Agnes Denes: A Retrospective Looking Ahead
By Dan Mills, Curator
Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces" is a retrospective exhibition of this visionary artist’s public projects and proposals. While Denes has been conceiving and creating public and environmental art throughout her career (she is a pioneer of ecological art), in recent years she has devoted an ever-increasing amount of her attention to this work.
Many of Denes’s extraordinary projects have been created, such as Tree Mountain–A Living Time Capsule, Forest for Australia, Wheatfield–A Confrontation, Rice/Tree/Burial, Poetry Walk, and Hypersphere. However, many others have not yet been built–and some can only be actualized when technology catches up with the artist’s ideas. Only when viewed together can this extraordinary body of public work, representing a vision of remarkable depth and breadth, begin to be fully understood and appreciated. While Denes’ work has been the focus of over 50 solo exhibitions, and she has been included in over 300 group exhibitions, no exhibition has focused exclusively on this important body of public and environmental work. For these reasons, "Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces" has been organized.
Whether the media is drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, or public projects, Denes’ art is art of ideas–and her ideas are extraordinary. Her output is complex, expansive, multi-disciplinary and difficult to categorize. Denes has investigated the physical and social sciences, philosophy, art history, linguistics, mathematics, poetry and psychology, and transformed her explorations into unique works of visual art. Her public projects often continue these investigations as a way to address ecological, cultural and social issues–often on a monumental scale.
"Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces" presents the concepts and philosophies of all of the artist’s many bodies of work, because they all inform her public and environmental projects. The first-time viewer of Denes’s work may be overwhelmed by the breadth and scope of her vision, and by the ideas represented in her numerous writings which accompany the art objects. For Denes, the writing–part philosophy and part project description–and the visualization of the project together are the work of art.
Viewers familiar with Denes’s work may recognize ideas, philosophies and forms that the artist has investigated in her many other series. For example, viewers familiar with the 1980 print Pascal’s Perfect Probability Pyramid and the People Paradox may be fascinated with the drawings, macquette, and documentation of Tree Mountain–A Living Time Capsule–11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years, 1992-96. They may also discover that by creating a project that engaged thousands of people in the planting of thousands of trees for thousands of other people around the globe, Denes created the seemingly abstract society she depicted in the work Pascal’s Pyramid in this monumental project. Eleanor Heartney’s superb catalogue essay will enlighten all viewers‘ understanding of Denes’s work.
Since her first environmental project in 1968, Haiku Poetry Burial, Rice Planting and Tree Chaining, Denes has conceived well over one hundred such projects. These projects apply, in her words, "…the power of knowledge, linguistics, and communication" and are the embodiment of the ideals Denes stated in her Manifesto of 1970; they are public projects that serve humanity and the environment.
Through over thirty years of work, Agnes Denes privileges us by communicating complex ideas about the human condition, and by creating projects that are often solutions to cultural and environmental problems. She makes public art that probes, questions and chides, visualizes paradoxes and theories, proposes solutions, poetic spaces, and spectacular forms. Through her work, she asks us to think exaltedly about ourselves and our relationships within society and on planet earth, and summons us to engage with our world on this elevated level.
Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces,
A retrospective is curated by Dan Mills and organized by the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University. The show will be running September 2 – November 6, 2004, at Chelsea Art Museum Home of the Miotte Foundation
556 W. 22 St., New York, NY 10011 • 212.255.0719 • www.chelseamuseum.org
