The Brooklyn Rail

My father celebrated his ninety-first birthday last weekend. If I try hard, I can remember him when he had thicker hair, more teeth, and full cheeks. But as I see him often and always have, the aging process has been gradual. I wasn’t alive when Eva Hesse (1936–1970) first exhibited the five pieces now on display at Hauser & Wirth, so I never saw them when they were new, but I feel the emotion of looking at them now is somewhat akin to viewing one’s parents in old age and remembering them when they were young. Hesse’s aesthetic is tied to physical elasticity, resilience, and the tactile sensations that would be associated with the works if we could touch them. The fact that they have aged so noticeably, especially Expanded Expansion (1969) and Area (1968), introduces the idea of deterioration into sculpture, something which tends to be avoided, at least on an institutional level. Hesse supported the idea of moving her works around and rearranging them, in particular Repetition Nineteen I (1967), so one wonders if presenting the works in a yellowed and mummified state would also be in keeping with her desires. At this point the parallel to my father breaks down, as we will definitely be keeping him no matter what.

Hesse’s sculptures have always been alien and hard to look at. Her connection to the Holocaust was visceral, having been part of the Kindertransport from Hamburg, Germany in 1938, and her sculptures made of fleshy tubes as well as hanging skeins of rubber seem to refer to human detritus. She references organs, skin, all the most savage and lurid aspects of the mass exterminations from which she and her family narrowly escaped, though not the body as a unit. In works such as Augment (1968), Area, and Expanded Expansion, the translucent, off-white, and sometimes pliable latex, canvas, and fiberglass materials are combined with an arrangement in series that takes on the appearance of segmented creatures. These forms actively reject anthropocentric notions of beauty and seem to instead embody the primordial forms of worms and shells. But Hesse seems to have avoided a sentimental connection to nature, refusing to make the work conventionally beautiful. Simultaneously, from vintage photographs of the works, we see Hesse critiquing the notion of the canvas and the rectangular picture plane, substituting a sumptuous folded and layered zone of visual representation. Expanded Expansion in its original form lingers somewhere between painting, curtains, and bat’s wing.

Of all the works, Augment has fared the best. A series of seventeen canvas and latex sheets lie flat on the floor, and play with a resemblance to both a splayed stack of paper or cards, and the interlocking segments of an armadillo-like shell. Hesse conferred supple, human touches to her Minimalist sculptures, which makes her repetitive elements engaging. Aught (1968) places the flesh-toned rectangles on the wall, and opposed to Augment, draws us into an examination of the unit, the crinkles and folds of the polyethylene sheets. Which brings one back to the folds and the crinkles themselves. In the case of Area and Expanded Expansion, they have multiplied over time, and the effect is completely changed from what it once was, and was intended to be. Pliability and adaptability have been superseded by a rigid and anxious fragility.

In the case of Eva Hesse, it seems the art establishment has manufactured an imaginary do-or-die scenario: how to maintain a masterpiece of feminist sculpture which has been fabricated from ephemeral materials? What if we shed our obsession with the literal authenticity of the art object, as many cultures do, and create exact reproductions of Hesse’s seminal works, as it seems contemporary technology could make quite possible, certainly with enough detail to accurately recreate the initial sensation of the sculptures from when they were made in the late 1960s. These four latex works would benefit from such an expanded approach, and would capture the artist’s original intentions far better.