Lecture critique: Briony Fer, Studiowork, 22 October 2009 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Briony Fer’s lecture takes place in the Fruitmarket Gallery’s upstairs space, in which several of Eva Hesse’s never-before-exhibited (nor intended by the artist to be exhibited) paper, wire and rubber test-pieces are on display without the protective cases or rope barriers normally associated with the artist’s fragile works. Fer weaves two main issues together: firstly, her primary impulse in researching Hesse’s test pieces, to question the status of these objects and the terms in which they have been assimilated into art historical discourse; secondly, to discuss her curatorial choice to show these ‘studioworks’, her term of choice, in a contemporary gallery rather than in a museum.
Her argument, that the works do count as ‘the thinnest art’ by ‘the narrowest of margins’, likened by Fer to fragments of Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, that ‘barely counted as poetry’, relies upon wide-ranging and sometimes disparate-seeming evidence. This includes careful visual and technical description of Hesse’s works and working processes (stitching, folding, to make interesting spatial formations), to demonstrate that the studioworks are as formally and technically complex as canonical Hesse sculptures. Theoretically, she draws upon Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ and Catherine de Zegher’s research on relationships between drawings and objects, suggesting the studioworks are closer to being drawings than sculptures.
Comparison to the work of Hesse’s contemporaries, such as Bochner, and to the recent art of Orozco brings up issues of failure and awkwardness in the status of the studioworks, and leads to discussions of their original display conditions, documented in 1960s studio photographs. Structurally, the lecture is an example of ‘starburst’ thinking, producing a range of ideas, theories and examples around the studioworks, rather than each new concept necessarily linking to and informing subsequent points. Stylistically, Fer’s acute sensitivity towards language is evident, in word-play around multiple meanings of ‘testing’, ‘work’ and ‘mess’.
This critique will address the significance of Fer’s lecture in three ways. Firstly, by looking at her curatorial response to Hesse’s test-pieces in the light of other Hesse exhibitions. Secondly, by assessing the persuasiveness of Fer’s use of theories stemming from Bataille’s informe. Thirdly, by briefly noting the similarities between Fer’s ideas and other recent feminist approaches. Each aspect will be discussed alongside relevant material from Fer’s own scholarship in order to position this lecture within her research interests. Fer has published extensively on the dissolution of modernism and on drawing, minimalism, surrealism, objecthood and the art historian’s role. Specifically, this essay will consider her prior work on surrealism and the throwaway, the importance of the studio in postmodern art, and objecthood.
Fer’s research on, and exhibition of, Hesse’s test-pieces, instead of the artist’s drawings or canonical sculptures, demonstrates her intent to break new ground, to introduce new material, into Hesse scholarship. Framing these works, and the lecture, in a contemporary gallery context reinforces Fer’s argument that the studioworks are indeed works of art, even suggesting that her construction of them has pushed them out of their status as test-pieces and produced them as new works of art, with relevance to contemporary interpretive frameworks and art practices. This concept of production of a new art work is described by Bal, 2003, in her essay on Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation, in which she views Bernini’s Saint Teresa as being translated, and therefore re-produced, its hidden potential released, by Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison sculpture. This idea of translation also suggests movement: perhaps the movement from the studio, or archived documentary photograph to the gallery, and research lecture slide, is enough to tip the studioworks into the realm of art.
In defending her decision not to use protective barriers, Fer says that she wanted to show the work ‘without it looking like a reliquary’. This challenges the traditional curatorial approach criticised by Lee, of SFMOMA’s 2002 Hesse retrospective, where most work was placed in vitrines or cordoned off, therefore dramatising ‘the question of medium’ and decay. On Tate Modern’s version of this survey, Nixon, 2005, notes that ‘an open cube set on the floor is not adequately represented by a closed cube set on a platform’; the museum setting framed Hesse as a historically significant artist (subject to protective museal constraints) rather than as an experimental young artist in the ‘studio milieu’. Fer’s own interest in the studio is first codified in a chapter on Hesse as a studio artist in her 2004 book, The Infinite Line; though she does not discuss any test-pieces, she notes that in Dorothy Beskind’s 1967 film of the artist in her studio, many works seem to be adaptable, often changing in formation, and that many more works were filmed being made than are now seen in canonical Hesse exhibitions or publications.
This idea of flexibility, multiplicity and instability converges with Nixon’s comment that ‘Hesse continually devised new ways of making and displaying work’; Nixon goes on to criticise the trend of the ‘photographic superego’ that dictates curatorial decisions away from Hesse’s flexible approach in an attempt to exactly recreate the documented past, as in the 1993 Yale Hesse survey. Fer’s choice of a contemporary art setting, minimal protection, careful embrace of the works’ physical condition without attempts at restoration, and deliberate rejection of 1960s photographic installation precedents (she contrasts slides of these images with her much looser curating style) demonstrates a desire to continue Hesse’s experimental, destabilising approach: a fresh curatorial methodology. Fer translates Hesse’s work for a 2009 contemporary art audience well versed in post-1960s theory.
