NEW YORK, NY.- Eva Hesse, a German American artist, wanted her work to look “ucky,” and accordingly, many of her sculptures can make your skin crawl. They behave like skin themselves: irregular in texture, their craggy folds suggesting, unnervingly, something alive.
Hesse, a post-minimalist of the 1960s (she died in 1970), dismantled the ideological scaffolding holding up what was considered art, often by reimagining industrial, non-art materials. But where others in that movement used rigid and impersonal plywood and steel, Hesse favored loose, often erratic configurations of rubber, latex and fiberglass, things that gave her sculptures humanity and softened minimalism’s stiff contours.
The visceral pieces she made were like psychic maps, the drippy resin effluvia of her forms conjuring the trauma and absurdity of living. They spread across the floor and crept up walls, unruly and impolite, like little else art had seen before. “All I wanted was to find my own scene — my own world,” Hesse said. “Inner peace or inner turmoil, but I wanted it to be mine.”
Five of those latex and fiberglass sculptures, changing what art could be, have been reunited for the first time in over 35 years in an affecting exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan that closes on July 26. Their uckiness has only intensified: the latex drained of its elasticity, their color oxidized into a deep rust. They’re given ample breathing room across the gallery’s ground floor, cool and low-lit, which gives a revenant, sepulchral flavor. That they still exist at all, given the fugitive properties of their makeup, is a small miracle. That they’re together, the result of five separate institutional loans — from the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Glenstone in Maryland, the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum — is a logistical feat likely only possible for an operation as muscular as Hauser & Wirth’s: The gallery represents the Hesse estate, but even it could not appeal to the Pompidou Center in Paris, which declined to move “Untitled (Seven Poles),” from 1970, the last work Hesse realized.
The sculptures’ presence here and their current state asks potent questions about an artist’s intention, and when an artwork stops fulfilling that intent. Works that confront the messy, ecstatic and betraying facts of corporeality, they are not the same as when they were created — they’ve changed, as people change. Diminished, they’re more themselves than ever. Their active deterioration may be their best quality.
Hesse’s work is often viewed through psychobiography and the inheritance of anxiety, irreducible from the agonizing details of her life. Hesse was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Third Reich Hamburg, Germany, in 1936. She spent her first years sheltering with a Catholic family before being bundled, with her older sister, Helen, onto one of the last Kindertransports to Holland, and eventually reuniting with their parents in New York, where they settled in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. But joy was fleeting. Hesse’s mother suffered severe depression; her parents divorced. When her mother learned that her own parents had perished in the camps, she jumped from the roof of her building.
As a young woman, Hesse was alternately nervous and depressed, wracked with self-doubt and nightmares, in both psychic and physical pain. But she was also ambitious, confident in her capacity as an artist and frustrated by the yoke of history. She attended Yale with designs to be a painter and was a favored pupil of Josef Albers, despite rejecting nearly all of his theory about the way people see color: “I will abandon restrictions,” she wrote in her diary. “I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed.”
She married sculptor Tom Doyle and in 1964 accompanied him on his residency at a textile mill in Germany. Only then was she able to achieve the spontaneity and freedom in her work that had eluded her. It became weirder and drolly confrontational: psychosexual reliefs cobbled from bits of abandoned machinery shaped into protuberances of breasts and genitalia; delirious drawings of human-machine forms colliding the synthetic and organic.
Within the year she had abandoned paint and canvas altogether and adopted a sculptural style that challenged minimalism’s cool geometries with something less tidy and more personal. Hesse found her materials in Canal Street’s run of industrial suppliers. She became enamored with chain polymers and thrilled to fiberglass, the chemical miracles of the newest science.
Within those miracles exist toxic nightmares, and the idea that inhaling their noxious fumes in her garret studio on the Bowery contributed to her death, at 34, from brain cancer — that she died for her art — is seductive but imprecise. Well before she became sick, she was producing work that looked like tumors and cellular growths, like prophetic pathological dreams. Her sculptures related to the body and its attendant functions and malfunctions, evoking guts and embalmed flesh (artist Robert Smithson likened them to “mummification”).
She was after something that could get at life’s rationality and irrationality expressed in the same gesture. “Repetition Nineteen I” (1967) does that. The first of three versions Hesse made over 10 months, it comprises 18 bucket-like forms (one was lost, fittingly frustrating the title). None are identical, nor did Hesse prescribe a set order. Her fabricator initially produced 19 perfect forms, which she rejected and remade herself, searching for “something with a life.” They’re disarmingly goofy, as though they’ve been gut-punched, intrusive thoughts in papier-mache. Repetition, for Hesse, was existentially Beckettian: “If something is absurd, it’s much more exaggerated, more absurd if it’s repeated.” But repetition can also be reassurance, recitations of comfort and consolation.
Its psychic twin is “Area” (1968), a skein of latex-coated wire mesh. Made from the mold of “Repetition Nineteen III,” it is literally leftovers. Whereas “Repetition” is empty vessels freighted with the baggage of loss, “Area” is too formless to count as empty. Hesse called it ugly, and the way it ripples along the floor and up onto the wall, like a sloughed-off skin, is deeply off-putting. But it’s also tender. Its flatness suggests three-dimensionality as if reaching for something emotionally ungraspable.
That same year Hesse made “Augment” and “Aught,” displayed together here as they were in their 1968 debut at the exhibition “9 at Leo Castelli.” “Augment” offers 17 sheets of rubberized canvas splayed on the floor, overlapping yet incrementally exposed. “Aught” brings “Augment” onto the wall, hung in four segments of two sheets of rubberized canvas attached at the edges and swollen with polyethylene scraps — a suspension between painting and sculpture.
Both pieces have contracted, the latex yellowed like a mouthful of brittle teeth. “Aught,” like many of her pieces, takes on a funereal cast. Yet even as Hesse’s life was haunted by death, her work rarely tipped into pathos. “Aught” recalls the Jewish custom of shrouding mirrors during the shiva mourning period, both an inducement to introspection and a kindness to the bereft.
The centerpiece is the modular, wall-size scrim “Expanded Expansion” (1969). It is the most startling, not just for its scale — over 10 feet tall and 30 feet wide — but for the way it has aged. When exhibited in a group show at the Whitney, it was off-white, its rubberized cheesecloth panels cascading like softly draped curtains. On view for just the second time in 35 years, it’s now the orange-brown of hardened amber, its drape totally tensed (a video of the Guggenheim’s heroic restoration process gives a good idea of the progression). It is a totally different piece of art; where its bellows were once supple they now resemble scar tissue. But its pose remains beguiling as ever. Propped up against the wall, it’s both at ease and exhausted.
Given its fragility and waning life span, each successive showing of Hesse’s work is potentially the last. Time is part of the deal. Hesse knew this. “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last,” she wrote. Her production was staggeringly compressed — effectively four years — and its exuberance is palpable. Its power comes from the knowledge that, like us, it would decay, and that she made them anyway.
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‘Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures’
Through Friday, Hauser & Wirth, 542 W. 22nd St., Manhattan, 212-790-3900; hauserwirth.com.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
