PREFACE
I am convinced that we create in order to connect to the world that is spirited, alive and wondrous to the extent that we cannot possibly fathom. I am convinced that art should inspire and lay the path towards this connection. I myself can be creative only from a happy place. Yet to reach this place I had to understand and overcome many obstacles. In my world, art comes from beauty and wonder. Once I overcame all dark emotions I could finally give something to the world and share. However there are times when we, artists, create from the dark places and in order to understand this terrain even further I decided to write the following essay which includes my poetry.
ART IS THE CURE FOR HEARTACHE. DISCOURSE ON MELANCHOLIA AND GRIEF BY THE EXAMPLE OF EVA HESSE.
Contents
Introduction - page 3
On Melancholia - page 4
Eva Hesse - page 8
Material Process - page 11
Abstract and Figurative - page 20
Conclusion - page 22
Bibliography
I would like to talk about us, humans, a central figure to any art practice, be it abstract or figurative, one cannot escape this very central phenomenon, the human being. Abstract art as it is, yet one can claim to step beyond our human senses. Cecily Brown mentioned that pure abstract is simply impossible and what an artist does instead - is ‘playing with the possibilities’.
So what do we humans experience, what urges us to create?
Some say that art is about aesthetics to create or communicate beauty, it is obviously not always the case. I would like to focus on the experiences of the human heart that force an artist to create, particularly: on the experience of melancholia, grief and sadness as a contrary to bliss and euphoria connected to experiences of love. On our willingness to communicate something unspoken, emotionally overpowering and metaphysical. All of this is very relevant to the practice of Eva Hesse. She has taken the concept of melancholia and grief as a form of loss and transformed it into affirming creative action. I will talk about art-making and how it has been experienced and represented by Eva Hesse. I will conclude by talking about figurative and abstract in art, how it relates to the human being and how knowledge contributes to one’s overcoming sadness. How the desire to evolve, grow and understand oneself can overcome all other personal hardships. I will talk about the abstract in art as a way of reaching through limitations towards new discoveries.
On Melancholia
How am I you are asking
Lying in the darkness
Listening to silence..
Slam the door
and do it louder!
So that the walls shutter
And the paint falls down
The ceiling cracks
and the floor collapse
Everything jumps up and nails down
Nailing your very common sense
Down to the maddening realisation
That all these walls
Meant not to be here.
Can I tell you something? This empty feeling would not go away, it is as if you are hungry, trying to eat, can even sense this growing appetite with penetrating frustration that taste won't ease this emptiness.
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Melancholia. Has been, no doubt, one of the driving forces for many artists to produce work. Whether to overcome it, to communicate it or simply pass the time while living with it. What is melancholia? The word melancholy originates from Greek ‘melan’ and ‘khole’ and designates black bile, which formerly was believed to cause depression. In the middle ages, Melancholia was defined as the deviation of one’s natural state to one of fear. Writers of Renaissance, such as Paracelsus wrote of melancholia as ‘The disease that deprives Man of his reason.’ He also noted that ‘ Melancholici' were one of the kinds of insane people who by their nature lose their reason and turn insane. With a statement like this, defining individuals with melancholia as insane, Paracelsus is saying that their mental capacities have been deteriorated.
Apart from this association of melancholia with insanity in the Renaissance period, Melancholia was considered to be a kind of quality associated with intellect: a predisposition for intellectual and imaginative accomplishments. Stanley Jackson in his book on Melancholia and depression says that:
‘Melancholy disposition was thought to be the basis for intellectual and imaginative accomplishments, to be the wellspring from which came great wit, poetic creations, deep religious insights, meaningful prophecies, and profound philosophical considerations.’
He, however, went on further, saying that this disposition could lead those who possess it at any given moment to a disease. This romantic approach to melancholia, where mental anguish was linked to desired aspects of intelligence, has been a fact according to Jackson up to the eighteenth century when further on it came to a halt.
In the nineteenth century, Melancholia was directly related to something as dramatic as ‘spiritual death’. Johann Christian Heinrich mentioned melancholia in his writing about disturbances of the soul. He described melancholia as paralysis by which the person affected loses the freedom of disposition and broods over a loss or a perceived loss, hence the grief.
