unmakings

Eva Hesse’s statement (written for the Fischbach solo exhibition):

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions.

What I want of my art I can eventually find. The work must go beyond this.

It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know.

The formal principles are understandable and understood.

It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go.

As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self.

In its simplistic stand it achieves its own identity.

It is something, it is nothing.

about to start school again, i feel like in a way, in applying to school i was trying really hard to make all the work cohesive, make it all speak to a certain statement, themes i found really relevant and exciting to me at the end of college and that continued for me as i entered the job world where i used my sewing skills for costume. now i feel a little like these themes are stale to me. i'm still interested in clothing, but now as i begin here in a new place, I'm not sure what direction i want to go. do i want to push materials, study them, make them evolve into their own thing (this is what i understand eva hesse means in her statement when she says the objects 'accedes to its non-logical self'.) that is interesting to me, art being something that an artist engages herself with, until eventually it achieves its own identity and escapes her. the process begins with unknowns, and then as making ensues, more becomes known, things are learned, but the end point is another unknown. in instances where i've felt that blissful feeling that i have done something beyond myself, like in new orleans, like in my thesis, these are times when i feel like the work escaped me at at a certain point and made itself. i remember walking around my thesis opening in a peach dress, greeting people and socializing, a little confused because i could see my installation and i could see my name placard near it, i knew i made it, but it was its own entity at that point. and at the beginning when i was brainstorming, the finished work stood so far in the future it seemed unreachable. 

work has to has a catalyst, a beginning idea, then more details get added, there are so many different potentials for what direction it could go and at the beginning point, the end is unknown. eva says she wants her work to be 'non-work', which i don't really get, but then she says, that it would 'find a way beyond [her] preconceptions.' this is what i want to be true with my work too, because at this point if i stick to 'what i do', i will limit myself in my learning. 

cindy nemser interviewed eva in the october files, a book i had from college, she writes that morse peckham in man's rage for chaos says that art is a 'desire for chaos, a kind of opening up of the unknown. the artist is seeking the unknown, seeking to give it order, but he or she has to find the chaotic before it can be given order. art basically makes people aware of the chaos that surrounds them so that they become alive to it... makes the viewer aware of a chaotic situation perhaps as a sort of reference to something of which he has never before been aware. its as if the art is a searching tool. it makes me aware of something i never thought was aesthetic before. but it is not only aesthetic. it makes me aware of an area of my surroundings or life that never dawned on me before.' in my knot drawings (need to get photoshop so i can figure out how to post the photos of those), i saw the drawing as a record of my process of learning. like the ideas i was having were taking a material form, in the form of note-taking sort of. i'd imagine that as my thoughts became more complicated, as would a layering of materials. so in a way, the drawing was a way that i ordered something chaotic, literally knotted string got simplified into a mathematical order. 

some ideas to start, i went through the blog and notebooks for old ideas:

- layers in material corresponding to dressing layers or more conceptual idea of layers. lately i've been interested in sheer layered over something else so you can see whats inside.

-matter, material -- dense coagulations, snarls, unmediated self (feelings)-architecture -- scaffolding, lattices, grids--repetition as absurditiy -- arithmetic, math-sculptures as costumes for imagined characters, characters could be feelings or things or whatever, not people, the sculptures are just things to stretch over some kind of armature and the armature can be nebulous or not real. 

-Scared of making feminist art, don't want my work to only appeal to women. yet, more interested in engaging my emotions ...

-cozy capturing but still a capturing -- captured, but snuggly-spooky but cozy i think this is my aesthetic.

{1 eva hesse' s hang up (1966), 2 tori (1969), 3 Sans II (1968), 4 contingent (1968), 5 rachel harrison's conquest of the useless, 6 vincent mauger}