eva hesse's influence today? conversations with three contemporary artists
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Eva Hesse's Influence Today? Conversations withThree Contemporary ArtistsJeanne SiegelPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Jeanne Siegel (2004) Eva Hesse's Influence Today? Conversations with Three Contemporary Artists,Art Journal, 63:2, 72-88
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2004.10791127
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Eva Hesse with Expanded Expansion,Whitney Museum of American Art, AntiIllusion, 1969, NewYork. ©The Estate of EvaHesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
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Duchamp:When one goes tosee people, one is influenced, even if one doesn't think about it!
Cabanne: Sometimes influence comes out later.
Duchamp:Yes, forty years later!-from Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp
Eva Hesse's InfluenceToday?
Conversations with ThreeContemporary Artists
Jeanne Siegel
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues withMarcel Duchamp,trans. Ron Padgett (1971; New York: Da CapoPress, 1987).
I. The exhibition was on view at Musee d'Orsay.Paris (September 16, 2002-January 12, 2003),and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(March 4-June 8, 2003).2. Renate Petzinger, "Thoughts on Hesse's EarlyWork, 1959-1965," in Eva Hesse, ed. ElisabethSussman (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 2002),40-55. The retrospective exhibition Eva Hesse, organized by Petzinger andSussman, was on view at the San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art (February 2-May 19,2002), Museum Wiesbaden (June II-October13, 2002), and the Tate Modern, London(February 2-March 9, 2003).
Influence is retrieving its value as clear signs of a return to citing sources are
surfacing. Museums feature major exhibitions of artists' works and their influ
ences on later artists. One recent example was Manet/Veiasquez:The French Taste forSpanish Painting, which tracked the influence of the Spanish painter's work over
some 250 years. I Critics reviewing all types of exhibitions don't hesitate to iden
tify possible influences and sources.My intention in examining influence has always been twofold: to trace the
development of an artist's style and content as it moves toward maturation and,
second, to locate what the artist has gained from a mentoror mentors and where she has diverged to create an indi
vidual or original artwork.Often, the intentions and words of the artist differ
from critical analysis, but both have a significant place
in getting a grasp on the work. In EvaHesse's case, herown profuse writings (journals, diaries, interviews, notes)
continue to dominate critical thinking and often suppressher actual aims. A revelation to viewers was the coverage
of Hesse's original reliefs and machine drawings (influ
enced by Francis Picabia) in an essay by Renate Petzinger,the Wiesbaden-based cocurator of the retrospective exhibi
tion Eva Hesse, shown in 2002-03 in San Francisco, Wiesbaden, and London. 2
Symposiums conducted in Weisbaden were designed to research furtherthe influence of German artists on Hesse's work. Recently, the American Lee
Bontecou and the Swede Oyvind Fahlstrom have been acknowledged as influences on Hesse's work.
The following conversations with three contemporary artists reveal their
degree of acknowledgment, acceptance, or rejection of influence. While these
artists come from different generations, they were all academically trained aspainters and later became sculptors. In each conversation I have tried to capture
in the artist's own voice the influence of her time period and where she camefrom and lived.
Time does not diminish the importance of influence on an artist's workthroughout her or his career. Artists don't necessarily discard what they've gainedfrom other, earlier sources. Influences become part of their artistic lineage, leadto new directions that merge with other ideas, and may eventually become sub
merged. A major reason for choosing these artists was their ability to highlighttheir individualities while noting their debts to Hesse. One feature that becomesevident in the conversations was the artists' awareness of the change in the relationship between the pictorial and the sculptural.
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Conversation with Jackie Winsor
The interview with Jackie Winsor was conductedin her studio in New York City on January IS,2003.
3. Yvonne Rainer's dance The Mind Is Q Musclewas first performed in 1966.
Jeanne Siegel: You arrived in New York in 1967, an extremely active period of
social and political upheaval.
JackieWinsor: The mood of the time was very particular-the Vietnam War and
the unrest at home. I spent my graduate years trying to get the courage to chop
off the big toe of my husband so he didn't have to go to war: There was also the
emotional chaos around the nationwide racial conflicts. The
art world at the time was a tiny place. You could see every
exhibition you wanted in about an hour and a half. It was an
unimaginably different time in SoHo. People were living illegally
in loft buildings and being kicked out by the Fire Department or the landlord in the
middle of the night. After 5:00 P.M. the streets were empty. It was just rats and you.
There were no expectations around money.
Siegel: Around 1970, women were beginning to make inroads into the privi
leged realms of men. It seems to me that you and Eva Hesse would have been
affected by the early feminist discourse. Was this important for you?
Winsor: Yes. I became aware of feminist activityaround 1969 and regularlyattended
large, informal meetings with other women artists from the neighborhood. I met
Hesse about that time. She was about five years older and was showing with my
male peers. I didn't show in New York until the 1970 Whitney Annual.
