Field Trip, I

As part of the Freshman Seminar I told you about earlier (e.g., here, here and here), we went on a field trip to MOCA in nearby downtown LA.

We went to see the exhibition of drawings by Eva Hesse. Hesse is very well known for her sculpture, and among the things she did, I think that a rather splendid one in this context is the one below. It is an example of those that resemble three dimensional renderings of her interesting use of line on the paper.

This one (not in the exhibition) is called “Metronomic Irregularity” (I think it has a number as well… there are several pieces of this title done by her).

The group is standing in front of the sculpture I posted about earlier. There’s Ashley and Adam, left and middle. Jeff (on the right in the picture) -who is not a freshman, but a senior who does physics research projects with me- came along as well. We had a rather good time, taking the bus up from campus (the horror!) and then walking up through the city, looking at some of the public spaces and public art that nobody seems to look at after hours much. We got to the museum just as it was opening.

A great deal of the work on display was in the form of developmental drawings, some of which were still in her notebooks, or were clearly pages of notebooks. These I found fascinating, for the most part. (Click the following for larger view):

One of the reasons is because -I think- they remind me of my own notebooks. There are doodlings, sketches of ideas, fully executed ideas, and -extremely interesting in themselves- little “notes to self” sorts of snippets of the chatter inside one’s head, made more tangible by having written them. I try to keep notebooks that allow me to reconstruct my trains for thought evern years later. They’re my lab-books, even though I don’t havea lab per se. I don’t know if many people do that any more. If you’re a theorist, do you?

Anyway, Hesse’s jottings and fully fledged sketches were on display for all to see (as well as a few three dimensional pieces/sculptures), and they were interesting indeed. She also sketched and developed ideas further in other media, and those were rather nice too. One thing that Jeff and I (as the scientists in the group) both latched on to immediately were her designs using graph paper. She’d build up various lattices on the paper which look so much like physics ideas and concepts. By this time I could not take any snaps for you since the museum staff had figured out that I was taking surruptitious snaps and were stalking me, and it would not do for my students to report that their professor had be thrown out of a museum for bad behaviour.

-cvj