Eleanor Antin is another artist I discovered reading Art Talk. In truth much of her work is too conceptual for my taste, however I love her “break out” work – 100 Boots.

In 1971 Antin created 100 Boots, a multi-part project in which she arranged and Philip Steinmetz photographed 100 rubber boots around southern California. The result was a 51 picture postcard narrative with the boots acting as the main character.

While the concept itself is interesting, what drew me to the work is that she produced it as postcards. Cindy Nemser’s interview she asked Antin why she invented the boots. Antin’s response speaks to how art was, and probably still is consumed.

“I was tired of coming into New York to put on shows that were always going into a vacuum once they were over. I wanted to do something that lasted longer… So I thought of the mails which are an obvious method of distribution that reach everyone with an address. Besides, people like getting mail.”

Antin mailed these 50 postcards over two and a half years to 1,000 people at random intervals based on the boot narrative.

“At one point, 100 Boots trespasses, and since this was their first crime I couldn’t wait for another month to pass for the m to make their getaway. They would have been caught. So a week later, I sent out the next card: 100 Boots on the Road, which was 100 boots on the lam – fast.”

The receivers never paid for the cards and at the time no one was able to purchase the cards or images from Antin (she has published a book). Ultimately in 1973 MoMA asked her to put together a full show for the boots, with the museum serving as the boots “crash pad” after their long journey.  Not only where the boots themselves on display, the 51 postcards were gathered together in full and 27 new images of the boots were displayed specifically for MoMA.

from artnet galleries

I wish I had been one of the lucky individuals on the mailing list, to be surprised when one arrived  and never knowing when the next would come.  In someways Antin’s work with 100 Boots feels like the start to so many series of photographs today. People take toys with them to places around the world for photographs or I even saw two friends who had their photograph taken in front of a post office of every town they visited. I tried to capture my shoes for one year – I actually started twice and made it about four months at one time, maybe it is time to try again or search for a new goal with Antin as my inspiration.

Eva Hesse is an American sculptor often discussed in relation to Minimalism and Postminimalism. I discovered her while reading Art Talk. Her biography gets a lot of attention and it is not a surprise that many writers have focused on how this chain of life events played a role in the work she produced.

Eva was born in Germany in 1936, at the age of two she fled to the Netherlands with her sister, later moving on to England before reuniting with her parents. The family eventually moved to the United States. Her parents would divorce and when Eva was ten her mother committed suicide. At the age of 33 Eva was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which would lead to her death in 1970.

Repetition Nineteen III © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

What really interested me about Hesse was not her biography, or her work. I have never had much interest in modern art; sculpture is something I am beginning to become interested in and am drawn to color, something that is almost non-existent in much of Eva’s work. Reading her interview she spoke with ease about her life, at ease with what had happened and where she was. In all honesty I was inspired by her. The relaxed nature she presented in the interview drew me to her. She discussed how she worked, how her creative process did not start with a final idea in mind. Eva’s work is not about the final piece of art, rather she talked about finding out what the medium she is working with could become.

All artists have a process, Eva’s process is recorded for us to see because she experimented with media. A process which created many test sculptures as she learned what the material could do.

In the early 1960s after studying art at both Cooper Union and Yale University she married sculptor Tom Doyle. A marriage which would end in divorce, however the couple spent a year working at a studio in Germany. It was during this period that Eva started to experiment with different materials she found including electrical wire and masonite. These art works out started as reliefs and evolved into sculptural objects with the use of papier mache, nets and string.

The assortment of materials she would use grew.  She used tubing and metal in her sculptures, then latex, fiberglass, wax and plastic upon her return to the United States.  Each material was an experiment, in the case of latex she selected it because she did not know how to work with it and she knew that it would deteriorate over time. These changes have occurred in the latex, the deterioration and discoloration of the material means that the work can never be completed. Her works today are different than they were  when she originally created them. This was something that Hesse accepted would happen when she was creating the work.

Sans II © The Estate of Eva Hesse - Image from SFMOMA

Due to Eva’s very short artistic career her test sculptures and experiments have come to be displayed, studied and understood much the same as her “finished” pieces. Briony Fer discusses how these pieces came to be part of Hesse’s oeuvre in the book Eva Hesse Studiowork. In truth, if she had not designated them as experiments or the molds for final works we may never know the difference. They have been displayed in cases, a manner which has been compared to works by Duchamp and Oldenberg.

Untitled, 1967–68 The LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

The idea the Fer stresses is that we as viewers are looking to find the final, that we are not comfortable with the idea of there being a test without a resolution. However Hesse would have never thought of art in that way. Starting something does not mean that there is an defined end, this was the message Hesse had shared with Nemser in Art Talk.

Maybe that is the best take away message, the best thing to think about as we start a new year.  So often we focus on goals, the idea of reaching an end point. We are focused on completing something, accomplishing something that we have created in our mind as the thing we want. More often it that idea of what we want is just that, an idea not a real thing. Maybe this year I will experiment with French and look at new ways to understand the art around me, rather than setting goals.

