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In the 1960s, a decade known for the ascension of minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptualism in sculpture, Eva Hesse was one of the most significant artists working in New York. Through the mid-to-late ’60s, Hesse used materials such as cord and rope, nets, plaster, steel, wood, papier-mâché, latex, rubber, and fiberglass to create forms that derived their structure from repetition and geometry but were executed with intuitive sensitivity. She made many important formal decisions in response to chance, gravity, randomness, and the circumstances of gallery architecture. Hesse created richly organic works that locate human tendencies, contradiction, and a dose of the surreal within the rigor of process-based conceptualism.

Ennead is composed of a thick, rectangular board gridded with three-dimensional papier-mâché hemispheres, with a single dyed string hanging from the center of each dome. The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

Ennead is an important piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Françoise Grossen, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding. Furthermore, Hesse’s work provides the foundation for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture that inform works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom were influenced by Hesse and her cohort.

2015.15

Eva Hesse was one of the most important artists working in New York in the 1960s, until her untimely death in 1970. In constant dialogue with that decade’s most influential minimalist, postminimalist, and conceptual artists—including Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Ruth Vollmer—Hesse’s work reflected that circle’s emphasis on rigorously structured sculptural process and fabrication techniques, but also exemplified and in many cases influenced the group’s more corporeal, psychologically loaded, and, to use the critic Lucy Lippard’s term, eccentric strains that ran through postminimalism and process art, and continue to resonate in contemporary sculpture today.

Part of Hesse’s prodigious experimental art making includes the Accession series, created from 1967 to 1968, four iterations of which are extant today. With this series, Hesse created one of the decade’s most radical and psychologically resonant bodies of work based on the primary form of the cube. In each sculpture, rubber tubing is threaded through perforations in the walls of a cube open at the top. The rigidity and aggressively protective exterior walls are subverted by the formal and material complexity of the rubber tubing, with its slick surface, hollow interior, and biomorphic behavior. The smallest in the series, Accession IV has a dense interior space that forcefully underscores the differences between outside and inside, steel and rubber. One of Hesse’s best-known forms, it is an exemplar of postminimalist sculpture, fusing repetition, geometry, and industrial materials with media and processes that suggest the complexity of human experience and the psychically loaded spaces of our built environment.

Accession IV is an important representation of minimalism and conceptualism within the ICA/Boston collection. Hesse’s work provides the foundations for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture (why a work sits on the floor instead of a pedestal, for instance) in works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom have responded to Hesse’s influence and the art history it represents.

2015.14

The sculptural installations of Carol Bove draw together found and made objects into thoughtfully constructed assemblages that explore both historical misapprehensions and modernist modes of display.

Bove has long addressed the social dynamics of the late 1960s and early ’70s through the presentation of objects, looking at, as she says, “the tiniest details to think about history and to think about history to reflect on the present moment.” She began by drawing portraits of women who appeared in issues of Playboy from 1966 to 1972, a period when she observed a “calculated ambivalence” in the women being photographed. Bove’s engagement with the era resulted in sculptural arrangements of its cultural artifacts; she employed furniture such as Knoll tables as settings for books, magazines, and objects that suggestively, albeit indeterminately, tie together various histories. Bove often put wall-mounted shelving units such as those designed by George Nelson and Poul Cadovius to similar ends. Innerspace Bullshit is one such wall-mounted shelf with an arrangement of books, objects, and ephemera, including Gregory Battcock’s conceptual art anthology Idea Art (1973), a small-press magazine called Grope, a collection of Michael McClure’s poetry called Ghost Tantras (1964), a rock from Marfa, and a pseudo-cubist sculpture. Bove’s meticulous arrangement further encodes the objects to project the aura of the ’60s, both the decade’s utopian impulses and its failures, creating a system through which history can be reevaluated in the present.

Bove’s shelf-based arrangements of books and objects are an early signature trademark of what has developed into a unique and important sculptural practice. Innerspace Bullshit contains all the hallmarks of this practice and points to Bove’s evolution, providing a crucial link between her early drawings and her more recent expansive installations. This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s diverse holdings in contemporary sculpture, especially works that reference the practice and legacy of integrating found elements, also seen in the works of Taylor Davis, Rachel Harrison, and Roni Horn.

2015.26

Sculptor, feminist, and influential artist Louise Bourgeois has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore such themes as the body, trauma, and sexuality.

