It strikes my funny bone to write about something that in some ways seems a little like nothing. Don’t get me wrong. This piece, Hang Up, by Eva Hesse, is quite something. But the irony of an empty picture frame with a wire coming out of it is not lost on me.
I’ve been really wanting to write about this piece for a long time. I keep a list, and it’s been on it from the beginning. I’ve been equally hesitant, however. A bit like meeting someone really special and your insides are turning with excitement. You want to tell the world, but the feeling is so special that you kind of want to keep it to yourself. And experiencing art can be intimate like that, can’t it? So special you know you wouldn’t be able to describe the feeling.
Eva Hesse was a German-born American artist, born in 1936. She’s described as a Post-minimalist, but her work isn’t so easily categorized. However one might classify her work, it’s brilliant. Eva’s life was short in years, dying from a brain tumor at 34, but her body of work is extraordinary and monumental in impact.
Hang Up lives in the permanent collection of my favorite big museum in America, The Art Institute of Chicago. I highly recommend you pay it a visit. Say hello to American Gothic and Nighthawks while you’re there.
I’ll write briefly about Hang Up before sharing Eva’s own words about this bold piece. Really, Hang Up can be described with just one word: absurd. It’s the first thing I thought when I saw it, and turns out, it’s exactly how she thought of it. I love absurdity, so this fits my sensibilities.
How is one supposed to process a piece like Hang Up? Obviously, the rectangle evokes the idea of a conventional picture frame, begging for a picture to validate it’s existence. Eva had been a painter, creating oils on canvas. At the time of Hang Up, she was transitioning into a sculptor, and isn’t this piece the perfect expression of that time? It’s like she’s solving this problem before our eyes, of moving from 2D to 3D.
Eva knows we’ll be expecting a painting when we see a frame, so she’s challenging us, playfully and seriously, with the unexpected. And isn’t the unexpected more interesting than the obvious? Eva begs us to let go of our preconceived notions and offers us something new in exchange. In her short time, she added many beautiful words to the vocabulary of art.
Here’s Eva’s thoughts, from an interview with Artforum in 1970, the year she passed.
When I came back from Europe, about 1965–66, I did a piece called Hangup. It was the most important early statement I made. It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through. It was a huge piece, six feet by seven feet. The construction is really very naive. If I now were to make it, I’d construct it differently. It is a frame, ostensibly, and it sits on the wall with a very thin, strong but easily bent rod that comes out of it. The frame is all cord and rope. It’s all tied up like a hospital bandage—as if someone broke an arm. The whole thing is absolutely rigid, neat cord around the entire thing . . . It is extreme and that is why I like it and don’t like it. It’s so absurd to have that long thin metal rod coming out of that structure. And it comes out a lot, about ten or eleven feet out, and what is it coming out of? It is coming out of this frame, something and yet nothing and—oh, more absurdity!—is very, very finely done. The colors on the frame were carefully gradated from light to dark—the whole thing is ludicrous. It is the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really good. It has a kind of depth I don’t always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get . . . I know there is nothing unconnected in this world, but if art can stand by itself, these really were alone. And there was no one doing anything like this at the time. I mean it was totally absurd to everybody. That was the height of Minimal and Pop—not that I care—all I wanted was to find my own scene—my own world—inner peace or inner turmoil, but I wanted it to be mine.
Here’s to Eva Hesse and Hang Up. May we all live so free and inspired.