Links

• The Jewish Museum

Book are a very big part of my life, and I think that they have always been. I was not a child that had a TV in my bedroom, so I would read at night and when we would visit my grandmother for the summer I would take all the Nancy Drew books out of the library by her house that I could find.  Part of my inspiration for this blog was the book Art Talk and over the last few years I have been collecting art books of various types and not actually reading them. When I looked the other day I realized that I have at least two unread books on Monet, a book on Sargent that I did not realize I had and I have added half-a-dozen art museum related books to my goodreads to read list in the last four months. What has happened now is that I have too many books that I want to read and don’t have the time to do so.

If I decide to follow this path all the way to teaching I will have to be the one writing the books. A weird concept to me, to have my work published, work I believe in and care about. One day several years back  I was interviewed for a book. When it happened I was at my old job and really did not want to be doing any work so I went along with the phone call figuring that the worst that could happen was that I would kill a few hours that day. Honestly I never thought that this was real or that I would ever hear from the guy again, but a few months later I received an email to sign off that I had said these things and that he could publish the information. Again, never thought the book would actually be printed. Well it was.

I have never actually seen the physical book but have seen my name in print on Google books which is pretty cool. The quality of the information or rather there way not be much value in the book Breaking Into Graphic Design now as things change so quickly in the field. With school I have been doing a lot of reading lately, not as much as some other people I know, but have completed ten books so far this year.  I will add another to that list later this week and if I were to count all the essays, chapters of books I have been reading the number of pages would be another book alone.

Just a week ago I finished a book on Remedios Varo, Unexpected Journeys and found it fascinating  I had learned about Varo in my Latin American Art class I took last spring and am now working on a research paper on her so that was “required reading” but one in which I really enjoyed. Once I complete my research paper I want to do her justice on these pages, but until then I will simply say that fitting her work into one category is not possible.

Her fantastic worlds and uncanny juxtapositions are pure Surrealism (hours of reading on Surrealism have taught me to say “uncanny juxtapositions”), but her technique is to detailed and narrative to be Surrealist. Her paintings are completely her, I do not know who I would compare her to.

Listening to now: Adele Turning Tables via YouTube

The first artist highlighted in Art Talk is Barbara Hepworth and thanks to Carol one of my fellow readers at GoodReads I found out that her birthday was yesterday. What helped her stand out to me while reading the book was that she was a sculptor and I have not known of many female sculptors.

Barbara Hepworth, Tides I, 1946, Tate ©

Born and raised in England, Hepworth was one of four children and while studying art at the Leeds School of Art meet another English sculptor Henry Moore, who became a lifelong friend. From Leeds she went on to study at the Royal Collage of art in London and then in Italy. She was married twice, both times to artists and had four children, including triplets in 1934. In her interview with Cindy Nemser she said about being a mother and wife;

“I found it was a great inspiration to me. I loved the family and everything to do with them. I loved the environment and the cooking. I used to cook and go in my studio. I had to have methods of working. If I was in the middle of work and the oven burned or the children called for me, I used to make an arrangement with music, records or poetry, so that when I went back to the studio, I pick up where I left off. I enjoyed it, you see; it was part of me. (p.14)”

Her work evolved over time, sometimes completely abstract shapes and at others figures or other forms where apparent. Many of my favorite pieces by her are the circular, curved, hollow shapes. In fact I have discovered that one of her pieces is in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden here in D.C., a goal for this year is to go see it in person. In fact it has been a while since I visited the Hirshhorn and this may be the excuse I need.

Barbara Hepworth Figure For Landscape, 1960, Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden

She did continue to gain recognition, both in her native England and around the world, one of her pieces is in the United Nations Plaza in New York City (Single Form) and in 1965 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.  On May 20, 1974 she died in a fire at her home, today the house is the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, part of the Tate museums in England.

Links:

• Barbara Hepworth
• Book on Barbara Hepworth
• National Museum of Women in the Arts

I finished reading Art Talk by Cindy Nemser, a book that I was given as a high school graduation gift. Since then the book has moved with me several times and never been read. This fall when I finished up most of my class reading I finally picked it up as my “gym” book. The teacher who had given this book to me, clearly knew me better when I was 17 then I knew myself at 30. If I had read the book before now I am not sure that I would have found it so inspiring, however when I was only a few pages in it connected perfectly with me.  It has been a stars aligning sort of experience and has been yet another marker on my journey letting me know that going back to school is what I was meant to do.

Art Talk by Cindy Nemser via Goodreads

The book itself is a little dated, originally published in 1975 the artists have evolved since its publication but their attitudes toward art as a female artist does not change with time. The whole book is a collection of  interviews between Cindy Nemsert and 15 female artists. Her focus is on the struggle to become an artist as a female and discussing the culture of the art world in the 50′s through the 70′s. Many of the artists she sits down with share with her how they have managed to do what was seen as impossible, be a wife, a mother and an artist. It is their attitudes that are inspiring. They talk about sacrifices and adapting while still remaining themselves and not compromising there artistic goals. Those that married show how important a supportive husband is in reaching goals and in the case of Lee Krasner, how important a supportive wife can be in helping her husband reach his goals as well.

Each artist opened up a new avenue of thinking about art to me and has inspired me to learn even more about their work. The book also provides a wonderful look at the crossing paths or artists, gallery owners,  art critics and surprisingly how influential de Kooning was. Never really a fan of his work, these artists insights into his work has perused me to take a deeper look at his art. Definitely a interesting idea, a book on female artists inspiring the study of a male artist, who many critics and art viewers have felt present women as violent and or being violated.