Girl Being A Sculpture

It is insane how much love I have for a woman I’ve never met.

It is also insane how young she died, how much art she left us with, and how her legacy as an artist has been unduly overshadowed by her more “popular” male peers. Eva Hesse was not only crucial to the development of the post-minimalist movement, she was one of its pioneers.

Eva Hesse studied under Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art but her work is nothing like his. Hesse understood her mentor’s pedagogy was not purely about the interaction of colors, but a more holistic approach toward the interaction of all materials.

However, she had no love lost for the teaching at Yale or Albers, who she described as “terribly limited but really maintains one point of view throughout.”

Her artwork inevitably challenged his rigid practices. But all of her artwork, no doubt, was deeply affected by her time at Yale.

In her graphite drawings, Hesse avoids easy analysis. They appear almost mechanical or obsessive in nature, but also organic at the same time. In on untitled drawing, each tiny circle is made by hand. The process seems labored and the hand of the artist is present.

Hesse is aware of her minimalist predecessors, but she rejects easy classification. Her materials were, in her time, altogether new and untested. So many of Albers’ drawings seem as if they were made by machine, whereas Hesse embraces the human hand.

In a sculpture entitled Hang Up, Hesse leaps out from the confines of “the frame.”

A rectangle hangs against the wall—the shape is altogether familiar of every painting we’ve ever seen.

But Hesse plays with us. A cord unexpectedly juts out into the third dimension, as if to say: Ceci n'est pas une peinture.

But Hang Up is nonetheless painterly.

The cord is welded by the human hand. The work changes in composition as one walks around it. Hesse does the work of many paintings at once. Although primarily known for her sculptures, she desperately sought to gain recognition as a painter. In her work, this remains altogether obvious. The hand of a painter is present in everything she makes.

Right After, though ethereal and delicate in appearance, seems a cheeky rebuke of Pollock’s drip paintings. Hesse takes Pollock’s drips and makes them physical. The tension of the work is like nothing I’ve seen before. The sculpture teeters so close to falling apart but doesn’t. We are slaves to gravity and we cannot control it, but we fight it, in the way that Sisyphus pushes the rock, day after day. Right After fights gravity, wins, then makes a spectacle out of the victory.

I’m attached to the image of Hesse as an artist of psychological depth and critical substance, but I’ve no interest in romanticizing her personal tragedies. Hesse would have probably preferred it that way. Too much weight has been given to the connection between her limited tenure in the art world and the formal qualities of her art which seems almost unfair for an artist whose work had great breadth.

Sol LeWitt, a close friend of Hesse’s, communicated back and forth over the years, pushing each other to understand their own work and processes. In her letters, Hesse seems unsure of herself.

She contemplates what it means to be an artist and the role of art in life and vice versa. In response to her concerns, LeWitt boldly wrote: “Learn to say ‘fuck you’ to the world once in a while.”

It was this advice that Hesse took wholeheartedly. Her work defied convention while acknowledging its history.

Hesse danced on the edge of chaos. Her work bears a fascination with the tension between entropy, order and time. The hanging sculptures—or what remains of them—are all the more poignant when you consider that the lines that stretch over space are created by disorder made deliberate.

I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is in essence a soul, and that’s what it’s about. In my inner soul art and life are inseparable. — Eva Hesse

In photos, Hesse appears girlish, full of life, and on the edge of greatness. Her paintings, sculptures and drawings all carry her mark but her work bore no formula or signature.

Each move appears in service of a story or feeling, rather than an attempt to establish a signature. In comparison to her peers, such as Rothko or Pollock, whose visual brand has achieved mainstream recognition, Hesse’s work has not. Many of her work remains untitled and, to the casual, unstudied viewer, not as easily attributed.

The work speaks of Hesse in a way: beautiful, fleeting but emotionally persistent. She intended to create “non-work” — and she succeeded.

Hesse’s personal life was rife with tragedy : her family escaped the Nazis, parents divorced, mother committed suicide, father died at an early age and her own marriage was a failed one. When I view Hesse’s paintings or sculptures, they seem borne from a deeply interior, psychological process. Her drawings, dark and frenzied, hint at the deeply contradictory nature of her work — the desire to be understood and not at all at the same time.

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions. It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing. — From Hesse’s statement for her 1968 exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery, New York

Underlying her work is an emotional chaos that manifests in the use of “worthless” or abandoned materials which were notoriously difficult to preserve. Textures in the form of plastics and rubbers are commonplace in her sculptures. Hesse preferred process over product. Posthumously, her works would undergo an irreversible process of disintegration, to the anguish of her collectors and museum curators.

If Richard Serra’s sculptures can be likened to a shout, Hesse’s are a whisper. Her work requires an emotional intimacy and trust from the viewer. We lean in to listen, in spite of all the noise.

Anne Michaels writes in Frieze of Hesse’s work as “lasting only as long as it is naturally meant to; it seems to insist on defying our contrived expectation that real art is meant to outlive us.” Most of Hesse’s peers chose materials that would outlast them, and so their work hangs on white walls, open to adoration and the critical commentary of note. However, in her coy evasion of critics, Hesse inadvertently invites them.

If Judd’s work was hammered out in punishing, exacting detail, Hesse’s work seemed a direct repudiation of that process.

Her sculptures achieved beauty in an organic process of deterioration, uncharted and out of the artist’s control.

The specific turns and twists or sags of the artwork, though not dictated by the artist, were fully intended. She seems to say, immortality disinterests me. But in saying so, Hesse reels me in all the more. Immortality is inherently uninteresting. Art is only important in so far that life is. When art ceases to be about life, it ceases to be human.

"Do I have a right to womanliness? Can I achieve an artistic endeavor and can they coincide?" — Eva Hesse, 1965

Despite her short stint in the art world, Eva Hesse remains one the art world’s most charismatic, beloved characters. Though her work seems to shy from mainstream recognition, it remains of great interest to art critics, scholars and historians.

I don’t have the right words to describe Eva Hesse or how meaningful her work has been to my own artistic process. Perhaps, in a silly way, I feel connected. Hesse was devastatingly sincere and her art deeply personal. Through reading her letters and seeing her work, I feel as if I’ve reached across time to a friend and artist, lost and vulnerable and talented.

In 1967, Eva Hesse wrote on a dance program, perhaps by accident or fate, Girl being a sculpture. Perhaps she meant sculptor. As Anna C. Chave writes in her essay, A Girl Being A Sculpture, perhaps Hesse considered “whether or how she could inscribe her femininity in her art, and how she could establish herself as a practitioner in a medium dominated by men.”

I disagree. Hesse herself stated in an interview for Artforum that “excellence [in art] has no sex.”

More importantly, she leaves us a clue for understanding the phrase, girl being a sculpture, when she claims interest in “an unknown factor in art and an unknown factor in life.” For Hesse, the phrase, girl being a sculpture, is not about femininity or womanhood. Life and art are deeply interwoven (though not to be confused with one another.) The words sculptor and sculpture, then, are not as far removed as we think.

There are artists whose work I admire, and then there are artists that remind me why I chose to be an artist and why art matters. Eva Hesse is one of the latter.

My life and art have not been separated. They have been together.
— Eva Hesse