Art 308: Sculpture Studio

Monica Milstead

Project 1- Process
ARTIST RESEARCH

Artist Research
Eva Hesse / Janine Antoni

The works of Eva Hesse and Janine Antoni are very much an engagement in process. Their works both show a narrative of process, which contributes to the meaning of the work. Our relationship with the works of Hesse and Antoni are intimate, as we can engage with the sometimes simple ways of how an object or action is made, and becomes an exploration for something larger.
Eve Hesse’s work plays between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Her early work plays upon an expansion or explosion of line out into a three-dimensional world. But my real focus is how her process is centralized on an exploration of the materiality of whatever medium she is using. In works like Untitled or Not Yet (1966) or Right After (1969), she is exploring the material and taking its lead as far as what the eventual object outcome is. Instead of forcing materials to do what is alien to them, she is letting them fall and drape, or dry naturally without any manipulation—thus exploiting its natural qualities.

Right After

Inherent in Hesse’s work is a tension between the geometric and the organic, the masculine and the feminine. In works like Schema (1967), there is a grid that aligns these soft, organic, fleshy shapes into an order. What makes her pieces though, is the seductive nature of the materials she is using, and the simple exploitation of gravity’s effect on those materials. Through this action, the object is turned inward on itself, and tells the audience about its own nature, rather than the nature of some other form. There is no metaphor here except perhaps the denial of the traditional nature of the artist and object, where the artist forces a medium or material to do something that is alien to it. Here Hesse is featuring the material and its qualities. Meaning can be inferred through what the object might eventually look like. Untitled or Not Yet and other works like it can be “attachable to, though not necessarily interpretable as the erotic.” This lends another dimension to Hesse’s work, because in the seemingly simple exploration of a material and a repetitive action or process, the final outcome or object is not only about material.

Untitled or Not Yet

Janine Antoni’s process is an engagement in metaphor and ritual, through the actions of her own body. She uses activities such as blinking, biting, licking, and bathing as tools for her art work. Through a single repetitive action, a form is made that creates (or sometimes destroys) an object. The materiality, the object, the actions, all of this is part of a process that creates a metaphor for the viewer. In her piece Lick and Lather (1993), Antoni casts two busts out of herself—one from chocolate and one from lard (to make soap). By bathing herself and the soap bust, she plays with metaphors of care and nurturing, destruction, and the self. She describes the action as very loving, and says that it allowed her to develop a relationship with her own image. However, in this loving action, the features of the bust are eroded. Rather than a simple material exploration like Hesse’s, Antoni is exploring what her body and the material can do in partnership. By introducing a ritualized action of bathing, for example, a narrative or metaphor is developed.

Lick and Lather