Featured White Papers
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- Aug. 28th: Delivering Online Presentations That Result in Higher Sales (Citrix Online)
- Tools & Strategies for Expense Management (American Express)
Content provided in partnership with
Vessels and vacancies: in a career that lasted barely 10 years, Eva Hesse moved with remarkable speed from the brooding self-portraits of 1960, through biomorphic drawings and collages, into the tragic, absurd and strikingly original sculptures for which she is now best known. A touring retrospective opening in London this month traces this explosive growth - Eva Hesse
Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Sue Taylor
Hesse's brilliant adaptations of Minimalism center on just such insinuations of the body into that movement's "specific objects." A premier example is the 36-inch cubic Accession, whose five perforated metal faces Hesse hand-threaded with some 30,000 individual lengths of plastic tubing, creating an open box with a stubbly, nestlike interior. Two versions of this sculpture (1967/69 and 1968) were included in the exhibition)--both, unfortunately, sealed in Plexiglas. Distressing as it was to view the works this way, the protective cases drove home the decidedly seductive character of Accession, which people seem compelled to touch when it is exhibited in the open. While Minimalist objects by Donald Judd and Robert Morris remain unyielding and nonrelational, their industrial fabrication distancing the viewer, Hesse's cube does the opposite, enticing one to feel, to stroke and, in at least one instance, even bodily to enter and curl up inside the bristling container. (12)
In the gallery with Hang Up, phallic, testicular and uterine forms appeared in ingenious sculptures whose odd conditions--flaccid, pendulous, ostensibly broken--elicit humor, pathos and corporeal empathy. Here, too, the very "pneumatic" quality Michael Fried would deplore in the Minimalism of Morris and Tony Smith becomes an operative feature: (13) for Ingeminate (1965), Hesse wrapped two inflated balloons in papier-mache and cord, sealed them in enamel paint and linked the resulting twin sausage shapes with an inordinate length of surgical hose. Ovaries and fallopian tubes seem obvious anatomical analogues to these suggestive forms, whose doubling, connection and mummification, and the title Ingeminate--to reiterate or repeat--relate the piece thematically to the self/mother theme. (14) What's significant, however, about Ingeminate and all the work that follows is how Hesse moved beyond the kind of literalism of two wristwatches into an arena of meaningful abstract forms that convey feeling on an entirely nondiscursive level.
The circle motif and its permutations in Hesse's drawings and sculptures of 1966 and 1967 provide a most eloquent example. Concentric circles are inscribed in ink on graph paper, rendered in spiraling string on masonite, materialized in grids of steel washers on wood. Using a compass to create hundreds of circles in delicate works on paper, Hesse carried Minimalist repetition and seriality to the point of obsession. These are no mere formalist exercises but polyvalent symbols of time, of chaos ordered, of life's sometimes painful cycles endured. They are also memories of the maternal breast, as when each of the 25 shaded circular forms in a subtle, untitled drawing (1967) expresses from its center a length of translucent nylon thread, like mother's milk. In Addendum (1967), the circles become gray-painted papier-mache hemispheres on a 10-foot wall-mounted lintel. A long cord hangs from each mound, spilling generously onto the floor. In a reprise of one of Judd's galvanized metal reliefs, Addendum involves a progression of increasing spatial intervals between hemispheres; from left to right on the lintel, moreover, one begins with a mound and ends with a blank space. Weaning is surely the theme of this piece, separation and loss its melancholy content.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur