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“Eva Hesse: Alone And/Or Only With”, Artspace, September-October 1992

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“Eva Hesse: Alone And/Or Only With”, Artspace, September-October 1992 ARTSPACE A MAGAZINE OF CONTEMPORARY ART Editor/Publisher William Peterson VOLUME 1 6 NUMBER Associate Editor Peter Clothier 5 Associate Publisher/Circulation Jan Schmitz SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1 992 Associate Publisher/Advertising Richard Heller Art Director Alyce Woodward Office Manager Ruanna Waldrum Contributing Editors Kenneth Baker, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University 30 Gus Blaisdell, Peter Frank, Dave Hickey, Joe Lewis, Ben Marks, Maria Porges, V.B. Price, Kathleen Shields. Guggenheim Grandeur: Gala Reopening and Expansion by Kenneth Baker 32 Correspondents (California): Lita Barrie, Aaron i3etsky, Jamie Brunson, Mario Cutajar, Susan Ehrlich, Cohn An Interview with James Corcoran by Richard Heller 35 Gardner, Joan Hugo, Mark Levy, John Muse, John O’Brien, Ralph Rugoff, Peter Selz, Rebecca Eva Hesse: “Alone And/Or Only With” by W.S. Wilson 36 Solnit, Benjamin Weissman, Kathy Zimmerer; (New Mexico): Edward Bryant, Eugenia P. Jams, Neery Norman Bluhm: Love’s Labors Won by Robert Creeley 42 Melkonian; (New York): Dan Cameron, W.S. Wilson, John Yau; (Nevada): Ingrid Evans, Peter Goin; (Texas): Karen Carson: Full Circle by Ben Marks 44 Frances Colpitt, Charles Dee Mitchell, Elizabeth Thomas McBride; (Washington): Jennifer McLerran, Max Gimblett: Iconic Abstraction by Lita Barrie 46 Patin. Agnostic Abstraction: David Ansico, Roger Hernsan,John Ivlillei Mailing Address: ARTSPACE, P.O. Box 36C69 by James Scarborough 49 Los Angeles, CA 90036-1269 Robert Tiemann: Beyond Originality by Frances Colpitt 52 Business and Editorial Office: ARTSPACE, 5657 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 340 Guy Dill: Sculpture Is About Proof by Jan Butterfield 55 Los Angeles, CA 90036 213/931-1433 Ursula von Rydingsvard by Peter Clothier 58 U.S.A. newsstand distribution: Reliquaries Among Friends by 60 Eastern News Distributors, Inc. Bill Berkson 1130 Cleveland Road, Sandusky, OH 44870 Chicago: by Kenneth Baker 1-800-221-3148 On the Scene 62 San Francisco: On the Scene by Maria Porges 64 Subscriptions: $29.95 per year. Canada & Mexico: $45. All other foreign: $65. Los Angeles: On the Scene by Lita Barrie 66 To order a subscription write: ARTSPACE - Dept. ARS Santa Fe: On the Scene by Arden Reed 68 P.O. Box 3000 Denville, NJ 07834-9818 BACK ISSUES: To order individual copies call or write: BOOKSTOP, 3412 Central SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106, tel. 505/268-8898. Libraries or Institu tions: Lawrence McGilvery, P.O. Box 852, La Jolla, CA 92038, tel. 619/454-4443 ARTSPACE is published bimonthly by Artspace COVER: Karen Carson, Los Au5cles, 12” in diameter, eel vinyl on found International, Inc., 5657 Wilshire Blvd. Suite # 340, globe, 1992. Photograph: Douglas M. Parker Swdio; courtesy Rosamund Angeles, California 90036. Contents copyright © Los Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles. 1992. ISSN: 0193-6596. ARTSPACE is not responsi ble for loss or damage to submissions, and publication of submitted materials is not guaranteed. Unsolicited sub missions cannot be returned without an SASE. The views expressed in the articles are those of the individ ual writers and do not necessarily represent those of the ARTSPACE management and staff. Eva Ri5ht.4firr, Hesce, 60” 216” x x 48” casting resin over fiberglass cord and svire hooks, 1969. Milwaukee Art Museum. Photo courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York. EVA HESSE “ALONE “ AND/OR ONLY WITH” # W.S. Wilson S9 is Manhattan Ice Floe... Methods of thought can generate objects of thought—phantom is metaphor a I use to think with about the structure of events, objects like an angel, or Pegasus, or universal generalizations—so meth and structures in works of art, and about systems and rules. Few people ods of thought have to be looked at. The facts in a science are con seem to have come to Manhattan to learn the rules and/or to obey structed by the experimental, observational, or methodological proce them: bikes the on sidewalk, air—horns blasting at dawn, parents jay— dures of that science. Phlogiston and the ether are among the sometime walking with babies in strollers. Walking home from Soho, picking hypothetical constructs which haven’t held up so well. Some mathe and choosing my own set of rules for pedestrian traffic, and improvising maticians think that mathematics discovers mathematical facts which my decorum from block to block, I passed a couple standing at the exist eternally, and others that mathematics constructs mathematical corner of 11th Street and 4th Street. He said that they couldn’t be at objects as the product of its methods of probing mathematical objects. 