Introduction
When existentialism appeared in the 1940-50s as a philosophic and literary movement, it primarily concerned the idea of alienation of the artist from the world and the deteriorating influence the society exerts on human nature (Modern art movements, n.d.).
Existentialists reacted against the systematic approach of rationalist philosophy that tried to explain the world with the help of universal logic. They insisted that life is to complex to be limited to a bundle of categories. Their starting point was the so-called “existential attitude” – confusion that a person feels having to face the world of absurdity. Existentialists believed that each individual was personally responsible for finding meaning of life (Golomb, 2012).
Though it is alleged that freedom is the gist of existentialism, its proponents valued authenticity much higher. They emphasized the significance of personal experience (as well as self-reflection) encompassing mental and sensory perceptions. These concepts were later integrated in abstract expressionist movement and art informel (Modern art movements, n.d.).
Thus, the paper at hand is aimed to prove that while the rational and traditional form of thinking tries to divide reality into two spheres – subjective and objective – the existential art unites them forming an irrational reality of the existential works, which can be understood merely intuitively.
“Right After” by Eva Hesse, 1969
Eva Hesse, a German minimalist artist, who died when she was only 34, created unique works characterized by fragility and deteriorating beauty. Hesse developed an unprecedented artistic language which she used to express her complex nature (Wolff-Bernstein, 2005).
Right After (created in 1969) is one of the two Hesse’s sculptures hanging down from the ceiling. Hesse took about two hundred feet of fiberglass cord and dipped it into latex. Afterwards, pieces of the cord were attached to the ceiling with the help of S-shaped metal hooks (Jackson, 2011).
Hesse was one of the first artists to experiment with latex, so she could not be sure whether it would drip off to the floor or stick to the cord. Right After (though it was made in collaboration with Doug John) attracted a lot of attention to Hesse’s personality. The work was undoubtedly unique as it was completely hand-made and was created from the materials encountered in everyday life. This made it stand apart from the works of minimalist artists. Hesse deliberately stepped aside from the accepted artistic traditions seeking her own medium. Her primary concern was to make objects, whose “preservation and deliverance into an institutional context have created a body of work which stimulates thought” (Jackson, 2011, p. 246).
The sculpture creates the effect of weightlessness, which is far from being light and inspirational. On the contrary, the spectator can participate in the artist’s struggle between chaos and order, her inner turmoil (Wolff-Bernstein, 2005). The position of the elements of the sculpture is non-random: when it was moved from one gallery to another, Hesse was worried as she could not ensure that the work would arrive intact. In fact, she believed that the studio where Right After was created was a part of this piece of art, which meant that placing it in a gallery would change the required perspective and distort the audience’s perception. This happened mostly because of bright light in galleries (as compared to shadows in the studio) (Pollock & Corby, 2006).
Through the use of light, semitransparent materials, the artist wanted to reflect how fragile her mental state was. The viewer is encouraged to look inside his own mind and find the reflection of the artist’s anxiety, uncertainty, chaos, and even fear (Wolff-Bernstein, 2005). Hesse, who was already terminally sick suffering from brain tumor, managed to capture the moment of self-contemplation of the dying mind, which cannot leave the observer unfazed (Pollock & Corby, 2006).
“Two Figures in a Landscape” by Willem de Kooning, 1968
Two Figures in a Landscape is a painting by Willem de Kooning, a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist, who created a series of pictures of women in charcoal. The landscape is a small work painted on paper: in fact, on seven sheets of translucent tracing paper, which reflected the artist’s collage approach to painting. The depicted figures are clustered closely together: one of them appears to lay on a chaise long while the other woman sits with crossed legs. The left-hand figure seems to be the central part of the composition. Quick and impulsive strokes suggest that the whole picture was created without interruption. De Kooning focused on sensations and inner feelings rather than outward signs (Shiff, 2014).
The uniqueness of this approach also manifested itself in the fact that de Kooning often preferred to draw with his eyes closed or using his left hand to deny himself technical facility and avoid cliché. His ultimate task was to transfer the inner perceptions of movement, not its outer visualization. Kooning “spoke against making distinctions between the figure and abstraction” (Shiff, 2014, p. 5).
Like Hesse, de Kooning focused on the feeling of objects and experience of their motion rather than their actual embodiment. This reflected the principle of authenticity that was underlying the philosophy of existentialism: the artist believed that his personal interaction with an object or a person and his vision of them were far more significant for art than realistic depictions. This constitutes the significance of his work in both social and artistic context because his approach represents him as an innovator.
De Kooning’s understanding of art developed into a new movement – American abstract expressionism. The woman in his and other artists’ paintings and drawings was manifested the source of desire, grief, contradiction, etc. and thus became an important symbol of art. Though it was seemingly simple, the attitude and the form were totally innovative. In most general terms, the content of de Kooning’s work is “the representational connotations of his imagery,” “trivial content, captured as intriguing form” (Shiff, 2014, p. 6).
Conclusion
The close observation of the artworks makes it clear that, in the context of irrational reality, the existentialist artists pay significant attention to the borderline situations in which an individual is vanishing in unconsciousness or is on the edge of rational thinking and madness. From the existentialist point of view, during these moments, a person may experience reality much closer than in any other time. This idea was expressed not only by painters but also by novelists in a number of literary works (e.g. La Nausée by Sartre that showed how revelation came to the main character at the moments of unbearable nausea bordering with insanity).
The analysis reveals that individual intuition plays an important role in the given context while the scientifically rationalized objects become insignificant. Each of the two artists relied on their personal understanding of reality, no matter how weird or illogical it might appear. This desire to capture the state of mind rather than the state of things was new to the artistic world
It can be stated that while creating their artworks, Hesse and de Kooning not merely tried to capture this state of irrationality and merge of objectivity and subjectivity but also strived to provoke and dramatize it making existentialism concepts part of their daily reality and expressing them in the abstract and non-figurative art forms.
References
Golomb, J. (2012). In search of authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus. London, UK: Routledge.
Jackson, A. (2011). Eva Hesse: Studiowork. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9(2), 240-247. Web.
Modern art movements, 1870-1970. (n.d.). Web.
Pollock, G., & Corby, V. (2006). Encountering Eva Hesse. New York, NY: Prestel Publishing.
Shiff, R. (2014). De Kooning: The kick, the twist, the woman, the rowboat. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 14(1), 5-20. Web.
Wolff-Bernstein, J. (2005). In search of her own language: Eva Hesse show, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 6(4), 345-368. Web.