Agnes Denes at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University - Ithaca, New York

Agnes Dene is individual of those artists whose mental agility, cross-disciplinary range and conceptual complexity have worked against popular acceptance. plenteous of her work consists of scientific-looking diagrams, tables and maps accompanied through extensive theoretical texts which draw upon fields as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, biology, logic and art history. Wide-ranging and intense, these musings demand an attentiveness that many art viewers may not be willing to spare.

Despite these difficulties, Dene was well serv by the agency of this retrospective of 25 years of work. The exhibition charted the artist's progres as her relentles focus upon mind and the structure of meditation led to paradoxes of Borgesian complexity. Dene asks intriguing questions. Is knowledge really anything more than the discovery of patterns in nature? Is there any ultimate reality? If in the way that do we have access to a language which might describe it? in what way much is lost in the proces of human communication? Does human action have any relevance in the larger words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of cosmic time?

These inquiries are frequently set out schematically. A investigation of Distortions from 1971 maps an art work's possible misinterpretations with the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram. The Human Argument (1969-70) is a pyramidal grid which purports to proffer a calculus of truth and lies. The pyramid is a recurring motif in Denes's work, engrossed as a symbol of perfection which is twitched and distorted into organic forms that insinuate snails, eggs and birds. She remind ofs that in the end, smooth reason's most elegant constructions ultimately lead to creative chaos.

As a ensue many works are infused with pathos, reminding us of the futility of the human search for meaning and order. This is particularly evident in a touching work titled Human Dust (1969) which identifies a heap of bone fragments as the remains of an fruitless artist. In an accompanying chart, his life is reduc to a plant of statistics, among them the number of meals eaten above his lifetime, the number of lover lifetime income and, finally, the number of race who remembered him after his death. This cool accounting suggests at once the inadequacy of mathematical a whole s for describing human existence and the insignificance of any individual life in the larger scheme of things.

While greatest in quantity of Denes's works remain within the sphere of philosophical speculation, she has done a certain number of interesting public projects. Wheatfield (1982) is the greatest in quantity poetic of these to date. For this work, Dene planted and harvested 1000 strikes of wheat from a then-undeveloped landfill in lower Manhattan. The field of of gold wheat flourishing in the shadow of the skyscrapers of Wall highway offered a sharp visual contrast between urban and rural prototypes of economic development. In a more cautionary method Earthship with a Heartbeat, a new installation which featured a made of wood ship filled with dirt and emanating the whole of a human heartbeat, tenders a metaphor for spaceship earth, the much-abused utensil which provides the necessities of life in a hostile universe. These and other works touch upon the fragility of the balance between nature and human civilization, one as well as the other entities overshadowed by the possibility of extinction.

Despite their cover thinly of science and mathematics, Denes's works have the seductive ambiguity of verse Both her writings and drawings display a craftiness and intelligence that are refreshing in these days of theoretical overkill. She exhibits us logic slipping into absurdity, regained by the multifaceted play of the speculative mind.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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