Al Hansen's Art of Pronouns
Al Hansen, Sweet Cell Dada , 1964. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gift of Michael Asher and Pamela Allen For Don Draper, the Hershey bar was "one of the most successful billboards of all time." The very real chocolate tycoon Milton Hershey would have agreed. He was in the habit of picking up discarded chocolate wrappers, only to replace them on the ground, with the Hershey name face up. For Fluxus provocateur Al Hansen, the Hershey wrapper was raw material for art. By 1962 he had noticed that the word HERSHEY contains the feminine pronouns HER and SHE. Hansen began making text collages of Hershey bar wrappers. They were concrete poetry embodying a Pop critique of consumer-capitalism and the Fluxus ethos of art-from-trash. Created sporadically until the end of Hansen's life (1927–1995), the collages became a running commentary on the male gaze from the sexual revolution to third-wave feminism. Conceptualist Michael Asher and Pamela Allen gave Hansen's...