The difficulty in 1967 was knowing who the women artists were. It wasn't until
I attended the women artists' meetings that that issue resolved. The weekly meet
ingswere in large lofts with up to one hundred women artists.
Siegel: In terms of the Women's Movement, how did you think of yourself?
Winsor: As the movement took shape and form, artist/activistJudy Chicago
formed a definition of feminist art principles. The early work in my first solo show
predated this formation. I thought of myself then and now as androgynous in
relationship to my work. Iwas married at the time to Keith Sonnier. His work fell
into her definition as much as mine did. I don't feel that I am being attentive to my
gender when I'm working.
Ideas are in the air. I think that everybody influences everyb- dy. When Ifirst
came to New York, I felt a rapport with Yvonne Rainer. Her work, like mine, was
very physical and equally mindful. Her The Mind Isa Muscle was inventive, with a
big presence and a no-nonsense discipline in it.3 I found it intriguing.
Siegel: Preceding the Women's Movement there was the Civil Rights Movement.
Many artists were engaged in activities against the Vietnam War and in protests
about issues that affected them specifically as artists. Hesse didn't use her art as
a forum for political protest; did you?
Winsor: Iwas interested in politics, but not in my work. The work's content is not
literary or narrative. It's about being physically here, present, and in the moment,
while quietly, silently remembering the universe.
Siegel: When Hesse first returned to New York after a year in Germany, she was
influenced by the work of the young Minimalists Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, and
Robert Smithson, and then she found a way to respond to them, to make it more
her own. When you see her work, you can recognize where her ideas came
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4. John Yau, "Neither about Art nor about Life,but about the Gap between Seeing and Knowing:The Sculpture of Jackie Winsor," injackieWinsor,ed. Dean Sobel (Milwaukee: Miiwaukee ArtMuseum, 1991), 47.
from, particularly her obsessive use of repetition and the objects hanging or
placed on the floor.
Winsor: When she visited Keith and me, I recall listening to her stories about her
childhood in Europe and I thought about her work, makingsense or connections
between the two. I felt there was a quality in the color and texture of the surfaceof her work that carried an emotional pitch that was very poetic and haunting.
I felt this particularly in the piece that is a group of wobbly, polyester cylinder/bagshapes. They remind me of souls that have left their bodies. For me they are a
beautiful poetic absence, a place to rest and reflect.
Siegel: Please talk about your cubes that started a few years after Hesse's con
tainers and stood on the floor. Do they relate to hers?
Winsor: I don't think they are in any way related because they didn't derive fromthe same thing. Mywork is about being present and still-a very conscious, disciplined stillness. I wanted the cube pieces to hold the place they occupied and have
a large presence. I wanted them (how they command a space) to be like a sleeping
person. I thought of them as you would experience a person of ninety. Whenyou're with them in the present, you're aware of their life history, of their experience, their sadness and joy, but you're also aware of being in the moment. The
pieces are not overwhelmed by the history. They are more concerned with back
ground issues rather than the theater of life in the foreground.
Siegel: One early piece, Bound Grid (1971-72), stands on the floor and leans onthe wall, with wood strips rising vertically. I thought it was an important piece
for the time. Particularly its use of unconventional, nonindustrial materials. Theurge to use different materials than had been used by men, that were softer,more flexible, was in the air. Some of your choices were similar to Hesse's-e-the
use of cord, rope, and the process of wrapping, twisting, and knotting.
Winsor: Iwas trained as a painter. What interested me in the use of rope andtrees was, on one hand, how they naturally reflected an interest in drawing (line
and color) and, on the other hand, how they had their own inherent fullnessof
energy. The piece, a wavy grid, was a linedrawing or sculpture. There were thicklines that became bumps or bigger bumps. But mostly I was creating a balance andpartnership of wood and rope.
Siegel: You devoted more time to making individual cubes than Hesse.Yourswere complete forms. Hesse's containers were left open on top, and the shellwas fabricated of galvanized steel. My understanding is that there is a differencebetween your concerns when you put a top on the boxes that closed theminto cubes. You introduced small rectangular openings in the sides so that onecould peek inside, but some of the interior remained hidden. It strikes a mysterious note vis-a-vis the meaning. It introduces questions to the viewer.What isvisible and what is covered over? There is a tension between the known and theunknown. Writer John Yauproposed you were examining this question in theseworks: "What is the difference between seeing and knowing?"?
Winsor: At that time I was interested in creating solids. I thought of the interior spaceas solid air, made real by the solidness of the cube that defined it. I was interested in
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JackieWinsor. Bound Grid,I971-72.Wood and twine.88 x 84 x 8 in. (223.5 x 213.4x 20.3 em). CollectionMusee national d'art moderne, Centre GeorgesPompidou, Paris. Courtesyof Paula Cooper Gallery,New York.
