拍品专文
Silk flowers form an ethereal curtain as pink, periwinkle, and red blooms cascade towards the earth. Delicate, yet palpably present, Jim Hodges’s Where Are We Now? marks a boundary between the real, physical world and somewhere unknown. Executed in 1999, works from this cycle can be found in the collections of several institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Fashioned from flowers that the artist has stitched together, the results are lyrical and heart-rending.
Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington, where he, one of six children, developed an acute sensitivity to the natural world. He spent much of his childhood drawing and later studied art as an undergraduate. In 1983, Hodges moved to Brooklyn to attend a master’s program at the Pratt Institute; initially, he studied painting, but by the end of the decade, had reoriented his attentions towards sculpture; Hodges was particularly arrested by Eva Hesse’s ephemeral works and their material poetics. His breakthrough came in 1994, with a widely praised solo exhibition at CRG Gallery in New York, for which Hodges showed A Diary of Flowers, a tapestry of 565 paper napkins each adorned with a single hand-drawn flower.
"I think of composing experiences in space as elementary choreography". Jim Hodges
Like so many of his contemporaries, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Gober, Hodges rose to prominence against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. These artists responded by producing formally rigorous works—enmeshed in the traditions of Minimalist and Conceptual art—that were imbued with subjectivity and emotion. “In the works that brought early attention,” Hodges recalls, “I was celebrating my identity as a person in the world at a particular time … I was working with a delicacy of material and thinking very much about time and the impossibility of halting it. For me that was everywhere I turned” (J. Hodges, quoted in H. Sheets, “Suspended Moments in Time,” ARTnews, January 2014, p. 81). In many ways, Where Are We Now? seems an elegy to lost friends and community, a sense reinforced both by the work’s title and its formal connection to Gonzalez-Torres’ delicate light strings and beaded curtains; much of Gonzalez-Torres’ practice contends with loss, and the artist himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1996.
As an art historical motif, flowers have long been associated with mortality owing to their use in memento mori, the pictorial genre that reminded viewers of the fleeting nature of life, as well as in Christian iconography. But flowers conjure innumerable connotations; they brim with both life and devastating loss, poetry, opulence, and love. The French Impressionists sought to capture the beauty and evanescence of a blossom, the way that light and atmosphere can change how a bloom is seen. Likewise, Hodges’s practice is open to and encourages myriad modes of interaction, and his art cannot be so easily reduced to one reading. In the case of Where Are We Now?, while the curtain may shroud, it also proffers color and beauty. As Ken Johnson noted, with Hodges’ work, “you may begin to see the world as a place that generously lends itself to formal and poetic re-creation” (K. Johnson, “ART IN REVIEW; Jim Hodges”, The New York Times, 31 May 2022, p. E39).
“When I make art,” says Hodges, “I think about its ability to connect with others and its ability to change or affect others, to bring them into the process, to bring easy access to art” (J. Hodges, quoted in J. Dobrzynski, “Taking the Ordinary and Finding it Beautiful”, The New York Times, 24 March 1999, online). Material became one of the first means through which he could ‘open’ his art: Unable to afford paint as a young artist, Hodges began to work with anything and everything he could get his hands on, including paperclips, napkins, and dirt. He became, as such, a bricoleur par excellence, drawing on craft histories, bridging the divide between so-called high and low art forms, and locating a sublime in the everyday.
Indeed, part of the joy of works such as Where Are We Now? resides in their ability to traverse multiple histories; in the example of craft, Hodges recuperates these methods—so often associated with women—as a form of community reengagement. By dint of their construction, his process is methodical and deliberate, with each idea germinating for many months; Hodges does not make preliminary sketches but rather goes over and refines an idea until he is ready to begin its construction. This sense of care is underscored in the art that he creates. As the curator Jeffrey Grove noted, “What’s interesting in Jim’s work is that its appearance may have changed racially over twenty-five years but there are certain gestures and threads and intentions that were clearly there from the beginning” (J. Grove, quoted in op. cit., 2014, p. 80). Where Are We Now? is an encapsulation of the artist’s ongoing preoccupations, namely, identity, friendship, love—and all that that carries. For Hodges, art is, above all, about capturing life.
Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington, where he, one of six children, developed an acute sensitivity to the natural world. He spent much of his childhood drawing and later studied art as an undergraduate. In 1983, Hodges moved to Brooklyn to attend a master’s program at the Pratt Institute; initially, he studied painting, but by the end of the decade, had reoriented his attentions towards sculpture; Hodges was particularly arrested by Eva Hesse’s ephemeral works and their material poetics. His breakthrough came in 1994, with a widely praised solo exhibition at CRG Gallery in New York, for which Hodges showed A Diary of Flowers, a tapestry of 565 paper napkins each adorned with a single hand-drawn flower.
"I think of composing experiences in space as elementary choreography". Jim Hodges
Like so many of his contemporaries, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Gober, Hodges rose to prominence against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. These artists responded by producing formally rigorous works—enmeshed in the traditions of Minimalist and Conceptual art—that were imbued with subjectivity and emotion. “In the works that brought early attention,” Hodges recalls, “I was celebrating my identity as a person in the world at a particular time … I was working with a delicacy of material and thinking very much about time and the impossibility of halting it. For me that was everywhere I turned” (J. Hodges, quoted in H. Sheets, “Suspended Moments in Time,” ARTnews, January 2014, p. 81). In many ways, Where Are We Now? seems an elegy to lost friends and community, a sense reinforced both by the work’s title and its formal connection to Gonzalez-Torres’ delicate light strings and beaded curtains; much of Gonzalez-Torres’ practice contends with loss, and the artist himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1996.
As an art historical motif, flowers have long been associated with mortality owing to their use in memento mori, the pictorial genre that reminded viewers of the fleeting nature of life, as well as in Christian iconography. But flowers conjure innumerable connotations; they brim with both life and devastating loss, poetry, opulence, and love. The French Impressionists sought to capture the beauty and evanescence of a blossom, the way that light and atmosphere can change how a bloom is seen. Likewise, Hodges’s practice is open to and encourages myriad modes of interaction, and his art cannot be so easily reduced to one reading. In the case of Where Are We Now?, while the curtain may shroud, it also proffers color and beauty. As Ken Johnson noted, with Hodges’ work, “you may begin to see the world as a place that generously lends itself to formal and poetic re-creation” (K. Johnson, “ART IN REVIEW; Jim Hodges”, The New York Times, 31 May 2022, p. E39).
“When I make art,” says Hodges, “I think about its ability to connect with others and its ability to change or affect others, to bring them into the process, to bring easy access to art” (J. Hodges, quoted in J. Dobrzynski, “Taking the Ordinary and Finding it Beautiful”, The New York Times, 24 March 1999, online). Material became one of the first means through which he could ‘open’ his art: Unable to afford paint as a young artist, Hodges began to work with anything and everything he could get his hands on, including paperclips, napkins, and dirt. He became, as such, a bricoleur par excellence, drawing on craft histories, bridging the divide between so-called high and low art forms, and locating a sublime in the everyday.
Indeed, part of the joy of works such as Where Are We Now? resides in their ability to traverse multiple histories; in the example of craft, Hodges recuperates these methods—so often associated with women—as a form of community reengagement. By dint of their construction, his process is methodical and deliberate, with each idea germinating for many months; Hodges does not make preliminary sketches but rather goes over and refines an idea until he is ready to begin its construction. This sense of care is underscored in the art that he creates. As the curator Jeffrey Grove noted, “What’s interesting in Jim’s work is that its appearance may have changed racially over twenty-five years but there are certain gestures and threads and intentions that were clearly there from the beginning” (J. Grove, quoted in op. cit., 2014, p. 80). Where Are We Now? is an encapsulation of the artist’s ongoing preoccupations, namely, identity, friendship, love—and all that that carries. For Hodges, art is, above all, about capturing life.