Heinrich says that the person gradually becomes quiet, withdrawn, secretive, loses appetite, sleep, weight and becomes fearful. The symptoms continue until the disease completely overcomes the individual and leads to fading out of the individual into nothingness. Heinrich’s idea of nothingness is being described as ‘hollow ego which grows at itself’ (Stanley Jackson 1990, 157). In other words, the melancholic individual could be described as the one who has lost individuality to the perceived narrowed condition of the inner world. This leads to seeing the world as some disorientating and absurd entity.
When darkness comes it forces you into a deep sleep
Aware that no one can help you this moment
And you yourself cannot explain…
This inhuman darkness
Like a parasite it falsifies You
against yourself
Julia Kristeva, philosopher and psychoanalyst, in her book ‘ Black sun: melancholia and depression’, says that the starting point of this condition is usually a loss of something central to the individual’s life which usually leads to a mourning period. Further, the mourning can shift to anger at the thing which disappeared and this can then turn inward until the self is transformed into a place of death and loss. This process became associated with the term ‘spiritual death’. Nothing that can be said or brought before the individual can remove that negative internal view towards it.
When we lose someone we grieve
yesterday I watched an interesting documentary on grief…
fundamental human emotion
a man examined it from the evolutionary point of view
he said that it is a byproduct of love
the price we have to pay for bounding
…a woman wrote that her grieving
experienced physically to the point of blindness
sudden bodily deformations
inability to perform a simple task
burning sensations around her chest and knees
and
continuous battle against
meaninglessness…
this byproduct of bounding
byproduct of love
as much as we love …as much as we grieve.
In the documentary on understanding grief, Dr Mark Bergson from Hamline University says that love and grief and therefore melancholia are closely linked together. He goes on saying that grief is the byproduct of love, and love is our evolutionary means of bonding with each other. Since this emotion is so debilitating and devastating it could only be compared to the opposite of it, the beauty of loving someone and being loved. Not everyone is going easily through what has been relieved seven stages of grief, it is always a gradual process of recovery and for some of us, this recovery happens through art making…
Eva Hesse
‘Everything for me has always been opposites, nothing has ever been in the middle.
My life never had anything normal or in the centre. It was always extremes and contradiction.’
1970 ( 34 yo )
Eva goes on saying that even when she was younger or a less mature artist she would always play with the ideas of order and juxtapose it to chaos. She always ended up finding the most ‘absurd opposites’ or extremes, inevitably considering the absurdity and contradiction of things around her. She could easily, and many artists do, relate to ‘ the total absurdity of life’. In her note, she mentioned that she felt very close to certain artists particularly due to the concept of absurdity that they have been expressing through their work. She mentioned Duchamp, Yvonne Rainer, Jasper Johns, Sartre, Ionesco, Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, - these were all on her favourite list.
To understand how trauma, melancholia, sense of loss and abandonment closely links to art making we shall have a look at the biography of the artist. Eva Hesse was born in Nazi Germany on the 11th of January 1936. At that time, being Jewish, at the age of three she and her sister were sent on a train to Amsterdam to escape the regime. We can only imagine what the child went through at that age when her mother’s love and care is the most essential for healthy development. Her father wrote in his diary that they did not know whether they would see their children again. Both girls ended up being captured and quarantined. At the camp, sisters were not allowed to see each other and were under strict surveillance. Eva had a real issue of abandonment said her sister Helen during the interview.
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She had been experiencing an overwhelming sense of loss in mature years which will follow. When both sisters and parents eventually met and emigrated to the US, her mother became mentally ill and was hospitalised. That lead to her parent’s divorce in 1944. This was another trauma for Eva. The following year in 1946 her mother committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building in Manhattan New York. Here Eva was at the age of 10 years old.
