The Art World: What If…?! Season 3 with Agnes Denes
The artist Agnes Denes saw it coming. Machines taking over. Technology converging with consciousness. History on a pendulum swinging perilously back and forth.
In this intimate conversation recorded with host Charlotte Burns in Denes' downtown Manhattan loft apartment and studio space, they talk about her work. When Denes wrote about these things more than 50 years ago, it was prescient, unsettling, and brilliant.
Now the artist is in her mid-90s and is still writing and making art every day. And she’s still asking the questions that matter: What is humanity's purpose? What is love? How do we survive?
Denes planted wheat in downtown Manhattan on a landfill that would become Battery Park City. She made ecological art before climate change was front-page news. Her work spans conceptual art, poetry, drawings, installations, sculptures, writings, and more. Twenty thousand pieces, mostly never seen.
Today? She hands out wheat seeds like promises. Plant hope. Harvest peace. Become part of the art.
The questions never change, she says, only their importance shifts.
What if we listened?
Charlotte Burns: Welcome to the new season of The Art World: What If, a podcast all about imagining new and better futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests saying “what if”]
Our first guest, the artist Agnes Denes, saw it coming: machines taking over, technology converging with consciousness, history on a pendulum swinging perilously back and forth. When she wrote about this more than 50 years ago, it was prescient, unsettling, and brilliant. Now in her mid-90s, she’s still writing every day and still asking the questions that count. What is humanity’s purpose? What is love? How do we survive?
Denes planted wheat in downtown Manhattan on a landfill that would become Battery Park City. She made ecological art before climate change was front-page news. Her work spans conceptual art, poetry, drawings, installations, sculptures, writings, and so much more. 20,000 pieces, most never seen.
Today, she hands out wheat seeds like promises. Plant hope, harvest peace, become part of the art. “The questions never change,” she says, “only their importance shifts.” What if we listened?
[Musical Interlude]
Agnes, it's such a pleasure to be here today.
Agnes Denes: Thank you.
Charlotte Burns: You posed a series of philosophical questions in 1968 in the work Rice/Tree/Burial [with Time Capsule, 1969-1979], such as: What do you consider humanity's most important achievement? What is love? What is humanity's purpose? How do you feel about death? Should we be more practical or more visionary?
And I wanted to ask you, would you still ask those questions today, and have your answers changed?
Agnes Denes: We never have the answers. The questions change. They change importance. They change direction. But the questions are always there, and the questions are always the same.
Charlotte Burns: Do you feel we should be more practical or more visionary?
Agnes Denes: We should be both. Obviously.
We should be as much as we can possibly be. And we have to be very strong. Humanity has to be very strong and less impressionable.
We are too impressionable right now. And that reminds me more [of] my sheep work, [Sheep In the Image of Man, 1998] than Rice/Tree/Burial, when I compare humanity to sheep.
Charlotte Burns: Tell me more about that.
Agnes Denes: I was at the [American] Academy in Rome, and I brought sheep into the Academy.
I brought sheep—dirty, smelly sheep—into the pristine gardens of the Academy. They represented humanity. As we are running, we don't have any vision, we don't have any space.
We are running the way sheep do, with our nose in the back of the sheep in front of us, and that is how humanity is propelling itself.
You have to read the text to go with sheep to understand this project, and it was done like 20 or 30 years ago, and it's so appropriate today.
Charlotte Burns: That reminds me of something you wrote in the 1970s about technology. You were an early adopter of computer technology, and you forecast then—more than 50 years ago—some of today's problems, in your writings.
For example, you wrote:
The general direction of development is towards the convergence in function of man and his machines. With the humanization of machines comes the dehumanization of man. Wouldn't it be a shame if mankind were beginning to understand its own mind and the nature of consciousness just as it was losing its humanity? In the distant future, when Homo Sapien has long been extinct and our only descendants are intelligent machines, those sentient beings may remember us with awe and reverence for humanity was but a form of organic life with such a simple chemistry that it could be created spontaneously from the dusts of the earth. And yet through the random forces of evolution, it somehow wondrously developed a good enough brain to create machine intelligence, a higher form of intellect that eventually succeeded its creator.