One of several major sculptures by Bourgeois in the ICA/Boston collection, Untitled is one of the artist’s early carved and painted-wood totemic sculptures, which she refers to as “personages.” Starkly vertical, thin, and luminescent, Untitled is an abstract, almost tusklike form that suggests the fragility of the upright human figure. The influence of the surrealists on Bourgeois is apparent in this work, in which the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar becomes paramount as the figurative adopts a new form.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. This work joins the ICA’s rich collection of sculptures by Bourgeois and adds to the holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.10

Since emerging as one of the most important video artists of the 1980s, Dara Birnbaum has used video, sound, found footage, and an array of editing and image-processing techniques to investigate the content and conventions of television and mass media.

Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is a groundbreaking early work made after Birnbaum came to attention with her first solo exhibition at Artist Space in New York in 1977. Taking what would become her signature approach, the artist drew on mass media’s vast reservoir of images and editing techniques to reveal the ideological content of television. Birnbaum constructed the six-minute video from excerpts of the television game show Hollywood Squares, isolating the participants’ expressions and gestures. When strung together and repeated, these banal looks—darting eyes, craning necks, and waving hands—reveal themselves as deeply conditioned by social codes. Presented on two cube monitors staggered in space, the installation reflects the technologies of the late-1970s period, while formally reiterating the repetition at the center of the unconscious gestures. Like much of Birnbaum’s work, Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry draws out and “talks back to” the seductive and alienating effects of mass media, especially as they inequitably implicate women.

This work by Birnbaum, one of the most important artists working in the 1980s, augments the ICA/Boston’s strong holdings of work from this period, especially those by other appropriation artists, such as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, who were part of the so-called Pictures Generation. Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is also an early example of sculptural video work, a genre used extensively in recent years by such artists as Mika Rottenberg and Hito Steyerl, both of whom are represented in the ICA collection.

2015.33

Working in sculpture, photography, performance, and video, Mona Hatoum—like her peers Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, and Rachel Whiteread—defamiliarizes ordinary domestic objects and transforms them into minimalist, conceptual, and performative art objects. Corrupting the essential features and functions of items such as kitchen utensils or household furniture, she infuses benign forms with the capacity to harm. Hatoum engages viewers’ tactile imagination, provoking them to imagine their own bodies responding to these newly aggressive objects. The multiple and often contradictory allusions contrast the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm with the history of violent conflict in the London-based Palestinian artist’s homeland.

This photograph documents an early performance during which the artist trudged barefoot through the streets of Brixton—an ethnically diverse, working-class suburb of London—dragging heavy, black Dr. Marten boots tied to her ankles. This particular style of boots was worn by both the British police and skinheads, overt opponents during the racially charged history of early 1980s London. Hatoum’s bare feet allude to the vulnerability of ethnic minorities in face of the violence and discrimination of a public authority charged with community protection.

Performance Still is part of a significant grouping of works by Hatoum at the ICA/Boston, and it engages with other many other works that explore performance, such as those by Ragnar Kjartansson, Yasumasa Morimura, and Cindy Sherman.

2014.21

Rineke Dijkstra’s apparently straightforward portraits divulge her perceptions of her sitters through the smallest details and subtlest facial expressions. She is concerned with balancing her subjects’ deliberate self-presentation with their unwitting self-revelation.

In 1998, in connection with an upcoming exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Art in Israel, Dijkstra undertook a new body of work in which she recorded young men and women who had joined the Israeli army. She took photographs of the men after a shooting exercise and the women on their first day of enlistment. Since then, Dijkstra has returned to Israel frequently to follow some of these original sitters and to document new recruits.

These two photographs of “Evgenya” were taken in 2003—the first on the day she was inducted, still in civilian clothes, and the second eight months later, in uniform. With this knowledge, we search Evgenya’s face, clothing, even hairstyle for clues as to if (and how) military service has transformed this striking young woman. Does she look fearful or apprehensive on her first day? Does she seem more confident in uniform? We might expect Evgenya’s fatigues to dampen her individuality, yet even in an army uniform her assertive self-expression is evident in her dark eyeliner, wispy bangs, and sure gaze.

This photograph exemplifies Dijkstra’s ability to capture the complexity of an individual through multiple images and social and political frames. The ICA/Boston made an early commitment to this artist, organizing one of her first U.S. museum exhibitions in 2001. This commitment was reinforced by the acquisition of this work, the first by Dijkstra to enter the collection.

