Pieces in the International Art Show for the End of World Hunger
By Rachel Buchanan
A public sculpture by one of the world'due south leading environmental artists is neglected and forgotten in the western suburbs of Melbourne and the adult female who fabricated it, Agnes Denes, wants it repaired and cared for.
New York-based Denes, 83, created A Forest For Australia in 1998. Working with volunteers, she planted 5 intersecting spirals of 6000 native seedlings on a barren 400-metre x 80-metre site at the City West Water sewage treatment plant on Queens Street, Altona.
Ecology sculpture A Forest For Australia. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer.
The woods comprised paperbarks, she oaks and ruby gums, planted in a step pyramid formation that moved up from the outer circle of squat paperbarks to a fundamental ring of gums.
"I institute mathematical forests for the reason that I want to blend man intellect with the majesty of nature," Denes told me past email from her Soho loft, where she is planning another little gardening projection – a forest of 50,000 copse for New York City.
Tom Bills' sculpture With and With Each Other in its original spot about the Queen Victoria market. Credit:John Woudstra
Denes, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and many other major institutions, was one of 60 international artists invited to Melbourne for The Bridge: Construction in Procedure VI. About 40 locals also took part.
Environmental artist Richard Thomas chaired the anarchic, anti-establishment x-day functioning art and sculpture event. It was run from the Footscray Community Arts Centre. Project managing director Katherine Armstrong negotiated access to the Altona site and the treatment establish provided sponsorship of the installation.
The Span received $420,000 in funding from state and federal government arts agencies and 20 other sponsors and an eclectic group of artists created work in unorthodox places.
Nearly pieces were ephemeral and many were purposefully opaque. Chinese artist Gu Dexin planted a field of poppies – made from pork meat, fabric, steel wire and staples – at the Royal Australasian Higher of Surgeons in the CBD. "Gu Dexin does not explain his work," the catalogue said.
A Google view of the sculpture.
Others were more literal. For a piece titled To the Artists of the Twentieth Century, Israel'due south Avraham Eilat erected a cavalcade of 20 toilets adjacent to Crown Casino.
Anita Dube (Republic of india) launched 2 illuminated, chest-shaped rafts at the signal where the Maribyrnong and Yarra rivers meet the bay, thus creating an unusual obstruction for the cargo ship that was sailing up the river at that moment. Her countryman K. Due south. Umesh carved a Chakravyuha (war plan) into the boggy soil of Andersons Swamp, Braybrook.
These three works are long gone, like almost everything else created for the result. "They were temporary works. It wasn't well-nigh creating monuments. It was near the procedure, a moment in time," Thomas said.
American artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) also took part. He made a maquette for Vertical Blocks #three, a vi.v 10 4.7 10 1.8-metre sculpture that was to have been built from physical blocks and installed near the West Gate Bridge. The project never eventuated but some other more awe-inspiring work in concrete was.
American Tom Bills is a practitioner of "hardcore sculptural minimalism". With the help of staff and students at Holmesglen TAFE, Bills created a 56-tonne physical sculpture that was erected on the roundabout at the corner of Franklin and Queen streets at the Queen Vic marketplace.
With and With Each Other, two shapes described variously as a bisected kidney edible bean, a pair of lungs or twin foetuses, is not a popular work of public fine art. In 2002 the City of Melbourne put it in storage and in 2008 the City of Maribyrnong took it off its hands. The bisected kidney bean is now on a patch of grass exterior Saltwater Childcare Middle at the intersection of Geelong and Ballarat roads.
Bills' work has received enough of critical attending but Denes' A Wood for Commonwealth of australia, the only other piece left from The Bridge project, has received none.
I have lived in Altona for nine years and knew nothing about it until a chance conversation.
The forest is even forgotten by the Victorian government entity on whose country it is planted. When I rang Urban center W Water'due south head office in Footscray to adjust a visit, a staff member said: "Woods? There'southward no forest at the Altona treatment plant."
Land art expert Chris McAuliffe, who was the director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art from 2001-2013, recalled the piece of work only when I rang him to enquire nigh Denes. "I forgot it," he said of the Altona wood. "I am ashamed to say I have been to the Us to see all the land art sites but I have not visited the one on my doorstep. Ain't that an Australian matter?"
Denes' offset large-scale piece of environmental art was Rice/Tree/Burial with Time Capsule (1968) in Sullivan Canton, New York. She planted rice, chained trees and cached haiku poems. She was i of the only women creating this sort of work in a scene dominated past much better-known male sculptors such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who used earthmoving equipment to brand monumental work in remote spots. Smithson built Screw Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1970, while Heizer bulldozed 244,000 tonnes of stone to make Double Negative in Moapa Valley, Nevada, in 1969.
Denes made her name with Wheatfield: A Confrontation (1982), in which she planted ii acresof wheat on a erstwhile landfill only a cake from Wall Street. The creative person harvested almost 1000 pounds of healthy wheat. The wheat was then sent around the world – and planted – every bit part of the International Art Bear witness for the End of World Hunger. In Critical Research (1990), Denes said Wheatfield "represented food, energy, commerce, world merchandise, economics. Information technology referred to mismanagement and world hunger."
Writing in Artforum magazine in 2008, Jeffrey Weiss, a curator at New York's Guggenheim Museum, said Wheatfield was one of land art's great transgressive masterpieces.
McAuliffe said Denes had taken country art to a new level. Early male person land artists such as Smithson and Heizer were ambivalent, if not antagonistic, to environmental issues, he said. "When approached to make works to redress ecology damage, they had mixed feelings about information technology. They didn't want to be the clean-up creative person. They didn't want their work to exist some sort of artistic Band-aid. Denes managed to resolve that," he said.
Denes, whose philosophical writings and extraordinarily precise drawings have been published in art, mathematics and scientific discipline journals around the earth, makes art whose meaning is revealed slowly, as it grows or falters. In 1996, two years earlier she arrived in Melbourne, Denes completed Tree Mount in Republic of finland, where she created a conical mount from soil tipped over a gravel pit. She then arranged for 11,000 people to plant xi,000 trees on it. She has speculated that equally the centuries pass, Tree Mountain could become "a thermometer, so to speak, of the evolution of fine art".
Her Melbourne projection as well reaches out to future generations with a legacy, but the message takes time to decipher. A Wood for Australia is a piece of work of public art hidden in plain view behind a chain-mesh fence dotted with danger signs and security cameras. Visitors need to sign in and out. Each day, 13 million litres of toxic sewage from Altona, Laverton and Indicate Melt is treated here, in a big tank behind the wood. When I flush the loo, it ends up in that tank.
"I'm amazed that it is still in that location," said Thomas, who invited Denes to participate in The Span. "A lot of the projects were community-driven and that projection was pretty under the radar. It was all done on a shoe string, with volunteers."
On my first visit to the forest, I had to article of clothing a loftier-viz vest and gaitors to protect my lower legs from serpent bites – a novel kit for viewing art. I took photos within the five spirals, or what remains of them.
The western-nearly band is intact. It feels special to be in that location. I walked through a circle of luxuriant, dumbo newspaper barks and into a smaller band of she oaks. These elegant copse have slender black trunks and leaves that are thin and limp, like the stringy remnants of prayer flags on a verandah. In the middle of the spiral are the red gums. The tallest is at least eight metres.
A pleasant screw path has been laid between the trees. No ane knows who put it in. Agnes Denes didn't.
The commencement spiral is fragile and peaceful but the rest are struggling.
The forest was planted one yr in to a drought that did not pause until 2010. Hundreds, or more probably thousands, of trees accept died. Landscaping contractors replanted some she oaks and red gum seedlings about ii years agone merely many of those have also died. The 2 Urban center West employees who showed me around were unable to give me more details near the seedlings.
"I had few helpers, a few volunteers and planted by and large past myself in the hot sunday," Denes said of the initial planting. "They gave me a silver umbrella to protect from the sun … but it was heavy, and ane can't walk or plant holding an umbrella. I still have it though. It will probably current of air up in a museum."
After my get-go trip, Denes asked me to visit the forest again and to mark all the surviving trees on five hand-drawn circles. I cannot draw only I agreed.
Nevertheless, the discovery of satellite photos on Google Maps saved me from the horrifying task of making a drawing for Denes. The bird's-eye images are a powerful illustration of the fate of this neglected forest. The spirals thin out as the basalt clay soil becomes more alkaline metal. Inside what is left of the eastern-near spiral, the dirt cracked under my boots. Tiny thick white shells dotted the dry surface. They are 10,000 years quondam, a reminder that this piece of earth was in one case under the sea.
In the creative person argument published in The Span catalogue (2000), Denes said: "I observe it important to create these works all over the world as examples of what needs to be done: on destroyed, barren land where resources extraction has taken its toll; in the nervous tension of cities; on deforested soil…"
She said her art reached out to future generations. "These works question the status quo, elicit and initiate new thinking processes, and offer provocative, meaningful communication."
Even though information technology is thin rather than dense, even though there are equally many phantom copse as real ones, the Denes forest demands recognition. Information technology challenges the status quo. It challenged me to human action.
I visited the site twice and sent dozens of emails, made many phone calls, ready up meetings, read virtually indigenous plants, all to research the history of the strange forest. As I finished this piece, I got the post-obit statement from City Westward Water managing director Anne Barker:
"The type of trees that were selected every bit part of Agnes Denes A Forest for Australia at the Altona Treatment Found in 1998 were not suited to soil and ecology conditions. This, combined with xi years of drought, has meant some copse take not thrived.
"We have received advice from a local arborist and are undertaking soil testing to determine the copse most suited to this location. A maintenance plan will commence in the cooler months to reinstate this important piece of conceptual art."
I sent this statement to Denes and asked for her response. She accepted City West Water's proposal but wanted the trees to exist replanted in the spirals she drew. "I usually would like to plant endangered species in order to retain their seed for the future, just will let them institute what they suggest. I would like to receive images of the suggested trees, their names, and if they can add endangered (trees) that would survive, I would be happy," she told me.
She was sorry her forest had been neglected but was philosophical near it too.
"I am grateful for anyone doing anything," she said. "I tin't wait people to practice what I do, unselfish acts for the adept of humanity. I am driven. I just desire people to be loyal at best."
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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/agnes-denes-public-sculpture-neglected-20141125-11kaxu.html
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