You wrote that in the early 1970s. I read it the other week, and I was dumbfounded by how prescient that was.
What made you write that then, and what are your views on technology and humanity now?
Agnes Denes: How should I respond to that?
I feel that what I'm saying now is I'm paraphrasing myself, what I have already written, and when it was so well written, and so eloquently expressed, whatever I'm saying now, answering these questions is simply paraphrasing myself.
So, let's start with new questions and fresh beginnings, rather than going back to something I have written 30 or 40 years ago.
Things don't change. The problems are always the same, and I just wrote the piece the other day called “The Pendulum.” The pendulum swings back and forth. You have to deal with it. You have to deal with the ups, the downs, the sideways, and try to survive.
Charlotte Burns: I want to ask you about writing. You said how eloquently you'd written that. Do you find it difficult to write? Do you write and rewrite? What's your writing process?
Agnes Denes: It's very easy for me to write. I am a writer as much as I am anything else, and I have written several books. I must have written a couple of million words, and I'm writing every day.
Charlotte Burns: You write every day?
Agnes Denes: Every day I write, and I'm 94 years old. I write every day.
Charlotte Burns: Do you have a habit? Do you write even when you don't want to?
Agnes Denes: Writing is not a habit. It's a very difficult thing to do if you want to say something that's meaningful. Otherwise, what's the sense to write?
No, that's not true. I also write poetry, and that's for my pleasure. I just started a new form of poem. I called a 10-minute poem. It takes 10 minutes to write it. Whatever blurts out from my mind, it's hit on the paper. It's very interesting. No looking for things, no searching for words, it just comes right out.
Charlotte Burns: It's interesting that you're creating in poetry now because you've said at other points in your life that when you were a child, you wanted to be a poet, but then you lost your language as you moved countries. And then you found that your creative impulses had found other ways of blurting out and expressing…
Agnes Denes: Right.
Charlotte Burns: …themselves…
Agnes Denes: Right.
Charlotte Burns: … and you've been so creative in so many different forms. You were a painter, but then you found painting frustrating, and you wanted more than the edge of the canvas.
Which of the media in which you've worked have you found least frustrating?
Agnes Denes: I can't say that, they're all the same. It's not frustrating, it's interesting to explore. And we just found my old paintings, never shown, never seen by anybody.
Charlotte Burns: Never shown?
Agnes Denes: Never shown. I have so much work that was never seen by anybody. I have maybe 20,000 works that I'm leaving, and you only know maybe 10% of my work.
Charlotte Burns: Wow.
Agnes Denes: And I find that interesting.
Yes, you go from one form to the next, and all creative process I went through was to investigate how I would react to it.
I went into painting, I went into sculpture, I went into color. I removed color from my work for 11 years to test if I could work without color.
That is putting yourself out there. It's investigating what you're capable of doing, and I did that to myself.
And in addition to being neglected, I did…I created difficulties for myself that I see now. I call it the back-view mirror. I see my life very clearly in a back-view mirror.
Charlotte Burns: Have you always been able to see it clearly, or is that something that you have more clarity on now?
Agnes Denes: If it interested in what?
Charlotte Burns: Your back-view mirror. Can you…
Agnes Denes: That’s new.
Charlotte Burns: Is it new?
Agnes Denes: Yeah. You get that when you get as old as I am.
Charlotte Burns: What do you see in it now?
Agnes Denes: How many hours or days do we have? [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: We can be here as long as you want. [Laughs]
Agnes Denes: I see everything more clearly. Let's put it that way. It's like putting a back-view mirror to your car. You see what's behind you that you don't see when you're driving forward.
It's very interesting. Exploration and examination of anything is very interesting, and I find it more interesting every day.
I'm very fortunate to have my mind. It never failed me, and you get as old as I am, you’ll find, without holding back, without vanity, you find the true meaning of what you can produce, and I find a lot of brilliance. And if I said that 20 years ago would be stupid, but saying that at 94, I can say I find a lot of brilliance, especially when you read something from early work. It had an awful lot of insight, and it still does.
Now, how far insight gets us, that's another story. Doesn't get us very far. Endurance does. I want people to be stronger. All my work is meant to have people become survival-oriented, but not in a sense of a go-bag.
