Restoration

Conceptual and reclamation artist Agnes Denes has moved from works exploring ecology and landscape to architecture and historic preservation.  Denes received widespread attention and praise for Wheatfield:  A Confrontation in the early 1980s, an installation in which she planted and harvested a two-acre field of wheat in the shadows of the World Trade Center.  While Wheatfield addressed resource management and the alienation of modern life from production, her more recent Tree Mountain offered a more optimistic message.  Located in an abandoned Finnish gravel quarry, the project used 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 volunteers to create a contoured mountainous landscape, a vibrant symbol of community regeneration in which each tree bore information about the individual who planted it, creating an intergenerational monument. 

Denes’s most recent project, however, blends ecological art more explicitly with community development and an awareness of history.  Her twenty-five-year masterplan for the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie, a 100 kilometer chain of fortifications in the Netherlands, commemorates several layers of historic evolution while incorporating wildlife preserves, green space development and forestation, and the creation of a symbolic crystal fortress.  Working to preserve structures built between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Denes’s vision relies on flood control and water management to protect the fabric of the buildings while a revised urban plan will integrate the forts into twenty-first century life, improving access for visitors while protecting the sites from potentially disruptive nearby construction.

Denes’s work in reclamation art and preservation more explicitly addresses the idea of history:  the awareness of continuity and change that shapes personal and social evolution by providing a sense of connection to the past and a reminder of the effects of one’s present actions, a dual recognition of legacy and possibility.