notes.husk.org/likes images.

jarrettfuller:

I really enjoyed this short profile of land artist Agnes Denes in the New York Times T Magazine by Karrie Jacobs:

Denes secured $10,000 in backing from the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit that has been producing works since 1977. By the early ’80s, the group had started to display creations by artists such as Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer on the Spectacolor sign in Times Square; “Wheatfield” wound up being one of the organization’s most ambitious projects.

Initially, Denes says, the Public Art Fund encouraged her to grow wheat in the quieter borough of Queens. She refused, setting her sights instead on the 92-acre Battery Park landfill, then one of the last undeveloped sections of Manhattan, an uncommonly serene slice of waterfront and the closest thing to farmland the island had to offer (it is now the site of a planned community).

The subtitle of Denes’s project — “A Confrontation” — was deliberate. The work seemed to stare down the World Trade Center, one of New York’s significant symbols of power, and force the viewer to confront difficult questions. Its placement, “one block from Wall Street, with traffic going through a block away, facing the Statue of Liberty,” Denes says, “was a meaningful attack” on the divide between rich and poor, between the pastoral and the technocratic, and how people embrace progress. The magic of the piece, then as now, was the setting: Significantly, it was the rare example of the Land Art genre that wasn’t off in some remote place, like the Great Salt Lake or the Painted Desert — or, for that matter, Queens.

The image above is striking — and I’ve found myself looking at it frequently since last Friday, when I read the piece. I’m ashamed I didn’t know Denes’s work until now but am looking forward to remedying that now.