Kirsten J. Swenson

My dissertation seeks to establish a social historical context for minimalist and “antiform” art that reflects the pervasive (though largely unexamined) “pre-feminist” gender politics of the 1960s art world. I examine how Hesse, the preeminent female sculptor of this period, participated in the art world’s symbolically masculine discourses of industry and technology. The title of my project reflects Hesse’s command of divergent formal and conceptual attitudes that generated contradictory, even irreconcilable, accounts of the artist. I argue that it was a self-conscious artistic strategy to create objects that could sustain such diverse interpretations; while she had a “fascination with chemistry and advanced materials” (Lucy Lippard, 1968), she also was concerned with “creating personal forms” that required her to “only use materials that she can make herself” (Marcia Tucker, 1969). The artist staged this ambiguity by employing factory production alongside domestic routine, as in latex serial pieces that were created in the kitchen, set to dry “on the radiator or in a muffin tin in the oven.”

The dominant models of labor with which artistic production was aligned in the 1960s—the conceptual, executive approach of Sol LeWitt, for whom “the idea is the machine that makes the art,” and working class “sweat labor,” as Richard Serra referred to his process—convey modes of masculine identity. Spanning from the landmark “Primary Structures” exhibit of 1966 to “antiform” art of the late-1960s, I explore narratives of gender and labor embedded in artistic strategies, curatorial concepts, and critical response, focusing on Hesse and others in her milieu including Serra, LeWitt, and Lynda Benglis.