Alchemy of Art

Agnes Denes: Art Ad Infinitum

(On Huffington Post - November 26, 2012)

When I was still a teenager I asked my father what the definition of intelligence was. My father is an art historian and an intellectual, a man who has spent his life in the rarefied realm of ideas and history. But he is also a man very much concerned with living the good life, with enjoying the material. It seemed to me, even back then, that if anyone could explain how a smart mind worked, it would be my father. And so he did. "It's the ability to connect abstract ideas and make them concrete," was his answer.

I've often thought that conceptual art was too concerned with abstract ideas. Concepts that take precedence, sometimes even replace, the aesthetic and material side of art. It's the rare artist whose work combines both the abstract and the concrete, the conceptual and the actual. Agnes Denes whose show,Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now, is on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects until January 19, 2013, is the even more rare artist, one who maps the process from idea to concrete apparition and back again.

Denes is an internationally recognized artist and the first environmental artist to synthesize land and performance art. At various times, she has incorporated mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, technology, theology and ecology into her work. The form her art takes is as varied as the sources she draws upon:drawings, sculptures, earth/land projects, performance, writings and photographs, to name only a few. On view at the Tonkonow show is a photographic and textual documentation of one of her best-known projects, Wheatfield -- A Confrontation from 1982. In Wheatfied, Denes planted two-acres of wheat in downtown New York, a comment on human values and misplaced priorities even then, of a real estate mad city. But, Wheatfield was also a stunning visual statement, a rich golden field smack in the middle of the stark cityscape of Manhattan. After the wheat was harvested, the hay was fed to horses and some of the grain traveled globally in the International Art Show for the End of World Hunger organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art, 1987-90. The piece had an actual, living cycle. Concept became art, art became food, food cycled through the ecosystem and we were left with the documentation -- with art.

Wheatfield -- A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan -- Blue Sky, World Trade Center, 1982 Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Much of Denes's work is concerned with cycles. Long ago she coined the term "eco-logic" to describe her art making process: thought and life, birth and death. An early example is Human Dust from 1969, a piece that documents a man's life through photographs, text, and actual cremated human bones. The bones are quite beautiful, calcified and organic shards displayed on a pedestal under a Plexiglas disc. The text is a poetic list of statistics. He was an artist. He died of a heart attack. He was born 50 years ago, which means he lived half a century or appr 2/3 of his expected lifespan. A demonstration of what we will all be reduced to, dust and facts, and yet the text all tells us that this everyman fathered 2 human beings, thus beginning a chain of 60 or more human beings added to the world population within 4 generations (counting up to 2000 A.D.). Like Wheatfield, the cycle of life and art continue.

Human Dust, 1969Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Systems. Denes is fascinated by systems and patterns. She maps out her projects in detailed and delicate drawings, a form of visual mathematics. In Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule, conceived in 1982 and planted in Finland in 1992-96, Denes created a manmade mountain and planted it with eleven thousand pine trees in an intricate mathematical pattern. It is eco-art in the truest sense of the word, a land reclamation project dedicated to humanity and to our natural environment. Tree Mountain has no lifespan; or rather its lifespan is unknown, projected into the future.

Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule -- 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 YearsCopyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Denes's art moves from one state to another, from the micro to the macro, from immediate to infinite, from part to whole, from the self to culture, from cold mathematics to gorgeous imagery. She doesn't allow boundaries to be finite, but is concerned with the process of change and the flow of information from one system to another. Her sculptures move beyond the concrete, to a place of open-ended, free reign, Her materials, whether wheat or trees or even a human life, stretch into the infinite.

And so I come back, full circle, to my father. Who I should fully disclose is the art historian Peter Selz and who first introduced me to the work Agnes Denes, and who himself, wrote in an essay on Agnes Denes for her show at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1992, "Everything is connected in Dene's multifarious work. Her concepts deal with space, but ultimately her work is focused on the life of humankind and on the human predicament."

