Exhibition ReviewEva Hesse

REVIEWED BYALISON ROWLEY

Textile, Volume 1, Issue 3, pp. 288–295Reprints available directly from the Publishers.Photocopying permitted by licence only.© 2003 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.

“not painting, not sculpture”In November 2002 I chaired a panelof artist speakers in a session called“The Studio Encounter” at theconference Encountering Eva Hesseat Tate Modern. Initiated by DrVanessa Corby and organized incollaboration with the AHRB (Artsand Humanities Research Board)Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theoryand History at the University ofLeeds, it provided a forum fordiscussion of the work of Eva Hessein the context of a new exhibitionoriginated by Elizabeth Sussmanand Renate Petzinger which wasshown in San Francisco andWiesbaden, and installed at TateModern by Sheena Wagstaff andNicholas Serota from November2002 through March 2003. In oursession Joanna Greenhill spoke ofher first encounter with Eva Hesse’swork in an exhibition at theWhitechapel Gallery in 1979 whileshe was a student making sculptureat art school in London. “Everythingin Eva Hesse’s work was differentfrom what I had experienced

before,” she told us. “It revealed anew space in sculpture . . . theymade some kind of relation to mybody, some kind of understandingthat was imagined as well asphysical. The works in thisexhibition were made of materialsand involved processes which werenot previously part of the languageof sculpture.” Yet, as PhyllidaBarlow so neatly phrased it in herpresentation, Hesse’s “near-copyright” on materials such asliquid latex and resin posed adilemma for young artistsencouraged to experiment with theirproperties as part of their training.“Once these processes have beendiscovered,” she explained, “whatnext? To make a series of near-missEva Hesses . . .”1

Together these remarksrepresent a concise history of theeffects, both enabling and limiting,of exposure to the work of EvaHesse most familiar to me before Ivisited the exhibition at TateModern. Incredible as it now seems,I did not see Eva Hesse: Sculpture at

Exhibition ReviewEva Hesse. Tate Modern, LondonNovember 13 2002 –March 9 2003

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the Whitechapel Art Gallery in thespring of 1979. It was not surprisingat the time though: I was a painterand sculpture did not interest me. Inher influential biographical study ofthe work of Hesse published in1976, Lucy Lippard closes thechapter covering the artist’scompleted “apprenticeship” at theend of a year working in Kettwig-am-Ruhr in Germany with the statementthat Hesse returned to New York in1965 full of new confidence and with“an image of herself as a sculptor”(Lippard 1976: 47). The line thusdrawn in Lippard’s narrative ofHesse’s development, between herimmature activity in painting andher coming of age as an artist insculpture, has characterizedcuratorial decision making, andmost of the critical writing about theartist’s practice ever since. In thegalleries of the exhibition at TateModern, however, in what counts asmy first encounter with the work ofEva Hesse twenty-three years onfrom Eva Hesse: Sculpture at theWhitechapel Gallery, that divisionlooked decidedly less distinct.

This is not to say that thecuratorial logic of the exhibitionbroke with the establishednarrative; the two rooms ofpaintings and colored drawingsHesse made between 1962 and1965 were located according to itsdevelopmental chronology, but theforce of their impact in the specificcontext of this exhibitionunexpectedly loosened its authority.“Chewing up the patriarchs” washow Max Kozloff described what hesaw in Hesse’s paintings when hewrote about them in hisintroduction to an exhibition at theRobert Miller Gallery in New York in1992. For Kozloff the source of their

energy was competition, generatedin Hesse’s acts of rejecting“prestigious forefathers in herpictorial culture.” On the other handhe detected a tension in the workthat he speculated was the result of“a female artist who is maleidentified at the expense ofinstincts in her own sexual being”(Kozloff 1992: unpaginated).Feminist scholars have analyzedthis dilemma: artists who werewomen had to negotiate the termsof their own interventions in theOedipal structure that determinedthe mode of avant-garde practice asone of “reference, deference, anddifference.”2 At the same time theystruggled to represent aspects oftheir subjectivity not recognized bya phallocentric culture.

The information panel in theexhibition cited the work of Mattaand Gorky as resources for thecolored drawings and paintingsHesse made between 1962 and1964. The impressive blue boxpainting (Untitled, oil on canvas,72 × 60 inches, 1964), and anassociated smaller 3D piece, alsofrom 1964, undoubtedly drew on thework of Sol Lewitt. Hesse plays fastand loose with Lewitt’s 3D wallpieces in oil on canvas and paintedwood of 1962, unceremoniouslytugging at the corners of his regularcubes to shape them according toan altogether different spatial logic.We know that Hesse visitedDocumenta 3 in Kassel in June 1964and was interested in paintings byAsger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky andScottish painter Alan Davie. Davie’svocabulary lingers in the series offive remarkable paintings made inGermany in 1964/5 that for me wasthe surprise and pleasure of thewhole exhibition. Medium sized,

