MANIFESTO, MATHEMATICS IN MY WORK

& OTHER ESSAYS

by Agnes Denes

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2007. Copyright © 1970, 1983, 2000, 2005 Agnes Denes. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

It is a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to publish a second installment of the writings of Agnes Denes, one of the premier visual artists not only of our moment but of the last decades of the twentieth century. The several essays that appear in this issue of Hyperion are just a small portion of her voluminous and insightful literary efforts, much of which has never been in publication or has been available only momentarily, distributed at her many art exhibitions and public projects. Denes’s writings present her views on the purposes of her art and the responsibilities of art in itself and of the intellect at our time in history. Her literary accomplishments demonstrate not only the extraordinary range of intellectual disciplines that are marshaled in her art and her thinking but also the clarity of coherent and unified philosophical objective that has driven the wide range of her work.

In particular, it is a pleasure for us to present the essays included here, for unlike her essay “Notes on a Visual Philosophy,” which appeared in Hyperion, volume I, issue 3, October 2006, as a republication of a work long out of print, all but one of the works in the present issue here have never seen broad publication. It is a privilege for Hyperion to have the chance to place them into the public discourse for the first time.

These works find an appropriate home in Hyperion for they speak at some length about Denes’s use of mathematics and the role and value of mathematics in art—a subject that has been broached several times previously in this publication. In many ways, Denes is the model of the kind of mathematically oriented and directed artist analyzed in this journal, and her thoughts on the ways in which mathematics can be employed to achieve incisive and recognizably aesthetic objectives is in complete accord with the views we have presented in past issues.

Four essays are included here:

Manifesto

This brief work is a statement of purpose from the beginning of Denes’s career, laying out the goals to which she intended to dedicate her art. They have guided her artistic and literary efforts ever since—they are the node points of the life of her mind.

Mathematics in My Work: Perfection and Beauty

This is a recent statement that presents comprehensively Denes’s understanding of the role of mathematics in art. It identifies many of the most significant and compelling mathematically directed works of art she has created over the course of her career and makes clear the intended purposes of each. In particular, the essay examines mathematics as the point of intersection for and the guiding principles for integrating “the human intellect with the majesty of nature.”

Artist Statement: for Poetry Walk

Poetry Walk is a project executed at the University of Virginia in the year 2000. Characterized by Denes as “A Project for the Millennium,” Poetry Walk consists of 20 granite stones, each one approximately four feet by five feet, which have been incised with poetry and quotations by writers from the canon and embedded in the university lawn. The artist statement distributed at the opening of the project goes well beyond a presentation of the ideas behind Poetry Walk—it is a meditation on the intellectual and ecological purposes of art, of the needed balance of “thinking globally and acting independently,” of integrating “individual creation and social consciousness.”

What it Means to Plant a Forest

This essay is a statement written for a 1983 environmental project: Tree Mountain. Tree Mountain consists of 10,000 fir trees planted on a mountain in the Pinziö gravel pits in Ylöjärvi, Finland. The trees are arranged in an intricate elliptical pattern derived from a complex mathematical formula, realizing on a geographical scale Denes’s objective of integrating art with nature in such a way as to create an intellectually coherent ecological vision.

For those who are unaware of Denes and her contributions to contemporary art and thought, we can do little better than repeat a portion of the introductory statement that accompanied Denes’s first appearance in Hyperion:

Agnes Denes has been one of the noted innovators in contemporary art over the past several decades, and she has been and is one of the most prominent philosophical forces in the field. Her work assembles a stunning array of intellectual disciplines and puts them in service of an aesthetic ambition that challenges the viewer’s ability to comprehend the depth of her learning and the power of her imaginative transformation of her materials.

Throughout her career, Denes has reset the boundaries of artistic practice. Consistently, she has been ahead of her time, and, in many areas, remains to this day unrivalled among contemporary artists in her use of sophisticated materials of imaginative thought. She is one of the earliest of the Conceptual Artists, initiating many of the strategies that have become standard artistic practice, and a pioneer of ecological art. She has been an innovator in the use in art of serial imagery, linguistic analysis, and Deconstructive tactics, and, perhaps above all, in the artistic approach to philosophical issues, mathematics, and advanced theories of physical science.

As an added benefit from the point of view of this journal, Denes’s thinking demonstrates a distinctly Nietzschean orientation. In these essays, as well as throughout her art and her writings, she speaks against weakness, sentimentality, and sheer conventionality of thought and for strength of mind, of imagination, of artistic creation, of compassion and responsibility, and of moral courage.

There have been few contemporary artists as courageous as Agnes Denes.

—Mark Daniel Cohen

THE ESSAYS:

MANIFESTO

MATHEMATICS IN MY WORK: PERFECTION AND BEAUTY

ARTIST STATEMENT: FOR POETRY WALK

WHAT IT MEANS TO PLANT A FOREST

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2007)

To download the entire set of four essays, Open PDF: | “ Manifesto, Mathematics in My Work, and Other Essays”

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