4 days ago
Rubber phalluses and leaking breasts take over the Courtauld
What's that hanging near the start of this risqué exhibition of abstract sculpture from the 1960s? A leg of yellowing jamón? No, it's – splutter! – a rubber phallus. Nearby, a plaster object with conical swellings like a mutant potato is titled, simply, Tits (1967). With Abstract Erotic, the Courtauld Gallery – that bastion of Post-Impressionism – unexpectedly serves up a dollop of raunch. The result is less pulse-quickening than this might suggest.
Co-curated by Jo Applin, a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the show pays homage to Eccentric Abstraction, a 'groundbreaking exhibition' organised by the critic and curator Lucy R Lippard in 1966. This grouped together avant-garde work then resisting Minimalism's prevailing hard-edged rigour, including sensuous sculptures by the three women who are Abstract Erotic's stars, all of whom lived and worked in New York City: Eva Hesse, a German-born prodigy, who died of cancer aged 34 in 1970; Alice Adams (b. 1930), who's still alive; and Louise Bourgeois, a French-American with a thing for spiders, who passed away in 2010, and is now considered one of the 20th century's most significant artists. Downstairs, the Courtauld simultaneously shows a selection of Bourgeois's drawings, which she called 'thought feathers'.
Often suggestive – or downright explicit in the case of Bourgeois's phallic Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99) – and with rough surfaces reminiscent of blotchy skin, the experimental work of all three artists, which Lippard described as 'offbeat', rapidly expanded sculpture's possibilities by manipulating surprising, industrial materials such as latex, foam, and chain-link fencing.
At the Courtauld, almost 30 pieces – some tiny, others massive – demonstrate this willingness to take risks. Various bulging, misshapen sculptures, suspended like Fillette, resemble wasps' nests. A couple with boulder-like or gelatinous elements enclosed within nets dangle and droop. In Hesse's Addendum (1967), grey cords, pooling on the floor, emerge from 17 breast-like forms arranged irregularly along a bar slathered with papier-mâché and positioned at eye level. It appears to be leaking.
Mostly, the sculptures are powerful, summoning a sense of inescapable psychological compulsions and biological drives, but – be warned – they're not pretty. Le Regard (1963), a gaping blob of latex-covered fabric by Bourgeois (who's responsible, here, for two turd-like forms), has the grace of a belching toad. Although the artists deliberately sought ugliness (or 'uckiness', as Hesse put it), there may be a limit to your tolerance for their monochrome monstrosities.
A few sculptures haven't aged well. Over time, latex darkens and becomes brittle. Adams's Expanded Cylinder (1970), a large, bobbly roll of latex-covered foam, like a gigantic ear of sweetcorn or plait of hair, looks tatty and deflated. Apart from Sheath (1964), a frisky little form like an upturned, fraying basket, with a scuttling, creaturely quality, as if it were a naughty beetle, the sculptures by Adams – the least familiar member of the show's triumvirate – feel less accomplished than those of her companions.
The ideas behind these splodgy sculptures are inventive and courageous, even electrifying. Several of the finished pieces, though, now appear dated, bedraggled, and unresolved.
