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| Dürer
Project Heather Hesterman Temple Studios 20 September- 5 October, 1997 Melbourne |
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 Heather Hesterman, Holes |
The
titles of exhibitions and their invitations often build
certain expectations to what will lie within the gallery.
Heather Hesterman's exhibition, the Dürer Project,
is one such title. Her invitation bears a fragmentary
detail of one the explanatory sketches from Dürer's Treatise
of Measurement. It shows an artist working with one
of the perspectival devices recommended by Dürer. There
is a hole punched through the card at a point where the
artists brush touches the picture plane and it becomes
the point of the sight lines penetration of the picture
plane. In quoting Dürer's perspectival studies, expectations are aroused for a dialogue with the development of Renaissance perspectival studies and the origins of the modern cartesian scopic regime. What Hesterman's Dürer Project in fact addresses is a far more recent polemic in the visual arts: the lack of women artists acknowledged in the conservative art history text books and in particular, Gombrich's Story of Art. This, of course, is not a new idea. In the early 70s, women producers were striking in their absence from the history of art. By the end of the seventies, however, a generation of predominantly American feminists had unearthed sufficient historical examples of female artists to prove that there was no gendered lack of ability throughout the ages but merely the same social machinations at work that were historically preventing women from taking centre stage in most areas of western society. Gombrich's Story of Art features in Hesterman's work as a tower of knowledge where the chapters are reworked as individual empty books waiting for the history of women artists to be written. Hesterman delivers a very literal interpretation of the absence of women in art history. The holes punched though the Dürer documentation of drawing methods, printed by Hesterman, are meant to indicate women's absence from the grand scheme in the history of art. The arrangement of the holes (absence) is intended to be arbitrary, however, she irresistibly succumbs to the adolescent impulse to punch out the eyes of the male artist in each study. Hesterman's work is surprisingly neither pious nor didactic in its message and she deliberately engages many the cliches of "women's art". In Points of Perceptive she reworks Dürer's diagrams of measurement for artists in needlepoint, interspersing them with the profile portraits of women. These are both traditional mediums of the properly finished young lady and valuable tools to survive what were historically lives of extreme restriction and boredom. Ironically, needle and thread are the basis of Dürer's second perspective apparatus, Man Drawing a Lute, and it was via needle and thread that Dürer promised to "render anything within reach in correct perspective by means of three threads". After Hesterman has been at it with the punch though, it begins to look like a primary school sewing card; no longer an apparatus with which to render the world truthfully but a mere diversion. In another Dürer illustration of a Perspective Apparatus a grid of threads is used by Dürer to plot the figure of a reclining nude. This image has been conventionally used in twentieth century texts to illustrate "the abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze", the new status of the scientific rational de-erotised gaze which facilitated "the withdrawal of the painter's emotional entanglement with the object depicted in geometricalized space". This gaze could still fall on objects of desire but "it did so largely in the service of the rectifying male look that turned its targets into stone".1 Gombrich found Dürer's image of an artist staring ostensibly between the legs of his model an example of "the need for the artist to become detached, to introduce an entirely different set of meanings" emphatically stating that this "could scarcely be more dramatically illustrated than in Dürer's woodcut".2 Being a ubiquitous figure of art education, the choice of Gombrich is obvious, but why Hesterman should focus on Dürer is less clear. Perhaps its because Gombrich's Dürer is placed in the context of a lesser renaissance to the "real" renaissance occurring in Italy. For Gombrich damns Dürer as a scientist, argues he is not an artist but a "diligent measure and balancer" and his bodies were patently "not as convincing and beautiful as their Italian classical models."3 While Gombrich reassures Dürer's genius, it is significant in this context that Dürer is feminised by his failings in relation to the real business of the Italian Renaissance. Unavoidably, much of the meat and potatoes of an art history education are present within Hesterman's references to both Dürer's perspectival studies and Gombrich's Story of Art. In this respect, the exhibition is a Pandora's Box of epistemological problems in art history, of which the lack of women artist is but one of many possible issues. In quoting such loaded imagery, Hesterman has undermined the possibility of presenting a clear polemic. Her beautiful and poetic images open up such a can(on) of worms that you are unsure which bit to question first. Helen Stuckey Endnotes © The artist and |
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 Heather
Hesterman, The |
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 Heather
Hesterman, Points of |
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