Her mother’s suicide brought yet another avalanche of emotions linked to grief and a sense of abandonment. These feelings will haunt the artist throughout her whole life. In later years she was perpetually afraid that she may follow her mother’s path, that she inherited her instability. She continuously experienced uncomfortable feelings of self-sabotage, sadness and self-doubt. When she married Tom Doyle, the sculptor more mature than her in years, Eva struggled with her feelings of competitiveness because he was more evolved in his art practice. She then dealt with his drinking and his interest in other women. When she and her husband spent a year in Germany in 1964, their marriage began slowly to crumble. Then in 1966, her father died, here Eva is 29 years old. A year after her husband left her. Extremely difficult for Eva was the acceptance of her divorce, it took her just over a year to finally take off the ring from her finger and sign the papers. Gradually we shall see from her diary that she began to learn how to live with her persistent feelings of anxiety, rejection and desertion. Only making art seemed to give her some solace and so Eva kept producing work. Her work gave her the means of surviving. It gave her the meaning and a path to go further in her life. Her diary reads…
‘I feel I have nowhere to turn. All my stakes are in my work. I have given up in everything else. Like my whole reality is there—I am all there. ‘
December 12, 1965
It is almost like an addiction when an addict turns to this little world that he crated. Holding on to something, because everything else collapses. At the age of 33 Eva was diagnosed with cancer, brain tumour, she underwent three surgeries yet eventually passed away a year later in May 1970.
‘Well I don’t know. Where does drawing begin and where does drawing end and painting begin.
And I don’t know if my own drawings now are – they are really paintings on paper but you know I call them drawings. But they really are not. There is no difference between that painting except that is smaller and on paper. It’s a canvas and – a sculpture – No I don’t feel like I’m doing traditional sculpture. The last piece that I did was like paintings that are hung from the ceiling and it could be hung against a wall.’
Eva Hesse
Material process
There is a sense of unity which comes across through Eva’s work. Eva approached her life and her art in a very unique way. She merged the boundaries, her world on paper eventually became the world outside of the paper. Her sculpture work eventually took over and yet it went back to two dimensional work again. Her creations spread literally everywhere around her. In her studio, there were paintings and drawing everywhere: hanging from the ceiling, on the walls, on the floor. Eva managed to unite different worlds and dimensions and bring them all together. Throughout her short life, she transitioned from being a painter into becoming a well-known sculptor. Materials she used were so various that it would not make any sense to try and describe them. She constantly experimented shifting from two dimensional drawings into three dimensional sculpture work and visa versa. It seems that she was getting hold of anything she could find available, as a means of saving herself from her troubled mind. She used fibreglass, rope, various holding materials, gels, fabrics, threads, plastic, metal - everything her contemporaries in the US and in Germany were applying plus whatever she found around (as during her residency at the textile factory in Germany in 1964).
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In the summer of 1964 and throughout a year which followed, Eva underwent through the series of transformations during. That year was a turning point in her career because she began producing collage and sculptural work. At first, she experimented with ‘ wild space’ - her work was very expressive, then she focused more on details and different parts of the drawings and eventually she was collecting everything around her, various factory parts, and drawing them. That led to her relief work and eventually to her sculpture work. Her work has been described by Vanessa Corgy as being on the borderline of uncontrollability, very distinctive, frágile and playful, psychologically challenged as she continually “materialised her anxieties’.
Let’s have a look at Eva’s work to the right, which has no name. It is made of enamel paint, string, papier-mâché and elastic cord. Eva created this piece in 1966. Whilst her contemporaries and friends around looked for conceptual perfection in geometrical abstraction ( for example Ad Reinhardt), which she might have been after as well, yet it seems that she was in opposition and contradicting that as well. She made this piece by wrapping a thin rope around some cylinder like form which hangs by itself. It seems that she was after something dirty, it may suggest intestines or some dark brown build up, very organic. It definitely feels bodily to many spectators and art critics. Either way, it gives away this playful interaction. An interesting and innovative way of dealing with the human body: whether it is food or excrement or the insides - it is all charged with an intense sense of associations.
Some people can see it as a primitive object or a weapon or even a fetish tool. It is by all means very playful and tells us even more about Eva’s character. There is also a sense of absurdity in this piece. That year in 1966 Eva was on her own, everyone she loved has either died or left her. In her diaries, we shall see that she has been dealing with melancholia most of the time and it has no doubt infused her with the sense of absurdity in the world around her.
