Dianne Hagen’s works have no titles. They are rightly named after the materials or parts they are composed of, because these works are not sculptures nor objects manufactured from raw material or made with a purpose or a function that would give them unity or clarity. They do not get round to the unity of a name and the clarity of language. Since they have no name, they can not fit in a whole either: the works do not look for contact with their “environment” or the world, nor with each other. The works cannot be “installed”. One can only look for a place where they can be alone in order to exist in their own space. Neither are Hagen’s works constructions or structures. One can not “formalize” the logic with which they were made. The work is not organised or supported by geometrical forms or by numbers, there is no structure which is filled and which gives the parts a necessary place and stability. No abstraction, symmetry, opposition, equilibrium.... Hagen’s works are compositions which, since they give no evidence of an underlying geometry and do not visualize a concept, appear to be amorphous and fragile and not justified.
What precedes language here, from this side, is an elementary corporality. Not of the body which reflects and basks itself in the longing of the other and already knows what it is and what it wants: a story, meaning. Not the body of desire, which is already “man” or “woman” and is involved in a social play of wanting and asking, display and seduction, give and take. But the body before it becomes image: the corporality of the earliest sensations, of the transitional feeling of the region of the mouth, for instance. That mixture of touch and taste, of the pressure of lips and the weight of cheeks, of the softness and smoothness or semi-roughness of lips and tongue and the hardness of palate and teeth, wet and dry, warm and cold, open and closed. In this sensations, language has not yet run its course - ‘the mouth? cherry, fruit, kiss, bite, cry, word.....”. Here, the body is still a turbid mixture. Hagen’s works are like models of this bodily sensations. They are made of “passive” materials, supple and flexible, solidified, hairy, impressionable, combined with hard, cutting, hurting materials. Hooks, angles, holes, shards, threads becomes parts of a “thing” that no longer has an overall shape. The connections that have been made are always contemporary, never decisive or definitive: hanging and sagging, touching, pricking, bursting, bulging, covering, intertwining, showing through. Each of these materials, formal elements and connections evokes primitive associations, constituting a whole that is experienced and felt rather than seen and understood. When, in her recent work, sound or blinking light - and therefore time- is added too, the work becomes more difficult to photograph.
Naturally, and spontaneously, the works also evokes ideas. But even though the decision to make works of this kind betrays a great awareness of what art is today and of the purposes art may serve, and even though one may, on a second level, read messages in it touching, for instance, on the relationship between art and “indecisiveness”, or between “process” and “work”, still the works do not refer to current issues or to the history of art. One can perhaps find examples in the history of modern art, such as the Coin de chasteté of Duchamp. The works themselves do not refer “culturally” however, but rather remind one of places where one is usually alone.
From ‘Groene Pasen’ by Bart Verschaffel.