In Hellen Ascoli’s recent work, the maker’s body helps determine the scale of the object and the viewer’s experience: in this way, she engages one of Minimalism’s familial legacies. Think of those stainless-steel boxes that fill Donald Judd’s compound in Marfa, Texas; they speak of the scale of the body in space. They reflect light, invite touch, and appear to remain still. The legacies of Minimalism manifest differently across other times and places. And here, the threads of movement become entangled, worn, and re-signified.
The body—and its ability to perceive, through its intellectual, emotional, and physical sensors—defines sculptural experience. In El telar me hizo tejedora, Judd’s formal aspects are sought, only to then improvise upon that same tradition. Ascoli therefore thinks through minimalist aesthetics from the practices of Guatemalan weavers. Working with the backstrap loom, the weaver’s body measurements give dimension to the textile. The loom fits intimately, embracing the body. As a result, the textiles may be understood as a kind of abstract portrait of the weaver, or at least as maintaining a strong relationship with the specific body that gave them form. Nor should we forget that these bodies are most often female. That these hands are female. That textiles cover our bodies and fill our domestic spaces. Yet Judd’s Minimalism has always been read as masculine. Whose body determines scale? And why? Ask Judd.
Since March, Ascoli has been exchanging polishing rags with shoe shiners in Zone 1. There is a particular material quality to these rags used for shining shoes. They snap when pulled, they give way. Corduroy pants found in secondhand bundles are the preferred fabric for the most experienced shiners. Ascoli trades a new rag plus two quetzales for a used one, participating in an economic exchange around these invisible materials, these remnants. Imagine all the feet these rags have rubbed, caressed, cleaned. Stories are inscribed in this grimy, black cloth. Economic systems, power relations, life histories reveal themselves in the materials around us, on us, and below us. They tell us stories of touch, of contact—our most intimate gesture, our most intimate way of interacting with others.
In Marfa, one cannot touch the sculptures.
The scale of the body
Insists on seeing the hand, on seeing gender
The exchange between artist and community
Between artist and collaborators:
All of these things are the infrastructures—the machinery more convenient to keep hidden—that Ascoli makes visible in her practice. There is fragility here. Fragility can also be a form of strength. Look at that delicate thread moving around the gallery, its shameless, naked machinery fully on display. What might it mean to see how something works? This is not merely a question of design or theory. It is a question pertinent to human relationships, to our shared spaces. In many ways, it is the most urgent question we have—the most intimate, the most personal, the most sacred question. Watch how the thread is pulled, how it moves, how it catches. Watch how it breaks.
— Laura A. L. Wellen
June 2016