5. Irving Sandler,Artof the Postmodern Era (NewYork: Harper Collins, 1996).29.
an equality between the two. Iwas interested in what would happen if you kept the
main sculptural element, the cube, constant. I burned a piece, exploded one, burned
a cube into a sphere. I constructed a layered plaster cube, broke it open, and recon
figured it inside-out, revealing steps and diagonals.
Siegel: The art historian Irving Sandler, writing about your work, listed yourchoice and source of materials: "tree trunks, bricks, cement, rope, sheetrock,
nails and lathing. In '68 to '71, she made circles of heavy rope, the materialsrefer to nature." 5
Winsor: They are altered nature.
Siegel: Did it relate to the nature of the Maritime Provinces in Canada, where
you were raised?
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6. Ibid.,30.
Winsor: Yes, in that it is part of the homogenous background of lifeexperiences.
But not in how I actually chose them. Iwas looking for materials that related to
what I liked about painting and drawing and that resonated with my sense of physi
cality. I used saplings because the young wood had a sense of muscularity and con
vexness. Iwas looking at the trees for the qualities they had in terms of drawing and
physicality. Physicality has also expressed itself in another way in my life: I've been
a gymnast for years.
Siegel: Sandler mentions Bound Grid, pointing out that "Winsor, like Hesse, was
obsessed with seemingly absurdist labor-intensive repetitive work."6 Also he
links the cubes, which became primary structures in your work, to Hesse's earlier
Accession (1967), where she threaded vinyl tubes through perforations into the
interior. Her work implied sexual references.
Winsor: Sandler came out of literature. As I continued to use the cube, I thought
of it more like a sheet of paper or a square canvas, a format that Iwanted to keep
constant to underplay the form sculpturally and bring attention to what happened
within it. Air is what was inside, a cube of solid air. "Obsession" was a word that
came to be used like "one size fits all" for women artists and their work. It brings
with it, from its use in psychiatry as "obsessive/compulsive," a devaluing and under
mining put-down by inference to a connection between women and madness. I saw
no difference in shaping the knots of rope in Bound Grid from using a brush to create
a form on canvas. Both activities are equally thoughtful, intuitive, and skilled. But I
like the word "absurdist." It's not a word used by the artist, but it indicates that the
viewer might have to try a little more. It's the place where humor can arise.
Siegel: Jeanne Silverthorne has a different point of view about influence. She
believes in it. She said, "r have an influence from everybody."
Winsor: That's a literary interest. It's true that we are shaped by our environment,
but nothing has impacted me as much as the experience of being an immigrant and
moving to the United States at age eleven. Nothing has created a comparable shift
in my being. Working alone, being alone such long hours, has its own influence on
you. When you drag a bunch of saplings home on a truck from New Jersey and then
drag them up five flights of stairs to your studio, you really don't have a bigfeeling
about influence. Instead you wonder who could help you drag them up, or drive the
car, or chop them down. The physicalitygrounds the ideas. I've learned from it, and
it has had an effect on my sense of size and scale.
Siegel: Does coming out of painting and drawing suggest a formalist approach?
Winsor: No, I liked moving the paint around and I painted figuratively as an under
graduate student. I made the models twenty pounds heavier with added muscle so
they looked Olympian and healthy. Iwas interested in the quality of fatness in the
paint. Myfocus was working to find something that resonated with me. Myfavorite
piece of sculpture was the Winged Victory (c. 190 B.C.E.?). I identified with it. It was
just like my paintings: convex, present, just likethose Olympian gymnasts. Another
favorite was the Venus of Willendorf (c. 22,000 B.C.E.). Perhaps both works pre
expressed an interest in powerful women. You don't know exactly what it is at the
time. After a while, you may identify it more.
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JackieWinsor. Inset WallPiece (mixed color cut 2"diagonal grid). 2001-02.Stainless steel, black concrete.16~ x 16~ x 7 in.(41.9x41.9x 17.8cm),inset in wall 4 in. (10.2 cm)deep. Courtesy of PaulaCooper Gallery, NewYork.Photograph:Adam Reich.
7. Elisabeth Sussman, "Letting It Go as It Will: TheArt of Eva Hesse," in Eva Hesse, 17.
Siegel: Elisabeth Sussman, a curator of the recent Hesse exhibition, opened her
catalogue introduction with Hesse's basic premise (1969) to get to non-art, nonnothing, everything-at another kind of meaning just not recognized but neverknown. Non-art distances itself from art'?
Winsor: Some people work on the edge of their own unknown. Historically, artists
of the twentieth century have spent a
lot of time trying to make non-art art.