I started writing a poem when you guys appeared, and it's called “The World on a Go-Bag”. Forget it, you can't plan. There is no getaway. There is no island. There is no money. There is no vanity that you can hide behind. You have to stand up, do what you were meant to be. Each one of us different, each one of us our own way, and do the best we can. Don't question why we are here. We are here. We are product. We must survive. We are survival-oriented. It's built into our system. We must survive, and we must help each other. That is very important, and that we must learn.
Any questions?
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: You talk about the rearview mirror, and in the Book of Dust [The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter], you talked about time. “Time is a passing train. In the blink of an eye, being born and dying.” You said, “One thing seems sure, it definitely kills us.”
Your work is always navigating between mortality and infinity. When you think of creating the work, or you are doing the drawings, or you're writing the poems, or you are doing the writings, how do you think of the scale for the idea when you're conceiving the idea?
Agnes Denes: The scale?
Charlotte Burns: The scale. Because the scale of the ideas are from humanity to the infinite. What you're conceiving, they're big ideas.
Agnes Denes: I’m not thinking of any scale.
Charlotte Burns: No?
Agnes Denes: I'm not even thinking. It comes from a creative process. I'm not thinking the effect it's gonna make. I'm not thinking of how it's going to be received. I'm not thinking of its survival. I'm thinking of expressing it the best I can. That's all I'm thinking about. And that is automatic, so I'm not even thinking it. It's automatic.
Be clear, be precise, and be interesting. Maybe, if I have any thoughts. But there are no thoughts, other than expressing a concept. The concept rules the game.
I get a concept, must come out. You leave, I'm gonna get a concept, I'm gonna write it down.
That's the best I can explain it. And it's all about communication. I want to communicate with you, I want to communicate with humanity. I want to communicate with anything that moves. Even a spider.
I was just reading about spiders in parts of Africa, and I don't like spiders, and I was thinking, “How could I learn to love a spider?” And it was easy. If a spider liked another spider, I liked a spider. Interaction. Communication.
Charlotte Burns: If you view your work through that lens of communicating your ideas, what do you think you've most successfully communicated? Which work do you think has communicated the most clearly?
Agnes Denes: Well, I like the sheep. I like my [Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space:] Map Projections. I like the fact that—next to philosophy—I have a lot of humor in my work, and people sometimes miss it because they get gulfed up by the philosophy, and the humor is always there.
And humor is necessary because it's the saliva to swallow the heavy stuff. So. That’s not a very nice example, but that's the best I can come up.
Charlotte Burns: Someone said about, I think it might have been in a Shakespeare play, that laughter is a graveside pirouette.
Agnes Denes: Yes. Yes. Humor. Laughter is the same. Yes, you're right.
Charlotte Burns: I wanted to ask you also about beauty because your work relies a lot on other disciplines beyond art. It brings a lot into art, whether that's maths or philosophy, or science. And you talked about people finding mathematics stern. But if you created something beautiful, then people would be drawn in by the beauty, and then, once they're drawn in by the beauty, then you've got them thinking.
Agnes Denes: Yes, exactly. You get people—you don't really care how—you get people into your thinking, if you want to communicate honestly with people.
And beauty is one way, humor is another. And they can swallow the philosophy, which is not so easy. So, it's communication. It's all about communication. I could, I just wish I could communicate to people not to be afraid. Whatever is being done today or tomorrow or yesterday. Don't be afraid. The pendulum swings. It’s going back and forth, up and down. Things change. Learn to work with the change. Be flexible, be lovable, and plant a lot of wheat fields. [Laughs]
I'm gonna give you a gift. Here [gestures to Charlotte].
Charlotte Burns: One second.
Agnes Denes: I can't reach. It just came yesterday.
Charlotte Burns: Let me just move this.
Agnes Denes: It's very valuable. Take out one piece, honey.
Charlotte Burns: This here?
Agnes Denes: Oh, one.
Charlotte Burns: What, this?
Agnes Denes: Yep. That's wheat I planted.
Charlotte Burns: Oh my goodness.
