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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 13
Lesson 1: Sculpture- Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning
- Hesse, Untitled
- Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece)
- The last work of Eva Hesse
- Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party
- Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I
- Barbara Zucker, Mix, Stir, Pour (White Floor Piece)
- Barbara Zucker, Time Signatures: Homage to Linda and Lucy. My Luminaries
- Winsor, #1 Rope
- Mario Merz, Giap’s Igloo
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Hesse, Untitled
Eva Hesse, Untitled, enamel paint, string, papier-mâché, elastic cord, 1966 (MoMA) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- How could the speakers react to such a piece of art in so many different ways? Most pieces of Eva Hesse that I've seen, she uses similar materials and imagery with the objects. This piece had me thinking of minimalism and just forms instead of the things the speakers saw.
I guess this is the beauty of interpretation, but what am I supposed to take home with me from the speakers here?(16 votes)- What I "take home" from many of these videos is the ability to look at the art beyond the surface. It gives me ideas to consider and think about. What was the artist thinking? What was the goal?
The type of questions and dialogue going on here is very similar to the dialogue you might have about a novel. By looking at the art and asking questions it gives me a deeper sense of things around me. In a way it reminds me of some literature classes where the teacher focused on the meanings of colors in the text. It gave me something to add to my toolbox of ways to interpret and think about the work.(1 vote)
- why are some paintings(art) untitled? why don't they have titles?(1 vote)
- There are many possibile answers to this question. The way i like to see it, is that it is that "no title" is still a title. You should therefore consider what exactly the "not giving a title to your artworks" communicates to the viewer. Some times, for example it may just as well be about freedom of interpretation: you -as an artist- don't want to pre-conditionate your viewer to feel or react in a certain "intended" way about your artwork, instead you accept the human diversity and give the viewer the freedom to contemplate you artwork in a more personal and subjective way. Or artists can explain it as: my art (should) speak for itself, it doesn't need a title or explaination.(5 votes)
- Was the artist trying to make the piece look like a fetish object or like it was made from human waste?(2 votes)
- Why is this considered "process art?"(1 vote)
- I think it is because as long as we keep thinking about what it could mean (also because it has no title) it still is under public interpretation confusing our own thoughts and meanings. It challenges our need to label things and put them in a box called 'conquered' and needs no more investigation.(2 votes)
- Is art another word for interpretation? good luck and good learning(0 votes)
Video transcript
(piano playing) Voiceover: This sculpture's not
usually up, but it's a great Hesse. It's sort of wonderfully awful. Voiceover: What do you
mean by wonderfully awful? Voiceover: She's so pushing
boundaries in so many important ways. I think in order to really appreciate
Hesse, it's really important
to understand what her friends, what the Avant-garde was
doing at this moment. She was hanging around with
people like Ad Reinhardt, with a whole series of artists that were
involved in a kind of high conceptualism, where there was an attempt to create
a perfection in the physical world that represented a kind of ideal. Voiceover: A kind of purity. Voiceover: A kind of purity
that was incredibly cerebral,
it was incredibly geometric. One has a sense when you
look at that kind of work, that anything that anybody
could make, that Ad Reinhardt
could make, for instance, would be just sort of a platonic
shadow of the truth that he was after. Voiceover: Well, leave it to a woman
to bring us something down and dirty. Voiceover: I think she did
that really consciously. Voiceover: I don't doubt it. Voiceover: She was a very
conscious feminist in that sense. It's early for sort of
that phase of feminism, but I think she was very
aware of the implications of
her making something by hand that was based in this old
secondary tradition of handy craft
that women had been saddled with. Voiceover: So she's wrapped thin
rope around this semi-circular- Voiceover: ... form that's hung by- Voiceover: ... nails on the wall. Voiceover: It's actually a beautiful kind
of swooping line that's created there. But the first impression you
have when you look at this because it's this dark brown and
it's got this waxy kind of build up, it's just incredibly organic
and incredibly handmade and it feels like it's of the body. Voiceover: It feels very bodily. Voiceover: You could think about the
connotations here, what does it remind- Voiceover: Pooped it out or uh- Voiceover: Yes, it's
scatological, it's intestines. Voiceover: Menstrual even. Voiceover: It's menstrual or
it could even be phallic right? Voiceover: Or phallic or
breasts even hanging down. Voiceover: It could be sausage, right? So you've got this really
uncomfortable kind of interaction between bodily functions that we
don't like to have mesh. (laughs) We don't like to see these
things together, but there's
kind of incredible ambiguity. Actually, if you just think
about the human body has been
represented historically. This is a pretty radical way
of dealing with the human body and the way in which we
think about ourselves right, if this is food, if it's
excrement, if it's our own bodies
represented all together somehow, that's a pretty intense
series of associations. Voiceover: That's true, but
it's something that I feel like
feminism is going to take up and really run with this. Voiceover: They will and I think
Hesse is rightfully seen as one
of the most important artists that so many people
then later respond too. I can't imagine Kiki Smith's work,
for instance, without Eva Hesse. Voiceover: There's also a kind of
primitivism here, it looks like- Voiceover: It just looks like a
fetish object in an African culture. Voiceover: It really does. Voiceover: Kind of weapon
or something like that, too. Voiceover: Oh, so this seems
because of it's materialality,
because of it's sort of oldness and it's handmade-ness this feels like
it could be in an ethnographic museum. That actually plays directly into what
we were talking about a moment ago, in terms of its self-conscious
secondary-ness which is embedded in this because we always think of
that as not fine art, right? Voiceover: Right. Voiceover: So is she every
self-consciously putting herself forward not as an artist in the highest order. It's really in opposition to
what her friends were doing, what
was happening in the art world. She's great. (piano playing)