Transcript Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, 1968, fiberglass

Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, 1968, fiberglass
“The nineteen hollow cylindrical
elements…sit on the floor in aimless but
congenial disorder…. Each unit is a
different distortion of the regular shape they
suggest when together…. One is very
nearly perfect, while another seems about
to crumple. Like schoolchildren in uniforms,
or prisoners, or young trees in a nursery,
they carry inside them their exuberant
individuality…. The units are receptacles,
and as such, they receive light and contain
the shadows at their bases. Through a lucky
fabrication accident, there were many little
bubbles which gave them an inner glow.
The light passes through the nubbly walls to
alter shadows on its own.”
--Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse
“The spectator arrives at Fini’s Ceremony as if coming into
the middle of an event which, despite the clarity of its
outward presentation, remains shrouded as to inner
meaning. The main protagonist is woman, her image at the
center of a mysterious ritual enacted before a stone altar
and under the sign of nature, present in the leafy branches
laid over the altar. The figures, one kneeling, one standing,
one viewed from the back and naked to the waist, the
other seen from the front and protected by a curved
breastplate, reinforce the tension between interior and
exterior, the protected and the vulnerable, the visible and
the veiled…. Fini’s meticulous draftsmanship serves to
heighten the sense of mystery and unapproachability that
pervades the work.”
Léonor Fini, Ceremony, 1939
--Whitney Chadwick,
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
“In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate
Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner
photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to
be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the
boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is
going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and
this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future
of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute
past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death
in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this
equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother
as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die… Whether
or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is
this catastrophe.”
--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
“Some photographers set up as scientists, others
as moralists. The scientists make an inventory of
the world; the moralists concentrate on hard
cases. An example of photography-as-science is
the project August Sander began in 1911: a
photographic catalogue of the German people. In
contrast to George Grosz’s drawings, which
summed up the spirit and variety of social types in
Weimar Germany through caricature, Sander’s
“archetype pictures” (as he called them)
imply a pseudo-scientific neutrality... It was not so
much that Sander chose individuals for their
representative character as that he assumed,
correctly, that the camera cannot help but reveal
faces as social masks. Each person photographed
was a sign of a certain trade, class, or
profession…. Sander’s look is not unkind; it is
permissive, unjudging…. Sander was not looking
for secrets; he was observing the typical.”
--Susan Sontag, On Photography
“In contrast to George Grosz’s drawings, which summed up the spirit and variety
of social types in Weimar Germany through caricature, Sander’s “archetype
pictures” (as he called them) imply a pseudo-scientific neutrality.”
“Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It
propagates through images that society’s belief in
itself. There are several reasons why these images
use the language of oil painting. Oil painting,
before it was anything else, was a celebration of
private property. As an art-form it derived from the
principle that you are what you have. It is a
mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual
art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last
Anonymous 19th
century painting
moribund form of that art. Publicity is, in essence,
nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It
cannot itself supply the standards of its own
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claims. And so all its references to quality are
bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would
lack both confidence and credibility if it used a
strictly contemporary language.”
--John Berger, Ways of Seeing
“One sees in [Rodin’s] Burghers of Calais how each
is contemplating in his own way the death to which
he is walking. And one sees this as one might if one
were watching a very great theatrical performance.”
--John Berger, Art and Revolution
“[I was] asking myself what sort of meaning
could be attached to owning a Duchamp and
having one of his works in your house on a
table in a hallway or sitting on a shelf. I mean,
how could you go out and buy one of the
copies he made of the Bicycle Wheel?… I find
this object tremendously intriguing and I am
quite unusually fond of it, but it’s not the sort of
thing I’d ever think it possible or sensible to
own…. Possessing Duchamp is something you
have to go about in ways that have nothing to
do with the possession of any of the objects
that he made, it’s an entirely different thing.”
--Gianfranco Baruchello, Why Duchamp?
“In Duchamp, in his works, you find yourself dealing
with an ego that’s more or less provisional. It’s an ‘I’
that’s not presented or respected as a structural
part of the person; it’s an ‘I’ that the person uses
when and if and however he wants, and it’s not at
all the ‘I’ that defines the person; what defines the
person is his ability to take his distances from the ‘I’.