Agnes Denes Sculptures of the Mind is on view at until January 19, 2013 at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projets, 535 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

 

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The Egg, Inside & Out

(as pubublished on the Huffington Post - 4/19/11)

In the world of computer software a Virtual Easter Egg is a hidden message within the text or program that once clicked on, opens up to reveal a joke or feature. It is the modern day version of the Russian cluster egg and takes its name from the first Faberge Egg that opened up to reveal a golden egg. Recently Lady Gaga used the idea when she gave birth to herself out of a transparent Egg at the Grammy Awards. For a long time, the artist Hope Sandrow has been fascinated by this conundrum and the multi-step process of discovery, of worlds and landscapes and ideas hidden inside containers that are both virtual and real.

And indeed, entering Sandrow's world is akin to stepping inside the diorama of a sugar-coated Easter Egg or slipping into the scene of a pastoral painting where art and vision merge. (Go on a Virtual Easter Egg hunt by clicking on the word And and searching the images.)

Hope Sandrow's Open Air Studio sits up a dirt road, tucked into the side of a hill in Shinnecock, Long Island. But wander through the turn-of-a century carriage house and suddenly, her sunny living space opens up into a continuous art installation, a panorama that is both an artscape, in which to view art, and a studio space in which her art is created.

Hope Sandrow, an artist who has worked with complex photographic images, conceptual and installation art, has long been preoccupied with evolution and ecosystems. In her Open Air Studio she now raises Panduan fowl, a rare breed of exotic roosters and hens. She began this project a number of years ago when Shinnecock -- a singular rooster with a Shakespearean personality -- followed her home while she was out taking photographs. The tale of Sandrow's interaction and involvement with the rooster she since named Shinnecock is now a well-documented story on her website, and he and his flock are viewable on live feed from her webcast. Needless to say, Shinnecock was the inspiration that first pursued Sandrow. In turn, she embraced and adopted Shinnecock as part of her life and work.

Out the living room window and even sometimes in the home, chickens, landscape and the art commingle. Roosters and hens wander freely through this paradise of form following after function. In an effort to protect her flock, Sandrow planted a wide variety of feather-like foliage, ostrich ferns, corkscrew grass, tall flowering balls of purple allium and bristling shrubs of juniper and cyprus that camouflage the birds' exotic plumage thereby protecting them from the hawks circling above. "No matter where I set the camera," Sandrow said. "I could create art that examines the concept of the growth of form through function."

A creek runs through the garden, and two odd structures sit on slight rises at various ends of the yard. These are the coops constructed from drawings of a Sol LeWitt parallelogram, which Sandrow transformed into a 3-dimensional habitat. Sol LeWitt had a long history of engagement and exchange with other artists, and Sandrow has honored the spirit of LeWitt in her use of materials, for they are full of light and she even calls them her Coop LeWitts. Sandrow says her flock lives in them happily. "My approach to conceptual art, and I believe this was Sol LeWitt's approach, is that this art is not removed from nature, but connected to it."

(Image courtesy of Hope Sandrow)

The studio can stretch away from the flock and their habitat. Sandrow has done a number of performance pieces that take the Open Air Studio on the road. In 2008 she created a tableau on the side of Montauk Highway, which borders her property. In En Plein Air, Sandrow, clad in a nude body stocking, sat with Tom Edmonds, her husband Ulf Skogsbergh, and Margaret Kelly, in a live re-enactment of Edouard Manet's famous painting of a blissful pastoral picnic, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe. Manet's image depicting the scene of a nude woman sitting and enjoying a lunch beside two fully dressed men had caused controversy back in 1863 when it was first exhibited. Sandrow's piece was a provocative homage to pastoral art as well as to contemporary installation art and to the artist's ability to inhabit both the inside and outside of the canvas. The work fully engaged its audience. "Commuters loved it," she said. "They waved, honked their horns and even stopped to talk. We were the highlight of their morning commute."