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flatly painted, none larger than35 × 43 inches, these works mayhave originated in drawings basedon letters and numbers Hesse madefor children who visited her studio inKettwig. They were importantenough for her to note theirqualities in her journal as “clear,direct, powerful” (Lippard 1976: 27).A letter to Sol Lewitt contains whatsounds like a description of how theplayful drawings developed . . .“contained forms somewhat harderoften in boxes and forms becomemachine like, real like, and as if to

tell a story in that they arecontained. Paintings followsimilarly” (Lippard 1976: 34).Rumbustious, comic strip kind ofpaintings these, and if they tell astory what is it? “A dirty one,” in theopinion of one of my viewingcompanions at the Tate. Sol Lewittreplied to Hesse’s letter quotedabove with the injunction “Do more.More nonsensical more crazy, moremachines, more breasts, penises,cunts, whatever . . .” (Lippard 1976:35). In Untitled, 32 × 40¼ inches(1964), and Untitled, 31 × 39¾

inches (1964), hair, fingernails, toesnails, teeth, anus, or is it aplughole? Sink, cistern, towel rack/chair back, crude forms outlined inblack that leaves a tide mark in thebody color, anticipate PhilipGuston’s late comic book style.Machines? I am reminded of StuartDavis’s flat, squared up Egg Beaterand Percolator paintings of the late1920s. Workmen were dismantlingweaving machines in the factoryHesse and Doyle were using as astudio in Germany, while not faraway, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp was

Figure 1Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Untitled 1965. Drawing and gouache on paper. Unique 496 × 647 mm. Courtesy of the Tate. Purchased1986. © Estate of Eva Hesse.

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etching his Bride as a spindlymachine. Sex machine-machinicsex, what’s the story? Precisely, Isuggest, the one Max Kozloff offersabout chewing up the patriarchs.

Hesse remarked on the Picassosshe saw at Documenta for theirinteresting use of color. Her own sheconsidered unimaginative and put itdown to the fact that she was tooinvolved in finding her own forms tomanage color at the same time. Theboldest pair of the 64/65 series,Untitled, 32 × 40¼ inches (1964),and Untitled, 31 × 39¾ inches(1964) bear out this assessment;they are monochrome in tones of

flesh or yellow, but theydemonstrate Hesse’s commentabout Picasso exactly in reverse.The paintings say: what I findinteresting in Picasso is his use ofform. A study in gouache and asimilar painting from 1964/5 have attheir center a bulbous hoopedelement reminiscent of theequestrian penis figure in Picasso’setching Dream and Lie of Franco 1(1937) which is, of course, a comicstrip narrative. The story whichprovides the pretext for the paintingthat must have been the centerpieceof Picasso’s 12 canvas contributionto Documenta is the rape of the

Figure 2Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Tomorrow’sApples (5 in White) 1965. Enamel,gouache and mixed media on board654 × 556 × 159 mm. Courtesy of theTate. Purchased 1979. © Estate ofEva Hesse.

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Sabine women, a not insignificantfact, it seems to me, if we read thisastonishing group of paintings byHesse in the light of Kozloff’s astutecomments about sex andcompetition. The theme of The Rapeof the Sabines was mobilized for thevirtuoso performances of thegenerations of painter fathersagainst whom Picasso was driven tocompete, and he takes them on. Iam not suggesting that Untitled,32 × 40¼ inches (1964), andUntitled, 31 × 39¾ inches (1964) area direct reworking of the narrativepretext of Picasso’s The Rape of theSabine Women (1962). It seems tome, however, that they are evidenceof Hesse’s highly ambitiousengagement with the vocabulary bymeans of which Picasso translatedsexual energy into visual form. Sheutilizes the crude and quirky, ratherthan cruel, conventions of the comicbook illustrator’s art to perform anaudacious deflation of Picasso’svirile forms. In the process sheachieves a sense of exhilarationthat belies Kozloff’s doubts abouther ability to articulate the mode ofher own sexuality under the termsof such an engagement.