What makes his works seem mad is that you can’t
see the ‘I’ that’s involved with them or responsible
for them. And that’s clear from as early as things
like…the Nude Descending a Staircase, which isn’t
at all a painting about speed, the way it would have
been for a Futurist, and it’s not about the
simultaneity of various points of view, as it would
have been for a Cubist: it’s a vision of what a
person is in a sequence of any number of different
moments in time. What we see is a whole series of
parallel states of existence, and the ‘I’ simply isn’t
there.”
--Gianfranco Baruchello, Why Duchamp?
Théodore Géricault, Scene of a Shipwreck (commonly called The Raft of the Medusa), 1818-19
“How do you turn catastrophe into art?….
The expedition set off on 17th June 1816.
The Medusa struck the reef in the afternoon of 2nd July 1816.
The survivors were rescued from the raft on 17th July 1816.
Savigny and Corréard published their account of the voyage in November 1817.…
The painting was finished in July 1819.”
--Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
“Let’s start with what he did not paint. He did not paint:
1) The Medusa striking the reef;
2) The moment when the tow-ropes were cast off and the raft abandoned;
3) The mutinies in the night;
4) The necessary cannibalism;
5) The self-protective mass murder;
6) The arrival of the butterfly;
7) The survivors up to their waists, or calves, or ankles in water;
8) The actual moment of rescue.
In othe words, his first concern was not to be 1) political; 2) symbolic; 3) theatrical; 4)
shocking; 5) thrilling; 6) sentimental; 7) documentational; or 8) unambiguous.”
“The Mutiny was the scene that Géricault most
nearly painted. Several preliminary drawings
survive. Night, tempest, heavy seas, riven sail,
raised sabres, drowning, hand-to-hand combat,
naked bodies. What’s wrong with all this?
Mainly that it looks like one of those saloon-bar
fights in B-Westerns where every single person
is involved -- throwing a punch, smashing a
chair, breaking a bottle over an enemy’s
head….
Géricault made one sketch of cannibalism on
the raft. The spotlit moment of anthropophagy
shows a well-muscled survivor gnawing the
elbow of a well-muscled cadaver. It is almost
comic. Tone was always going to be a problem
here.”
“What did he paint, then?… We see survivors on a raft hailing a tiny ship on the horizon…
Our initial presumption is that this is the moment of sighting which leads to a rescue. This
feeling comes partly from a tireless preference for happy endings, but….what backs up this
presumption? The ship is on the horizon; the sun is also on the horizon (though unseen),
lightening it with yellow. Sunrise, we deduce, and the ship arriving with the sun, bringing a
new day, hope and rescue; the black clouds overhead (very black) will soon disappear.
However, what it it were sunset? Dawn and dusk are easily confused. What if it were
sunset, with the ship about to vanish like the sun, and the castaways facing hopeless night
as black as that cloud overhead?… A third possibility occurs: it could be sunrise, yet even
so the rescuing vessel is not coming towards the shipwrecked. This would be the plainest
rebuff of all from fate: the sun is rising, but not for you.”
“As Géricault approaches his final image questions of form predominate. He pulls the focus,
crops, adjusts. The horizon is raised and lowered… Géricault cuts down the surrounding
areas of sea and sky, hurling us on to the raft whether we like it or not. He stretches the
distance from the shipwrecked to the rescuing vessel. He readjusts the positions of his
figures. How often in a picture do so many of the chief participants have their backs to the
spectator?
And what splendidly muscular backs they are. We feel embarrassed at this point, yet we
shouldn’t be. The naïve question often proves to be the central one. So go on, let’s ask:
Why do the survivors look so healthy?…. Where are the wounds, the scars, the
haggardness, the disease? These are men who have drunk their own urine, gnawed the
leather from their hats, consumed their own comrades.”
“And there we have it -- the moment of supreme agony on the raft, taken up,
transformed, justified by art, turned into a sprung and weighted image, then varnished,
framed, glazed, hung in a famous art gallery to illuminate our human condition, fixed,
final, always there. Is that what we have? Well, no. People die; rafts rot; and works of art
are not exempt…. To make the shadows as black as possible, Géricault used quantities
of bitumen to give him the shimmeringly gloomy black he sought. Bitumen, however, is
chemically unstable, and from the moment Louis XVIII examined the work a slow,
irreparable decay of the paint surface was inevitable. ‘No sooner do we come into this
world,’ said Flaubert, ‘than bits of us start to fall off.’ The masterpiece, once completed,
does not stops: it continues in motion, downhill. ”