America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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The transformed consumer landscape of the 1960s opened up tremendous possibilities for artists. Rather than carving or modeling by hand, sculptors could take plans to fabricators and have works produced to commercial standards with industrial processes. Suddenly a vast range of new materials was readily available, including neon, latex, lead, resin, and Plexiglas. The factory became a studio and the hardware store a source of art supplies.

The artists who came to be known as Minimalists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, used these new materials and production processes to pursue simple geometric forms with high finishes and to work on a new scale midway between the human and the architectural. The resulting sculpture emphasized the relationships among the viewer’s body, the work, and the environment, encouraging the viewer to focus on the complexities of perceptual experience. At the same time, other artists explored these issues in shaped canvases and reliefs that toyed with the sometimes strange relationship between actual physical experience and spatial illusionism, as in Al Loving’s Rational Irrationalism.

The rigid geometries of these works were followed by a response from artists who sought to use the new materials in more spontaneous ways that captured the sense of making art as an active process subject to forces like gravity or the movement of the artist’s body. In 1969, the Whitney included many of these figures—Eva Hesse, Rafael Ferrer, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier—in the exhibition of Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. The exhibition also included contemporary music, dance, and visual art as captured in videos of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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In Eva Hesse’s untitled sculpture, mutability itself operates as a sculptural medium. To create this suspended work, one of the last she made before her death at the age of thirty-four, Hesse had knotted ropes dipped into buckets of latex. When these were hung up to dry, the viscous liquid either adhered to the twisted ropes’ surface or dripped off, resulting in sections of tangled gnarls and sweeping loops that retain the incongruities of their making. Hesse signaled her interest in such unpredictability in her notes for a preparatory drawing, describing “hung irregularly tying knots as connections really letting it go as it will. Allowing it to determine more of the way it completes its self.” Consequently, this sculpture is configured somewhat differently every time it is put on display.

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America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

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EVA HESSE (1936-1970), NO TITLE, 1969-70

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

18

EVA HESSE (1936-1970), NO TITLE, 1969-70

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection