SELECTED WORK: EVA HESSE, REPETITION NINETEEN III, 1968
Hesse’s Career
Eva Hesse was born in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany, to an observant Jewish family. When Hesse was two, her parents, fearing for their lives in Nazi Germany, sent Hesse and her older sister to the Netherlands. The family reunited in England and then made their way to America, settling in New York City in 1939. At the age of nine, Hesse became a U.S. citizen, and went on to study art at the School of Industrial Art, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union. (She also interned at Seventeen magazine but did not meet Sol LeWitt, who was also working there, until 1960.) In 1957, she won a scholarship to the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art and then studied painting with Josef Albers in the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University, where she graduated with a B.F.A. in 1959.
Hesse moved back to New York that year and began working as a textile designer, while continuing to draw and paint. In 1961, her work was included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and John Heller Gallery, and in 1963, she had her first solo show, comprised entirely of drawings. The following year, Hesse traveled with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, to the industrial German town of Kettwig-am-Ruhr, where Doyle had been invited by a prominent textile manufacturer and art collector to work in residence. Hesse took up studio space in part of an old factory and began to make relief paintings and three-dimensional objects with rope, rubber, and other discarded materials. Similar to the trajectories of LeWitt and Donald Judd, she shifted from painting to sculpture by first creating forms that extended from the wall, only later breaking with the wall entirely. Her sculptures were first shown in Düsseldorf in 1965, shortly before Hesse and Doyle returned to New York (and subsequently separated).
She participated in the landmark 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery in New York and shortly thereafter, in 1967–68, began making the works for which she would become best known—sculptures constructed with latex-based materials and fiberglass. As her career was progressing rapidly, she was diagnosed in 1969 with a brain tumor and, after several failed operations, died less than a year later in May 1970. Her drawings and sculptures have been widely exhibited since her death, and she is considered among the most influential American sculptors of the twentieth century, despite having only made sculptures for half a decade.
Hesse moved back to New York that year and began working as a textile designer, while continuing to draw and paint. In 1961, her work was included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and John Heller Gallery, and in 1963, she had her first solo show, comprised entirely of drawings. The following year, Hesse traveled with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, to the industrial German town of Kettwig-am-Ruhr, where Doyle had been invited by a prominent textile manufacturer and art collector to work in residence. Hesse took up studio space in part of an old factory and began to make relief paintings and three-dimensional objects with rope, rubber, and other discarded materials. Similar to the trajectories of LeWitt and Donald Judd, she shifted from painting to sculpture by first creating forms that extended from the wall, only later breaking with the wall entirely. Her sculptures were first shown in Düsseldorf in 1965, shortly before Hesse and Doyle returned to New York (and subsequently separated).
She participated in the landmark 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery in New York and shortly thereafter, in 1967–68, began making the works for which she would become best known—sculptures constructed with latex-based materials and fiberglass. As her career was progressing rapidly, she was diagnosed in 1969 with a brain tumor and, after several failed operations, died less than a year later in May 1970. Her drawings and sculptures have been widely exhibited since her death, and she is considered among the most influential American sculptors of the twentieth century, despite having only made sculptures for half a decade.
Larger Context: From Minimalism to Post-Minimalism
Hesse’s sculptural work is often categorized as “Post-Minimalist,” a characterization that draws attention to her indebtedness to contemporaneous artists working in the vein of hard-edged, geometric Minimalism as well as to the ways in which she departed from their approach. Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, as loosely structured movements or artistic tendencies, were actually unfolding simultaneously: Primary Structures, Minimalism’s first major exhibition, and Eccentric Abstraction, the first show that attempted to group the Post-Minimalists, were mounted in New York in the very same year. The term “Post-Minimalism,” however, was first coined somewhat retrospectively, in 1971, by the critic Robert Pincus- Witten, who used it to describe the work of a wide range of artists from the mid-1960s onward, including Hesse, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, and many others.388 Although those artists worked in many different styles in a broad range of materials (from lead sheets to liquid latex to fiberglass), they all distanced themselves from Minimalism’s rationality, anonymity, and its prioritization of the idea or concept behind the work.