This impulse is now a hundred years
old. Nihilism is about death. Nihilism
and non-art held hands in the early
part of the century, around the time of
World War I,when there were many
deaths and the culture was in trauma.
Siegel: Hesse was born into concen
tration-camp Germany. Later,afterbecoming severely ill, she was anx
ious to arrive at something totallyoriginal before she died. But she wasagainst beauty in art.
Winsor: I can understand that.
Superficially, beauty carries baggage
related to convention, but the histori
cal function of beauty is to make palat
able the experience of loss related to
death. Even now we send our loved
ones' dead bodies to the funeral parlor
to make them look beautiful. Beauty is
healing, for it has the power to coun
terbalance the horrific-to make it
palatable. Death intrudes and you are
caught in a profound moment of loss
with a great need to share it. I think
that beauty is the balm for that moment, for loss. Beauty can go into that area of
lifeexperience that is horrific and give voice to it, touching the profoundness that is
harbored within and ends up being poetry to other people.
Siegel: In your consistent denial of influence you have argued for a differentrationale. You point out profound and individual ways of arriving at ideas thatmay have their sources in Hesse, but are dissimilar in their intentions and ultimate meanings. This allows room for influence and originality. I find it provocative. Nevertheless, I want to point out where I think you definitely share ideas.Youboth fleshed out the minimalist principle of repetition, but never with the exactitude of Minimalism. You shared a deep interest in the body, if in different ways.You both thought of yourselves as loners, women searching for self-identity. Youshared the desire to express self-identity through art not controlled by gender.
Your own recent works such as InsetWall Piece (2001-02), in which you cut outspaces in the wall, appear to be less about muscularity and heaviness, perhapsstill about hidden things.
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The interview with Jeanne Silverthorne was conducted in her studio on January 28,2003.
Winsor: The first one was a small portion of the cube pieces, the window. With
its open invitation to closeness, it invites you to your center within its center. I have
been interested for a long time in reuniting opposites into a seamless experience
of being whole. The opposites in these pieces are the functions related to the
head and the heart, to thought and feeling. The work is both abstract and intimate.
The square and the cube are abstract, they're mathematical forms, measurements,
perimeters, boundaries, mental constructs, and as such, are emotionally unknow
able. Into that emotional distance I bring richness, closeness, and the presence
of feeling and caring. Radiance and stillness are qualities shared by both the very
distant and the very close. It is another focus of this series. Radiance, likethe sun,
is expressed as color saturation and intensity, along with the quality of emotional
substance in the material; it reaches out to meet you. The stillness of the mountain
is expressed in the centeredness of the form. The direction inward, into the wall,
into yourself, into the more eternal qualities reflected through the material becomes
an echo of yourself.
Siegel: You came to NewYork in 1985, so you wouldn't have known Eva Hesse.
But you know a lot about her?
Jeanne Silverthorne: Ifell in love with her work like everybody else. I read the arti
cles that were published around the time of her death, particularly Lucy Lippard's
Eccentric Abstraction essay."
Siegel: Which every critic continues to use as a source. Then
Conversation with Jeanne Silverthorne in 1970 , Life published an article "Fling, Dribble, and Dip"that reproduced Hesse, along with Lynda Benglis and Richard
Serra, and showed her late Rope piece that clearly identified
her with Pollock.? Did you value her work as an innovator of great importance?
Silverthorne: Absolutely. She deflated Minimalism in a really witty, inventive way.
Iwas just looking this morning at the reproductions of her work and was struck
again by those early reliefs with which I actually had a rather long courtship. I
was much more immediately taken with the "signature" sculptures. I don't know
whether it was time passing or the times changing, but those reliefs and drawings
grew on me. I got interested in Philip Guston and I think there's a lot of Guston-like
qualities in those works-cartoon abstraction, with various sorts of pipelike exten
sions that can read as plumbing or human body parts. That was something Iwas
already interested in. Now I'm at the point where I prefer the early work. I think
of the reliefs as falling into a category that might be labeled the "comic/organic."
Siegel: I find them original, but strange. I found the formal play innovative
where cords projected beyond the Masonite frame.
8. Essay written in conjunction with the exhibitionEccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, NewYork, in fall 1966; Lucy R. Lippard, "EccentricAbstraction," Art International I0, no. 9 (November 20, 1966): 28, 34-40; repro in Changing (NewYork: Dutton, 1971), 100.9. "Fling,Dribble, and Dip," Life 68, no. 7(February 27, 1970): 66.
Silverthorne: While the sculpture seems very American, the reliefs have a more
European sensibility-are more tied to that tradition of abstraction and Surrealism
than the sculpture is. I think the reliefs come right out of somebody likeJean Arp,
but with the addition of that eccentricity that she's so famous for, that makes her
results seem unfamiliar. I like that, on the one hand, they seem familiar because
they seem European and traditional, and, on the other hand, they seem completely
strange. And that is really compelling to me-the familiar and strange side by side.