4th Street, they had just been at 12th Street, and she said, “We’re not Parallel questions are found in the visual arts. at 4th, we’re at 11th,” and he gave her a look. So much for the legiti-. For some artists, a world of objective external facts precedes inves mation of systems and of rules. Eva 1-lesse wrote in her notebook, tigation of the facts, and such facts can be imitated or represented, with October 28th, 1960: “I will paint against every rule I or others have verisimilitude or expressionist interpretation, in realistic pictures. But invisibly placed. Oh, how they penetrate throughout and all over...” construction, or constructivism, such as you are reading about in this Perhaps people break laws as an experimental method of thinking sentence which is building itself here, pertains to objects which are about laws, and rules, the and legitimation of systems. Experimental constructed by the methods which investigate those objects. In this methods, after all, purge deceptive illusions, and violating rules gives sense, constructs, or constructivisi objects—”.. did not exist for our State one good a look at the edges—where rules can be broken down, or ments to be true or false of before we carried out the investigations where they might break down, or just stop. At the edge of a system of which brought them into being” (Michael Dummett, “Wittgenstein’s rules one may be on one’s own, but needing to do perhaps what one Philosophy of Mathematict” in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical needs to do—to invent one’s own rules, or to decide which rules to Investigations, ed. George Pitcher [“)ew York: 19661, 447). Eighteen— preserve and to try to extend those into the future. I think that every year-old Eva Hesse was quoted in Seventeen magazine, September, moment is anarchic, or would be, except that we pull the rules and 1954: “For me being an artist means to see, to observe, to investi laws along with us. Often lately I try to wait for the light to change gate...” Her verb, “to investigate,” suggests that she is questioning before crossing. conventional “facts,” and that she might already think that some enti 36 - ,.. Eva Hesse, Repetition Ni,ieteeit III, 19 anus, each 19”— 20’,” high. 11”— 12” diameter, fiberglass and polyester resin, July 1968. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery. ties would not exist apart from the investigations which bring them lished. As edited so far, this chronology notes for 1966: “June 4—5: into existence on a visual plane among other observables. weekend at Fire Island with artists Paul Thek and Mike Todd.” I Scientific investigations have taken some concepts from ordinary wrote an essay on the late Paul Thek for Art and Artists (“Paul Thek: common-sensical discourse, and have returned them with their edges Love-Death,” April, 1968) in which I suggest that the meaning of his sharpened—words like indeterminacy, undecidability, foundationlessness, work is that it is intellectually uninterpretable—that it is about the exis incompleteness, catastrophe, chaos, and uncertainty. Uncertainties anse even tence of the kind of uninterpretable bodily feelings that it elicits. in an ordinary measurement because standards and rules of measure A weekend with Paul Thek and Mike Todd must have been a ment are not empincally observable. The measurement is a construc working weekend, if only because Eva Hesse was always working on tion made by following the rules of a system. Then, once a measure her thinking with materials, trying to formulate the questions not of life ment has been made, it introduces uncertainties about its accuracy, and in general, but of her life, as visual questions. She was trying to answer for some purposes, must be repeated, as one gradually constructs a those visual questions with visual answers which she could believe, and more precise uncertainty which hasn’t existed before. Other uncertainties thus teach herself to hold her own beliefs (borrowing a phrase from and indeterminacies emerge in experiments which, as they study light, Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge). construct light into waves or into corpuscles: waves and/or corpuscles. Mike Todd was and is a sculptor, now in Los Angeles, who some “And/or” is like a logical hinge which allows one to make a turn with times used pieces of blue denim jeans heavily stitched at the seams- in an idea: one, or the other. Eva Hesse writes in her journal, March and feathers. Those three artists at that weekend on the beach were 30th, 1961: “Want to be alone and/or only with one person I can three individuals with problems about bnnging the surface of materials love.” Two weeks later she writes—emphasis mine—”l have been to the surface in a work of art. They shared questions about the u’itli Tom Doyle the last 3 days.” expressiveness of the condition of the materials they were using- My theme here, “alone and/or only with,” is inspired by the whether to transform the material completely, as Paul Thek used great show honoring Eva Hesse as an alumna at the Yale University Art encaustic to imitate raw flesh; whether, like Mike Todd, to paint Gallery. Scheduled for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden objects such as old shoes, or whether to leave the matenals raw, on the in Washington, D.C.
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