Hesse’s sculptural work is often categorized as “Post-Minimalist,” a characterization that draws attention to her indebtedness to contemporaneous artists working in the vein of hard-edged, geometric Minimalism as well as to the ways in which she departed from their approach. Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, as loosely structured movements or artistic tendencies, were actually unfolding simultaneously: Primary Structures, Minimalism’s first major exhibition, and Eccentric Abstraction, the first show that attempted to group the Post-Minimalists, were mounted in New York in the very same year. The term “Post-Minimalism,” however, was first coined somewhat retrospectively, in 1971, by the critic Robert Pincus- Witten, who used it to describe the work of a wide range of artists from the mid-1960s onward, including Hesse, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, and many others.388 Although those artists worked in many different styles in a broad range of materials (from lead sheets to liquid latex to fiberglass), they all distanced themselves from Minimalism’s rationality, anonymity, and its prioritization of the idea or concept behind the work.
Instead, artists like Hesse worked with sometimes difficult, non-traditional materials that determined what would be possible in the finished work, rather than conforming her materials to an entirely pre-determined design. Similarly, Morris worked with long sheets of industrial felt, cutting them into various configurations and then allowing them to hang from hooks on the wall, drooping with the weight of gravity. He referred to this approach as “anti-form” because the material itself dictated how the work would ultimately appear. The tactility and warmth of Hesse’s and Morris’s chosen materials also reflect their desires to move away from the coldness, hardness, and exactness of Minimalism and toward an art that would be more human and more resonant with the body, and that, in the view of many critics, would have a strong psychological and sometimes erotic element as well. Both Surrealist sculpture (of the 1920s and ’30s) and the early to mid-1960s fabric works of Yayoi Kusama and Claes Oldenburg served as important precedents for Post-Minimalist approaches to sculpture.
Repetition Nineteen III: Analysis
Hesse’s 1968 work Repetition Nineteen III is comprised of nineteen “buckets” (wide cylinders with closed bottoms), each of which stands between nineteen and twenty inches tall. They are made of translucent industrial fiberglass, which was originally a clearish-white and has yellowed significantly over time, giving the work a more visceral quality. Each of the buckets has a slightly different shape, with some standing almost perfectly erect and others slumped or crumpled. Their surfaces are bubbly and uneven, distinguishing them further. The buckets sit as a group directly on the floor of the gallery, in a random arrangement that does not resemble a grid, per Hesse’s instructions.
Hesse had begun experimenting with fiberglass in the year prior to making Repetition Nineteen III. Developed in the 1930s, fiberglass (originally patented under the name “Fiberglas”) is a very strong material made of glass fibers (woven into a kind of fabric) adhered to plastic. Fiberglass had been put to many different industrial uses prior to the 1960s, when the Owens Corning glass company realized they could also market such materials to working artists. Hesse worked with a professional fabricator named Doug Johns, who operated a small business dedicated to reinforced plastics, to create almost all of her fiberglass sculptures, including Repetition Nineteen III, which was the third iteration of the same design. Johns created molds that he lined with fiberglass sheets and brushed with a liquid resin that hardened as it cured, leaving the work rigid and translucent once peeled out of the mold. Hesse rejected the first buckets Johns produced because they were perfectly identical, whereas she wanted them each to have a distinct character, which they achieved on the third attempt.
Like many contemporaneous Minimalists, Hesse was interested in repetition and sameness and in sculptures that had an object-like quality that might be equally familiar and strange. She did not, however, aim for an inorganic, perfect sameness, but rather for a more human imperfection that would be further highlighted by the repetition of form. For Hesse’s 1968 solo exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery, titled Chain Polymers, critic Lucy Lippard wrote: The core of Eva Hesse’s art lies in a forthright confrontation of incongruous physical and formal attributes: hardness/softness, roughness/smoothness, precision/chance, geometry/free form, toughness/ vulnerability, ‘natural’ surface/industrial construction.
