Philosophy in the land: since the 1960s, Agnes Denes has been exploring the relationship between nature and culture through a variety of mediums. A show documenting her public art concludes its tour at New York's Chelsea Art Museum

Given that these thousands of figures constitute a vast social structure, their individual differences are ultimately not important. The difference is a secondary or subsidiary condition--except to the individuals themselves. Denes stresses that theoretically no figure can be removed. The Pascalian pyramid is so integral a structure that it would risk collapse if a single figure were replaced by empty space.

One cannot neglect the fact that the pyramid involves a reference to ancient Egyptian society. In the early Romantic period, the age of the Schlegels and Schopenhauer, Egypt was regarded as having been a society that embodied a more or less unchanging order in which class distinctions were embedded and, it seems, inescapable. Yet a harmony of sorts nevertheless appears to have prevailed. Similarly, Denes's 16,000 figures, each meticulously and precisely drawn, each different from every other, seem to accept their place in an ordered universe.

Several of Denes's pyramid works involve seeing only the isosceles triangle of one face of the pyramid; that triangle in turn is divided internally into several hundred smaller isosceles triangles, each containing a written word or symbol. In the ink drawing The Human Argument (1969-70) the upward-pointing triangles are filled with propositions in the symbolic logic worked out by Russell and Whitehead; the downward-pointing triangles meanwhile are left empty. In another drawing, 4,000 Years--"If the Mind ..." (1975), the upward-pointing triangles contain symbols from Egyptian hieroglyphics struggling to express a sentiment that could not naturally be expressed in the vocabulary of these symbols.

Here again is the paradox, in another form. Denes's 4,000 Years is an attempt to translate into ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics the following observation by the artist: "If the mind possesses universal validity, art reveals a universal truth. I want that truth." And yet, Denes has also repeatedly stated the counterview that there is no eternal, unchanging and universally applicable truth. "Truth as ultimate reality," she says, "is inaccessible to us." (13) But she also writes, "I want that truth." (14) In such a context, perhaps one should think of Pascal saying: "It is not certain that nothing is certain." Presumably the confrontation between an accessible truth and an inaccessible truth is part of the paradox on which she says her work is founded. Perhaps, also, she felt, as many have, that ancient Egyptian culture had an unchanging idea of truth to a degree beyond any other society.

In another pyramid ink drawing, Strength Analysis--A Dictionary of Strength (1971-81), each upward-pointing triangle contains an English word meaning, roughly, "strength," all gleaned from a reading of Webster's Unabridged English Dictionary over a period of 11 years; downward-pointing triangles, again, are empty. In ancient times, goddesses were often represented by a downward pointing triangle (referred to by scholars as the pubic triangle), the male principle by the upward-pointing triangle, though this occurs far less commonly. In other words, leaving the downward-pointing triangles empty suggests the womb as an empty space of potentiality, while the upward-pointing triangles suggest male elements poised for union.