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ART REVIEW

Bringing the Soul Into Minimalism: Eva Hesse



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By GRACE GLUECK Published: May 12, 2006

NOT many contemporary artists have approached the uncertainties and contradictions of making art as resolutely as Eva Hesse. Her challenges to Mimimalism, the reigning movement of her day, while using some of its vocabulary and serialist aesthetic, helped create a genre that went beyond Minimalism's antiExpressionism and rigidity of form.

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The estate of Eva Hesse; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich and London

Eva Hesse's "Untitled (Rope Piece)" (1970) was made when the artist was dying. More Photos

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Slide Show: Beyond Minimalism

Using materials then new to sculpture, like latex and fiberglass, she made work that hung, draped, dangled, looped, drooped, slumped, webbed, protruded breast- and penislike, imitated skin, suggested bodily orifices, spilled or just lay on the floor. Art that wasn't "art" was her aim. "I wanted to get to nonart, nonconnotive, nonanthropomorphic, nongeometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort, from a total other reference point," she wrote in an exhibition statement in 1968. Unlike the impersonal geometries of Minimalism, her work related directly to the body and its quirks, but also reflected the emotional struggles she experienced in her short life. (Born in 1936, she died at 34 in 1970. Although she did not regard herself as a feminist per se, her adventurous explorations had a powerful influence on the perception of women's and alternative approaches then coming into recognition. Today, gender questions aside, she is viewed as one of the most innovative artists of the postwar scene. The confluence of two shows, "Eve Hesse: Sculpture" at the Jewish Museum, and "Eva Hesse: Drawing" at the Drawing Center, puts a fresh spotlight on Ms. Hesse, who would have been 70 this year. The sculpture show, assembled by Elizabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Fred Wasserman, a curator at the Jewish Museum, focuses on a pivotal Hesse exhibition, "Chain Polymers," at the Fischbach Gallery known for promoting Minimalist painters in 1968. (The name refers to properties of latex and fiberglass.) Arguably a compilation of her best work, it was her first and only solo show of sculpture during her lifetime, and most of the objects in it along with some earlier and later pieces are here. Ms. Hesse's work reflects, however subtly, her traumatic life story. Born in Nazi Germany, at 2 she was sent for safety's sake to the Netherlands with her older sister. They were reunited with their parents for emigration to the United States, where they learned that Ms. Hesse's uncle and grandparents had died in concentration camps. Then came her mother's mental breakdown, her parents' divorce, her father's remarriage, her mother's suicide when Ms. Hesse was not yet 10 and, still later, the failure of her own marriage and her father's death before the onset of her losing battle with brain cancer. An important section of the show, assembled by Mr. Wasserman, is devoted to biographical materials, including her father's moving daybooks that lovingly tracked the lives of his two daughters (the older, Helen Hesse Charash, survives). One of the earliest objects in the sculpture show is "Compart" (1966), a four-panel vertical that starts at the top with a fully formed round, breastlike image of neatly wound cord that mysteriously breaks up into part

of the same image on each of the three panels beneath. Does it have to do, as the catalog for the drawing show suggests, with an absent mother? The last, most startling and most impressive work is "Untitled (Rope Piece)," of 1970, made as Ms. Hesse was dying, finished with the help of friends. Of latex over rope, string and wire, it is a tangled drawing in space suspended from the ceiling, some of its ends touching the floor, that looks like the work of giant spiders gone berserk or a doodle that got out of hand. Its strident arrhythmia seems to mock comfortable notions of composition and aesthetic purpose. It could be seen as anti-art and -architecture, a rootless, homeless sort of dysfunctional shelter that may, it has been suggested, have unconsciously expressed Ms. Hesse's emotional dislocation or is that too easy? At any rate, like the work of her contemporaries Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris and Alan Saret, it stood out from the anal-retentive neatness of Minimalism.

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Some works appeal particularly in the way they trap light and glow with it, like "Sans II" (1968), a double row of joined boxes of polyester resin and fiberglass that extends along more than 35 feet of wall, suggesting a Donald Judd work gone somewhat soft. More body-related objects include "Schema" (1967-68), a floor piece in the form of a flat latex sheet studded with 144 luscious-looking, repetitive protuberances, like breasts or muffins; and "Area" (1968), a long, rectangular piece of rough, barklike skin that hugs the wall, then extends onto the floor like a mat.
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Slide Show: Beyond Minimalism

"Several" (1965), a hanging work of long, slightly curvy, phallic sausages in shiny gray, has an appealing wimpy dejectedness. I can't, however, warm up to "Aught" (1968), four large, wrinkly, ruglike rectangles in dull yellow latex and filler over canvas, hung flat on the wall in serial repetition. For the show, the museum has removed the carpeting in its ground-floor galleries to reveal concrete painted light-gray, giving a sense of Ms. Hesse's working studio. The change should be made permanent; it looks great and puts the viewer in better touch with the vitality of Ms. Hesse's creations. As might be expected, the Drawing Center's show, co-produced with the Menil Collection in Houston by Ms. Sussman and Catherine de Zegher, the former executive director of the Drawing Center, deals in depth with Ms. Hesse's works on paper. They range from rough sketches or notes to test pieces made from various materials that function as drawings, to finished pieces that stand on their own. A zealous researcher, Ms.

Hesse made all kinds of thumbnail notations and calculations to explore the properties of her malleable materials. Many of these sheets, perhaps too many, are shown, too. From the early 60's there are lively color drawings whose fanciful components childlike squiggles, doodles and bizarre shapes dancing over spacey fields show a wide but still unfocused vocabulary. Ms. Hesse quickly came to regard her excursions in color, however, as dumb and uninteresting. She recognized that her style and inclinations were toward achromatism. Her more restrained and restricted-palette drawings of 1965 to '68, many with circular themes, in shades of black, white and gray, relate to parts of the body, like "Ingeminate" (1965), a dimensional drawing of two sausage-shaped objects wrapped in black cord and connected by a shiny black length of tubing. Some beautifully shaded drawings of series of breastlike circles, concentric and otherwise, from this period resemble several at the Jewish Museum. A breakthrough for Ms. Hesse came in the mid-60's, when, on a lengthy stay in Germany with the sculptor Tom Doyle, her husband at the time, she began to explore line in two and three dimensions, like "Tomorrow's Apples (5 in White)" of 1965, a relief drawing in which five wrapped cords in different colors are plugged into a drawing of abstract white relief areas. In "Metronomic Irregularity III" of 1966, a wallmounted green board bears three square separated wooden slabs, each with holes bored in it. Green cottoncovered wires emerge from the holes to flow across the board like drawn lines, giving the effect of flowing water, an apt analogy for the freshness of her work. At the Jewish Museum, a welcome innovation is its decision, for the first time, to open on Saturdays (except for the holiday of Shavuot on June 3), from 11 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., at least until the show ends on Sept. 17. What's more, Saturday admission will be free, although the shops and cafe will be closed, and audio guides unavailable. The new hours are on a trial basis, a spokesman said. Let's hope they become permanent.

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