“Artists are not locked into a single discipline. Art is a specialization that need not feed upon itself. It is capable of imbibing key elements from other systems, unifying them into a unique and coherent vision. The new role of the artist may be to create an art that is more than decoration, commodity, or political tool. It is an art that questions the status quo and the direction life has taken, the endless contradictions we accept and approve. An that elicits and initiates thinking process has the power to make statements with universal validity and thus benefit humanity.”
Agnes Denes 1992.
Agnes Denes is a pioneer, an activist, a conceptual and environmental artist… and until very recently, I had never heard of her. I am now finding this quite astonishing considering one of her most notable works Wheatfield- A Confrontation (1982), saw the artist plant a two acre wheat field in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty, in what is now known as Battery Park.
Brain Sholis, writing in Artforum noted both the “simple generosity” of the work (Denes harvested one thousand pounds of the crop that August and planted it around the globe) and that “Wheatfield–A Confrontation and can be understood as one of the first occasions on which Denes worked on a scale large enough and in a location public enough to suit her outsize ambition. The intervention represented, in the artist’s words, nothing less than ‘food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns’.”
According to the artist the work “called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger”, organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe”.
At the time, this part of Manhattan was a landfill but the real-estate was worth more than $4.5 Billion dollars. In this work Denes distilled both the paradox and the tragedy inherent in the socio-cultural power structures of the western world. To my mind, this work continues to resonate, and even takes on new significance in our post 9/11, post GFC world. The location of Wheatfield- A Confrontation has been so significantly tied to both these aforementioned events. In 1982 Denes asked the people of Manhattan, of America, of the First World, to “renthink their priorities and realise that unless human values were reassessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger”. In the artist’s words, “Wheatfield was a symbol and a universal concept.“
This work draws my attention to the importance of the archive and the artistic document. Although this work was only a temporary eco-intervention, through its documentation, its power and resonance is ongoing. Wheatfield, in its defiant absurdity and ambition, reminds us that our world is this way because we will it to be, or we allow it to be. It is about agency, responsibility and our priorities, not just environmental, but social, cultural and political too.
Jane Diserio
Read more about Agnes Denes here.
all art is quite useful 
02Oct / 2012
Wheatfield – a confrontation…
“Artists are not locked into a single discipline. Art is a specialization that need not feed upon itself. It is capable of imbibing key elements from other systems, unifying them into a unique and coherent vision. The new role of the artist may be to create an art that is more than decoration, commodity, or political tool. It is an art that questions the status quo and the direction life has taken, the endless contradictions we accept and approve. An that elicits and initiates thinking process has the power to make statements with universal validity and thus benefit humanity.”
Agnes Denes 1992.
Agnes Denes is a pioneer, an activist, a conceptual and environmental artist… and until very recently, I had never heard of her. I am now finding this quite astonishing considering one of her most notable works Wheatfield- A Confrontation (1982), saw the artist plant a two acre wheat field in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty, in what is now known as Battery Park.
Brain Sholis, writing in Artforum noted both the “simple generosity” of the work (Denes harvested one thousand pounds of the crop that August and planted it around the globe) and that “Wheatfield–A Confrontation and can be understood as one of the first occasions on which Denes worked on a scale large enough and in a location public enough to suit her outsize ambition. The intervention represented, in the artist’s words, nothing less than ‘food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns’.”
According to the artist the work “called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger”, organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe”.
At the time, this part of Manhattan was a landfill but the real-estate was worth more than $4.5 Billion dollars. In this work Denes distilled both the paradox and the tragedy inherent in the socio-cultural power structures of the western world. To my mind, this work continues to resonate, and even takes on new significance in our post 9/11, post GFC world. The location of Wheatfield- A Confrontation has been so significantly tied to both these aforementioned events. In 1982 Denes asked the people of Manhattan, of America, of the First World, to “renthink their priorities and realise that unless human values were reassessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger”. In the artist’s words, “Wheatfield was a symbol and a universal concept.“
This work draws my attention to the importance of the archive and the artistic document. Although this work was only a temporary eco-intervention, through its documentation, its power and resonance is ongoing. Wheatfield, in its defiant absurdity and ambition, reminds us that our world is this way because we will it to be, or we allow it to be. It is about agency, responsibility and our priorities, not just environmental, but social, cultural and political too.
Jane Diserio
Read more about Agnes Denes here.
Posted in Comment on Consumption, interventionist art
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