One such theory, first documented as a renegade surrealist concept in 1929, but later developed as a post-structuralist interpretive framework by Krauss and Bois in their 1996 exhibition ‘L’informe: Mode d’emploi’, is Georges Bataille’s informe, or ‘formless’, an anti-modernist, anti-idealist notion defined by base materialism: ‘devolutionary, regressive, low’. Hesse’s open cube, Accession, 1968, with its repetitive, but organic, structure was included in this exhibition; Krauss, 1997, comments on Hesse’s participation in horizontality (a key element of the informe’s lowness) reading her large-scale, collapsing sculpture, Seven Poles, 1970, as a critique of Jackson Pollock’s return to verticality. Fer’s interest in the informe’s ‘baseness… to trigger rot and decay’ extends into much of her published scholarship, for example she relates Agnes Martin’s late 1950s relief work ‘to an aesthetics of the thrown away’.
In her lecture, Fer combines her interest in studio-practice’s proliferation of never-exhibited experiments and models, as seen in Beskind’s film, with an extension of Hesse’s interpretation through the informe, to include its ‘mess or art waste’ aspect – Fer directly references Bataille in her lecture here. Keeping interpretive options open, she uses word-play, saying that the studioworks ‘mess with our minds, mess with neat categories’ but also literally compares works, such as partial papier-mâché casts of balloons, to detritus on the studio floor that might just as easily be thrown out as preserved and valued as art. However, this move (translation?) is not wholly convincing. While Bataille brings heavyweight art-theoretical cachet to Fer’s analysis, Hollier describes his ‘real practice of imbalance’ as ‘a real risk to mental health’; connection to mental illness through biography is something that much recent Hesse scholarship has rejected; Bataille, with his dark political and ethical connotations might simply be too extreme to apply to an ambitious New York artist in the 1960s. Writing in 1995, Fer made a more subtle and persuasive use of surrealist concepts with regards to Hesse, writing that the distanced or ‘skewed relationship to the object’ comes from surrealism, but that the effects of this relationship are ‘neither simply reparative nor simply – at the other end of the scale – desublimatory.’
This 1995 article also discusses the impact of feminism. While Fer acknowledges Lippard’s affirmation of feminine subjectivity in Hesse’s oeuvre, she asserts that what is now needed is ‘the radical possibility of a more precarious subjectivity’ evolving out of feminism. Fer’s interest in the studioworks stems from their connection to the unstable and precarious; her lecture does not mention gender, sexuality or the body, instead focusing on materiality, language and the viewing subject’s (including the puzzled art historian’s) ‘testing’ experience of the pieces. This approach has similarities to Anne Wagner’s reading of Hesse’s work as deliberately destabilising gender categories; like Fer, Wagner then reads a surrealist aesthetic into Hesse’s work: the ‘fantasmatic and the hyperbolic, the absurd and the irrational’. This destabilising approach is becoming typical in Hesse scholarship – even where femininity is foregrounded – as demonstrated by Applin’s and de Zegher’s Fruitmarket lectures, concerning Hesse’s female contemporaries’ conflation of bodily and machine-like imagery and Ettinger’s matrixial (non-binary) psychoanalytic theory respectively.
As Charles Darwent writes, ‘by asking the question, “Are these artworks?”… the Fruitmarket’s show cannot help but answer it.’ Fer’s lecture seems similarly fated to answer in the affirmative due to its gallery context, and well-established theoretical approaches. However, in a 1995 book review Fer praises Foster, for working against ‘the easy assimilation of practice to theory or theory to practice’ in his refusal to force all objects of a certain type into a certain theoretical framework. Similarly, Fer’s disparate ‘starburst’ structure, resistance to tying up loose ends, and embrace of contradiction, may be seen not as a weakness but as an awareness of several possible means of enquiry, and a reluctance to limit the works to a codified textual interpretation at this early stage in their life as works of art on show. Her lecture’s structure appears to mirror her interpretive attitude to the test pieces: she said that the works ‘test us as viewers’, and that she felt pressed to create ‘sample terms’ to describe these exploratory objects; perhaps the lecture was yet another test, for Fer, or for the audience.
Fer’s lecture is relevant to museology and conservation studies as well as art theory. The contradiction involved in raising what is quite possibly studio-waste to the level of, admittedly ‘precarious’, fine art, is also closely related, at least metaphorically, to the ongoing debate on the separation of Art History and Visual Culture, through its questioning of the value and status of these ‘sub-objects’. In this way, the integrated exhibition and lecture are both provocative and significant, as announcements of the studioworks’ debut into art historical, and contemporary art, discourse.
This essay was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.