(Image courtesy of Hope Sandrow)

More recently Ms. Sandrow has been producing elegant, poetic multimedia pieces that incorporate shells, feathers, even, on one occasion, a gallon container of eggshell white enamel paint. In 2010 she created Two Eggs Observational Findings from the series titled The Sky is Falling. In the description of material used to produce the work, Sandrow gives credit to the two eggs created by the Shinnecock Family Hens, which she has placed under a glass bell jar.

(Image courtesy of Hope Sandrow)

Hope Sandrow can be seen as the glass bell jar, a protective yet transparent womb. An egg, of course, is also a womb, an incubator that holds a secret, a message, a life that will hatch and transform. Hope Sandrow, in serving as a window on her own work, allows visibility into this magical world, which is constantly revealing itself both to her and to us. In examining and participating in this fragile ecosystem, Sandrow's art acts as a permeable membrane through which we witness and access her creative process, which is not separate, but in tandem with nature.

Hope Sandrow has two upcoming events: a live, streamed performance from the Open Air Studio conceived by Elke Luyten and a work titled Happening Live that will begin in summer of 2011.

 

Diviner Dennis

(as published on the Huffington Post 1/27/11)

Conceptual, earth, performance, body artist and lately, large-scale public sculptor, Dennis Oppenheim died Friday night January 21st, 2011 at the age of 72 from complications from cancer. He’d been diagnosed only six weeks earlier, was in the process of undergoing chemotherapy, but then slipped away so stealthily that the Las Vegas Metro reported his death as a possible hoax. Would that it were a joke. Dennis loved a good joke. He was a supreme satirist, a punster extraordinaire, an artist who constantly reinvented his medium, endeavoring to find ways to synthesize multiple ideas. In the beginning, Dennis used his body, the earth and sky as art and as a means to explore creating sculpture; then performance became his sculpture, and recently, his public artworks investigated structures that incorporate architecture into sculptures that are both visually stunning and thought provoking.

    Starting in the 60s Dennis became well-known as one of the original earth artists. The first piece I ever saw by Dennis Oppenheim was a photograph of a work titled Annual Rings, an action and earth/art piece done in 1968 in which he transposed the annual rings that mark a tree's growth onto the snow-banks along the U.S. and Canadian border line. Cutting with a shovel back and forth across political as well as time zones, Dennis’s piece dramatized the arbitrary boundaries in our cultural landscape. Politics is largely about taking sides, and Dennis’s shovel literally cut through sides and stances, while his image of concentric circles united them.

     In the late 70s Dennis began to use puppets as a way to segue from performance art to motorized sculptures. He called his puppets his “surrogates.” They bore his facial features and danced and sang songs Dennis wrote, “It ain’t what you make, it’s what makes you do it,” and even lectured on art history. In the infamous Lecture from 1976, a puppet with Dennis’s face discussed the death of body and earth art to a room of empty chairs. Dennis’s puppets were an extension of himself. They were often marionettes of Dennis being manipulated by strings, and they spoke of the artist as a puppet being at the mercy of art commerce.

    Another favorite and darkly humorous piece was a large-scale public work, Devise to Root Out Evil first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and later installed and then uninstalled after an uproar at the Vancouver Biennale in 2005. Dennis’s Devise was a galvanized steel structure of a church turned upside down so that the steeple pointed into the ground like a divining rod to expose the wicked.

 

    My father, the art historian Peter Selz, wrote that artists play an important role in changing social and political issues and that to transform situations, “We must change not only our industrial practices, but the way we view the world.” In tackling the physical environment, the body, and the corporate infrastructures of public institutions, Dennis continued to practice in his inimitable way, the art of social and political dissent.

    Dennis was a shaman, part magic man, part irritant. And though his cleverness could frustrate his audience, even in that regard, by working so closely within the public realm, he endeavored to “critique” his ability to annoy, amuse and engage us. He referred to himself as, “a little devil.” And in truth, like the art he created, Dennis could be wickedly demonic, widely clever, beautiful all at once.