Global Frame for ... Friendship
Observations on Works by Ernst Hesse
By Jürgen Raap, 2003
- shizuoka, japan
I
Ernst Hesse's sculpture, Global Frame ... for Friendship (2001) stands on a road leading to the stadium in Fukuroi, Japan. It is made of weathering cor-ten steel. Its rectangular contours measure 3x 5 m. A negative elliptical form is hollowed out and pierced by two diagonals. The ellipse offers views from both sides into the landscape beyond.
It is not the complete panorama of the popular views so enjoyed by tourism, but a landscape detail, its limits defined by the frame of the ellipse. In this way, a framed field of vision becomes a quasi composed picture. From one side the eye is drawn down the line of a road whose development is shortly to be completed. In the opposite direction the gaze falls upon an old temple set in a verdant landscape.
These two fields of vision present the old (temple) and the new contemporary architecture in a relationship of aesthetic contrast, likewise the green landscape and the urban setting, and thereby, nature and civilisation. Artificial, or cultivated nature in the form of traditional Japanese garden design is seen there as a form of ‘borrowed’ nature. The frame draws a dividing line between the viewer and the visual experience of the landscape. The viewer remains outside the scene he confronts, like an onlooker in an audience, peering into the scenery in a peep-show.
The peep-show stage is the field of action for the theatre of illusion. The Fukuroi landscape is perceived by the viewer as a stage backdrop, yet it is the creation of town planners and architects, and certainly finished with none of the illusionistic effects of stage painting. Through European painting of the Rococo with its pastoral idylls, and German Romanticism’s portrayals of the sublimity of nature, we are familiar with pictorial strategies of aesthetic stylisation and elevation. Classical Japanese and Chinese landscape painting also contains similarities in composition, albeit in the service of other pictorial content.
Geo-cultural singularities are levelled out in today's world of metropolitan urbanity and landscape utilisation. The ground is exploited by planners, be they Japanese, European, Chinese, or US nationals. The planning of artificial biotopes and urban infrastructure alike follow the criteria of functionalism. How much oxygen do ten million people need? How wide should the entrances to a football stadium be, to allow 50 000 spectators to evacuate within fifteen minutes?
Until early European Modernism, the traditional, framed (panel) picture usually represented something. Around the same time, circa 1900, Naturalism appeared in European theatre, and the first tendencies toward abstraction entered fine art. Anti-illusionism was the common factor. Yet the photographic studios of the same period set those they portrayed before illusionistic backdrops of drapery or painted scenery - the forerunners of today's photo-wallpaper. Through Hesse's ‘Global Frame’, also, one glimpses no naturalistic portrayal. Here concrete reality (street, landscape) and its subjection to the process of art (= choice of siting for the sculpture ‘frame’) are identical. Here, ultimately, the peep-show experience cited above no longer applies.
The outer dimensions of the frame follow the edicts of the "golden section" familiar to us from maths, and which, in European art history from Renaissance times, constituted an ideal of aesthetic harmony. The sculpture thus proposes an examination of the physiological and psychological basis of perceived formal harmony and its intercultural effectiveness.
II
Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralist linguistics, and Naum Chomsky in his theory of generative grammar distinguish between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. Competence is demonstrated in the fundamental (anthropological) ability of man for language. Performance is articulated in actual linguistic expression. There is a deep structure, or an underlying pattern from which every language and dialect in the world functions ‘structurally’. Then there is the surface structure with the concrete completion of the structural tree, through the rules of syntax and the lexical vocabulary of a national or cultural language through the acute articulation of a phrase. Jürgen Habermas extended the concept of linguistic competence to communicative competence. Part of this faculty includes the ability to recognise that meaning is also communicated by non-verbal expression.
If one extends this idea to include ‘creative’ and ‘artistic’ competence, and connects the concept with the discoveries of gestalt psychology and semiotics, one is then in a position to clarify the inter-cultural communicability of works of art.
A trans-cultural comparison reveals a deep structural underlying pattern for sculpture. The most diverse ancient cultures had a canon for the form and design of amphorae, vases, columns, stelae. Such a canon of form was adapted not only to the technical demands of the craft and the properties of its materials, and criteria of functionality, (as, say, the case of a vase) but always simultaneously to a purely aesthetic ideal, free from functionalism. This guaranteed the artwork its autonomy.
On the deep structural level one constantly encounters simple forms, basic geometric shapes like the circle, the triangle, the square, rectangle, ellipse. Such forms are culture and epoch neutral. They therefore have their international currency, recognisable, for example in street signage the world over. Ernst Hesse’s Global Frame piece with its rectangular design and cut-out ellipse also follows this basic pattern of gestalt perception. Strictly speaking, it is the product of the accumulation of basic forms. The sum of the rectangle and ellipse and the shape of the intrusions forms the sculpture itself.