SELECTED WORK:
RICHARD SERRA, GUTTER CORNER SPLASH: NIGHT SHIFT (FORMERLY TITLED SPLASH PIECE: CASTING), 1969/1995
Serra’s Early Career
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, graduating in 1961 with a degree in English literature. During that time, he also began to work in a steel mill to support himself, an experience that would prove to be transformative in his career. He went on to earn a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from Yale University; in his final year, he worked as an instructor and also assisted Josef Albers on his volume The Interaction of Color. In 1965, Yale awarded Serra a travel fellowship, and he spent a year studying in Paris, followed by travels in Athens and Istanbul, and a Fulbright grant that allowed him to spend a year in Florence, where he exhibited a series of “Habitats” that involved cages of live and stuffed animals.
Returning to the U.S. in 1967, Serra began making sculptures out of rubber and neon tubing, and then out of cast and molten lead, with formal qualities similar to the works of his Minimalist and Post-Minimalist peers. In 1968–69, he signed on to the Leo Castelli Gallery and exhibited a number of lead rolls and props at the Guggenheim Museum and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These works consisted of lead sheets that had been rolled up and placed on the floor (sometimes in groups of two or three) and sheets and bars of lead that existed in precarious relationships, propped against each other or against the wall in such a way that they seemed likely to collapse at any moment. Simultaneously, Serra began to work on monumental Cor-Ten steel sculptures—the work for which he would become best known—with the support of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.392 He accepted a number of major commissions from the late 1960s onward, most famously to create a public work for Federal Plaza in New York City, where he installed a long torqued wall of steel that grew unpopular and was eventually removed and destroyed, despite Serra’s protestations in court that such an action would violate his First Amendment rights. In addition to making sculptures, Serra has, since the 1970s, been making drawings and prints, often using jet black pigments that convey the same heaviness as his works in metal.
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Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift (Formerly Titled Splash Piece: Casting): Analysis
Richard Serra executed his first “splash piece”—created by flinging thousands of pounds of molten lead at the “gutter” where a floor meets a wall—in 1968, at gallerist Leo Castelli’s warehouse space in New York for a group exhibition organized by Robert Morris. He created similar works numerous times over the next year, for a solo show at Castelli’s gallery (photographs of which were published in Life Magazine in 1970); outdoors at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (with the help of his friend, composer Philip Glass); and in the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland for the landmark exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, which included the work of Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, and Morris, among many other American and European artists.
In each case, Serra completed the work in situ, allowing the lead to cool and harden in place. The result was silvery lead splashed on the lower part of the wall and emanating outward from the wall across the floor. Although Serra’s act of creation might seem like performance art, or like an extension of Jackson Pollock’s “drip painting,” Serra has clarified, “I saw it as forming a sculpture through a repetitive process.” The sculpture revealed the condition of Serra’s chosen material as it hardened, taking the form of whatever place in which it was created.
In each case, Serra completed the work in situ, allowing the lead to cool and harden in place. The result was silvery lead splashed on the lower part of the wall and emanating outward from the wall across the floor. Although Serra’s act of creation might seem like performance art, or like an extension of Jackson Pollock’s “drip painting,” Serra has clarified, “I saw it as forming a sculpture through a repetitive process.” The sculpture revealed the condition of Serra’s chosen material as it hardened, taking the form of whatever place in which it was created.
The image shown in your Art Reproductions Booklet shows a version of the 1969 work Splash Piece. That year Serra installed a splash piece in Jasper Johns’s New York studio, using three thousand pounds of lead. In 1991, Johns donated what remained of the work to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and in 1995, Serra agreed to re-create the work, to be retitled Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift, in the museum’s galleries, where it would become a permanent installation. Gutter Corner Splash, which was made over several nights to avoid exposing museum visitors to toxic fumes (hence the work’s subtitle), occupies an entire gallery. It consists of several related parts: lead that has been splashed up the walls and hardened in the “gutter,” along with seven long sculptures formed out of lead Serra flung into the gutter, allowed to cool, pried away from the wall (which had served as a kind of mold), and then arranged neatly on the floor. As with every version of Serra’s lead splashes, the re-creation at SFMOMA relied upon and continues to highlight the architecture of the gallery, imposing itself in perpetuity on the institution, since the part of the work that still exists on the wall and in the gutter cannot be moved without being destroyed.
