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  • From: "Janet Kagan" <jkagan AT nc.rr.com>
  • To: <chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Chpac-staff] Agnes Denes Manifesto
  • Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 08:21:49 -0400

CHPAC
 
As promised, please find below Agnes Denes 1970 Manifesto.  Denes spoke of her 35 year commitment to a creativity that questions the status quo.  
 

Working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns

desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream

persisting in the eternal search

 

 

During her talk, she stressed the transdisciplinary nature of public art and the importance to have the size of the work reflect its "necessity."  The Tree Mountain that Kate showed us last evening is an example of her thinking about the eco-system.  She mentioned that it takes 400 years for the ecology to change, and asked us (when she showed that slide at the conference) to consider how we interact with nature. 

 

As you can surmise from the Manifesto, for her, art balances between universals and the self.  One of her primary interests is how we process thoughts and anticipate; her pyramids are based on "probability" curves that she then designs in various shapes.  These shapes reflect her sense of our "Predicament," which she describes as the assumption that we think we are free and individual but that we are fully necessary to each other.

 

Other themes of her work include Portals, which ask the attender to notice where, when, and how we change, which she believes is inevitable.   

 

I find her work very compelling; I hope you like it too!

 

Yours

 

Janet

 

 



  • [Chpac-staff] Agnes Denes Manifesto, Janet Kagan, 06/16/2005

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