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Jeanne Silverthorne.Untitled (Chandelier), 1994.Rubber and resin. 60 x40 in. diam. (152.4 x 101.6em), installation dimensions variable. Courtesy ofMcKee Gallery, NewYork.
Siegel: You're a feminist; aren't women better off today?
Silverthorne: No question! It was all men until the I970s. Women's work usually
didn't get shown, if shown didn't often get reviewed, and if reviewed didn't get
illustrated in the magazines. Women artists' work didn't command the same prices.
Still doesn't. Things may be immensely improved, but remain far from equitable.
Today the situation is complicated by the fact that there's just so much out
there. The sheer quantity speeds up the rate of amnesia. Even though we spent so
much time deconstructing notions of authorial originality, we proceed as if we were
all firstborns and all born yesterday.
siegel:You're an exception because you seem to welcome influences.
Silverthorne: I think of what has been done and is being done as a conversation
one enters, rather than a competition. Among the many functions one's work takes
on is that of engaging in a series of responses, questions, digressions. It is not so
much an argument as a conversation.
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Siegel: One area that you share with Hesse is your use of materials. They sepa
rate from the hard industrial materials that the Minimalists favored. They are soft,
pliable, and tend to be characterized as more feminine.
Silverthorne: Latex, which Hesse used a lot, is one kind of rubber. I use synthetic
rubber almost exclusively, and it's certainly soft and pliable. Another difference is
that her pieces are constructed, and mine are literally modeled and then cast.
Although this may not seem like a big distinction, I think it is, because most of my
work has to do with the touch of the hand, sometimes literally.
Siegel: Hesse's had to do with the hand too.
Silverthorne: Yes, but the hand wrapping or other repetitive kinds of obsessive
activities were considered, at the time, uncontaminated by art connotations.
Whereas I am more engaged in the eye-hand coordination aspect of modeling
and copying. Another difference is that her sculptures are spatial, but not architec
tural. I am more concerned with architecture. And my family background had an
influence as well. Myfather was a machinist who could do electrical and plumbing
jobs. In my use of wires and pipes Iwasn't thinking about Hesse first.
Siegel: Do you see Hesse's work as metaphoric or illustrative? For example, do
you see any evidence of surgical instruments in her drawings?
Silverthorne: Isee them as transformative. She goes beyond these meanings.
Siegel: Do you see any similar meanings in your work? You were both con
cerned with the body. How is that registered in your content?
Silverthorne: I like to make objective correlatives for the nonsubstantial-you
know, what's the shape or weight of an idea, what does a feeling look like? And
feelings are often expressed through the body-somaticized. Ultimately, however,
I may care more about form than content, inextricable as they are, and Iwant
there to be a slidingregister from representation to abstraction in any given instal
lation, sometimes in an individual piece.
Siegel: Do you believe in the role of beauty?
Silverthorne: I've spent my whole life trying to make things beautiful and beautiful
things. Possibly I'm just not very good at it. Myobjects don't necessarily look beau
tiful. I'm also very drawn to strangeness, and beauty is familiar. We recognize it
when we see it, even though it may be in the eyes of the beholder, whereas strange
ness is by definition unfamiliar. So there's something about that dialectic, about
being seduced and attracted to the strangeness, on the one hand, and repulsed and
pushed away by it, on the other hand. I stillwant the sculptures to be beautiful more
than anything else. The strangeness just happens.
Siegel: This is a characteristic you do not share with Hesse. She negated beauty.
She associated it with the decorative.
Silverthorne: Maybe beauty came too easily to her. Anyway, her sculptures are
very beautiful. She couldn't finally escape it. Strangeness is the element that I can't
seem to escape, it happens despite my best efforts to avoid it.
Siegel: But your practice of hanging objects from the ceiling or letting cords
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10. Mel Bochner. "Discussion between MelBochner and Joan Simon," October File, EVQ Hesse,ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002),44.I I. Ibid.
hang down to the floor in a loose and scattered way reminds me of Hesse. I also
see an influence of Bruce Nauman.
Silverthorne: Absolutely. And with Nauman there was a linguistic aspect. Back in
the early '80s Iwas interested in the relationship between language and the body.
Iwas interested in what it felt like to be on the receiving end of language, what the
physical impact of words was, so Iwas modeling prosthetic devices and putting
them on bases with words as a way of talking about how language is a kind of sup
port but feels like a replacement. It isn't, in fact, but it feels like it's taking the place
of something that's lost. And again there's the dual sense of being, on the one hand
a help and, on the other, an emblem of loss.
Siegel: Hesse had a very personal interest in language. She wanted to self-educate.
