Erotic?! You’re kidding!” Staff at the Courtauld Gallery should brace themselves for refund requests from bewildered visitors lured in by the name of its latest exhibition, Abstract Erotic, a rare outing for sculpture at the gallery and a bold deviation from its Impressionist comfort zone.
Instead, visitors should prepare to enter the ugly zone, the preferred territory of Eva Hesse (1936-1970), who with Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), and Alice Adams (1930-), makes up the trio of New York-based sculptors reunited here, for the first time since 1966, when they featured in the now-legendary exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, curated by American art critic Lucy Lippard.
Across the two rooms of the Courtauld’s exhibition space, sculptures that hang, sag and bulge with bodily heft present no shortage of holes and tumescences, suggestive folds, mounds and private places. But if, to you, “erotic” means the fantasised body, you won’t find it here. In place of dopamine-saturated arousal, expect sensations that pulse around the darker reaches of perception, where gut-turning disgust exists in tension with desire, echoing the well-rehearsed connection between pleasure and pain.
Untitled watercolour on paper by Louise Bourgeois, 1968. The smaller exhibition of her drawings is downstairs and not-to-be-missed (Photo: Christopher Burke, The Easton Foundation)In the 60s, when personal expression in art was pushed to minimalism’s starkly geometric sidelines, Lippard’s selection of artists looked eccentric to say the least. They used abstraction and unconventional materials to explore the experience of the body and the bodily, mischievously harnessing the viewer’s unfailing impulse to interpret and narrativise what they see. In doing so, these artists stood out not only from the work of minimalist contemporaries like Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, but from a slew of racy, sexually explicit exhibitions of work that claimed to belong to the new era of sexual liberation, but that in the eyes of many, including Lucy Lippard, were straightforwardly pornographic.
Lippard coined “abstract erotic” to describe the art in the Courtauld’s exhibition: it’s about touch, and sensation, but above all it’s about the imagination, which is revealed in all its mysterious contradictions and perversities. It’s the imagination that powers the works here, permitting Louise Bourgeois’s flaccid, bruised pouch to be understood as a giant blood blister, but no less as an obscenely large and open vulva. Its title, Le Regard / The Gaze, (1963), is the killer blow in an act of gleeful vengeance on producers and viewers of pornography: “You want to look at a vulva?” says Bourgeois. “Go right ahead.”
Though it presents the work of three artist women, who each reclaim the female body as an active, wild and unruly agent, the exhibition is not rooted in gender identity, or gender politics: in 1966, Lippard had never heard of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and it was only later that she wrote: “I can see now that I was looking for ‘feminist art’.”
For Bourgeois, who was older and better established than either Hesse or Adams, the 60s were a period of renewed activity, in which she began drawing (the focus of a smaller, not-to-be-missed exhibition downstairs) and exploring new and unusual materials, including wax, plaster and resin, but most importantly liquid latex. Mouldable, and drying to form a skinlike membrane, latex enabled her to produce some of her most ick-inducing sculptures, including Avenza, (1968-1969), its multiplying protrusions as tumour-like as they are breastlike.
‘Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s’ is also on at The Courtauld Gallery from 20th June to 14th September (Photo: Bolton & Quinn)In a photograph, a smiling Bourgeois wears the sculpture wrapped around her like some revolting cocoon or carapace, the absurdity of it, and the humour, a quality shared with Eva Hesse, whose sculptures with their loops of excess cord seem calculated to torment her minimalist peers. A similar playfulness enlivens Addendum (1967), a carefully calculated sequence of breast-like mounds, which each expel a length of cord that is allowed on installation to find its own position, the resulting muddle of lines disrupting the orderly rhythm of the sculpture’s upper register.
Like Bourgeois and Adams, Hesse used diverse, often scavenged materials, from wood and rubber tubing, to cord, nets and paper, to suggest and provoke in ways that make you wonder at the state of your own mind. Can I really be so basic that to me, Untitled or Not Yet, (1966), with its pendulous nets of weighted, crumpled plastic, seems simply scrotal? A thin sausage of rubber tubing, pinched to form an absurdly bulbous tip, is tragically phallic, a humiliation of male power that is taken further by Bourgeois in her extraordinary, grotesque cock and balls sculpture, Fillette, (1968-99). It’s not just the title, which translates as “little girl”, that is a taunt: so too is its presentation, skewered with wire and suspended from the ceiling.
Eva Hesse, 1966. (Photo: Courtesy Hauser & Wirth / The Estate of Eva Hesse / Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich)Hesse died very young, but curator Jo Applin, who has been immersed in her subject for at least two decades, emphasises the remarkable precocity that has made the artist so influential, though her career lasted only 10 years.
The outlier in this trio of artists is Alice Adams, of whom many – myself included – will not previously have heard. Like Bourgeois, whose parents were tapestry restorers, Adams had a background in textiles and originally trained as a weaver, before shifting focus in the early 60s, when she swapped fibre art for heavy industrial materials – steel cables, wire mesh, chicken wire and chain link fencing, which she manipulated and shaped with an ease you might associate with fabric.
The results are counter-intuitive: the giant form of Big Aluminium 2, (1965), is a suspended roll of chicken wire that though never freed from its identity as industrial junk hangs in space like the ghostly form of a deep sea creature, or a watery, womblike cavity.
‘Big Aluminium 2’ by Alice Adams, 1965 (Photo: Bolton & Quinn)The woven form of Sheath (1964) is no less multi-layered, its ludicrously suggestive title thwarted at once by its obvious inadequacy – as a sheath, or anything, really. Most definitely not sexy, its skirt of frayed ends, and tail-like cord make it haplessly animal-like, though it is hardly endearing, a quality emphasised by Lippard who described similar sculptures as “not cute” and “a bit surly”.
One of the most viscerally fascinating sculptures in the show is Adams’s Expanded Cylinder (1970), which along with Big Aluminium 2 most clearly expresses the way that she was able to render unpromising materials sensuous.
Expanded Cylinder is made from the sort of foam rubber used to stuff car seats and cheap upholstery, which Adams impressed with chain link fencing, and then set with latex to preserve the “corn on the cob” effect before the foam could spring back into shape. It’s a fascinating piece – not least because it is inexplicably unpleasant to look at, setting your teeth on edge, but in a way more elegant than the revulsion induced by the various turdlike piles and unpleasant growths and cavities encountered elsewhere around the show.
‘Threaded Drain Plate’ by Alice Adams (Photo: Bolton & Quinn)Perhaps it’s because the soft foam is held in an unnatural state of tension, its malleability similar enough to human flesh to elicit an empathetic response. Certainly, Adams recognised a connection between the body and her materials, commenting somewhat opaquely in 1969: “I find a correspondence between feelings about my own physiological make up and the feelings I have when working with flexible materials in an unfixed space.”
Put together with razor-sharp insight and intelligence, this perfectly compact exhibition explores a key moment in the development of both feminist art and sculpture after modernism. It is an evocative snapshot of the New York art scene more than half a century ago, that with the rise of the manosphere and authoritarian encroachment on women’s bodies in America and beyond, resonates now as much as it did then.
‘Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams’ and ‘Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s’ is on at The Courtauld Gallery from 20th June to 14th September
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