First, on the surface structural level the basic form becomes a concrete (‘time’) signal or symbol. Frequently other contextual information is required, whether for example, a skull and two cross-bones is to be interpreted as a symbol from a pirates' flag or a warning of poison. A sculpture in a public space is normally a semiotic sign for itself.
The surface structure is telling, also for the ‘typical’ geocultural traits of the artwork. On this level, too, artistic style is manifest. Yet not only the deep structural basic forms, but the stylistically conceived surface structure of a work is interculturally transferrable. Thus in the history of European porcelain, eighteenth century manufacturers could produce so-called Chinoiserie, adopting ornamental forms of the Chinese Ming dynasty.
III
- blick auf den topkapı saray vom galata turm, istanbul
It is important for Ernest Hesse and his art to travel to other nations, and there to teach. In Istanbul, in 1994, he and a group of art students installed an art exhibition aboard a ferry on the Bosporus. The year before, he carried out a similar project with students on the station at Izmir. Art presentations in the neutral ‘White Cube’ interior of a museum or gallery are not tangent to the autonomy of a work, which works here ‘for itself’. The artwork outside functions differently, communicating a relationship with its surroundings, the landscape, or urban space, which contribute to it as a work of art.
The ferry and the station are per se metaphors for movement, exchange, connection. The quest for communication with humanity in an everyday situation in these two projects with Turkish art students was more than just an educational strategy. The exchange and transportation of culture(s) is the general theme throughout every phase of Hesse's work and fuels the basis of his art.
A productive and vital exchange never leads to folkloric socio-culture. This is ultimately no more than a means of disguising cultural estrangement, and as such, too readily becomes a cliché substitute for culture.
Wherever the contemporary media bandy headlines on the political-ideological ‘ battle of cultures’, debate around terms like ‘global art’ focuses attention on issues of both the authenticity and the safeguarding of individual practice. It would be erroneous to interpret this as a purely museological form of ‘protection of the species’, where the ethnic museum, like a zoological garden, cultivates its enclosures as ‘identical to nature’. Threatened languages and dialects cannot be preserved artificially in everyday life. No linguistic purism can succeed against the Americanisms entering other languages from globalisation, however much the French, for example might insist that a computer be referred to as an ordinateur.
The current globalisation of politics, culture(s), and industry has a completely ambivalent face. The knitting-together of infrastructures and social organisation systems, the speeding-up of transport and communication, the proliferation and trading of knowledge and information, form, on the one hand, a chance. Thirty years ago the Canadian media theorist, Herbert Marshall McLuhan published War and Peace in the Global Village, in which he propounded the theory that the more we know of each other, the more we are interconnected, the more peace would be enjoyed by the world.
The contemporary situation in world politics might show that McLuhan was not necessarily correct. For wherever the old structures of the industrial age break down, great insecurity is unleashed. Social destabilisation is one of the bases for the conflict potential simmering all over the world. . The widest variations of criticism come from left and right factions. The left wing opponents of globalisation attack radical mercantilist capitalism; right wingers see, as polemically formulated by the popular theorist Diedrich Diederichsen, ‘a battle of cultures fought between McDonald's and the German Bratwurst’. Left and right are unanimous in their criticism of global culture, both equating it, in its standardisation and dictated norms, with cultural imperialism.
Added to this is the fact that opportunities in the field of globalisation are not distributed equitably. The world -wide web demands knowledge of English and Roman script. The medium offers only limited access to those who speak only Cantonese, or write only Cyrillic. Such tendencies fuel the warnings of globalisation's critics, of a world of political and cultural unilateralism.
The great Cassel exhibition, the ‘documenta’ has, as its theme in 2002, the international socio-political exchange of paradigms. ‘The world mix of different cultures, which has spread and accelerated in recent times, has resulted in the creation of new forms of identity. Streams of images and cultural symbols surge through a geographical space where new pathways are configured and differentiated. The sudden, unrelenting, often violent confrontation of cultures, has lead to a sense of instability and unpredictability, where old symmetries no longer count.’
IV
To pitch Utopias against reality is a vehicle of civilised cultural progress. Ernst Hesse clarifies his projects' purpose of expanding consciousness with the phrase, ‘art must open spaces’. This is to be understood in direct terms. Hesse sometimes allows expressly banal interaction with his work. The Global Frame sculpture, for example, may be used by World Cup fans in Japan as props, or a frame, for their souvenir photos. In this way a symbolic appropriation of the landscape takes place, and a gestural appropriation of art by those who actively incorporate the frame as their backdrop.
The blank of the negative form recalls the frames for family photos popular in the 1920s and 1930s, or the goalmouths in the television sports studio where, in every edition of that [German TV] programme, prominent guests attempt penalty kicks. Ernst Hesse also refers to a circular window in the Ginkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto, and the shoji in Japanese architecture, the connection of inside and outside. Doors with thin rice paper bring nature symbolically, atmospherically, inside.
