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For 50 years, the American artist Maren Hassinger has created impressive sculptures of real places from simple actions: building a big knot, twisting metal in organic shapes, breathing air in a plastic bag, walking in a room. By Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Moving Growing, Berkeley Art The museum (BAMPFA) offers a comprehensive, but wonderful, re-creation of his most famous works, documenting his achievements, and bringing the audience to joy.
“There is a magic in the nature of his work,” said BAMPFA director general Anthony Graham, “the way he can transform things and change the environment in which they exist, making us see them in a new way.”
Indeed, Hassinger makes you look at things in a new way. One of his earliest pieces, simply titled Untitled Rope, gathers the titular’s biceps-thick, industrial length, each formed into a spectacularly loose knot of macrame about to be pulled. “I always approach the statue with the idea that it’s done underground,” Graham said, referring to what would happen if we agreed to tie the strings. “As if we would walk on either side, pick up the cord, and tie the knots together, we would be away, and bring us closer together.”
Knots are everywhere in Living Moving Growing. There are pieces like Untitled Rope and Sign of the Times, the latter of which consists of countless New York Times leaflets carefully folded and tied together to form large newspaper ropes that hang on the wall of the museum. You can see huge ropes about to be tied, pink plastic bags tied for breath, and even Hassinger’s hands tied in a single knot after his 2005 movie Birthright.
As Graham shared, the quotidian nature of principles, as well as their great variability, make them ideal practices for Hassinger, who likes to focus on things that are invisible to us in their repetition, yet are essential to the construction of our shared lives. “Knotting is an art that is at the same time everyday, like tying shoes, and decorative, like macrame, or being industrial, like the types of knots needed on ships,” he said. “In many of his works there is a repetitive pattern, but the closest is the attention to painting so that there is a great change.”
In Hassinger’s hands, these practices can be a way to reach out to others to make connections. Her piece Love (Pyramid) shows the artist filling countless pink plastic shopping bags with her breath and a small love note, then placing them on a glass wall in a large sculpture.
With works like Love (Pyramid) and Sign of the Times, what would otherwise be consumerist trash becomes strange and human, engaging the viewer and making us think about how simple breathing connects us all. Love (Pyramid) is a field that requires care, meaning it is subject to constant care and communication that brings the museum staff into Hassinger’s quotidian practice. “It’s very simple, just take a deflated bag, fill it with air, and screw it back to the wall,” Graham said. “So there is also the ability to take care of things and give them new life.”
Sign of the Times brings Hassinger’s creations to the Berkeley Art Museum community, where the institution is creating a workshop to build the sculpture piece by piece over time. When I went to see the exhibit, long strands of knotted newspapers hung down the wall of the building, looking like a cross of jungle vines and torn paper. Over time, as Hassinger leads monthly discussions to fill more space, the sculpture will gradually expand, filling the entire building with a stunning natural landscape.
This course is more than an opportunity to worry about tearing a piece of writing paper into small strips, twisting and gluing it ourselves – it is a way to bring Hassinger’s recitation to a wider audience, and make it a basis for cooperation.
As Graham explained, the daily invitation to Hassinger’s creative work disrupts the categories and dynamics that are often placed in the art gallery, giving curators, artists and audiences alike a platform to engage as human beings. “On opening day, we were in the theater and it was amazing,” he said of Hassinger’s first meeting. “The theater is full of people who are talking, everyone is like in the same world, and it disrupts the order. For Hassinger, that becomes a big thing, to create a caring world.”
Movies like Birthright and Daily Mask have brought to the fore the politics of race and identity that, while present in Hassinger’s art, are rarely found in the material. The past traces the history of his family, as it records the time when he began to explore new branches of his family through the first meeting with his uncle. The latter shows a close-up of Hassinger’s face as he rubs a stick of oil on his face, covering himself with a black mask.
As a Black female artist who emerged in the 1970s primarily in theater and web sculpture, Hassinger faced challenges finding her place in the arts. After graduating from UCLA in 1973, he found a group with other Black avant-garde artists, including David Hammons, Franklin Parker and Ulysses Jenkins, collaborating at a time when few others could.
Hassinger moved to New York in 1984, continuing to make a name for himself with practice, eventually becoming the director of the Reinhardt School of sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This recognition helped expand his profile, as did the 2011 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles called Now Dig This!, which brought prominence to a group of black artists working in Los Angeles. “I think this show was, for a lot of people, a real revelation of all this history that a lot of people didn’t know about,” Graham said.
Having an extensive history of work at BAMPFA is a big moment for Hassinger, and it comes at a time when the simplicity and joy of his practice are very important. As Graham shared, at the beginning of Hassinger’s artistic work one finds care and joy, and the goal is to open spaces for sharing. Remembering Hassinger’s newspaper conference in Ohio, he echoed the artist in his words as he held up a giant newspaper: “If we can come together to make something as silly as a newspaper ball, we can come together to love each other forever.”
Graham wants this feeling to be contagious in his audience. He said: “I hope this show will help people to slow down and pay attention to the world around them,” he said, “to see the little movements and movements and all the things that we have all the time that have meaning.”