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Larger Context: “Process” Art and the Reaction to Minimalism
Post-Minimalism is a term that encompasses many subcategories with subtle differences in emphasis. Serra’s early work is typically characterized as “process art,” or art that is concerned primarily with the process of its making and with leaving that process evident in the final product. In 1967, the year before Serra began to make sculptures from splashed molten lead, he wrote a list of verbs in neat script that begins “to roll / to crease / to fold...” and ends, two pages later, with the directive “to continue.” In Serra’s words, “It was important that whatever was finally made reveal its making.” The list of verbs, which was published in the Conceptual magazine Avalanche and is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, was a way for Serra to emphasize the importance of action in the process of making a work of art and to define his own practice as one of acting upon materials, which distinguished his seemingly minimal objects from the tactics of the Minimalists.
Serra articulated a similar notion in a series of short films he made in the late 1960s, which included a three-minute- long film titled Hand Catching Lead, which simply shows a hand catching (or failing to catch) falling clumps of lead. Like the splash pieces, the work is based on a repetitive activity, but one that is done with only partial success, lending the films a subtle psychological charge. The films also connect Serra’s “process art” with that of Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and others who were exploring sculpture, the body, and the act of art-making through the relatively new medium of video. Influential for many of these artists was the prominence of dance in the avant-garde New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s, which drew attention to the body in ways they translated into artistic practice. Serra attended many performances staged by the important group Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, and later recalled, “I saw things—in terms of movement and equilibrium, stasis and balance—I could use in my sculpture.”
Serra articulated a similar notion in a series of short films he made in the late 1960s, which included a three-minute- long film titled Hand Catching Lead, which simply shows a hand catching (or failing to catch) falling clumps of lead. Like the splash pieces, the work is based on a repetitive activity, but one that is done with only partial success, lending the films a subtle psychological charge. The films also connect Serra’s “process art” with that of Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and others who were exploring sculpture, the body, and the act of art-making through the relatively new medium of video. Influential for many of these artists was the prominence of dance in the avant-garde New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s, which drew attention to the body in ways they translated into artistic practice. Serra attended many performances staged by the important group Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, and later recalled, “I saw things—in terms of movement and equilibrium, stasis and balance—I could use in my sculpture.”
SELECTED WORK: MICHAEL HEIZER, DOUBLE NEGATIVE, 1969–70
Heizer’s Early Work
Michael Heizer was born in Berkeley, California, in 1944. His father was an archeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and had excavated extensively in California, Nevada, and Mexico. When Heizer was twelve, he took a year away from formal schooling to make site drawings for his father on a dig in Mexico. Heizer briefly attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1963–64 before abandoning school and relocating to New York. There he worked painting lofts while also pursuing his own art. He met Robert Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt, both of whom were interested in working out in a natural landscape rather than making work for a museum or gallery setting. Heizer helped acquaint them with the landscape of the American West and did the same for a number of other artists, including Walter de Maria, who were part of a burgeoning movement called Land art or Earthworks.
Heizer’s work was included in the two earliest exhibitions of Land art, Earthworks at Virginia Dwan’s New York gallery in 1968 and Earth Art, curated by New York artist, critic, and publisher Willoughby Sharp for the museum on the campus of Cornell University in 1969. For the latter, Heizer used a semi-bulldozer to dig a pit that was fifteen feet in diameter and displace the dirt to the side of the pit. Heizer, who is famously cantankerous, withdrew his work from the show, and the displaced dirt was claimed by another artist as his own contribution. Heizer’s relationship with gallerist Virginia Dwan proved more crucial to the development of his career and to the trajectory of Land art in general. The heir to a manufacturing fortune, Dwan was willing to support her artists in whatever they pursued— including the production of monumental unsaleable artworks created in the desert, far from New York City.