In this respect, the hole in the Global Frame sculpture, the material non-presence – the void – also constitutes the elliptic interior form. The artist creates this interior form in the knowledge of the meditative potential of the empty interior space in classical Japanese architecture.
The sculpture led to an invitation to make a further work for the Olympic Park in Busan, South Korea (2002). Two curved cor-ten steel sheets form the symbol for ‘man’ from Korean, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. It is an example of a deep structural gestalt sign, as described above; its iconography, anchored in pictogram script across several cultures. The basic form can be seen in the matchstick-men drawings by children – and in contemporary art in the repertoire of Keith Haring, and A.R. Penck, in ‘traffic light men’ and the information symbols used internationally, in airports, etc. For structural reasons, the curves in the plates are tighter below than above. But this progression also contributes to the formal effect and has aesthetic value.
Two Early Pieces (2002) stand in configuration to the ‘Man’ sign. A crosspiece with two horizontal elements like a Roman letter H forms the sign for ‘grass’ in oriental script. From this set of sculptural transpositions of pictograms emerge a series of works in which lines or rectangles as basic elements are translated into the three-dimensional. Hesse bestows upon these elements a geometric character which they did not have in their original calligraphic function.
Here the European artist’s capacity for abstraction is revealed. Yet its intercultural communicability meets cognitive limits. The course of abstraction in the development of East Asian calligraphy, and the imaginative processes associated with it, are of a completely different nature. In fact, the calligraphic Informel painters in Europe in the 1950s laid great emphasis on gesturalism in the painterly process, largely ignoring the iconographic aspect of the symbols in Oriental script.
The recipient's ability to descry the step from the deep, to the surface structure of a pictogram, is only possible after long initiation in the schooling of perception. Should maker and recipient share close cultural proximity in space and time, or similar attitudes to life, then their mutual cognitive attitudes will largely accord. The contemporary European observer of a modern work by a current Japanese artist may well feel more at home with it than he would with the mystic symbolism in a work of sacred art from the European Middle Ages.
- ren, jin, corten (chinesisch - japanisches zeichen für mensch)
V
Between 2000 and 2002 Ernst Hesse created bronze sculptures of loaves of bread in their actual dimensions. Nowhere in the world are there more varieties and forms of bread than in Central Europe. Hesse makes ‘Bread’ a cipher for European culture. Admittedly, the surfaces of these sculptures bear no realistic textures. Instead, a certain abstractification may be descried, linking these sculptures to the ones already discussed. This abstraction may be defined as a form phenomenon in reference to the works outside, and as a structure phenomenon in relation to bread pieces. Hesse uses hollow casting, whose materiality (bronze) helps to separate his work from Duchamp and the ‘ready made’ optically and conceptually.
Since 1988 Hesse has continuously made drawings on the theme of ‘Inner Spaces’. They show clearly-contoured surfaces in grey graphite or ultramarine, with semi-circular or sharply angular tending outlines. They may not be read as figurative, yet they summon in the viewer concrete recollections. Hesse describes them as ‘inner deposits’ of outer experiences from his travels.
The original inspiration for the formal concepts of Hesse’s sculpture make a motley list. ??A lotus-bowl, //The calyx of a lotus, ((a: Kelch = Gefäss; b: bot.)) and chalice forms from Ottoman architecture, African masks, Lingam stones from the Himalayas. Again, the chalice form is quite evidently significant as an interculturally meaningful, deep structural form.
Around 2000, Hesse produced small sculptures with conical forms, their inverted points standing on a cube or square which in turn functions both as a plinth and as part of the formal ensemble of the whole work. Here, again the gesamtform amounts to the sum of simple basic elements. Within these many parts a dialogue of contrasts sounds, the rounded with the angular, the pointed with the flat. The principle of adding form to form varies in its stratifications. The laying down of cube-on-sphere-on-tilted-cube is an allusion to an illustration of a Zen Buddhist world model. Through minimal disruption, like the tipping of the cube, Hesse brings a sense of movement within the static structuring.
A logical step would be to examine this in the construction, human-height, of two bulbous forms, which describe an ‘Eight’, and a tilted cube (2002). The final ensemble’s capacity is determined largely through the actual demands of the exhibition space or the environmental setting. To ascertain the final form, Hesse frequently makes use of scale models. Thus the circle to the harmonious proportions of the Global Frame discussed at the outset, is complete. In an ideal sense, harmony also signifies a communicative accord between the individual and the world.
(1) From ‘documenta-Plattform Nr. 3’, January 2002.
Quotation from www.documenta.de (Trans. Heather Eastes)
