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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 (Rope Piece)
Eva Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece), 1970, rope, latex, string, wire, variable dimensions (Whitney Museum of American Art). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- What emotion do you think this piece of art was meant to make us feel? Uneasiness, confusion, chaos?(16 votes)
- I think was supposed to be felt differently for every person. For me, it makes me feel spooky.(13 votes)
- Am I the only one who feels like Hesse got the inspiration for this work of art by looking at a spider web that was made by a spider who was either very drunk or on some sort of mind altering drugs?(5 votes)
- I think the inspiration was came from the Jackson Pollock's painting where she turns her expression in 3D rope sculpture like Jackson did..(4 votes)
- Could this on one level be considered a tongue-in-cheek critique of Pollock?(6 votes)
- I think this is just tangled rope strung up to make people like this(2 votes)
- 3:08intestines really? Could be something like the blood-brain barrier.(2 votes)
- Or mucus under a microscope, or a squished bug, or discolored semen, or anything else that looks stringy...(3 votes)
- who found the painting in Hesse's studio?(3 votes)
- how about we team up and research about this fascinating fact.(1 vote)
- They narrators keep mentioning bodily shapes and forms. I see a spider web.(3 votes)
- Reminds me of Gunter von Hagens plastinated nervous System. Surely that was not the intention put it looks quite similar.(3 votes)
- Wow, thanks for mentioning that, I googled it [Gunter von Hagens plastinated nervous System] and what an intensely intriguing visual. Amazing work that is.(1 vote)
- I can see the spider web, but a web that has been destroyed or disrupted.....and I can see the spooky feeling also...maybe the destroyed world wide web...used for destructive purposes...of course this is just my perspective on it. Does anyone see the destructive, disturbing here?(2 votes)
- Yes John, I see the spookiness also but in the sense of nerve endings and that everything is connected to our bodies. The room is the shell that holds this bodily connection in mid air.(2 votes)
- I don't understand what we are supposed to gain from this. Is no one else watching this and thinking of the utter lack of talent it took to create this? What makes this so revolutionary? I'm asking sincerely not rethorically(2 votes)
- , it is a tangled drawing in space suspended from the ceiling, some of its ends touching the floor, that looks like the work of giant spiders gone berserk or a doodle that got out of hand. Its strident arrhythmia seems to mock comfortable notions of composition and aesthetic purpose.
It could be seen as anti-art and -architecture, a rootless, homeless sort of dysfunctional shelter that may, it has been suggested, have unconsciously expressed Ms. Hesse’s emotional dislocation — or is that too easy? At any rate, like the work of her contemporaries Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris and Alan Saret, it stood out from the anal-retentive neatness of Minimalism.
“Bringing the Soul Into Minimalism: Eva Hesse.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 May 2006. Web. 07 Aug. 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/arts/design/12hess.html?pagewanted=all(2 votes)
- I know at this time hero's like Pollock were often distasteful for female artists who had a much more difficult time elbowing their way into being seen. Considering this, at2:41when Dr Beth Harris says that this work directly references Jackson Pollock, does she assume that was intentional or unintentional?(2 votes)
- Great question. It is generally understood to be an intentional reference.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazz music) Voiceover: We're in the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York and we're look at a late Eva Hesse. This is from 1970 and like so much of
her sculpture, it's simply untitled. Voiceover: It's rope hung
in the corner of the room. Different sizes and textures
hung from the ceiling, almost like a hammock. Voiceover: When this sculpture
was made right before Hesse died, she was only 34 years old, it was in 1970. This sculpture was still
hanging in her studio. Voiceover: Part of what this
work is about is the way that this can be hung in different ways. Hesse left that open. Voiceover: We have rope that she's handled in all kinds of different ways. Voiceover: Unraveled it. Voiceover: Right, it remains
braided in certain areas and then its been unraveled. Voiceover: The rope's
been treated, obviously. It's not raw rope. Voiceover: Right, it's
been dipped in latex, which is a material that
she used quite often. The latex has this wild quality. It's almost flesh-like, slightly
translucent, and a little bit rubbery. The rope is, of course,
completely flexible, malleable, but with the latex coating,
it becomes a little stiffer. The rope does maintain some of
its original turn and arabesque and arching, on the other
hand, we can reorganize it. That seems, to me, to be very much a part of the intention of the sculpture, so it exists both physically,
in a sense, conceptually. The sculpture has its
original organization and it can be reformed, to some
extent, though not entirely. Voiceover: Which is a really
radical idea, it seems to me. The whole idea of art, often, is
the artist's intention realized in the work of art and that
sense of self expression and as soon as someone else can come in and hang it slightly differently or
do something else differently to it, it seems to me that that's
a radical break with the way that we conceptualize
what a work of art is. Voiceover: Think about the art
that was being made at this time, the art that she was responding to, the people that she was
spending her time with, people like Donald Judd and others. You have a kind of
intentionality that is absolute and a very fixed form, heavily
machined industrial materials that can't be changed in any way. Voiceover: It's hard not to tie
some things that we see here back to the fact that she's a woman, that she makes something
that's more malleable. If we think about coming
after abstract expressionism, maybe there's some anti-heroic movement against the heroicism of Jackson Pollock. Voiceover: Who's certainly
quoted here in some (crosstalk) Absolutely. That's really interesting and clearly
the art history criticism written about Hesse gives her that intentionality. She is opening up these issues
of what it means to be a woman and an artist in an intensely
male environment in the art world in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. This will have an enormous
impact on later artists. In thinking about Kiki Smith and others, she's really brilliant in the
way that she has found a means to represent the physical, the
body, in a way that is not literal, but metaphoric and visceral. Voiceover: It has a feeling
almost of being intestines that have been taken out of the
body and handled and manipulated. There's something that
feels like innards here, that I think speaks to what
will be a real engagement on the part of feminist
artists in the 1970s with body. For all its draping and its
recalling of Jackson Pollock's drips, we have a really complicated work. Voiceover: This really
fascinating visual web. (jazz music)