Her Own Worst Enemy

One of the true tests of an artist, no matter how influential, is how well her own work holds up over time.Another true test is how well that work holds up in the greater flow of art.Two current exhibitions provide us with ample opportunity to re-evaluate the work and importance of Eva Hesse (1936-70). Walking through these two shows, I was surprised not only by how fresh and contemporary many of the objects are, but also by how well they hold up to much of the art – influenced by Hesse during the last 40 years – that has come in the wake of her death, at age 34, from a brain tumor. And yet, surprised as I am by the ubiquity of her influence, I wonder if Hesse’s art might be leading artists toward a dead end.Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 to an Orthodox Jewish family who fled Germany in 1938. She was sent with her sister to Holland on a children’s train. Her family then met up with them and they moved to New York, where she was eventually granted American citizenship. Trained at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and under Josef Albers at Yale, she was one of a handful of artists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the tenets of Minimalism.Her artworks nod to Minimalism’s strictures (sequence and repetition, the grid, virtually no-color color), yet disregard the movement’s spiritual aspirations and its reduction of form to near intangibility. Returning to earlier Modernist and Abstract Expressionist modes of picture-making (as well as to Conceptual, chance, and Process art), Hesse, an experimental artist, worked fluidly between two and three dimensions. She imbued her Minimalist drawings-become-sculptures-become-drawings with sexuality, humor, and an often haphazard, childish, and frenetic energy that all undercut her art’s serious core – a seriousness that is often lacking (or undercut by irony) in the work of many later artists who remain under her spell.The Jewish Museum’s show is the first major New York City museum exhibition of Hesse’s sculpture since 1972. Organized by Fred Wasserman and Elisabeth Sussman and pristinely installed, it comprises 35 sculptures (some of them large installations) and small drawings, as well as a major selection of biographical ephemera.The Drawing Center’s show of 150 works on paper, as well as a few small sculptures (also gorgeously installed) is co-curated by Catherine de Zegher and Ms. Sussman.The two exhibitions, though each can stand alone, together comprise a drawing-heavy retrospective, and they benefit from being seen consecutively. (I mention this because the Drawing Center’s show closes in July, whereas the Jewish Museum’s exhibition is up into September.)It would be preferable to see more sculptures in the exhibitions.Many of the drawings are from sketchbooks and diaries, and they are too tentative and unresolved to be considered as finished works. And yet, since many of the sculptures are often actually drawings in three dimensions, Hesse’s sketches offer insight into her working methods.As is evident in the sculptures on view, Hesse was pulled in numerous directions – from small and unassuming tiles in unfired clay to large hanging installations and wall works. The numerous drawings, in which she worked out her ideas and mapped out her sculptures, suggest that she treated the studio as a laboratory. Yet because her career was cut short, many of her experiments ended up merely touching upon,without fully exploring or bringing to fruition, her various interests. What these two shows also make clear is that Hesse was her own worst enemy. Her ideas, regardless of how well they were developed in her art, were often limited and rather fruitless to begin with.Light, line, and geometry captivated Hesse. But in working out of and struggling against the self-imposed limitations of Minimalism – rather than working out of the wellspring of earlier geometric abstraction – she confined herself to a restricted playing field. Choosing the whispered-on geometry of Agnes Martin – rather than, for example, that of a master such as Sonia Delaunay – as a starting point, Hesse watered down the inherent power and life of the circle and the square. She merely punched up Minimalism’s demureness.Hesse had moments of earnestness and clarity within a career that was generally off-track. An early black-andwhite abstract ink drawing at the Draw ing Center, “No Title” (c. 1960-61), is light-filled, fluid, and washy, its character and geometry reminiscent of Arthur Dove. But rather than develop that geometry, Hesse often worked toward watering it down.In other works, such as “Untitled” (1968) and “Untitled” (1969), both at the Jewish Museum, Hesse builds up ink, metallic gouache, and pencil into floating, abstract, scrim-like forms that fluctuate between a fragile, metallic haze and an earthen density. Their Rothko-esque, atmospheric light is translated into works such as “Test Piece for Contingent” (1969), also at the Jewish Museum. Still, tied to Minimalist effects, they lack compositional complexity. A single, yellow-orange hanging banner made of latex over cheesecloth and draped over a wooden rod, “Test Piece” has a frail, tatteredflag aura – but as a work of art, though sweet, it is thin.In many other ink and wash drawings, circles, maniacally repeated, stacked, and held to the grid, are weighted variously at their centers and contours. They glow, swell, and roll in place, nudging one another or clinging together like cells in mutation. However, there is also a sense that the circles are all treading water and that the sizes and scales of the rectangles in the drawing are arbitrary, that the drawings are confused and the circles, unaware of their ultimate purpose, are merely going through their circular motions.Sculpture is generally a slower process than drawing, and Hesse, working in three dimensions, was less successful at realizing tension and form. Her fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures, which glow with a delicate, dirty-yellow light, are initially captivating, but they can feel clinical and detached. Often they do not have enough internal life to get much further beyond the three-dimensional illustration of a two-dimensional idea.On view at the Jewish Museum are “Repetition Nineteen III,” a set of 19 organically wobbly, wastepaper basketsize containers that are grouped on the floor; “Accretion,” consisting of 50 58-inch-long tubes that lean against the wall in a row; “Sans II,” a roughly 35-foot-long grid, two high and 30 across, of open boxes (all 1968); and “Connection” (1969), 20 pieces of snakeskinlike forms that dangle from the ceiling.In all of these sculptures, Hesse achieves tension between stiffness and pliability, between individuality and the group. But they lack the kind of specificity and internal drive – the essential relationship of part to part that I experience, for instance, in a Donald Judd – that give a work of art its sense of necessity, its living presence. Walking among her sculptures and drawings, I never felt like her aspirations are enough to hold me for any extended period of time.The question is not whether Hesse accomplished what she set out to do, or whether she did what she did well, or even if she did it first (which is often not the case), or whether she did it better than many later artists who have come under her influence. The question is whether or not what she did is worthwhile enough to pursue in the first place.Sculpture until September 17 (1109 Fifth Avenue, 212-423-3232). Drawing until July 15 (35 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome Streets, 212-219-2166).

Her Own Worst Enemy

Her Own Worst Enemy

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