Mel Bochner bought her a thesaurus and she spent time expanding her vocabu
lary, evident particularly in her titles. Was your interest in language what made
you realize your belief in art history and its influence? When did you start writ
ing reviews for Artforum?
Silverthorne: I reviewed for Artforum from about 1982 to 1986 and wrote a couple
of articles on film in the early 1990s. 1wouldn't say I "believe" in art history-far
from it. But to ignore precedent, recorded or not, validated or not, is impoverishing.
Siegel: Hesse admired some contemporaries, such as Carl Andre, but was influ
enced by others. A surprising one that has surfaced is Oyvind Fahlstrom, whom
she met before 1963 in New York.10
Silverthorne: Ican see that. Fahlstrorn's project was so allegorical, so dense in its
references that it's hard to feel one knows it well without serious study. Certainly in
terms of the formal issues at play in the work, I can see how Hesse was influenced
by him. He makes these odd physical extensions, linking everything in stretched-out
chains. And, of course, Hesse is all about extensions, almost umbilical extensions.
Siegel: When she made Connection (1969), which consisted of approximately
twenty individual pieces hung from the ceiling, she used fiberglass soaked in
polyester resin wrapped over with cloth-covered wire. Despite Hesse's claim,
they were bonelike and awkward, but beautiful. The surface material reflected
the light and they became luminous. Bochner said her ability to trap light on
a surface was a major contribution. II
You both were trained as painters. One issue argued in Hesse's time was
that her work was mostly about painting, not about sculpture. Was that an issue
for you?
Silverthorne: The separateness of the categories painting and sculpture certainly
seems less relevant than ever. I think one of the reasons she's so interesting is pre
cisely because she helped break down those distinctions.
Siegel: Hesse developed a flow between the horizontal and the vertical.
Silverthorne: Absolutely. This is what's so interesting-the state of in-between.
Siegel: Hesse, particularly in her sculptures and later works, was so aware of
surfaces. You share an interest in surfaces and skin. Your recent frame reliefs were
obviously about flesh. And strange indeed! Do they relate somehow to Hesse's
thinking or process?
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Jeanne Silverthorne. Noel+ H20 (Big Grief), 2003.Rubber. 45 x 33 x 13 in.(114.3 x 83.8 x 33 ern),Edition of 3. Courtesy ofMcKee Gallery, NewYork.Photograph: Michael Korol,NewYork.
Silverthorne: Rubber references flesh-has the same tactile quality. So we share
that. But her skin is about surface and mine is about depth.
Siegel: You've spoken of being more representational. In some new work you
introduced tiny rubber figures with postures that represent their feelings.
Silverthorne: I meant that although everything Ido is representational, in that it
is a copy of something--a fragment of plaster debris, a microscopic view of a retinal
cell, for instance-it comes out looking likeabstract art. While the frame works are
blowups of distress viewed from inside the body, the figures are also representative
of anxious states. but seen from the outside, dwarfed by their emotions.
Siegel: One relief, a pile of intertwining, stringy forms, is Pollock-like. It also
resembles James Rosenquist's spaghetti in F-III (1965).
Silverthorne: That's actually a picture of tear-activated protein, very loosely inter
preted. Rosenquist was another one of those people I was wild about. I saw F-I I Iin Philadelphiaas a student, and the fact that you could walk through parts of that
was amazing. And again, it was between painting and sculpture.
Siegel: Many internal parts of the body have been linked to recent scientificfindings. Are yours based on them?
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Conversation with PollyApfelbaum
The interview with PollyApfelbaum took placein her studio in New York on January 16. 2003.Some elements are excerpted from a talk by theartist at the School of VisualArts in November2002.
Silverthorne: Yes, in a certain way. Big Griefis a view of saltwater molecules (NaCi
+ H20), with pipes coming out of the frame that are labeled with the proteins and
hormones we make when we cry. Tear-activated Protein looks likespaghetti; it is a
picture of protein shapes, freely composed, proteins being a by-product of crying.
Siegel: Do you use technology?
Silverthorne: Yes, I use photoelectron microscopic images and other illustrations
from science textbooks to find out what the shape of protein is, but the composi
tion or arrangement of those shapes is often my own.
Siegel: Do you recontextualize science as art?
Silverthorne: No, I simply use the recent findings of science to create newer pic
tures of emotion. We somaticize our feelings, translate our feelings into symptoms
and other physical reactions.
Siegel: Despite your leap into science, do you still see the new works as strange
and beautiful?
Silverthorne: In the last few I've changed my palette to black and white. It may be
the case that this makes the sculptures more conventionally beautiful.
Siegel: How did you view yourself as an artist when you first started?
Polly Apfelbaum: I considered myself a hybrid and also a poacher, so anything
was up for grabs. I started poaching because I really wanted to take from as many
worlds as possible. Maybe because I didn't study sculpture, the first thing Igot
interested in was three-dimensional form. Igot interested in simple form, simple
geometries-like a cut flower-and the pieces were fabricated in wood.
