Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I am Elizabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra
Gillman Curator of Photography at the Whitney
Museum of American Art. And I am standing in
front of Eva Hesse's untitled 1970 sculpture
which I refer to as a rope piece because
it's made out of rope. When you're standing
right in front of it, it looks like a big
tangled skein of yarn. And when you get very
close to into it, you really, I don't know,
you sort of feel very lost and tangled in it.
And you let your eye travel along the rope and
the knots and the latex and you look at the
very primative kind of way of holding it
together and hanging it from the ceiling.
And so you sort of get into the making of it
and that's very much what she wanted --
the process of making the work would be
visible. The rope itself is dipped into
buckets of latex that Eva Hesse bought on
Canal Street which is where she went shopping
for sculptural materials when she had her
studio on the Bowery down near Canal. She was
sort of teaching herself how to use latex
because it had never been used with the
freedom that she wanted to use it.
By hanging it, it was a way of drying it
and a way of the liquid sort of falling off
the piece, or adhering to the piece. It was
quite by chance that that happened, and she
never knew how it was going to end up so she
had this way of talking about her work where
the thing made itself.
When she was making it, she was physically
very, very ill because she was fighting brain
cancer. And... that she... her manual abilities
were really reduced considerably. She worked
with a studio assistant to make this piece.
But she accepted these limitations.
I think it's been one of the most influential
pieces of American sculpture. But, to today's
artists, it demands something. There's no
pop reference in it, there's little humor
in it. There's kind of a pathos in it, I think.
I think it's demanding.