Why do I feel a pressure to define what I do? Is it always a good thing for us to try and understand what we’ve produced? When you get to a certain ‘level’ you have curators and critics who can write about your work much more eloquently and succinctly than you can, and hopefully express it to a wider audience what you are trying to achieve. There needs to be motivation of course from the artist to want to make the work and this stems from some kind of investigation; a query that needs to be addressed. But where would we be if we all resolved these questions? What’s exciting about art is that we can investigate them visually through different media, using whatever method we find comfortable or to continue or critique a historical genre.
I’m interested in sculpture and in particular the transition from minimalism to post minimalism. I think that there’s still a vast space there to be investigated; where the hard, macho investigation into the subjective ultimately left the artist estranged from the making of the object. Eva Hesse’s ethereal sculptural experiments are said to be the next wave of sculpture in direct response to the minimalists. (The classification of art trends/movements and how there are defined is of course a separate debate.)
What is important though is that Hesse was involved around the minimalists artists and their work and her work was included in later shows (also too Mary Kelly). In her studio Hesse produced work which responded to the minimalists but under her own rules of investigation and experimentation with different materials.
The rise of the feminist movement of the late 60’s and 70’s and the move towards women using performance art to create work is also a valid point here. This type of work can be seen as another response to the heavy masculine history of art sculpture and women made it their own as there was no matriarchal history embedded in it. What if the performance for Hesse was the making of the sculpture, the involvement of the body in making the objects?
This has left me wondering if there is a gender issue with regards to the development of sculpture between 1960’s and 70’s and in particular the social constructs. Minimalism can be seen to have ‘male traits’; objective, rational, unemotional, present, hard, geometric , permanent whilst Hesses’ work is tactile, ‘made’, subjective, ethereal, non permanent.
Some themes of minimalism are still valid and interesting such as the spatial aspects, the repetition and the phenomenology of the experiences when encountering the objects.
But are we still at this juncture between the hard and the soft, the fabricated and the made, the objective and the subjective? There is so much theory written around these subjects that I’m still only feel like I’m scraping at the surface and have no real answers yet, only a line of investigation which, hopefully will continue to provide a rich basis for producing work.