Agnes Denes: Read it, honey.
Charlotte Burns: So you've just given me a gift, and it says:
Agnes Denes, Plant/Hope/Harvest/Peace. This wheat was harvested from artist Agnes Denes, 2024 Ecological Artwork, wheat field, and inspiration. The seed is in the ground.
Contained in this packet is Bobcat Winter Wheat harvested from Denes' installation at Tinworks Art in the fall of 2024. Bobcat was developed by the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station and released in 2019. Bobcat is a hard red winter wheat with a solid stem, improved yield potential, and bred to be drought-tolerant. The artist encourages the community to plant the seeds, tend the wheat, harvest the grains, and process them according to local customs. By participating, you become part of the art.
Agnes Denes: Okay, that's…that explains it. And that's my wheat. I grew it, and it…I want it planted all over the world.
And why wheat? It doesn't matter. It's a symbol. Why do I use pyramids in my drawings? It's a symbol. The wheat is a symbol. I could have chosen rice, I could have chosen anything else. I want wheat to be planted all over the world so that we give strength to everybody. And the wheat represents solidarity and strength with each other.
So, it's just a symbol. And I think my work is a symbol. I don't want to say things. I don't want my talk to sound like a lecture. I just want to make sure it's honest, simple, intelligent communication that I give you.
Charlotte Burns: When you talk about symbols, I want to ask you about that. It's really interesting. Behind you, there's a little banner poster saying “A pyramid is forever”, which I love.
Agnes Denes: Pyramid is unimportant as a pyramid. It's a symbol.
Charlotte Burns: And the symbol for you is hope and solidarity…
Agnes Denes: Of communication. It’s a method. It's a key. It's very important that when we communicate that we have good keys to communicate with. Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: How many good keys do you think there are?
Agnes Denes: Two and a half? I don't know. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: There's a great image of you, a famous image of you—probably the most famous image of you—standing alone in a golden wheat field in downtown Manhattan, and what would become Battery Park. You're wearing blue jeans and a pastel striped shirt. It's two acres of wheat. Behind you is the rubble of landfill, and then rising up vertically beyond that is the Financial District, and it's an image that anybody who's studied art history will know, and there's something really magical about the image. It seems like it's a dream.
Agnes Denes: What a nice way to put it.
Charlotte Burns: It feels that way.
I wanna ask you a question about that in a minute, but what I read too, the critic, Holland Cotter was living in New York that summer and he wrote, “if you stood in the middle of the field—and anyone could—you had views of the Twin Towers rising nearby and the Statue of Liberty off to the south. The scent there that hot summer was pure country (as were the bugs),” and I'd never thought about the way it must have smelled.
But what I wanted to ask you was, whenever I've seen that image, it feels magical and dreamlike. But what did it feel like for you walking amongst that field?
Agnes Denes: Very strenuous. It was very hard. I worked at the field all day, and I needed volunteers, so after I went home, I had to create sandwiches for the next day's volunteers, and then start working again early in the morning, in the field all day. It was extremely strenuous. I wrote a poem describing my process at the field, and that's what's left of it, of course. And the memory.
When we harvested, it was such a triumph. The adversity. I was chased by the people who worked at the field, I called them the mafia. They were construction mafia, and the guy was after me. I was good-looking. I was young. And he wanted to bed me the worst possible way. “Come with me to Atlantic City one weekend, and we'll leave you alone. We won't harass you anymore.” So I said, “Harass me.”
We fought all through the summer. The end of the summer, he brought me the key to the city, on a rug on his knees. [Laughs] That was my triumph.
But it was very difficult. The work itself, the attention it took. “Don't make a mistake. Don't do this. Don't do that.” It was a very difficult project, but most of my projects are difficult.
When I was at the edge of Niagara Falls facing death for eight days, that was difficult too. I was ready to die for my art, and that was in Rice/Tree/Burial. Niagara Falls didn't have barriers in those days. They probably put them up because of me. And my students, my assistants, left me there overnight, and I was alone facing the sky over me, which is gorgeous because of the falls, the turbulence it causes. And the thoughts that I had, the incredible creativity that was given me there. And I was facing death.
