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Hesse, Untitled

Eva Hesse, Untitled, enamel paint, string, papier-mâché, elastic cord, 1966 (MoMA) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.

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  • purple pi purple style avatar for user Alasdair Kerr
    How could the speakers react to such a piece of art in so many different ways? Most pieces of Eva Hesse that I've seen, she uses similar materials and imagery with the objects. This piece had me thinking of minimalism and just forms instead of the things the speakers saw.
    I guess this is the beauty of interpretation, but what am I supposed to take home with me from the speakers here?
    (16 votes)
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    • hopper cool style avatar for user Christi
      What I "take home" from many of these videos is the ability to look at the art beyond the surface. It gives me ideas to consider and think about. What was the artist thinking? What was the goal?

      The type of questions and dialogue going on here is very similar to the dialogue you might have about a novel. By looking at the art and asking questions it gives me a deeper sense of things around me. In a way it reminds me of some literature classes where the teacher focused on the meanings of colors in the text. It gave me something to add to my toolbox of ways to interpret and think about the work.
      (1 vote)
  • leafers ultimate style avatar for user Hana
    why are some paintings(art) untitled? why don't they have titles?
    (1 vote)
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    • leaf green style avatar for user Thomas Deprez
      There are many possibile answers to this question. The way i like to see it, is that it is that "no title" is still a title. You should therefore consider what exactly the "not giving a title to your artworks" communicates to the viewer. Some times, for example it may just as well be about freedom of interpretation: you -as an artist- don't want to pre-conditionate your viewer to feel or react in a certain "intended" way about your artwork, instead you accept the human diversity and give the viewer the freedom to contemplate you artwork in a more personal and subjective way. Or artists can explain it as: my art (should) speak for itself, it doesn't need a title or explaination.
      (5 votes)
  • duskpin seedling style avatar for user elliot gilmore
    Was the artist trying to make the piece look like a fetish object or like it was made from human waste?
    (2 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user Laurel Turner
    Why is this considered "process art?"
    (1 vote)
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  • orange juice squid orange style avatar for user rick lee
    Is art another word for interpretation? good luck and good learning
    (0 votes)
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Video transcript

(piano playing) Voiceover: This sculpture's not usually up, but it's a great Hesse. It's sort of wonderfully awful. Voiceover: What do you mean by wonderfully awful? Voiceover: She's so pushing boundaries in so many important ways. I think in order to really appreciate Hesse, it's really important to understand what her friends, what the Avant-garde was doing at this moment. She was hanging around with people like Ad Reinhardt, with a whole series of artists that were involved in a kind of high conceptualism, where there was an attempt to create a perfection in the physical world that represented a kind of ideal. Voiceover: A kind of purity. Voiceover: A kind of purity that was incredibly cerebral, it was incredibly geometric. One has a sense when you look at that kind of work, that anything that anybody could make, that Ad Reinhardt could make, for instance, would be just sort of a platonic shadow of the truth that he was after. Voiceover: Well, leave it to a woman to bring us something down and dirty. Voiceover: I think she did that really consciously. Voiceover: I don't doubt it. Voiceover: She was a very conscious feminist in that sense. It's early for sort of that phase of feminism, but I think she was very aware of the implications of her making something by hand that was based in this old secondary tradition of handy craft that women had been saddled with. Voiceover: So she's wrapped thin rope around this semi-circular- Voiceover: ... form that's hung by- Voiceover: ... nails on the wall. Voiceover: It's actually a beautiful kind of swooping line that's created there. But the first impression you have when you look at this because it's this dark brown and it's got this waxy kind of build up, it's just incredibly organic and incredibly handmade and it feels like it's of the body. Voiceover: It feels very bodily. Voiceover: You could think about the connotations here, what does it remind- Voiceover: Pooped it out or uh- Voiceover: Yes, it's scatological, it's intestines. Voiceover: Menstrual even. Voiceover: It's menstrual or it could even be phallic right? Voiceover: Or phallic or breasts even hanging down. Voiceover: It could be sausage, right? So you've got this really uncomfortable kind of interaction between bodily functions that we don't like to have mesh. (laughs) We don't like to see these things together, but there's kind of incredible ambiguity. Actually, if you just think about the human body has been represented historically. This is a pretty radical way of dealing with the human body and the way in which we think about ourselves right, if this is food, if it's excrement, if it's our own bodies represented all together somehow, that's a pretty intense series of associations. Voiceover: That's true, but it's something that I feel like feminism is going to take up and really run with this. Voiceover: They will and I think Hesse is rightfully seen as one of the most important artists that so many people then later respond too. I can't imagine Kiki Smith's work, for instance, without Eva Hesse. Voiceover: There's also a kind of primitivism here, it looks like- Voiceover: It just looks like a fetish object in an African culture. Voiceover: It really does. Voiceover: Kind of weapon or something like that, too. Voiceover: Oh, so this seems because of it's materialality, because of it's sort of oldness and it's handmade-ness this feels like it could be in an ethnographic museum. That actually plays directly into what we were talking about a moment ago, in terms of its self-conscious secondary-ness which is embedded in this because we always think of that as not fine art, right? Voiceover: Right. Voiceover: So is she every self-consciously putting herself forward not as an artist in the highest order. It's really in opposition to what her friends were doing, what was happening in the art world. She's great. (piano playing)