From Minimalism to Land Art
Land art or Earthworks was yet another category that fell under the umbrella term Post-Minimalism, highlighting the ways in which Land art grew out of and reacted to the sculptural tenets of Minimalism. As discussed in Section V, Minimalism was concerned not just with geometric abstraction, objecthood, and repetition, but also with architecture and physical space more generally. The art historian Rosalind Krauss, in her influential 1977 book Passages in Modern Sculpture, positioned Land art at the very end of her history. As with Minimalism, she writes, “our bodies and our experience of our bodies continue to be the subject of this sculpture—even when a work is made of several hundred tons of earth.” In Krauss’s view, the point of Heizer’s and Smithson’s work in the landscape is to offer a particular experience that de-centers and disorients our bodies, a project that began long before Minimalism but reached its apex in the sculptural practices of the 1960s.
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Double Negative: Analysis
Heizer’s Double Negative is monumental in scale but quite simple in its form. Situated on the Mormon Mesa in Nevada, the work consists of two sloped gashes that have been blasted out of either side of a small valley. To create Double Negative, Heizer worked with an assistant to blast and remove 240,000 tons of rock, leaving behind two equally sized ramps that face each other like mirror images across an expanse.400 Visitors can stand on the mesa and see both ramps or walk down one of the ramps and look across the valley at the other one. Important is that one’s view of the work constantly changes, and, save for viewing it from an airplane, one can never quite see the entire work at once.
Critic Philip Leider, writing in Artforum in September 1970, recounted visiting the recently completed work with Richard Serra and video and performance artist Joan Jonas. “[Double Negative] took its place in nature in the most modest and unassuming manner,” he wrote, “the quiet participation of a man-made shape in a particular configuration of valley, ravine, mesa, and sky.” Anticipating Krauss’s understanding of the work’s effect on the body, Leider continued, “From it, one oriented oneself to the rest in a special way... The piece was a new place in nature. That seemed to me a risky kind of art: there was a range of consequences in doing it wrong that one wasn’t used to contemplating in relation to art.”
Indeed, the work was not only challenging in its potentially risky relationship to nature, but also in its relationship to the institutions that define the art world. Virginia Dwan had given Heizer the money he needed to finance the work’s production, and she thereby maintained ownership of it, though it was always free and open to the public that might venture out to see it. In the 1980s, however, Dwan donated Double Negative to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in a radical move toward institutionalizing Land art. While Heizer initially rejected any intimation that the work should be maintained, he has since changed his mind and has requested that the museum raise funds to restore the work, which has degraded significantly over its nearly fifty-year history.
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Documenting Land Art
Each of the artists associated with Land art has had a different approach to the question of photographic or filmic documentation and its ability to convey the essence of their work. Heizer has taken the most negative approach, as he has consistently maintained that his work exists only in the landscape and cannot be accurately represented in photographic documentation. Other artists, including Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, played more readily with film and photography, and with objects intended for gallery settings, believing that Land art need not only exist out in a natural landscape. In their 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon argued that, regardless of the protestations of some Land artists, documentation was in fact essential to the circulation and success of Land art from the very beginning, which relied to some degree on Land art’s “resonance with the rising environmental movement on the one hand and the Cold War race to space on the other.” Kaiser and Kwon echo some of the earliest criticism of Land art, which noted as early as 1969 that only reproducible documentation would ensure that Land art did not go entirely unseen, given that it was typically remote and difficult to find. As a result, Land art’s emphasis on bodily experience must be considered in dialogue with a more usual experience of the work in the form of film footage, photographs, and written accounts. Those forms of communication might transmit some of the physicality of the work, but it must be admitted that it also renders the work, to some degree, into a two-dimensional image that highlights Land art’s reliance on art’s oldest formal strategies: line and shape.