When I photographed my wheat field, lying in the mud, I never felt cold. I never felt wetness. I was thinking, “How will that shot come out?”
When you make art, you don't think of, if you're a real artist, you don't think of anything else…What effect it's going to have, if people will even understand it. You think of doing it, and you think of doing it the best possible way you can.
That is…remembering my art and thinking back, and doing it today. That's what I can impart best. If you want to communicate honestly, don't think of anything else but to communicate what you have to say to someone else.
Any questions?
Charlotte Burns: Yes, I do.
This idea of focusing on communicating and not whether the work is received well or anything like that, you only got your first New York retrospective in 2019, aged 88, after living in the city for more than 60 years. And you said, “A lot of your projects remained unrealized. Perhaps because I'm a woman. They would always prefer a man.”
You were part of A.I.R. Gallery, which is a nonprofit created in 1972 by and for women artists, including you, Howardena Pindell, Judith Bernstein, and several others. And you were at a historic protest that year at the Corcoran Gallery [of Art] in D.C., where 350 women artists protested the male-dominated art world, and you denounced a vaginal sensibility, saying that, “The only inner space I recognize is where my brain is and my soul.”
And I wanted to ask you, as you look back in your back-view mirror, how you reflect on your place within the women's art movement, or think of your career as a woman artist, and think about what has changed and what hasn't for women artists in that time?
Agnes Denes: It's a very good question, but I don't think of my work as women's work. I am a creative entity. I'm not a woman or a man. Sure about that. I don't think in those terms. I would be segregating against myself.
Yes, I've been pushed down, I've been ignored, and I was given, now, at the end. They usually give you success toward the end. That's the way humanity is.
And the best answer to that is, learn to live with success without it spoiling you. It's not spoiling me. I find it as difficult as it is to make art today, as it always was, and men are still favored today because that's the way humanity is wired. Can't help it. I am not saying to put up with it. I'm not saying to fight it. You just do what comes naturally. It's not much you can do. You roll with the punches.
Charlotte Burns: I meant to ask you a question when you talked about Wheatfield as well. We talked about that photograph of you, and that photo's quite unique because mostly you take photographs of your own work through your career. You talked about lying in the mud and taking a photograph, but that image I hadn't realized of you in the wheat field was unusual because it was taken by a Time photographer. And you said they came in and they told you to hold a staff in your hand and you said…
Agnes Denes: To hold what in my hand?
Charlotte Burns: To hold the staff.
Agnes Denes: Oh, the staff. Yeah. Okay.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. And you said, “That's ridiculous,” and he said, “Just hold it.”
And I thought there was something quite…I don't know. I never knew that the photograph was taken by someone who made you hold a prop, and that you thought it was ridiculous at the time. And I wondered how it felt for you.
Agnes Denes: Well, he wanted me to show that I was in charge. He didn't say it nastily; he said it nicely. And I said, “But you know, it's not just me. It's a lot of people.” And he says, “Hold it. Yeah, it's you. You inspired everybody.” But that's neither here nor there. It's like taking credit at the end of…for something is so ridiculous. If…
I'm not gonna say that. Agnes, don't say that. Don't get into that.
Nobody should take credit for humanity. So you can’t take credit for anything. Just...please, humanity! Be the best you can. Don't be so easily swayed this way or that. Stand up for what you believe in, and that belief be good.
Charlotte Burns: Do you feel hopeful at this moment of time for humanity?
Agnes Denes: I don't know. We are going through very difficult times. I'm communicating with the future with all my time capsules and letters 1,000 years into the future. I wanted 5,000, and then one million, but it's a little bit more difficult.
I did send something out into space that's one million years, but I am constantly in communication with 1,000 years in the future because I am fascinated what's going to happen to us in 1,000 years. And humanity will, most of it will be destroyed, but not all of it. We’ll survive, we’ll start all over. And probably make the same mistakes all over again.
That's the way the pendulum moves, and we just have to keep moving, keep creating. You do the best at what you do. You do the best of what you do. And that's all we can do. Be proud of it. Be proud of yourself.
