Dec. 28, 1992 What Does Science Tell Us About God?
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<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
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REVIEWS, Page 68
ART
Telling an Inner Life
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<p>By Robert Hughes
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<qt>
<l>EXHIBIT: EVA HESSE: A RETROSPECTIVE</l>
<l>WHERE: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington</l>
<l>WHAT: More than 100 Sculptures and Other Works</l>
</qt>
<p> THE BOTTOM LINE: By making Minimalism personal and female,
Hesse became a pivotal figure in American sculpture.
</p>
<p> The retrospective of the work of Eva Hesse organized by
the Yale University Art Gallery and now in its last weeks at
the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (it runs through Jan. 10) is
one of the sleepers of the fall season. It deserves attention
from anyone who cares about the history of art made by women in
America--and, in general, of sculpture since the 1960s. Hesse
died of brain cancer in 1970 at 34, an age at which most
artists' careers are barely under way. Yet no American sculptor
in her generation has more to tell us, through her work, about
being a woman. To an astonishing degree, she personalized
Minimalism, the artistic context to which she belonged, taking
it out of the constraints of theory and system and making it an
instrument of feeling--of telling an inner life.
</p>
<p> If one had to pick a single object that epitomized the
difference between Hesse's work and other images of the
Minimalist movement, it would be Accession II, 1969. Quick first
glimpse: a gray metal-mesh cube, 30 inches on a side, sitting
on the museum floor like the rest of the industrially fabricated
boxes--Donald Judd's, for instance--that typify Minimal
sculpture. But a few seconds later, how differently it reads!
Every pair of holes in the mesh has a strand of gray plastic
tubing threaded through it, the ends pointing inward. The whole
inside of the cube is lined with these enormous glossy hairs.
You can't not see it as organic: sea anemone, vagina. And it
refers back culturally too, since its obvious predecessor is
that icon of oral sex in the Museum of Modern Art, Meret
Oppenheim's fur-lined cup and spoon. What happens then to the
famous hands-off character of Minimalism--austere objects
fabricated by remote control, factory-made to specifications
issued by the artist?
</p>
<p> Mental arithmetic, faced by this weird plastic plush--seven inches or so of tube per hole, 80 holes on each side--yields about 3 1/2 miles of plastic tubing; one imagines Hesse,
who couldn't afford studio assistants, subjecting herself to a
routine of repetitious semi-craftwork as punishing as any
weaver's or assembly-line slave's, all in the interest of one
restrained, tough, unappealing image that seems to oscillate
between fear and desire, irony and alarm. There are boxes and
boxes, but not many are as powerful as this one.
</p>
<p> Probably Hesse's leaning to the personal, the bodily and
the autobiographical would have come out in her art anyway--she began as a painter of Expressionist heads, vaguely along
the lines of Munch's The Scream--but it was certainly helped
by a year's visit to the German city of Dusseldorf in 1964-65.
There Hesse came to know the work of Joseph Beuys and the
post-Dada Fluxus group. From that point on--accelerated by her
admiration for artists like Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg--she
grew more and more interested in whatever did not pertain to
sculpture as commonly understood. She backed away from
sculpture's "male" rigidity, idealism and rhetorical clarity,
which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, and
allowed her fascination with the female and the inward, not
excluding the grotesque and the pathetic, to enlarge and
eventually take over her growing image bank.
</p>
<p> Even when Hesse's work seems entirely abstract, it refers
to bodily functions. Hang Up, 1966, looks at first like a trope
about illusion and reality--the big rectangular frame hanging
on the wall with nothing in it, but with a loop of steel tube
spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's
top-left to its bottom-right corner. But again, there's a fleshy
metaphor--both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like
bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube seems to be
recirculating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies? Even
in absence, the body is somehow there, not as a simple metaphor
but as an ironically suffering presence.
</p>
<p> Since her death, Hesse has been the object of some
mythmaking. She kept diaries, mostly fragmentary. These served
her not only as a way of working out ideas but also as a dump
for emotional neediness, frustration, the difficulty of
achieving clarity in her work, the fear of madness, pain and
death. As an "explanation" of Hesse's art, they have limited
value. It's not uncommon to run across people who imagine that
Hesse, a highly intelligent artist with deep wells of melancholy
and self-doubt, actually committed suicide or was in some way
immolated on the altars of a sexist art world. But she wasn't
an art martyr, and this sort of lumpen-feminist romanticism is
totally beside the point of Hesse's life. She was avid to live
and knew that the cancer was killing her just at the moment that
her work was reaching its full eloquence. This knowledge was
unbearable, but she refused to let it paralyze her as an artist.
</p>
<p> Her images are more than mere enactments of illness, still
less of oppression. She left a deep mark on American sculpture,
which this show documents, but she never wanted to see her work
snugly categorized as women's art. Quite the contrary: she was
a sculptor who, like all serious artists, wanted her work to
join the general argument of modern images, uncramped by gender
or race niches. "The best way to beat discrimination in art is
by art," she brusquely replied to a list of questions a
journalist sent her for an article on women artists. "Excellence
has no sex."
</p>
<p> Very old-fashioned of her, by the standards of cultural
complaint we have in the early '90s. Nevertheless, she marked
out a territory of feeling that has been assiduously mined by
others since. Thus the work of her brief maturity still looks
new. More than 20 years after her death, it is easy to see what
was evident to only a few people during her life--that Hesse
was a marvelously gifted artist and a pivotal figure in American