I came to New York in the age of appropriation. This opened up some new
territory for artists. I made a piece called Daisy Chain (1989) that was taken from
Andy Warhol. He used dingbats, the graphic-design signs. Iwas interested in differ
ent kinds of playful little forms (clovers, flowers) that he
used, putting them together and havingthem as a chart of
my different interests at that time.
On the other hand, a lot of sculpture at that time was
big and monumental. Iwanted to get away from that. What Iwas discovering about
form was that it could be fluid and it could change. It could reference all kinds of
art-historical movements, but it could also have humility. These are things that I'm
still thinking about, and they really have to do with the kind of formal and concep
tual concerns that I'm interested in now. An important piece from that time is
Wallflowers (1990). It's a wallflower, it's a target, it uses the cliches of our culture
and the wall as support for a piece of sculpture. There are about 650 little paper
flowers obsessively tacked to the wall, referencing a rose window, all kinds of asso
ciations, but also creating an abstract form.Around the same time, I began to rediscover making things with my hand
making something fast and quick. Iwas interested in craft, mixinghigh and low. I
didn't want art on a pedestal. And Iwas trying to bring in color, trying to find out
what color was and what materials Iwanted to work with. Igave myself the option
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PollyApfelbaum. TheException and the Rule,1989.Woad. Forty-eightunits, each 68 x 77 x 4 in.(172.7 x 195.6 x 10.2 em).Courtesy of the artist andO'Amelio Terras, NewYork.
of two very different materials. One that was everyday-cardboard, sheeting-the
other was a synthetic fabric that I came across. I liked it because it was cheesy. It
was slinky. Poor material to rich material, the everyday to the extravagant. So, the
early work had many more cultural associations, and I wanted to figure out how
that translated out in the world.
I suppose the material, in a way, led me from sculpture to painting. It allowed
me to deal with the kind of color, the form that I was interested in. abstracting that
language-an abstraction that was likea meltdown of color and form. At this point
too, I was opening up a bottle of dye and just spilling it on the fabric. No control. I
was looking for fluidity of form and collapse of form. I was interested in pulling from
different worlds. Sculpture sits on the floor, but Iwondered what it would mean to
have a painting on the floor. It was a support that I thought had been ignored. And
it can be an interesting place-a place that belongs to domesticity, the place where
your dirty clothes go. And it turned out to be a good place for me to go. Color and
material could be sexy. Puddled and pink-shocking.
Of course, I also looked at the floor historically-at Lynda Benglis, for exam
ple, and her ideas of flow. I wanted to locate my work in the everyday, with cheap,
lightweight materials. What happens when you just throw material on the floor
skirting ideas of reverence? Nothing is ever glued down. I think of myself more as
a collagist, as a kind of cutter. The consequence is that it becomes temporal. The
work is fixed in place for the length of the show, and then it's packed up in boxes.
As the show would go to different places, I would take the materials from the studio
and reorganize and recontextualize them, within this simple visual language.
I have a piece called Compulsory Figures (1996). It is an installation, it's not
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PollyApfelbaum. Gun Club,2002. Synthetic crushedvelvet and dye. 19 x 21 ft.(579.1 x 640 em]. Courtesy ofthe artist and D'AmelioTerras, NewYork.
painting. The viewer activates this space-the viewer is like the ball in a pinball
machine. "Compulsory figures" is an ice-skating term for the strict geometries that
are the structure behind the more expressive part. The material is very flat, but
because of the nap, the viewer activates it by walking through the piece as a visual
field. Of course it's also an homage to certain painters-Ellsworth Kelly and Blinky
Palermo-to a kind of thinking about geometry and systems that has gone by the
wayside.
Siegel: You've mentioned some earlier artists who have influenced you. Andy
Warhol was a favorite. You told me you felt influenced by the contemporary
Elizabeth Murray. In what way?
Apfelbaum: Mainly the use of color and the exuberance of her forms. She is also a
painter who moves out into space. I also think about Chuck Close, Paul Feeley,
Agnes Martin, and so many others.
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12. The mid-career survey exhibition PollyApfelbaum. organized by the Institute ofContemporary Art. Philadelphia (May 3-July 27.2003), traveled to the Contemporary Art Center,Cincinnati (December 5. 2003-February 29.2004). and the Kemper Museum of ContemporaryArt. Kansas City (June 4-September 5. 2004).
Siegel: This may sound strange, but I feel, in other ways, you have been influ
enced by Eva Hesse. Do you feel any connection?
Apfelbaum: Yes, of course, I think there is a strong affinity. Hesse is a good exam
ple of someone who moves from floor to wall to space very freely and, in so doing,
she gives artists a kind of permission to cross boundaries, use new materials, occupy
different spaces. But she is also very structured, in spite of the fluidity of her forms.
