Duchampian in Eva Hesse

Runa Yu         

Art Since 1945

Prof. Schum

May 1st, 2016

Duchampian in Eva Hesse

        Marcel Duchamp as the pioneer of surrealistic conceptual artist had influenced many well-known artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamil and Eva Hesse. “The establishments of the Duchampian model include artist’s persona, art and commodity culture, aesthetic debates, the questioning of the art object, and the shift to a ‘postmodern’ cultural situation”(Hopkins) Among this topic of Duchampian art, Eva Hesse appear very special of her superb use of new materials, such as fiberglass, latex and plastics, and her engagement of post-minimalist movement. Although she did not motioned a lot about her influence on Marcel Duchamp in her personal diary and interviews, we can see association within her work and life experiences. Moreover I will use Ai weiwei as a contemporary example for pointing out the significance of Duchampian.         

        By the 1960s, Duchamp has largely use readymade items and objects as the mean body of his art pieces. His readymade work such as Fountain had largely recreated by artists like Sherrie Levine and Robert Gober. “By succinctly turning the readymade or mass-produced back into art, as symbolized both by the ‘pedestal’ on which the objects stood and by the utilization of the time-honoured sculptural process” od traditional sculpture making a “conceptual conundrums about the relationship between uniquenesss and sameness” had raised. In the year of 1917, Duchamp created an installation called Trebuchet (The Trap), which got huge attention by Eva Hesse. Basically Duchamp recreates a coat hanger, a household item rendered useless, into a whole new conceptual level in an artistic perspective, by nail the trap onto the floor of his New York Studio. After that Duchamp whitened the trap and made a line drawing of it, which he replicated the details of the tract in which he had covered by the white paint. Nevertheless, one of Eva Hesse’s most famous art pieces Hang Up (1966), which Hesse read as her first ‘important statement’ maintained some association with Marcel Duchamp’s Trebuchet piece. Hang Up (1966) is an installation piece projects from the wall into the space of the room. After adding long metal rod to a canvas, the simple canvas dramatically became a painting into a sculpture. It is also a symbolization for Eva Hesse’s own changing from working in two dimensions to three dimensions. Therefore in this piece Eva Hesse is trying to redetermine the origin definition of a plain canvas. She wan wants to state another meaning to the object itself, which relevantly close to what Duchamp did for all his readymade art works.

        After a long period of time for art world to specifically using institutional approach to make and evaluate art, the new Dada wave that leads by Duchamp has influenced many artists, and it is continually affecting many contemporary artists, such as the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. In “Duchamp’s mind”, there are some connections “between the ironic ‘individuality’ of mass-produced items”, which then creates contrast and provocation (Hopkins). Similar to Duchamp, Ai Weiwei takes the provocation of using manufacture objects as art performance to show audiences by his famous piece Dropping of the Han Dynasty Urn and Study of Perspective (photographic series). Moreover, among the shocking effect, Ai Weiwei also engaged his political conflicts into his piece with very deep conceptual meaning, which also very relevant to Duchamp’s idea that “the idea of concept being more relevant then the artwork” (Hopkins). Moreover, Ai Weiwei likes to see audiences’ interpretation is a very important part for art piece. He creates space between art and audience, and tries to make more freedom for audiences to interact and think through art piece. Similarly, Duchamp thinks that artist do not really know what there are doing, the thoughts from spectator is more important than artists’ own ideas.