We’re talking stuff and ‘stuffness’ this week on The Feminist Lecture Program with the wonderful Isobel Atacus, addressing the work of American artist Eva Hesse…
CLASS DESCRIPTION
Taking stuff and stuffness as its theme, this talk considers the way stuff sits at the edges of our attention and requires a kind of peripheral gaze; looked at too closely, its sense of stuffness slips. Yet it is precisely stuff’s slippery nature that provides a kind of joyful resistance, eluding capture, slipping through the net. Although ‘stuff’ quickly tends towards the abject, bringing to mind the perils of hoarding, dumping and waste, it also refuses to be commodified, categorised, kept. To explore this, the session addresses the work of American artist Eva Hesse.
Writing to a friend in 1965 Hesse noted: ‘Last Friday 15 minutes before this place closed I bought liquid casting rubber and filler and separator. I experimented all weekend. […] Today (I used it all up over the weekend) I went to get a larger supply. Its possibilities are endless.’ An interest in what you do with stuff you come across by chance, just before the store closes, formed an integral part of Hesse’s process, and leads this discussion into stuff. For Hesse, this resulted in around 70 studioworks, small abstract forms that were discovered on a shelf in her studio on her death in 1970, and sat as an undercurrent to her more formal practice. They were exhibited once (sort of), and given away to friends, yet they were never claimed as either ‘work’ or ‘non-work’. ‘After-work’ might be a possible descriptor? It shouldn’t really matter. The studioworks – like much of Hesse’s work that used latex and fibreglass – are deteriorating, they are falling apart.
At the time, the refusal of the studioworks to be categorised or named presented a strong feminist response to the gendered nature of the context Hesse was working in. Through these small works she claimed the studio as her site of research and pushed back against the pressures of an art market always-already primed to pounce. Their existence also reflected back on the very ‘stuffness’ of studio practice, its everydayness, as a space to experiment, try, set things aside, repeat, and fail. Yet fifty years on, what do they do for us now? How do we treat Hesse’s ‘stuff’? As forgotten objects now reclaimed, the studioworks become meta-objects, through which to imagine new, unruly futures.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Completing a PhD between the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and King’s College London, Isobel Atacus is a visual artist whose practice playfully questions the fleeting and ambiguous nature of interactions that take place in the physical realm. Encompassing sculpture, writing and performance, she brings the domestic and the natural world into conversation to challenge expectations of how materials and objects might behave. Excavating, mediating and re-directing, she treats materials as meta-objects that might take us towards new future possibilities. This forms the basis of her research project.
Isobel founded the icing room project and is part of the collective at Zaratan-Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon. Work has been exhibited, published and performed internationally. Lectures and talks include the Modernist Art Writing: Writing Modern Art conference at Nottingham University, the Worldmaking conference for the DLLC at King’s College London and a lecture and forthcoming article on Eva Hesse’s Studioworks for the Society for French Studies.
Instagram: @isobelatacus
Website: https://www.isobelatacus.com/
UPCOMING SESSIONS WITH THE FEMINIST LECTURE PROGRAM
Monday 16th September
Kitty Underhill (she/her)
Where do Flaws Come From?: Bellies, Bodies and the Social Construction of Imperfection
Monday 23rd September
N.A. Kimber (she/her) and K.E. Donoghue-Stanford (she/her)
Death and the Maiden: Femininity in the Gothic
Monday 30th September
Carolina Hades (she/her)
Pole Dancing Against the Algorithm
Monday 7th October
Janine Francois (she/they)
Black {Gendered} Space Time: From the Heavens to Outer Space
Monday 14th October
Parumveer Walia (he/him)
Staged Bodies: Performativity in Feminist Photography
Monday 21st October
Isobel Atacus (she/they)
Eva Hesse: Imagining the Unruly
Monday 28th October
Gudrun Filipska (she/her)
Feminism and Zombie Culture
Monday 4th November
Anna Titov (she/her)
Cyborgs, Transcorporeality and Volatile Bodies: Ecofeminist Theories of Embodiment
Monday 11th November
COMING SOON
Monday 18th November
Melissa Baksh (she/her)
Whitewashed? Whiteness and Femininity in Art History
Monday 25th November
Dr. Noam Yadin Evron (she/her)
Hildegard of Bingen: Mystic, Artist, Composer, Pioneer
Monday 2nd December
COMING SOON
Monday 9th December
Baylee Woodley (they/them)
Medieval Femmes: Queer Femininities in Medieval England
Monday 16th December
Summer Lee (she/her)
The Incendiary History of Red Lingerie
RECORDING
A recording of the lecture will be sent out by The Feminist Lecture Program after the event finishes, within 2 hours of the end of the class. This email will also contain any resources/reading list the lecturer shares.
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Please note that the recording will expire 7 days after sending.
PAY WHAT YOU CAN
Everyone is welcome to join this Pay-What-You-Can class. We suggest a donation of £20, however, we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we can continue to offer our sessions on a donation basis.
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