Artist Agnes Denes: ‘When I first started talking about ecological concepts, they were laughing at me’

To visit the artist Agnes Denes is to step back in time. In the foyer of a skinny but handsome brick building in the heart of New York’s SoHo, among the fire notices and building permits, a piece of paper with the letters “AIR” is stuck on top of the noticeboard. It means Artist In Residence, and when Denes moved here in 1980, nearly every lobby in the street would have had one too, as required by law for those living in former industrial buildings.

Almost all the artists’ lofts have long been taken over by boutiques and restaurants and co-working spaces, but you can step from the elevator directly into the one Denes still occupies on the fifth floor. It is a New York archetype — a long room with big windows front and back — and is piled high with her life’s work. There are boxes of papers and projects, 3D models and framed works, and a rail of clothing carefully clad in plastic sleeves.

To talk to Denes, though, is to be very firmly in the present: the themes she has worked around since the late 1960s are now more urgent than ever. One of the earliest adopters of an ecological art practice, from the off she has considered the tensions between man and nature. “I was the first one to think seriously about what we are doing to the environment,” she says. (Artists such as Joseph Beuys and Hans Haacke might disagree.)

Her most famous work — “Wheatfield: a Confrontation”, in which she grew a handsome crop of wheat on a two-acre site near Wall Street and the World Trade Center — was made in 1982 and deliberated on the greed of developers and the danger of creating an urbanism that only considered the needs of capitalism, not people. “Wheatfield” was harvested on a sweaty August day and yielded more than 1,000lbs of grain; afterwards the area was turned into Battery Park City.

Yet the ephemeral “Wheatfield” has never quite disappeared. A version was planted in London’s Hackney in 2009 and in Milan in 2015. This summer yet another iteration, involving 1,100 sturdy pallets laden with soil and grain (already growing off-site), will take over the plaza outside the Messe building in which Art Basel takes place. In this sanitised context, it is less a radical act than art-historical reminder, as its name, “Honouring Wheatfield: a Confrontation”, suggests.

“The value of her art is about the conversation it creates,” says Samuel Leuenberger, the curator in charge of the commission. “Some images are better than 10,000 words, and Agnes’s wheat fields are an emblematic version of that.” Indeed, the photographs of the flame-haired Denes striding through her Manhattan field more than 40 years ago — taken for Life magazine — have endured.

Meanwhile, in the Montana town of Bozeman, Denes has organised a more community-focused project at not-for-profit space Tinworks. It is called “Wheatfield: an Inspiration” and as well as planting a crop, the artist has invited the whole community of Bozeman, where agriculture is rapidly giving way to real estate, to participate, to plant freely distributed seeds in any available fallow land, front yards, back yards or planters around the town. “I want people to believe in themselves,” says Denes, indicating her faith in the possibility of humans improving their lot.

Denes turned 93 in May and she is frail but spirited. She sits in a wheelchair, buried among the boxes, her thick hair still red with a dazzling white flash at the front. “When I first started talking about ecological concepts in the 1960s, they were laughing at me,” says Denes, a combative interviewee who often turns my questions into questions of her own. “They said, ‘How stupid. What does nature have to do with this or that?’”

Her male peers were absorbed in Land Art, taking their work out of the studio and into the most expansive spaces they could. With huge industrial diggers they created grand statements in remote places, churning up land and nature in the service of their artistic egos. Denes, by contrast, was making projects about the land, often accessible, often in the city.

“All my work becomes more timely,” she says before describing a project she first conceptualised when she was 20 to make a film of migrating birds, a study of environmental pressures, alienation and adaptation. “One encounters similar problems in large cosmopolitan cities,” she noted in a 1979 piece. The work has now, finally, been made, thanks to the Konsthall in Lund, Sweden, where it will be shown this summer.

Denes knows what it feels like to fly away. She was born in Budapest but her family escaped to Sweden because of the second world war, and later moved to the US. “Originally I expressed myself through poetry,” she says, “but I lost my language, if you like, by moving from one country to another. So I started becoming creative in a visual way instead. Art is just another way to explore the universe.”

Her current productivity is partly driven by the spotlight thrown on her by an exhibition at The Shed in New York in 2019. “To me she was a prophet,” says Emma Enderby, its curator. It is also a fact of age. “When you’re young you don’t care. You create when you feel like it,” says Denes. “Let’s first get drunk, let’s first get laid. And then we’ll create. Today, I create first. I amaze myself.”

‘Honouring Wheatfield: a Confrontation’ will be on display in Basel from June 10 over the summer, artbasel.com