I'M GREETED AT THE GALLERY BY A SMALL, EBULLIENT woman hiding merry eyes behind her serious-minded
glasses. My host, Susan Hensel, is a recent transplant to Minnesota, but she’d been planning this move
for nearly twenty years. She moved to the Twin Cities from her hometown of
Lansing, Michigan in May 2004. Widowed when her son was two-and-a-half, she
wanted to raise her son in Michigan near her family and support network, at
least until he left for school. “”But after that, all bets were off,” she
recalls.


So for years, when she traveled to workshops or for shows, Hensel kept
dossiers of each city’s merits in little file folders at home. “I fell in love
with a lot of places,” she admits, “but by the time my son left for Oberlin,
I’d forgotten all about this promise I’d made to myself.”


That is, she forgot until she spent a week in Manhattan for her first New York
show. She spent a full week taking in Manhattan, walking till she got shin
splints. “I had an absolute ball,” she remembers.


And when she got home, she broke down and wept for three days straight.


“And I’m not much of a crier,” she insists.


She knew she was tired, menopausal even. But that wasn’t what was bothering
her. And then she remembered The Plan. So she dug out her folders and her
dossiers and started planning for this new chapter in her life, and set about
choosing her next home.


By this time, she’d been showing her own work for years, she was ready to
start her own gallery. She has some longtime friends in the area, so she came
to visit. “It felt like there was a Sue-shaped hole waiting for me here.
Minneapolis was where I needed to come,” she says.


So she packed up her little dog, Baby, and moved to a charming two-story place
in Minneapolis which would allow for a friendly exhibition space on the ground
floor as well as cozy living space above. “I wanted the opportunity not only
to show my own work, but to find new work by emerging artists. I want artists
whose work makes my heart beat faster, who have a story to tell—one that might
not be commercial, but that needs to be seen. I want to show work by artists
with guts,” she stresses.


The work Hensel displays in her gallery isn’t like the polished fine press
pieces that show in Minnesota Center for
Book Arts, but there’s a vitality and audacity in the pieces Hensel
chooses, even if the craftsmanship is sometimes a bit raw. A number of the
pieces in the gallery’s current show,
Readers’
Art 7: Frugal Finds for Prudent Collectors, are filled with clever
little marvels of paper and playful form, rich in wordplay and visual wit. And
it’s likely you simply wouldn’t run across these artists’ peculiar pieces
anywhere else.


Pick up any of Hensel’s own artwork, and it’s readily apparent that she’s an
inveterate reader and an avid (perhaps even obsessive) journal-keeper. One of
her peculiar (albeit appealing) multimedia pieces,
Panty
Symphony, springs from a little notebook Susan kept as a daily record
of her underwear (i.e. “Tuesday I wore the old blue pair that the dog had
gotten a hold of.”). Take the underwear journal, scan the actual underwear,
and sprinkle in a bit of experimental sound and some 
DIY I
Ching fortune-telling, and you’ve got a true Hensel original.


Hensel’s talent lies in her ability to take a highly idiosyncratic pursuit and
turn it into
something
ingenious, but accessible. It’s what she calls taking the personal and
“turning it into gestalt” for your artwork.


“I know this sounds harsh, but I think it’s true: while there may well be
value for the artist in writing what I snidely call ‘The Story
of My Rape’,” Hensel says with conviction. “There is not much value for the
public in that kind of art. But if you can take that personal story and step
back from it a bit, universalize it, then there’s value beyond
the artist for the work.”


While she writes the text for her artist’s books herself, she doesn’t really
have any interest in seeing the work she’s created for these pieces published
out of context on its own. “That’s not its intent and, honestly, most of the
writing I’ve done for these works isn’t strong enough to stand on its own.
These artist’s books and sculptures are all of a piece: structure, content,
and materials. None of the elements can exist on their own, without the
others.”


Some of Hensel’s creations are simply witty collage and play with word and
image. One such piece,
Clichés,
mixes an array of vintage clip art from a variety of textual sources (old
anatomy texts, advertisements, etc.) to produce visual puns on bromides
elegizing home. Her literal rendering of “Home is Where the Heart Is” offers a
Monty Python-esque visual joke, complete with an anatomically accurate
clip-art heart perched incongruously atop a line-drawing of an elegant
Victorian home.


Yet, not all her work is so lighthearted. For a year, Hensel immersed herself
in first-person Holocaust literature and poetry. “I, like many of us, have
really wrestled with the problem of evil. How can humanity can produce such
sublime art and culture and yet also, just as fundamentally, persist in
propagating the horrors of genocide, generation after generation?
I
wanted to try and understand more about how this kind of evil could emerge in
an otherwise rational culture.”


And so, Hensel did what she’d always done when getting to the bottom of
something. She read—book after book, one harrowing account after another—for a
year. “It was a devastating experience to take on this project, but I really
needed to understand the phenomenon of genocide. And, at
fifty, I decided I was finally old enough to do it. I figure, if something
terrifies or angers me, it’s probably a clue that I should work on it [in my
artwork].”


Shoah
is Hensel’s own powerful reader’s response to that year’s worth of reading
and research into Holocaust literature. The book itself is small but handsome,
and it has some heft: the pages are thick handmade sheaves of cotton pulp,
coated with shellac to hold onto her drawings and bound in rich, aged leather.
Replete with hand-drawn illustrations and her own reading notes and musings,
Shoah is at once lovely and terrible. And I suspect that’s
just as Hensel intends it.


After the Holocaust work, she was ready to change gears altogether. She was
also, at the time, particularly piqued at a feeling of sexual invisibility as
she neared fifty.  And so she began working on
the
Desire installation.


“I wanted it to be a layered, erotic experience to move through the
installation and browse through the book. A triumph for mature sexuality,” she
explains. “I read a lot on the subject, from erotica to sexuality handbooks
(it was fun!). My intention was to create a semi-public space where someone
might re-examine their most intimate thoughts on sex and identity. I’m not
sure if that part worked, but
the
book itself is just gorgeous,” Hensel laughs.


As we wind up our conversation, browsing through her intriguing literary
sculptures, she observes: “We are a story-making species, no matter what. When
we see artwork, we need to assign it meaning, a narrative. More generally,
that’s how we relate to the world and to each other. It’s not important to me
that a viewer have the same experience with my work that I have, but it’s
important that we’re all on the same page. I’ll help get you there—my
installations include sound, scent, light, image, and words—to help get you
into the arena. But once you’re there, your experience of the story is all
yours.”


 


About the artist:
Susan Hensel
investigates the book as object, as literature, and as
cultural icon. She is known around the country for her multimedia “narrative
sculptures,” rich in metaphor and symbol, and for her “literary sculptures,”
which serve as meditations on the lives and work of legendary
poets.





Her artist's statement: "Book" represents the preservation
and dissemination of knowledge, values and beliefs. "Book" contains the
history of the revolution of human knowledge with the inventions of writing,
of papermaking, of binding, of printing. "Book" carries the piquant intimacy
of journals, the innocence of childhood stories and the intellectual rigor of
the university. "Book" can encompass two-dimensions, three dimensions, and
persist across time. "Book" is performance art; it is both flowing and static,
open and closed, and full of meaning—whether those meanings are stated,
implied, or inferred.


--Susannah Schouweiler

access+ENGAGE Issue 16.1: Wordsmiths
Click here to read the web (HTML) version of the issue in which this collection was originally featured.

Susan Hensel Design Gallery
Browse through an extensive collection of Susan's personal artwork and keep up with the gallery's intriguing line-up of exhibits.

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Susannah Schouweiler on mnartists.org

access + ENGAGE, Book Arts, Mixed Media, Sculpture