Curator: Veronica Roberts
Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt celebrates the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). While their practices diverged in innumerable, seemingly antithetical ways—LeWitt's art is associated with ideas and system-based conceptual art and Hesse's is associated with the body and her own hand—this exhibition of approximately 40 works will highlight the crucial impact that their decade-long friendship had on both their lives and work. In 1970, immediately upon learning of Hesse's premature death at the age of 34, LeWitt created a wall drawing filled with "not straight" lines as a way of paying homage to the organic contours that were a hallmark of Hesse's art. Organized by the Blanton, the exhibition will take this wall drawing, Wall Drawing #46, as its point of departure, while also revealing the way Hesse's approach to making art had vast-reaching implications on LeWitt's work. Included are wall drawings, sculpture, painting, drawings, prints, and correspondence between the artists. |
“The job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,”Dani Shapiro wrote in her beautiful meditation on the perils of plans. But while embracing uncertainty may be the cure for our epidemic of anxiety and the root of the creative spirit, it remains an art enormously challenging and uneasy-making for the human psyche. Instead, we try to abate the discomfort of uncertainty by making long-term plans and obsessing over everyday to-do lists.What motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it’s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future — not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.
Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a relationship you entered despite being dimly aware that it wasn’t for you, or a job you accepted even though, looking back, it’s clear that it was mismatched to your interests or abilities. If it felt like a difficult decision at the time, then it’s likely that, prior to taking it, you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but simply the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty.
We tend to imagine that the special skill of an entrepreneur lies in having a powerfully original idea and then fighting to turn that vision into reality. But the outlook of Sarasvathy’s interviewees rarely bore this out. Their precise endpoint was often mysterious to them, and their means of proceeding reflected this. Overwhelmingly, they scoffed at the goals-first doctrine of [management theorists Edwin] Locke and [Gary] Latham. Almost none of them suggested creating a detailed business plan or doing comprehensive market research to hone the details of the product they were aiming to release.
The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur … isn’t “vision” or “passion” or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier between yourself and some prize you’re obsessed with. Rather, it’s the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by rigid focus on any one goal.
The effectualists include the cook who scours the fridge for leftover ingredients; the chemist who figured out that the insufficiently sticky glue he had developed could be used to create the Post-it note; or the unhappy lawyer who realises that her spare-time photography hobby, for which she already possesses the skills and the equipment, could be turned into a job. One foundation of effectuation is the “bird in hand” principle: “Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.” A second is the “principle of affordable loss”: Don’t be guided by thoughts of how wonderful the rewards might be if you were spectacularly successful at any given next step. Instead — and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario — ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.
Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities — for success, for happiness, for really living — are waiting.
Today was the final day of destall of BRIMMING at 1 Royal Terrace. All the casts were wrapped in bubble wrap and transported out of the gallery, into my friend's car and then driven to my studio. We then loaded the casts into a number of shopping trolleys and wheeled them into the studio. 
I was also reminded of a work by the artist Liz West in which she filled shopping trolleys with products of the same colour..png)
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