2006.14

Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist whose works often focus on the sociopolitical history of the body. Born in Paraguay, Wilding emigrated to the United States in 1961. Her life and work have been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Frequently discussed in relation to feminist art, Wilding’s sculptures can also be seen as an exploration of the expanded possibilities of drawing through her deployment of linear thread.

Crocheted Environment is a sculptural installation referred to as “womb room.” This piece was originally part of the 1972 exhibition Womanhouse, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. The exhibition was staged in an abandoned mansion in Hollywood and one of the rooms included Wilding’s Crocheted Environment. At the ICA/Boston, the viewer experiences this piece in a small chamber with black walls. Suspended from the ceiling and enveloping the space is a large crocheted, weblike composition. The threads are simultaneously dense and open. Viewers may stand or sit in this enclosure, suggesting contradictory sensations of security, entrapment, serenity, and danger. About this work, the artist says: “Our female ancestors first build themselves and their families round-shaped shelters. These were protective environments, often woven out of grasses, braches, or weeds. I think of my environment as linked in form and feeling with those primitive womb-shelters, but with the added freedom of not being functional.”

Crocheted Environment is an important installation in the ICA’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Eva Hesse, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and marks the museum’s commitment to examining the relationships between craft-based media and contemporary art.

2012.20

Andy Warhol, a leading figure in the 1960s pop art movement, began his career as a successful magazine and ad illustrator and later pioneered a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations, and writing. His work uniquely challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.

From 1969 to 1975, Warhol created a series of Red Books, which were culled from over one hundred small red Holson Polaroid albums. Each book contains thirteen to twenty-two unique Polaroid Type 107 black-and-white, or Polacolor 108, photographs selected and organized by Warhol. The Red Books provide 203 intimate, snapshot-style images of the eclectic world of Hollywood movie and TV personalities, rock stars, art celebrities, and wealthy socialites. Each album is themed around a certain event, location, or a particular personality. Unlike Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, these images were spontaneous and affectionate. The photographs playfully depict subjects in different locations, including Warhol’s Factory, his summer retreat in Montauk, overseas, and during casual gatherings. Many of the images are signed and dedicated “To Andy Love,” “For Andy, a Great Talent,” or “To Andy Peace.”

Red Book Prefix F158 depicts a series of photographs taken during a weekend in Montauk with the Kennedy and Radziwill offspring (John Kennedy, Jr., Jed Johnson, and Anthony Radziwill). The photos are candid portraits of Warhol with the children, and the children playing on the beach or wrestling in the bedroom. There is a freshness and intimacy in the snapshots uncharacteristic of Warhol’s work. He gives special attention to the subjects’ clothing and hairstyles, not only offering insight into their personalities and rank in society, but also creating an offhand portrait of American culture at the time. The use of the Polaroid camera combines two of Warhol’s interests: the tendency toward disposability in modern consumerism and the photograph as readymade. The near-instant capacity of the Polaroid process meant that the photographs could be passed around, admired, and written on moments after the event or individual had been captured.

As an important influence on and precursor to art of the 1980s, Red Book Prefix F158 provides an addition to other series of portraits in the ICA/Boston’s collection, such as those by Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Nicholas Nixon, and Collier Schorr.

2014.01.1–21

Charline von Heyl was a central figure of the thriving 1980s art scene in Cologne before moving to New York in the mid-1990s. A multifaceted artist experimenting with printmaking, drawing, and collage, she is best known for fostering contemporary dialogues between painting and abstraction. Heyl’s paintings are not depictions based on objects or figures; instead, she is interested in creating images conjured from the mind and investigating the material properties of the painting medium.

Guitar Gangster is a large-scale painting that juxtaposes fields of colors, gestural lines, geometrical shapes, and a loose grid. The painting embodies an intentional contradiction between foreground and background, creating a dynamic energy through its combination of architectural and organic forms. About her work, Heyl says: “It is about the feeling that a painting can give— when you can’t stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand… . Good paintings have this tantalizing quality. They leave a hole in the mind, a longing.”

This painting joins works in the museum’s collection by Matthew Ritchie and Amy Sillman, which also explore the history of abstraction and complements another work by Heyl in the collection, Untitled, 2003.

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