For many people it would be impossible to focus on work in such circumstances, when external powers and emotions are overpowering. As Faustus in Mantuan says on Love Melancholy : ‘I found no pleasure either in rest or work, my senses were numb and my mind inert, my love of poetry faded ( Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Volume 3 on love melancholy, p 151 ) Only gradually over time Eva’s thoughts, judging by her notes in the diary, became more occupied by books she was reading or appointment she was engaged with or the art materials she was using. In her notes, she described how much she loved plaster for its flexibility and lightness. She admired its whiteness. Then she discovered the joy of cutting the fabric in strips and experimenting with them. A few days later she would make another note of the same nature:
‘I finally took a screen. heavy mesh which is stretched on a frame like so and taken cord which I cut into smaller pieces. I soak them in plaster and knot each piece through a hole and around wire. It is compulsive work which I enjoy.’
December 14, 1964
In her work, Eva explored the unexpected, irrational and ‘absurd’. Combination of such could come across as chaotic and disorderly, and yet she found her own way of dealing with the chaos. If we look closely at Hesse’s sculpture piece which she created in 1970 ( Untitled, Rope Piece, to the right). This piece was made of rope, latex, string and wire. By looking at it closely we shall see a lot of tangled twisted organic like threads as if drawings in space. At first, this seems chaotic.
During the exhibition at the Whitney Museum ropes hang from a ceiling in a corner of a room, different sizes and textures.These robes are obsessively wrapped, they are not fixed and free to be moved. It seems that they are reaching up yet hopelessly weighted down by the tangled coils that droop around. This could suggest the whole psychological condition Eva was experiencing. This work was made right before she died at the age of 34. When she died the sculpture was still hanging in her studio. This work is about flexibility - everything leads to this one word. realms.
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This sculpture has its original structure, which could be then deformed or reformed to some extent yet not entirely. Eva, experiencing all the complexity of her life and emotions intertwined with pain and anxieties, she was terminally ill and was very likely questioning the unknown ahead of her. If we look at her contemporaries and her friend, artist Donald Judd, - they all were producing work with an intention to absolute, it was very fixed, heavy, machine like and unchangeable: often geometric and monochromatic. Eva did something opposite, possibly as many critics refer to this work to be malleable, opening up issues on what it is like to be a woman.
If we look at Eva’s earlier work, we shall see that it has always been dealing with the concept of absurdity. Her many other drawings and sculptures play with this very idea. In one of her works back in 1967, titled ( Addendum, 1967, to the right), we see circular almost breast-like hemispheres along the bar positioned at increasing intervals.
Eva hung rope cords from each hemisphere which fall to the ground in unpredictable curls, this already suggests absurdity which is either coming out of something geometrically calculated therefore orderly or vice versa leading to such. The regulated structure of the bar contrasts with the disordered appearance of the cords. Hesse recognised that such systems were not rational, commenting that ‘Serial art is another way of repeating absurdity’.
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What is obvious is that Eva was dealing with her own 'absurdity' - the sensation of chaos and abandonment. She lost everyone she loved and life for her was obscure, absurd and chaotic. Eva was great in communicating her feelings, she knew how to express herself, for this reason, she was often associated with expressionists:
'The expressionist style is as evident in Hesse’s words as in her work, and those words tell us a good deal about her art: how important drawing always was for her; how the freeing of line in her drawings led to her first sculptures. Like all expressionists, Hesse marked her work with her personal presence, with the traces of her path through it' –E.H.J.
Her own expressive style she developed earlier on in her life. It is evident in her previous works, for example, in her many untitled drawings produced whilst she was on her residency in Germany in 1964.
These drawings could be described as abstract machinery yet organic in nature. They are made of soft lines and shapes: repeating circles with different density of ink and colour - all these shapes are somehow abstract, disorientated in space as if portraying her own state, - always fragile and uncertain.
