Can the unnatural supplant the natural?

It is a question that Maren Hassinger has returned to repeatedly throughout her career—and perhaps no work better addresses the tension between “natural” and “unnatural” than 2021’s Bushes. From a distance, these works are indistinct from the local flora and fauna, blending seamlessly into the landscape. It is only as one approaches that the true nature of these “bushes” is revealed, composed as they are of densely interwoven wire rope, a decidedly unnatural material. Indeed, this dissonance between form and medium is a hallmark of Hassinger’s career and allows her to stage incisive interventions, unsettling conditions of our modern world.

Hassinger’s diverse treatments of wire rope are long-standing, but her use of the material was wholly novel when she first stumbled across it as an MFA student in UCLA’s Fiber Arts program, in the early 1970s. Recognizing the medium’s unique qualities—it is pliable enough to work by hand yet more than capable of supporting its own weight; it can be infinitely, unfurled, rewoven, and reused—steel rope quickly became iconic in Hassinger’s oeuvre. Likewise, seriality became a hallmark of her practice. As a child of Minimalism, the repetition of forms and concepts was a familiar artistic strategy. Bushes 2021 is part of storied lineage as these wire bundles occur at several key points in the artist’s career.

The earliest inklings of what would become Hassinger’s Bushes appeared in her groundbreaking 1981 exhibition, On Dangerous Ground, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. What would be the first solo exhibition of a Black artist at the institution, Hassinger was given what was then known as Gallery Six. A narrow gallery with popcorn ceiling and grey industrial carpeting, she filled the space, both walls and floor, with her spiky, wire rope sculptures. Hassinger’s intent was to make manifest the latent yet oppressive discomfort that accompanied her status as a woman of color in the institutional space. Alongside circular wall works, wire rope bundles littered the floor—direct antecedents of what would appear again a decade later.

Hassinger’s next major museum outing was curated by the well-respected curator, critic, and cultural historian Maurice Berger for the Hillwood Art Museum at Long Island University. It was there in 1991 that Hassinger realized Circle of Bushes, a large-scale outdoor installation made up of five large scale wire rope bundles scattered throughout the landscape, in Hassinger’s words “struggling to be part of the nature of the site.” This piece made way for the 2021 installation of Bushes commissioned for Dia Bridgehampton and exhibited from Spring 2021 to Spring 2022. Similar in appearance to their 1981 predecessor, their setting and ideological associations are decidedly different.

Rather than confronting the socio-political context of the gallery, Bushes contemplates the growing tension between Nature and Industry. Taking a subtle approach, “when installed in the landscape” Hassinger’s sculptures “are so much a part of it that they can barely be noticed,” seeming to “hide from the spotlight rather than seek it out” (Brenson, Michael, “Art View; Quiet Art Need Not Be Boring or Wimpish,” New York Times, November 26, 1989). Yet this is not to say that Bushes is unimpactful—only that the installation does not draw attention to its own status as a doomed replica of nature. Rather, from its position overlooking a bountiful garden or nestled within a quiet, tree-dotted campus, the installation points the viewer’s attention beyond itself to the natural splendor that surrounds it. The calm stoicism of each bush is undeniably striking, but it’s beauty only highlights the loveliness and inimitability of every bush, tree, and blade of grass. Hassinger reminds us that our world is precious, not easily reproduced or replaced.
"I think that in some way all my work expresses a nostalgia for a lost natural space, a perfection that is past."