An installation by the Hungarian-born visual artist Agnes Denes presented in the garden of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. Now based in New York, Denes is a pioneering eco-artist working with a wide range of media.
The nine-metre-tall wooden structure is filled with 600 different plant species from Istanbul’s native urban fauna (the province of Istanbul alone has greater diversity than the entire British Isles). Ten months on the pyramid has truly come into its own. A magnificent ‘work in progress’ one wishes it could just stay put. The museum has always been exemplary in its approach to gardening, every plant clearly tagged with its Latin name.
Denes, who is 92 this year, was described by the New York Times as ‘a kind of global gardener’. Among her most ambitious ‘earth works’ were A Living Time Capsule, 1996, an 11,000-conifer forest in Finland, and A Forest for Australia, 1998 – 6,000 native saplings planted in the form of five spiraling steps in Melbourne. She first constructed her pyramid in 2015 at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York. It then reappeared in Kassel in 2017. Filled with four tons of earth, each of its wooden terraces carefully planted out.
Next to the pyrmad, inscribed in marble for the museum, her Manifesto. It will become a permanent fixture in the museum’s glorious oasis of a garden.
MANIFESTO, by Agnes Denes, 1996
working with a paradox defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years – measuring time in the extreme distances – long before and beyond living existence
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
striving to surpass human limitations by searching the mysteries and probing the silent universe, alive with hidden creativity
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
probing to locate the center of things – the true inner core of inherent but not yet understood meaning – and expose it to be analyzed
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting, and re-examining
understanding that everything has further meaning, that order has been created out of chaos, but order, when it reaches a certain totality must be shattered by new disorder and by new inquiries and developments
finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns
understanding the finitude of human existence and still strivingto create beauty and provocative reasoning
recognizing and interpreting the relationship of creative elements to each other: people to people, people to god, people to nature, nature to nature, thought to thought, art to art
seeing reality and still being able to dream
desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence
persisting in the eternal search
AGNES DENES, 1996
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
