Means as Means
It’s really new so I don’t know how to talk about it … [lengthy pause] … I’ve been working on it for ten years.1
Fiona Macdonald
In the immersion of thinking and making (and particularly thinking), which wends unendingly into the infinite layers of another’s work, and then reverberates back into one’s own making, each move enacted returns to consciousness as a becoming new, and as the ever-newly becoming, while also recognising each act as one of retrieval, a salvaging of material from the past that also functions as a potent act upon the present…
Fiona Macdonald’s, ‘Means as Means’, touches again on the work of Eva Hesse. In the past, Macdonald has exhibited Hesse-derived works—perhaps a redrawing of a Hesse drawing as part of a group show,2 or a Hesse redrawing as part of a solo show that included the remaking of other artists’ works.3 However, with a menacing kind of silence, what remained unspoken in these earlier manifestations was Macdonald’s commentary upon the body of Hesse scholarship, which tends to magnify biographical stories about the artist’s life and death.4 And since ‘what appears to be reality is only a reflection of a forgotten past’,5 these selective details, many times removed from their source, are delivered with such prurient fascination, it is as though Hesse has become the channel for certain art historians’ own compulsive death drives (fort/da).6
A problem for Macdonald: how might the conditions of reception that have hitherto suffocated Hesse’s work, confining it within a specific set of discursive parameters, be reassessed (Macdonald speaks of producing a new encounter with the work),7 without then subsuming Hesse’s work... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Build Wall, 2014. Concrete sheet and steel walls, 30 running metres. Photograph Andrew Curtis.
Detriment, 2014. Acrylic sheet, timber, steel and printed wall panel, 100 x 100 x 100cm. Photograph Andrew Curtis.
