Cynthia Hawkins’s Art Notes, Art

For a period in the late seventies and early eighties, artist Cynthia Hawkins experimented with wired sculptures, documenting her thinking around this work in a journal. As she writes in the foreword to its recently published version, she “always intend[ed] to publish this manuscript, I carried it with me through every move, every life transition.” The published writings include Hawkins’s small sketches, her notes working out form and structure, and references to her influences and crit groups. But, most importantly, the publication serves as a crucial record of this body of work, since the sculptures are no longer extant. “I made the decision to let them go because I was concerned about the artistic integrity of the malleable wire forms,” she explains in the foreword. “It only recently occurred to me that this manuscript is an act of recovery, a project to bring into the world that which has been lost.” This book brings her Art Notes, Art into the world as a typed book, each page undated save for the year. What comes across is Hawkins’s dedication to art making and willingness to experiment.

She writes about struggling with materials and media, “I must, I guess, reaffirm my ideas as to what art is, or rather what kind of art I am involved in.” In the same entry she goes on to describe “Bending lines like drawing” in her sculptures, followed by illustrative sketches. Other pages document her struggling over the definition of formalism and its place in her work. In a late entry, under the heading “Politics of Art,” she explains how “art is political, because it is always an expression of something, a feeling, or an occurrence. Some, and I include myself, feel entrenched in the historicism of formalism.” Some of the most interesting entries reveal her vulnerabilities as she works to define her own practice, “What is my work about? There is a broad base of concepts, of ideas where neither is more important than the other—for example, to communicate through the visual content of an artwork as well as its intellectual content (that which inspires).” Sharing this side of artistic practice—the doubt all artists feel at some point—is both surprising and refreshing, given that she claims to always have intended to publish these notes.

Though the journal is her own insular narrative of this period in her work, it is peppered with influences and other voices. She writes briefly and eloquently about other artists exhibiting at this time, including Edward Hopper (“It’s true that Hopper understands morning and evening light like no one else”) and David Smith. She later goes on to credit Smith for developments in her own drawings: “I’m excited about using spray paint to make a negative grid. The first came out beautifully, like a photograph. (I got the spray idea from David Smith.)”

In addition to the work she was seeing in galleries, she frequently makes references to her supportive colleagues and fellow artists, such as artists Howardena Pindell, Clinton Hill, and Irene Wheeler, and Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Just before her first solo show at JAM, she drafts her artist statement, adding after, “Maybe I should call Irene Wheeler and read it to her.” Her joy and reservations about her career direction are evident throughout (“P.S. I am very excited now. It’s really going to happen!”) as well as her trust in her cohort.

After writing about her recent work she laments, “I really hate my new pieces. I think I have fallen off the wagon somewhere. Sometimes I feel more the artist and sometimes I feel very much less the artist. I wish I knew what I am really looking for.” But then, just a couple of pages later, “At the meeting I learned, of course, that I had exaggerated my artistic problems. I hope I can hold this lesson for more than six months.” For readers who are also creatives, her ups and down are familiar. On an early page she writes (in what I imagine to be a frantic scrawl): “Sometimes the urge to make art is so strong I want to scream to get rid of it. But I do not. I try to channel it into work . . . sometimes it makes me do nothing. This is not fantasy, it is real. I can see that this is not a fantasy . . . I must make art.” The notion that she must make art above all else runs throughout, with and against parallel personal narratives as she supports her husband through law school applications and wrestles to maintain her crit group of women.

Towards the end of the short volume are more reproductions from her saved slides, showing her sketches and the final opening of her solo show at JAM. Hawkins’s publication is unique for her self-awareness about archiving: “It is fortunate that I retained for my personal archive the slides documenting my work,” she notes in the forward, “(poor quality as they might be), and I can now share them with you.” What would be left of this period of work if Hawkins had not chosen to self-archive? JAM factors heavily in the notes, as the book concludes with her show. JAM’s own story was recently told at length at an exhibition at MoMA, thanks to Linda Goode Bryant’s own self-archiving efforts. I wonder if the two ever discussed the importance of archiving their efforts, untrustworthy, perhaps that other institutions would save their stories.