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Feminist art manifestos: Agnes Denes, "A Manifesto"

In our continuing series of feminist art manifestos, we present “A Manifesto” (1970) by Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist. Denes has described her work as ranging “between individual creation and social consciousness. It addresses the challenges of global survival and is often monumental in scale.”

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

using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition

achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness

being creatively obsessive

questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting and re-examining

understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create beauty and provocative reasoning

finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns

desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence

seeing reality and still being able to dream

persisting in the eternal search

Above image: Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982, by Agnes Denes

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