Texte zur Kunst

Eva Hesse, "Untitled ('Rope Piece')", 1970

This spring two thoroughly curated shows in New York allowed for a renewed examination of the life and work of Eva Hesse. Alongside personal documents her minimalist sculptures, whose unconventional materiality contains moments of expression, were presented on a retospective scale. Both exhibitions not only invited to deal with Hesse's work in all its variety, but also to regard it against the backdrop of her biography - the escape from Nazi Germany and her arrival in the United States. Her status as a precursor and mentor of much contemporary art meanwhile went without saying.

Almost everything about Eva Hesse's life - from her childhood as a German-Jewish refugee, to her singular breakthrough in a male-dominated art scene, to her death at an early age - conspires to overdetermine the reception of her work. Thus, her oeuvre takes on an iconic function that distinguishes it from that of peers like Allan Saret or Mel Bochner, to name just two. Yet, the work itself is radically open. As Hesse famously declared in 1968: "I wanted to get to non art, non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. From a total other reference point (...) that vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipline. I will do it." [1]

Hesse's pursuit of openness differs dramatically from John Cage's. If Cage's "I have nothing to say and I am saying it" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, Hesse declares her intention to struggle. Despite Hesse's aesthetic of refusal, her work, in a manner similar to Georgia O'Keeffe's, has come to attract a broad public.

Together, the Drawing Center and the Jewish Museum presented a significant selection of Hesse's drawings, paintings and sculpture. The Drawing Center show, co-curated by Catherine de Zegher and Elisabeth Sussman, is the first exhibit in twenty years to survey Hesse's drawing and works on paper. This included not only finished drawings but also working notes - material especially important for a figure identified as a process artist. The Jewish Museum exhibit, co-curated by Fred Wasserman and Elisabeth Sussman, broke down into three parts: works on paper, sculpture and biographical documents. In contrast to the Drawing Center's selection, here the works on paper tended to be more iconic than process-oriented, typically executed in gouache or ink wash. Hesse's sculpture was the focal point, especially selections from her definitive exhibition "Chain Polymers". It's worth noting that negative factors shaped the sculpture selection as well; many of the latex works have deteriorated completely. In addition to Hesse's artwork, the Jewish Museum featured an extensive array of personal photos, diaries and notebooks. Prominent among these were the detailed "Tagebücher" kept by Hesse's father, Wilhelm. These chronicled Hesse's bourgeois childhood in Hamburg, the flight to Holland, then New York and her abandonment by her mother. Hesse acquired her father's penchant for keeping records. Thus, her life is exceptionally well documented. In these records, the trauma of the holocaust ultimately overshadows her mother's suicide, the artist's own failed marriage - even her premature death from brain cancer. Curiously, all this is the very sort of material Hesse ostensibly sought to keep separate from her work. Especially striking, then, are the photos where she poses with her paintings and sculpture. The charismatic, young artist appears unselfconscious before the camera, utterly devoid of pretense or affectation. Often she physically interacts with what she has made: holding a painting on her lap, adjusting a skein of latex-covered ropes and cords or raising a sheet of transparent plastic aloft. Notably, portraits like these have become dated, if not taboo. (In the 1980s, Jeff Koons even exploited this style of portrait as a low-key transgression.) [2] This may be because they seemingly cast artistic production as a kind of truncated cause and effect: "This is the artwork. This is the artist who made it. End of story."

Often, those who seek social justice invoke the phrase "the accident of history". This construction attempts to square reality with a rational moral framework - and to address the disparity between the two. In the twentieth century, more than anything else, the technological transformation of society gave rise to this unprecedented sense of discontinuity. Mechanization, in the form of the industrial revolution, vastly extended technical control over nature in both time and space, but in increasingly abstract terms. Newly globalized political and financial systems took on lives of their own, often to disastrous effect. In the wake of the First World War, Dada was the first art movement to confront these conditions directly - and Dada provides the foundation for Hesse's oeuvre. This confrontation might be explicit, as in the work of Heartfield, or implicit, as in the work of Arp, who is clearly more the model for Hesse. Dada tactics included deployment of chance procedures, the apparent reduction of signs to brute material (e. g., collage or Tzara's poems) and cultivation of the absurd. To some extent, they mirror the shock of technological modernization and all surface in Hesse's work. Largely through her inclusion in Marcia Tucker and James Monte's landmark exhibition, "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" at the Whitney Museum in 1968, Hesse has been categorized as a process artist. She was also labeled "post-minimalist". Although process is indeed central to Hesse's work, it functions differently than in the work of Robert Morris or Richard Serra where process becomes more of an end in itself. Hesse instead always subordinated it to some notion of composition, however relative that may be. Morris notably theorized process as a "recovery of means" in his essay "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: the Search for the Motivated" (1970). In this text, which marks a decisive break with his minimalist stance in "Notes on Sculpture" (1968), Morris implies that the shift in emphasis from product to process will somehow counteract the artwork's de facto commodity status. He goes on to argue that by "automating" their technique, artists can overcome the arbitrariness of taste that traditional composition represents. He cites Donatello as an example because instead of rendering draped cloth by hand, Donatello would soak cloth in plaster, drape it over a model, let it harden and use this to make the mold. Paradoxically, then, for Morris process becomes a means of automating the work, yet also a means of reinstating the artist's hand or corporeal presence. By coating ropes and cords with latex, then hanging them from hooks, Hesse used a technique similar to Donatello's to produce "Right After" (1969) and "Untitled" ("Rope Piece", 1970). Many compare "Right After" and "Untitled" ("Rope Piece") to Pollock's paintings, that also served as an inspiration for Morris. Indeed, the connection is not only visual or formal. Even the style of photos of Hesse interacting with her art and her materials resonate with Hans Namuth's famous portraits of Pollock at work.

