When an artist dies young, one wants always to remember her that way, as if she never could grow old. Everything she did comes weighted down with mortality and promise. However, she also remains oddly accessible. I feel I could still go up to her at an opening without apologizing too much. I could congratulate her, thank her for the inspiration, and ask how she ever pulled it off. What exactly goes into those thick, creepy constructions, other than fear and pleasure?
At the Jewish Museum through September 17, Eva Hesse still feels that way. Much of the exhibition sticks to a single episode, barely two years before her death. It tries to recreate a November 1968 exhibition that she titled "Chain Polymers." A few early and late works supply another kind of snapshot, a "before and after." Memorabilia line the last wall, as if the artist were saying goodbye on one's way out.
I really could imagine that I had walked into a gallery in another time and place to discover Hesse for myself. One walks carefully past the nineteen variations on squat, rounded packing material. The work still makes me think of elephant feet. Ordinary rectangular cartons provided the mold for pale, irregular open boxes, in four thick rows just above and below eye level. United for the first time in years, they stretch across nearly the entire room. Do their pale, vitreous yellow edges bar penetration by the light, or is that only the wall behind them? Do they bar as well a human touch, or do they just make one afraid to try?
Hesse works with fragile materials. At times her grays block the light, and at times her love of translucency makes her textures seem lighter still. She works intuitively, with a distaste for mathematics beyond counting. Her organic shapes, shades of black, dangerous edges, murky interiors, and moldy latex put the fur on her Minimalist teacup. In one final work, a tangle of rope descends from the ceiling to just within reach. It allows the charged gallery space to penetrate further into the materials. The interplay continues between algorithm and chaos, manufacture and the illusion of growth, gravity and weightlessness, but mathematical order has disappeared.
All these elements give her work the semblance of a human body. They define the body, too, as an other to the viewer's own—unpredictably hard or soft, threatening, and ever so slightly out of reach. One can take titles like Ingeminate or Accretion literally, as formal descriptions of an art object's inception, or as matters of life and death. One has a hard time not reading back into her work her escape from the Holocaust, her mother's suicide, and even her death at only 34.
One can see Hesse as the anti-Minimalist, as a woman happily appropriating Minimalism for her own ends, or as its victim. One can see her as more confessional than her peers or more self-effacing, darker or more playful. Yet even her ambivalence here belongs very much to Minimalism. Not just Hesse, but every artist of the time toyed with the poles of object and space, heavy and light, the concept and sensual overload, prescription and chance. The show cannot make up for the retrospective that missed New York. At least, however, you can discover a young artist as if no one knew her yet but you and her closest friends.
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It's great to have you here John! I hope you continue to write for Sharkforum. I also hope readers also visit you site, where some of the most thoughtful and independent reviews and commentaries on art appear.