Much has been written onquestions raised by the issue of theimpermanence of the materialsHesse employed to make sculpture,particularly in the last works: resindiscolors and latex perishes. Shoulddegradation be accepted as part ofthe work’s natural life? What is thestatus of the object exhibited now?Before my first visit to the exhibitionI attended a workshop conducted inthe Fine Art studios at the Universityof Leeds by sculptor Doug Johnswho assisted Hesse with thefabrication of her later work,including Sans II (1968), Contingent

(1969), Right After (1969) and thehanging rope piece Untitled (1970).We saw the qualities of the freshmaterials and experienced theirtechnical potentials and limitations:the frustrations and excitements ofdrying and hardening times, theunpredictability of chemicalreactions. It became apparent fromthe demonstration that managingthese “liquid to solid”3 processeson the scale of Right After andUntitled involved an ambitiouschoreography, at once technicallyexacting and thrilling in its potentialto materialize a proposition. Aboutwhat I was not sure until confrontedin the galleries of Tate Modern bythe “blasphemy” of Untitled,32 × 40¼ inches (1964), andUntitled, 31 × 39¾ (1964) and theneagerly anticipated the apotheosisof their promise in the furthestrooms of the exhibition.4 Untitled(1970) indeed was the last work inthe show, but the translucent droolof fresh latex over rope, at oncefascinating and repellent in theworkshop demonstration andunimaginable spanning meters, hadturned opaque with age, darkened,hardened and begun to crack.Contingent, tantalizing inreproduction as the exquisitemature resolution of the proposalillustratively prefigured in Hang Up(1966), “not painting: notsculpture,” is too fragile to travel,even to hang and languishes inboxes in the National Gallery ofAustralia in Canberra.5

Paradoxically, the vitality missingfrom the sculpture of the late 1960s,its origin and loss both an effect ofephemeral processes, resided now,as if it had migrated betweenrooms, in the relative stability of theearlier paintings. To put this another

way: in a phenomenologicalencounter with a chronologicalinstallation of what of Hesse’spractice can be brought together forexhibition today, an unexpectedtemporal reversal occurred. At thepoint of the exhibition’srepresentation of the very period ofHesse’s practice we have come toaccept from art historical, criticaland pedagogical discourses as thepinnacle of her achievements as asculptor, an intense moment of herpre-sculptural production returnedto re-animate it in the present. Thisraises interesting questions not somuch about what, as how the workof Eva Hesse means today. Whatdetermines the sense it makes now?How do we go about writing andcurating new meanings for it?

An old meaning, new meanings,the curatorial coherence of theexhibition was everywhere evidentin enlightening and provokingtransitions from room to room.Nowhere more so than in thedecision to represent quite literallythe passage of Hesse’s ideasthrough drawing in corridors linkingthe predominantly painting andpredominantly sculpture sides ofthe exhibition. Coming after theroom of wonderful colored reliefs,and in the company of Hang up, thepictorial framing of Ingeminate(1965), Untitled (1965) and Ennead(1966), installed close to the wallsand lit for shadows, made sense interms of narrating a transition frompainting to sculpture. There was,however, one glaringmiscalculation. For conservationreasons dangling and hangingstrings and cords were not allowedto touch the floor. To get around theproblem such pieces were installedon white platforms raised above the

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wooden floor of the gallery. But didthey need to be quite so high? Theresulting bulk proved disastrous inthe long stretch of Addendum whereit read as an added element of thework and wrecked the stunningmaterial economy of Hesse’scondensation of manycontradictions that makes it such anastonishing work of art. Thismistake apart, the work wasthoughtfully installed, and we must

thank all the people whocollaborated to bring the exhibitionto London. It offered those for whomthe example of Eva Hesse’s practicehas been central to their own formany years as artists, art historians,cultural analysts, together withthose of us who have engaged withit more recently, the opportunity tostudy its full range at first hand. Weare left to discuss and debate whatto make of it today.

Figure 3Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Ingeminate1965. Enamel paint, cord, and papier-mâché over two balloons connectedwith surgical hose. Each balloon:55.9 × 11.4 cm Hose: 365.8 cm. Courtesyof Daros Collection, Switzerland.© Estate of Eva Hesse. Photocredit:Courtesy The Estate of Eva Hesse.Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

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Notes1. Publication of the papers

presented by Joanna Greenhilland Phyllida Barlow isforthcoming.

2. See Griselda Pollock’s importantstudy of this situation in “KillingMen and Dying Women: AWoman’s Touch in the Cold Zoneof American Painting in the1950s” in Orton, Fred andPollock, Griselda (eds). 1996.Avant-Gardes and PartisansReviewed. Manchester:

Manchester University Press,221–294.

3. The description is PhyllidaBarlow’s.

4. Donna Haraway’s concept ofblasphemy offers a helpful wayof reading these works. SeeHaraway, Donna. 1991. “ACyborg Manifesto” in Simians,Cyborgs and Women – TheReinvention of Nature. New York :Routledge.

5. The phrase “not painting, notsculpture” comes from Hesse’s

catalogue statementaccompanying Contingent whenit was shown at Finch College’sArt in Process IV, Fall 1969.

ReferencesKozloff, Max. 1992. “Undertow: ThePaintings of Eva Hesse” in EvaHesse: Paintings From 1960 to 1964.New York: Robert Miller Gallery.

Lippard, Lucy. 1976. Eva Hesse. NewYork: New York University Press.