Charlotte Burns: In your work and in your writings, you're a visionary. You've written things years in advance of things happening. You've been able to synthesize ideas, bringing together different disciplines and forecasting events before they've happened and pointing away ahead. And I wonder if that is a lonely place to be when then you see humanity ignoring those things.
Is it easier to communicate with the future than with the present?
Agnes Denes: No, it's just an interesting thing. It fascinates me how they're gonna see us, the mistakes we made. “Oh, why did they do that?” Why did humanity go this way or that way? I'm fascinated by what's…how they're going to see us. So it’s just interest.
I'm a very curious person. I'm one of the most curious people you've ever known. I'm never satisfied with any answer. And I was reading just recently about a piece on Einstein, and it's very interesting. He also felt that the answers were not as important as the questions. He says, “I am not so smart. I'm just very curious.” And I said the same thing, was written by the time I read what he wrote. It's very interesting.
I'm not so smart. I'm just very curious.
Charlotte Burns: When you look back now, you're in your 90s, when you look back at the you who wanted to communicate with the future when you were in your 30s, what surprises you about the world now, and you now, and the work you're making now?
Agnes Denes: Oh, nothing surprises me in the world today. There is nothing new. Absolutely nothing. We do what we're supposed to be doing. Dumb, stupid, intelligent, fascinating, exactly what we're supposed to be doing. It's what we are doing. And nobody can tell us differently. Nobody is wise enough to tell us what we should be doing differently.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: I wanted to ask you…
Agnes Denes: One more crescendo.
Charlotte Burns: One more. Well, can I have two more?
Agnes Denes: Yeah. Two crescendos.
Charlotte Burns: Okay, thanks.
So, the show's called What If. I'm gonna ask you two ‘what ifs.’
Your work is so innovative. I'm thinking of things like Future City [Snail Pyramid - Study for Self-Contained, Self-Supporting City Dwelling - A Future Habitat, 1988], to Wheatfield, to the first ecological works of art anybody made, to being a pioneer of climate-forward pieces.
What if people embraced innovation? What would the world look like?
Agnes Denes: We'll go through the process, and we go through to another phase, and another phase from that, we go through phases. And what if there is a disaster? Some of it will survive. What if it's all a myth? We find another myth.
I mean, there is no answer to the ‘what if.’ The whole world and the whole life is ‘what if.’ And it depends if you have a question mark after it, a period, or an exclamation mark. That's the only difference.
Charlotte Burns: We do “...?!” So we do all of them.
Agnes Denes: That's all the above.
Charlotte Burns: All the above.
Agnes Denes: All the above. Thank you.
Charlotte Burns: So my final question for you is, you talked at the top of the show about having 20,000 works of art.
Agnes Denes: Yeah. Maybe more.
Charlotte Burns: What do you think about your legacy? I know that you are very flexible when it comes to materials and media, or you know, you 3D printed a pyramid recently, for instance. What do you think about your instructions for how people should view those works of art in the future?
Agnes Denes: I want people to understand it, study it, and pick what's good for them and let them benefit from it. I was never after money. I don't want people to be after money. I mean, if that's what you're into, go for it, but just do what’s good for you. Take what's given to you, what you can use. And that's what I'm giving to humanity. Take from my work. Whatever benefits you. That's all I can say. And however banal it seems, good luck.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much, Agnes. I really appreciated your time today.
Agnes Denes: Thank you.
Charlotte Burns: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I had? Anything else you'd like to say?
Agnes Denes: An assistant. I'm functioning with a hundred emails a day without help, and I shouldn't have to at this stage of the game. Somebody should be able to help get me an assistant, so that's all I want out of life.
Charlotte Burns: I think you should have it.
Agnes Denes: Thank you.
[Laughs]
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Thank you to Agnes. What a privilege to speak to her—and I hope she gets an excellent assistant.
Join us next time when we’ll be talking to Allan Schwartzman about all things art, market, and museums.
Allan Schwartzman:
There are fewer and fewer artists that the market will be able to support, but there's also fewer institutions that will survive. I think that we're likely to see institutions closing or merging or being absorbed into other kinds of entities, nonprofits becoming, in a sense, for-profits. So, I think the institutions are as threatened as the individuals.
Charlotte Burns: See you next time on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art.