Installation view of The Meaning of Greatness, Project, Dublin 2006
Solo exhibition at Project, Dublin (10 June - 21 July 2006) and reinstalled in Feminist Legacies, curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher as part of If I Can't Dance, Edition II at MuHKA, Antwerp (27 October 2007 - 6 January 2008).
The Meaning of Greatness draws on Pierce's own biography as an artist, her history and 'progress', along with art historical and counter-cultural references from feminism to modernism. The project in an ongoing interplay with notions of being an artist, friendship, and the personal and political legacies that form an art practice.
The American sociologist C. Wright Mills talks about the interdisciplinary aspects of intellectualism, and the practice of keeping a file, or set of files, that contains all the ideas or materials that compel one's research. He recommends periodically spreading the contents out and arranging them to figure connections between them. The Meaning of Greatness is such a 'file'. Convened temporarily, it is driven by coincidental affiliations, but these lead to unexpected readings often immersed in dissent and self-determination.
Installation view of The Meaning of Greatness, Project, Dublin 2006
Installation view of The Meaning of Greatness, Project, Dublin 2006
Installation view of The Meaning of Greatness, Project, Dublin 2006
Installation view of The Meaning of Greatness, Project, Dublin 2006
by Sarah Pierce
What does Hesse's art look like? The question is simple--it sits docilely enough on the page--but answers to it obey more complex laws than might be assumed.
-Anne Wagner, "Another Hesse"
The work that Eva Hesse is best known for is a piece that she called 'untitled', 'rope piece', 'the knot piece'. Since the work's inception into Whitney Museum's collection, its official title is Untitled, (Rope Piece) 1970. The date coincides with the year she died, the year Hesse began real work on Rope Piece. She exhibited it when she was alive, although for the most part it hung in her studio where she continued to work on it until her death, causing some to consider Rope Piece unfinished.
One or two images exist of Rope Piece hanging amidst the beams of Hesse's Bowery studio. However, the most prevalent photograph of the work installed is a singular view at the Whitney Museum. Elisabeth Sussman is the curator who has most overseen Rope Piece's installation, notably in retrospective exhibitions at San Francisco MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Jewish Museum. In each instance, Sussman hangs the work with an uncanny exactness that mirrors the Whitney image, using the rope Hesse used. Over the years, the latex on the rope has significantly darkened and decayed, making the work of installation difficult. There is no reason (despite a brand of early-90s writing on Hesse's work that claims the contrary) to understand decomposition as a quality that was at all compelling to Hesse.
Eva Hesse, Untilted Rope Piece 1970. Photograph from Eva Hesse by Lucy Lippard, New York University Press: New York 1976
The work's disintegration over time, its fragility, (from a conservator's point of view) is a characteristic that frustrated Hesse, who was drawn to latex's flexibility, but not its impermanence. Hesse's own account of making Rope Piece describes 2 or 3 people working together, allowing it to "determine more of the way it completes itself." In 2006, I remade the Rope Piece based on an extended caption written by Lucy Lippard relating to a 1970 pencil study by Hesse. It took several days working in the gallery with Grant Watson. We concerned ourselves with making Rope Piece; not another Rope Piece, or a replica, but the Rope Piece.
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In posing this question in 1988, Linda Nochlin cautions us (feminists) not to take the bait. Take pause! Before petitioning a list female names to add to the canon, consider, Why is it so difficult to retire the canon altogether?
In Belgrade in 1971, the communist Yugoslav government handed a local student population its own art space to operate and programme. The following spring, the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) organized the first of what would become an annual April Meeting, which invited young artists and students from across Yugoslavia to gather and discuss the 'expanded media.' After a 10 year hiatus between 1992-2002, the April Meeting resurfaced, but this time as an open video call with little connection to a present student body. My research in 2006 into SKC's beginnings and its legacy of April meetings, brought me to the studios of Zoran Popović and Raši Todosijević. Both men are in their 60s. They are among an echelon of artists identified with the experimental and international art world that defined Belgrade in the 1970s, and which revolved around the SKC. With me, they have little interest in discussing those days. Instead, each tells me about his work. Raši outwardly describes his art as "genius". Zoran uses the word "unappreciated", but I reckon he means genius, nonetheless.
At Belgrade University's Faculty of Art, I meet with the second and third year sculpture students. Looking around their studios, I am drawn most to the 'test pieces' — preliminary studies for future works that tryout an idea or test the properties of certain materials. I propose an exhibition in the SKC gallery of these unfinished works to mark the 2006 April Meeting. The students are game, and I leave the school with all I can manage. I display the test pieces on discarded furniture collected from behind the building. On one table I place a bounty of black-and-white photographs from the SKC archive taken in the same gallery between 1972-1976. I have cropped and reprinted each image, cutting out the performers and the art, so that all that remains is the audience — artists and students, mostly in their twenties, seated crossed-legged on the ground, leaning on the walls and each other.
April Meeting, Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade c. 1972. Courtesy Studentski Kulturni Centar Archive, Belgrade.
Letter to the Student's of Kent State, 1970. Courtesy the Linda Lyke Papers, May 4 Collection, Kent State University Libraries and Media Services, Department of Special Collections and Archives.
My college art teacher, Linda Lyke, was at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, the day the National Guard shot and killed four students during an anti-war protest on the campus. She tells me this while we are in Japan together in the summer of 1989 — the same summer the Chinese government killed protesters in Tian'anmen Square. I discover later that Lyke donated a dossier of papers to Kent State — condolences sent to the student government in the weeks following the deaths. In Kent State's vast archive related to the shootings, I come across a photograph dated May 1, 1970 of people gathered on the hill at Victory Bell. It is a strikingly peaceful scene depicting about 100 students seated along the grass, their backs to the camera.
Instead of a canon, imagine a more affectionate past. Formative, unfinished, not yet art, not in the realm of the documentable. Anne Wagner writes: "The wish to know Hesse is deeply nostalgic: it voices the desire for a return to the past to recover the Hesse who disappeared there, the woman who in 1970 died of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-four. She is the only Hesse we have, after all. [...]" My desire to know Hesse is no less nostalgic; my mother and Hesse were born in the same year. They grew up a few miles from each other; my mother in Port Washington, Long Island, Hesse in Washington Heights. Both come from families with moderate incomes and educated parents. For college, Hesse went to Pratt and Cooper Union, before settling on Studio Art at Yale. My mother majored in Art History and English at Brown. Other minor coincidences include Hesse's time at the Art Students League where my mother's father taught, and marriages within a few years of each other. Lives in sync — not so much with each other as with the times.
I give special thanks to Grant Watson for being an intent and discerning curator, and Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher for including me in their thinking. I extend gratitude to the archivists: Craig Simpson at the May 4 Collection, Kent State University Libraries and Media Services, and Dragica Vukadinović at the Studentski Kulturni Centar Archive, Belgrade. I am also indebted to the students at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Belgrade who contributed their test pieces, Ana Krstić, Milorad Panić, and Bojana Rajević, and to Sandra Grozdanić for organizing this exchange. Finally, I thank my mother Anne Guerry Pierce for lending me her drawings.
(Sarah Pierce, "Notes on The Meaning of Greatness", in The Meaning of Greatness, a once-off zine accompanying the exhibition of the same name in If I Can't dance I don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution", Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Art, MuHKA, Antwerp, 2008. Published by The Metropolitan Complex:Dublin 2008)