I went to go see the Agnes Denes retrospective at the Shed. Here’s something I scribbled about it this AM:
Denes’s work first caught my eye in the mid-’90s, which makes sense. The eco-feminist dimensions of her work didn’t get much traction in the Reagan–Bush era, plus or minus, but its other main dimension — bloodless, OCD-ish visualization — was ripe for passing interest amidst the rise of the net. In the Shed show, that divide becomes an abyss: the lower floor is given over to a majesty that hasn’t gone mad quite yet, the upper floor is alive with hilarious experiments.
The Shed — a nuseum made of money not history — is understandably proud of finally giving Denes her due, which includes a few commissions on the majestic floor. They’re derivative place-holders, biggish-budget items cranked out to justify a windfall. More interesting are the older works on that floor, clusters of works around a particular insight: one interesting work — one where you can still see her hand — from the early ’80s, accompanied by a few hand-free retreads from a decade or two later. In these I think we can see a pattern unlike the ones that dominate her work but all too familiar: a neglected luminary putting every iota of her talent into fleeting chances at actually making a living. I don’t know that for a fact, but it invested her precise minimalism with a pathos it otherwise lacked and made her work the context for the Shed rather than vice versa.
The upper floor is dazzling: whimsical, erudite, relentless, refractory, and much else. If you put half the vacuous masculine systems-wanking brains of Silicon Valley in a blender (a ‘smart’ one, of course), the resulting thought soup couldn’t hold a candle up to Denes’s passionate fascinations — with structures, scales, systems, orders, patterns, balance, projects, projections, and all the rest. But, like, with refractions of Lawrence Weiner–like rules, Tom Phillips micro-, nano-, and femto-drawings, Archigram–like experiments, Tim Hawkinson–like modelscapes and Andy Goldsworthy–like landscapes, along with loooong works that smack of heroic guys from Stanley Milgram to Bruce Mau. But here’s the thing: Denes, to put it mildly, wasn’t a guy. Hence the decades-long neglect of her work. And, as on the tragic floor, you can see it on the comic one as well: the first works as you enter play on stubby little Cynthia Plaster Caster–esque penis prints, ‘studies of Napoleon,’ with the flattened glans as his hat.
You get the feeling she learned early on to leave that confrontational style behind and hew to more ‘splain-friendly avenues. The result is like a lenticular image of decades, waves, schools of feminism: impulses, ideas, practices, pranks, and a thousand other barely-things flit into view, appear spectrally in moirés, and tickle your memory. The retrospective sets out to recuperate her as a feminist hero, which she both is and isn’t; the Shed tries to frame her work as the prehistory of vacuous visualization, which she both did and didn’t. Neither agenda succeeds: Denes and her work come out scathed, which gives them the one thing that makes conceptual art finally worth it but she’s never been privileged with: a patina of history.