It’s difficult to even plant a seed in contemporary art without referring to Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield (1982). The two-acre wheat field that she set out in lower Manhattan has become immortalised in photographs of the golden grain swaying in the wind in front of the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty.
Denes’s work is currently on view alongside Swedish artist Åsa Sonjasdotter at Lund Konsthall. Both artists are deeply rooted in questions of environmental justice and have many affinities, not least manifested in the grain that Sonjasdotter is growing in custom-built planters in the konsthall’s inner courtyard. But there are also significant differences in the style and tone of the works.
Wheatfield is presented through a film in which Denes talks about the work, and in the iconic photographs installed in the front gallery. Despite all the exposure, these images retain their power; their striking contrasts convey what made the original work so sensational. Denes has described how stockbrokers and others who had grown attached to the work over the course of the summer stood and wept as it was harvested on a hot day in August.
Denes was born in Budapest but at the end of the Second World War fled to Sweden where her family stayed for a few years before finally settling in the United States. While in Sweden, she became interested in the behaviour of migratory birds and devised an idea for a work that had not been realised until now. The film Bird Migration follows birds in southern Sweden to the sound of the 93-year-old artist reading a text linking the project to her own development as an eco-artist (“a bird still flying, now in her ninth decade”).
Denes’s slow delivery and deep voice fills the large back gallery and spills into a walk-through gallery where Sonjasdotter’s film Cultivating Abundance (2022) is on view. The film is about archival research, industrial farming techniques for breeding monoculture crops, and links to racial biology. My guess is that few visitors will see the whole thing, which has a running time of an hour.
Sonjasdotter’s practice deals with both archival research and actual plant cultivation. For thirty Swedish crowns, visitors can pick up a bag of seed potatoes of a variety that was developed in East Germany and has become one of the most popular among potato growers in former Soviet Union countries. It must be replanted every season to survive, and an accompanying pamphlet describes the spud as an archive of its own cultivation process. Sonjasdotter emerges as a custodian of archives, undoubtedly an important role, but as exhibition art it withers in the shadow of the older artist.
Both artists believe that art can change the world, and their presentations are persuasive in that regard. But Denes’s work is characterised by an exhilarating sense of pretension and authority. She calls herself a pioneer and describes the artist’s role as that of a “scientific and technological seer and sensitiser.” She lives up to the motto that she offered in a 2019 interview for Frieze: “Art has to be strong enough to make room for itself. It has to be strong enough to withstand the public’s lack of understanding.”
For her hilarious Psychograph (1971–72), a questionnaire was sent to (mainly male) artists and critics who were asked to complete sentences about art and life. Psychologists then analysed the responses. None of the respondents did exactly what they were told. One failed to answer at all and wrote a note saying that he suffered from a “deep horror” of questionnaires and forms. The psychologist concludes that he “seems overly impressed with his own success and importance.”
What’s most striking in Lund is how Denes doesn’t at all seem to belong to the past. It’s as if we’re still standing in that wheat field, as if there’s still hope. This is partly because the exhibition highlights how Sonjasdotter carries the torch forward. But above all it has to do with how Denes’s commanding persona fills a void in me. I didn’t realise until now that this is the kind of artist I’ve been yearning for.
