Philosophy in the land: since the 1960s, Agnes Denes has been exploring the relationship between nature and culture through a variety of mediums. A show documenting her public art concludes its tour at New York's Chelsea Art Museum

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Thomas McEvilley

Formerly this plain was the richest of the fields that give life, but at this time it gave no life at all, lying waste, barren, and all leafless. But in a little while, by Demeter's plan, as the springtime progressed, it would be waving long ears of grain like a mane in the wind, and its fertile furrows would be filled with grain lying at harvest.... Demeter made fruits spring up from the rich plowlands, and the whole wide world became heavy with leaves and flowers.--Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Agnes Denes was born in Budapest shortly before World War II. After the war, her family immigrated to Stockholm. where she attended high school, then to New York, where from 1964 to '68 she attended Columbia University and the New School and painted in a variety of styles. In 1968, she abandoned painting and commenced a post-studio oeuvre that initiated and still epitomizes some of the key themes of that revolutionary era of art.

A leading method in Denes's work is triangulation. Her earliest dated work, Dialectic Triangulations, A Visual Philosophy (1967-69), is a monoprint that depicts triangular shapes gleaned from science books in several disciplines, accompanied by Denes's list of 15 verbal types of dialectical triangulations such as: "arriving at a conclusion derived from two propositions." The two propositions plus the conclusion constitute a triad of the form: thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

The triangle is a kind of atomic unit in geometry. As Plato said in the Timaeus, the triangle is the first two dimensional form, prior to all others because it is made with the fewest possible points. It is also an ultimate analytical unit for polygons (closed figures composed of straight lines), all of which can be reduced to agglomerations of triangles. As the universe fills out, growing from two to three dimensions, the next primal form is the tetrahedron, or four-sided figure. This is the first solid figure, the three-dimensional form of the triangle. Whereas the tetrahedron is composed of four triangles, the pyramid (or pentahedron), which looks a lot like it, is composed of four triangles and a square--the base.

Since ancient Egypt, the pyramid has possessed a potent aura as a primal form. One aspect of its cultural depth is that the four-square base of the pyramid orients it to the four compass points and thus represents physical space as humans experience and conceive of it. In Denes's work, both the triangle and the pyramid occur at all levels and perform a variety of functions.

In 1967, Denes had started lengthy research on triangulation. At the time, art was moving ever closer to the realm of science, particularly with the rise of Conceptual art, and Denes, who had a leading role in this shift, chose a demanding method for this refocusing. Artists often make superficial references to scholarly or scientific topics. Others take more extreme approaches: Bernar Venet refuses to study the context or meaning of the mathematical and astrophysical formulas he uses in his work. He wants, hanging over tim work like an atmosphere in the air, the emptiness of not-knowing. Denes, by contrast, has intensively studied each of the disciplines she has drawn from, attempting to bring the inner meaning of scientific ideas into the artwork. For Denes, art and science have closely related ambitions.

Dialectical Triangulations was a conceptual map of terrain that Denes was about to enter and would go on to investigate fur decades. In the midst of creating it, she also made her first work on the theme, Rice/Tree/Burial, which was produced in two versions, 1968 and 1977. In each, there are three parts. First, in 1968, Denes cleared a field in Sullivan County in upstate New York and planted it with rice. Second, she stretched chains around a group of trees in an adjoining forest and they began to bend and grow toward one another from the force of the enchainment. Third, she buried a time capsule that contained all her poems, which were haiku an extremely terse, questioning form.

A mythological trinity of ancient Greek goddesses, another triangulation, provides a clue to the meaning of the three parts of the work. Demeter, literally Earth Mother, is represented by the growing of the rice crop; Artemis, the cruel virgin huntress, by the painful confinement of the trees; these are the thesis and antithesis. Finally, a third archetype enters, functioning as synthesis, which could be called Athena. (1) One modern scholar, Karl Kerenyi, refers to her mediating function when he calls her "a virginal and simultaneously maternal goddess." (2) (She is, in other words, both Demeter and Artemis.) Kerenyi also thinks of the ancient goddesses as enacting a drama of the unfolding of consciousness in stages. But Athena is different from the others: she "is on all stages, without fully revealing herself in any single appearance on this or that stage." (3) In the Hegelian dialectic the thesis and antithesis confront each other, then merge to leap upward, or "sublate" (German, Aufhebung) onto a higher plane--where it all starts over again. In this conceit of using goddess names as critical terms, Athena is the power to sublate. The buried casket of haiku can thus stand for the force that reconciles the opposition of the growing rice and the groaning trees. Like the emptiness of nut-knowing, the silence of the hidden poems balances (or absorbs) the opposition.