Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Economy of Loss

After meeting Yoko Ono the other day and reviewing her work, I started thinking more about one of my favorite artists, Eva Hesse, and her approach to minimalism. It is easy to reduce minimalism to just that, reduction but Hesse saw it quite differently. In Mignon Nixon's Eva Hesse (MIT Press, Cambridge 2002) Briony Fer eloquently sums up Hesse's perspective:

Hesse's work dramatizes some tendency within minimalism itself, in the realm of the "symbolic" and the formal resistance to "symbols" as such....Rather than looking at localized or particular forms as vehicles of meaning, I am interested in the symbolic procedure at work, which in Hesse's work, I shall argue, is based on an economy of loss.