Her diary tells us that she was not sure of her main motivation, whether it was recognition, praise or acceptance. She felt that it was somewhat vain to desire recognition and yet she desired it so badly: ‘it causes an impossible pressure to live with’. She explained that her own inadequacy was pushing her to that vanity as a counterbalance: ‘ my feelings of inadequacy are so great that I oppose them with an equally extreme need for outside recognition’. ( Note from her diary. July 14, 1964 )
At the age of 24, Eva wrote that she was looking for some hope in her life. Nothing else but her art making provided her with something permanent, mature and lasting. Later at the age of 26, she wrote that only her art could totally understand her as if it is a living being. She was almost merging with her art, - it has always been her source of ‘goals, ambitions, satisfactions’ as if nothing else existed apart from it. She wrote that only the art allowed her to channel the thoughts, understand them better and understand her own growth and development. Art was solving the problems for her and providing solutions to various ongoing anxieties. It helped her to understand herself and her own fears: ‘it affords the problems which I can think through, form ideas which I can work with and arrive at a statement’. With the help of her art, she developed her own strength. When she worked everything else in her life seemed to come together: ‘when I work all else seems to hold together much better’( August 3, 1962).
And yet her doubting of herself never left her: ‘I sit and hope I will work some. I might just have to believe in myself more before working will mean something’( June 13, 1964).
There was a letter she wrote in 1964 which explained exactly the nature of her agony. In the letter, she questioned the reasons for creating work. At first, it was recognition because she could not give it herself:
‘I respect myself too little so too much must come from the outside’. Then she wrote that all her drawings could be split into three stages: the first kind is made of free and crazy forms. The second is of detailed and carefully crafted machine-like forms. And the final stage: drawings which are larger, bolder and weirder, - the ones which grew into nonsense. She concluded the letter by saying that she was always lost in her art, always on the edge of giving up, always confused: ‘I don’t know where I belong and so I give up again. All the time it is like that. . . .That is my hopelessness . . . . Everything for me personally is glossed with anxiety. . .’
At the age of thirty Eva created her sculpture titled (Hang up, 1966, see bellow). She herself considered this to be her best work at that time. Here we see the metal frame and a cord absurdly hanging out of it, it is something very minimal on the junction between a painting and a sculpture.
In this piece, Eva herself wrote that all absurdity came out through her with the full depth of it: ‘the kind of depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning.’ She described it as a frame on the wall, tied almost like a ‘ hospital bandage’. And then that absurd string is coming out of it ‘ as if someone broke an arm’. Eva said that it was the most ‘ridiculous’ structure she had ever made.
Abstract and Figurative.
Art cannot be easily defined. The abstract side of it is representative of the human being, our metaphysical plane. The word abstract originates from Latin ‘ab’ plus ‘trahere’, which means to draw away, disassociate, and to detach. If we look at a work called ‘ Contingent’ which Eva did in 1970 (an image bellow), we will find shapes, colours and gestural marks that do not have any attempt to point out at a specific form or accurate representation. She herself referred to it as either a painting or sculpture, something in between or both. Abstraction has been defined as something that has no definite representation in it. Abstraction includes feelings or ideas which have not emerged into the real world yet. The word contingent suggests something unforeseen, possible, accidental, it is not defined but rather fluid and abstract. When Eva did this work she was already 33, the last year of her life. Definition of abstract is so very subtle and broad, one can say that there is abstraction everywhere. All Eva’s work has abstraction in it, towards the end of her life it became even more prominent, like the above piece or her rope piece. Abstraction is the ideal expression of something unknown or unpredictable. Abstraction in art is a perfect channel for an artist to communicate the deepest and unspoken feelings. Whilst creating this piece, Eva was ill with cancer, she was not only making art but dealing with the illness, looking into the future without knowing what is going go happen. 'Silence is so accurate’ said Mark Rothko. It is important to understand that in silence, abstract silence of art making, many painters found peace. One can even say that silence can transform a man. Abstract art making is a gateway into another world, yet between each abstract artist there is an enormous gulf, we all have our own gateways and there is so much yet to discover.
20
If we look at the abstract aspect of Eva Hesse’s work and compare it with Cecily Brown or Mark Rothko: they are all very different. If Eva was playing with absurdity, conceptually it seems that it was her way of reaching beyond her own limitations, juxtaposing various figurative and abstract elements and finding her way through the unknown. On the other hand, Mark Rothko was coming from the non-objective world, speaking to the viewer through the abstract nature of colour, for him it was peaceful and orderly. Eva was communicating through lines in her drawings or absurdly entwined, chaotic sculpture twists. Mark Rothko was communicating through colours and minimal shapes. Mark Rothko said, ‘It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes.’ , eventually he abandoned all figurative elements in his work saying that it allowed more clarity: ‘the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea.’ It seems that he reached his own peak of evolution and stepped into his own ‘unknown’, where he obtained his unique discoveries.