Or you might say, she needs to be structured in order to embrace the fluidity of her
materials and forms, without losing all control. This is something Ifeel very close to.
Siegel: One obvious similarity is your desire for a different set of materials
more associated with women-soft, domestic materials. Your choices of them
were for different purposes, but you were both antimonumental in your
approaches.
Apfelbaum: I am a do-it-yourselfer. A certain self-reliance has been very important
to me and the work.
Siegel: Hesse was educated by Albers atYaleand decidedly interested in color.
She was a painter, a collagist, and a sculptor-mediums that you have gravitated
to as well.
Apfelbaum: At Purchase, where I studied before going to Tyler, some of the faculty
members had studied with Albers at Yale. The material and color influence comes
from a number of different places in both design and art. Earlyon, I looked at Klee
and Kandinsky as I started out with printmaking and painting.
Drawing (in the broad sense of the term) is in the work. The new piece, TodayJ Love Everybody (2003), installed at Triple Candie in New York in summer 2003, is
all about drawing and line. I do make wall work too. I don't show the wall work as
much as the floor work, but it's just as important to me. The installation in my sur
vey exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphiawas the wallpaper designed for the space.'?
It came out of drawing on bed sheets. In the past Iwanted to keep the two bodies
of work separate, but now I am trying to integrate the two. Wall-floor.
Siegel: You are more of an appropriator than Hesse. She responded first to
Abstract Expressionism, then Surrealism, then a specific response to Minimalism,
and finally to Pollock. Are you influenced by Pollock in any way, say his moving
around the painting on the floor?
Apfelbaum: I sometimes think he has entered my body-especially when I am
installing. Maybe I am channeling him. The floor has a different physicality, which is
something that I am very conscious of. Depending on the piece, I leave it on the
floor; it's all about the viewer moving around the space and that relationship.
Siegel: Although Hesse could be ambiguous, you specifically leave more room
for the viewer. Participation has become a more important phenomenon today
in art. You spoke about gravity being "the secret of your work." That was clearlyregistered in Hesse's hanging pieces. How do you express it?
Apfelbaum: Not really a secret. Without gravity my work would not exist, but I am
sayingthat because most people think the work is glued down. It is not!
Siegel: Unlike Hesse you welcome beauty.
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Apfelbaum: I think her work is very beautiful. It worked in its own context. Iam
working in my own time.
Siegel: You both were obsessed by opposites, as a matter of fact, some similarones. Order and chaos, for example.
Apfelbaum: That seems natural. You do one thing then you try its opposite. I love
to see different moods, tones, voices-loud and quiet. I always seem to be rebelling
against myself.
Siegel: Hesse was working in the 1960s, which means she was known a genera
tion before you were. She had a rough time, in part due to her horrific background. Her personality was very different from yours. Although smart, she was
worried and insecure. But you share a desire for the exploratory. However, theworld you entered in the 1980swas jumping. By the time you were showing, the
role of women in the art world was more respected and their art was collected.It was a joyful and active time in the art scene.
Apfelbaum: And the times we're living in now are hard times to make art. I alwayssay that I'm a desperate optimist, but these are truly uglytimes. I recently came
across a quote from the folksinger Phil Ochs, from 1967, that said, "In ugly timesbeauty is the best revenge." I'm also a huge fan of punk rock music. For example
Gun Club has the kind of spirit that Iwanted to see in my work, a mix of experimentation and absurdity. Loud but also structured. I don't want to make a program of
anxiety, because it seems to me that the one thing about art is that it is not con
strained by a program.
jeanne Siegel is an art historian and critic. as well as chair of fine arts at the School of VisualArts in NewYork City. The former president of AICA/USA, she is the editor of Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s(UMI Research Press. 1985) and Art Talk: TheEarly 80s (Da Capo Press, 1990), and the author of Paintingafter Pollock: Structures of Inffuence (Gordon and Breach Arts International, 1999).
jackie Winsor was born in Newfoundland, moved to Nova Scotia and finallythe United States. She hasexhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and in the Whitney Biennial.Her most recent one-person showwas the inaugural exhibition at the redesigned P.S.I Contemporary Art Center in Long IslandCity(October 1997-May 1998). She has been represented by Paula Cooper Gallery since 1973.
jeanne Silverthorne, born and educated in Philadelphia, is represented by McKee Gallery, New York, PauleAnglim Gallery, San Francisco, and Shoshana-Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured insolo and group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and many other venues.
PollyApfelbaum, born in Pennsylvania, has been a New York-based artist since 1978. After approximatelyeight years of developing work in her studio, she went on to have one hundred group shows and twentyfour one-person shows. She is represented by the D'Amelio Terras gallery, New York.
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