist Giuliano Mauri adapted traditional farmers’ methods of soaking and bending willow branches to fashion supports for climbing crops or to weave into baskets. For a commission in a park in Trento, for example, Mauri created a "vegetal cathedral" from four rows of bundled branches arranged into organic Gothic vaults. "My works are not made to last," he declared. "Some will return to the earth where they originated."

Inspired by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s odes to "natural" man, Marie Antoinette, a decade before losing her head, built a replica of a rustic hamlet on a secluded section of Versailles where she played at milking cows and tending to other rural chores. A few years ago this forerunner of the modern theme park was transformed into a children’s farm where young visitors can have a similar experience. As artists and designers incorporate into their practices agricultural forms and methods, they either will continue to play, like the queen, or their works will transcend allegory and restore our sense of the values underlying the original culture of cultivation.