Abstract in art is extremely important so that an artist can progress further playing with his own unknown. It is important to note, however, that abstraction is impossible without some rationalisation, some ground or a figure. It is like chaos and order, abstract cannot exist without figurative, if one overrides another there will be an inevitable disaster, chaos creates order and order creates chaos. Any art work contains both figurative and abstract aspects to it, through which an artist manoeuvres.
The word figurative comes from the Latin word ‘ figura’, meaning ‘ to form’. In art, figurative is based on the shapes of the real objects, tangible ideas and visual representations. Figurative is what our eyes make sense of, it is made of shapes and forms, it is what we understand. The objects and the meaning which we give to them, what we understand when we see them. Figurative has its borders, it is made of a line, a body or a shape. It also represents something, has associations with something, it is representative. It is possible that through figurative in art we better connect to our conscious thoughts and the visual world around us. It is possible that whilst considering the figurative aspects of her work, Eva could better process her real problems and challenges. For example, if we look at Eva’s last piece ‘ The Rope’, figurative here would be the rope itself, its tangible structure. Whilst touching it and modelling it into various shapes, Eva was reflecting on her current situation, her life and through a series of associations was reaching towards her own peace.
21
Conclusion
Figurative could give that structure and order to the other side of things. The other is the unknown and abstract. Yet, figurative is dependable on abstract: the colour, light, mass, volume to name a few. One cannot exist without another, abstract and figurative are entwined for life. Just like thoughts inside of a human being, or outside thus we do not know. Some thoughts are sleeping somewhere in the subconscious whilst others form sentences and are brought to the surface. How can an individual work through all that chaos, especially in Eva’s case, whilst drowning in melancholia and an inbuilt wall of depression. The only way out of it is to break that wall, that pattern of thinking, those figures and shapes that cause harm and by causing harm I mean suffering. To understand her life better Eva was using defined lines and juxtaposed them to abstract shapes, or defined shapes and played with chaos as in her last work. In a way, she was finding her own balance. Life is that walk forward between order and chaos, between abstract and unknown and defined figurative and seemingly known.
Many artists encountered absurdity in the process of living and art making. However, once an artist begins experimenting with random chances and possibilities, - there come new horizons of knowledge and personal evolution. A breakthrough one may say. Absurdity could be a form of chaos and it is common to believe that from chaos comes the order.
Eva mentioned in her diary :
‘only knowledge of the self is possible and that for each individual the self - itself is the only thing really existent’.
Art making offers that sacred process of understanding oneself. Art process is often entwined with a retrospective meditative process. Meditation itself is closely linked to self awareness and awareness in general. If one fails to do so there comes all sorts of disasters. Many books has been written about it. Carl Jung wrote a book on mental diseases. Inna Segal wrote her ‘ Secret language of the body’ as a manual for those already ill. Our emotions must be understood and processed or at last we must make the effort to understand them. Art offers that playground to look within oneself. Whilst making art one eventually opens up towards curiosity. Curiosity opens the gates to knowledge and the latter provides the tools for handling often debilitating and all consuming human emotions. Art also provides the meaning to ones life and as we know finding meaning is the main challenge of every individual as Victor Frankl mentioned in his ‘ Man’s search for meaning’. How can art provide meaning? It is very simple as it teaches us the process of ‘co- creation’. Co-creation is a gift that each of us internally possess. Could it be that the cure to melancholy (a byproduct of love) would be the knowledge itself? Knowledge and the discovery of one’s true abilities and nature? Both abstract and figurative conditions of a human being are biomorphic, both in a “ state of flux‘ - it all constantly mutates and flows just like life itself. For a human to be alive means to try and to understand oneself. To live is to learn, develop, grow and experiment. Creating art can give that gateway to self awareness and self knowledge. And this knowledge can ease any sort of pain, just what Eva has been trying to achieve during her short life.
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