Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

Jackson Pollock "Number  28" and Sol Lewitt " Incomplete Open Cubes"
photograph by Hallie Cohen

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, the title for the current show at the Met Breuer, is the one thing of finished perfection in a show devoted to works that are either intentionally or unintentionally unfinished. Balzac wrote “The Unknown Masterpiece,”  in which Poussin plays a cameo as he does in the current exhibit which shows his “Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus (1627). However, Balzac was interested in the kind of implosion of the artistic personality in the striving for greatness. The "Non Finito" works on display at the Met are more matter of fact in their intention. Pliny is cited early in the exhibition since he encouraged the artist to “take his hand off the painting.”  Da Vinci’s “Head and Shoulders of a Woman (La Scapagliata)" is a perfect illustration of the point, as the head itself is pure perfection while the hair is left to the imagination. In the modernist framework Picasso is quoted thusly, “To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul” and here is the conceptualist Robert Morris, “Under attack is the rationalist notion that art is a form of work that results in a finished product.” A room devoted to J.M.W. Turner poses the question of what the impressionist style is, e.g. an absence of decision in which reality is only partially limned or, in fact, the scrim through which the artist’s vision ultimately comes to life. A parallel can be made with Kafka whose ending for The Trial might be seen as the absence of an ending.The air of unfinished business of course lies over the whole cannon of modern and post-modernism as is illustrated by Cage and Cunningham and certainly by Pollock whose Number 28 from l950 is exhibited opposite a work by Sol Lewitt fittingly titled “Incomplete Open Cubes” (1974-82).

Eva Hesse

Marcie Begleiter’s Eva Hesse has been held over at Film Forum and it’s significant that audiences have been so drawn to the documentary about the artist who died at 34 of a brain tumor-- since the world it describes is definitely not what's happening in art today. Richard Serra who's one of the many artists interviewed in the film (Nancy Holt, Tom Doyle, Hesse’s first husband, Robert and Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Carl Andre all make cameo appearances) remarks that “commodification hadn't occurred” when Hesse first emerged. It’s almost as if Hesse’s life provokes a nostalgia and even romanticization of the so-called troubled and angst-ridden notion of the artistic personality. One of the most significant elements of the Hesse film is the way it turns to her actual diary pages, which are shown on screen. “There’s not been a normal thing in my life, not one, “ she writes. She calls one of her early ars poetica, The Autobiographical Sketch of a Nobody (1955), “Pretty face, pretty body, pretty drawings however the person does not feel pretty inside,” she remarks in another passage and in yet another “the true artist is a paradigm for the true misfit.” Animations are employed to dramatize these passages including one in which her history as refugee from Nazi Germany fuels a dream of being captured by Nazis who “said if I were not a child they would have killed me.” When you look at the big artistic careers today, of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, promoted by international dealers like Larry Gagosian who treat art as just another tangible asset, Eva Hesse charts another era. It’s not that Hesse herself wasn’t ambitious, but it’s a matter of the horse and the cart. Despite the encouragement she had from artists like Sol LeWitt, one cannot imagine her self-consciously engineering her career with the public relations savvy and marketing skills of today’s superstars. On the other hand once she got going and found her niche in Postminimalism--in the sculptural work that appeared in her "Chain Polymers" show at the Fischbach gallery in l968, including the iconic buckets of "Repetition Nineteen III"--she was obsessed with success, right up until her untimely death.

The Vatican of Minimalism

The monumentality of Dia:Beacon is astonishing. It’s the Vatican of minimalism, the church in which those who worship saints like Sandback, Ryman, Serra, Beuys, Lewitt and Smithson congregate. The immensity feels opulent, the art sleek and self-contained and notably unconcerned with the notions of social conscience that have of late asserted themselves in the post-modernist landscape. Here’s a note that accompanies a Sol Lewitt, a squiggly line on a wall: “A not straight line is drawn from a point halfway between the center of the wall and the midpoint of the right side to a point halfway between the midpoint of the right side and the lower right corner to a point halfway between a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper right corner to a point halfway between the midpoint of the right side and the upper right corner.” The object of Fred Sandback’s string sculpture is described thusly: “To assert a certain space and volume in its full materiality without occupying it and obscuring it.” This temple of formalism is a little like the Large Hadron Collider—a huge space is required to unleash small particles, the esthetic equivalent of the elementary building blocks of matter. The scale of Dia:Beacon is also reminiscent of Versailles, and like Versailles it venerates order and an aristocratic view of art that has all but passed from our world.