In 1992, Hesse's close friend Mel Bochner characterized her work as "haunted" [3]. Although Bochner was referring to overlooked artistic influences, [4] more than these haunt her art. Rather than de-alienating the artist from the products of her or his labor as Morris suggests, a process approach (as quasi-automation) - seen in a broader historical perspective - appears to allegorize the dissociated experience of modernity. In this respect, process art reproduces the logic of Dada, or more precisely, the logic of Arp's version of Dada. Although many consider her work expressive, Hesse deploys literalist procedures and materials in order not to represent the historical trauma that is its precondition. One then might read the openness of Hesse's oeuvre as a refusal to signify - at least in expected ways. At the very least, it defers registering trauma. What her work does represent, or better, reenact, is the role of mechanization in transforming social relations. The organic character of her forms, however, masks this somewhat. The connection to the machine is more overt in minimalist sculpture. In his catalog essay titled "Dumb", written for the Jewish Museum, Yve-Alain Bois offers, among other things, a detailed account of links between minimalism and Hesse's work. He begins by citing Donald Judd's sculpture, noting that its rational look (geometry, system) is a decoy that "undermines the pretenses of reason" and that Judd himself was "adamant all his life about the irrationalism of his endeavor." [5] Quoting Anne Wagner, Bois further contends that, after 1966, Hesse quickly assimilated "the codes and tropes of Minimalism ('machine, grid, cube, repetition, industrial processes')" to rework them on her own terms. [6] Among the minimalist sculptors, Hesse's closest friends were Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre. LeWitt, in a letter to Hesse written on April 14, 1965, urged her to "do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machine". [7] This is the same artist who, two years later in "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", would write: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." [8] Then, in "Sentences on Conceptual Art", he went on to declare: "28. Once the idea of a piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly (...) 29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." [9]

Andre's influence on Hesse is even more pronounced. The serial structure of her later work derives directly from his. The connotation of this is closely bound to LeWitt's sense of the idea as a means of automation: once begun, the predetermined units repeat impervious to all else; the exact number of units is arbitrary. It is a way to shut out the rest of the world. Eerily enough, Andre's floor pieces reminded Hesse of "the concentration camp" - something she struggled to explain. [10] The concentration camp, of course, introduced the industrialization of genocide. There, the overriding goal of following a process through to the end made the unthinkable possible. In this vein, the relationship of minimalism to the machine is ambivalent at best. Machines are not always instruments of reason; they might also help implement deeply irrational forces. If minimalism dramatizes the shock of machine culture, Hesse reinstates the corporeal, the visceral, the somatic and the organic, all of which at first seem to mediate the initial shock. If commodity fetishism is the sex appeal of the inorganic, Bois notes that Freud diagnosed a particular anxiety in his study of the uncanny that arises from the inability to distinguish between organic and inorganic, dead and alive. [11] Where commodity culture has long split the difference between these, technology has begun more recently to break down the divide. In hindsight, Hesse's oeuvre seems to anticipate this prospect: from pacemakers and artificial joints to cloning and stem cell research and on to nanotechnologies that would make the integration of the biological and the mechanical seamless.

Despite the efforts Hesse made to divorce her art from "the accidents of history", it would be wrong to characterize her efforts as anti-historical. At a more discursive level, via her reworking of minimalist tropes, she attempted to engage the very conditions that facilitate such so-called accidents. While listing what she wanted to purge from her work, she also spoke of setting "a total other reference point". This need for a new reference accords with Walter Benjamin's critique of determinism in "Theses on the Philosophy of History": that the unrealized desires of the oppressed nonetheless constitute real historical material. If one then considers Hesse's oeuvre through its aspirations, it is to this that it is aligned.

"Eva Hesse: Sculpture", Jewish Museum New York, 12 May - 17 September 2006

"Eva Hesse Drawing", The Drawing Center, New York, 6 May - 15 July 2006