Sunday 1 November 2009

Contingency: orange peel, sacks, golf balls and babies.

Eva Hesse, Studiowork, The Fruitmarket Gallery.







The sculptures of Eva Hesse’s (1936 – 1970) Studiowork could constitute the displays of a bizarre museum, remnants collected from the distressing deserts of Kafka or Eggers.


On the Fruitmarket Gallery’s ground-floor glass encases the browning amber colours of spherical, palm-sized, wax curls; sculptures that evoke discarded orange peel and golf balls, or with that slight transparency – a glowing bulb. On the wall hangs a long tendril-like piece of latex. There is a nightmarish quality to these things: their undecided states possess the lack of sense and acculturation which dreams present. At the same time their resemblances to known objects tease our imagination and allude to belonging, not unlike object trouve and the erotic objects of surrealism, such as Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure (The lunch in fur): a fur covered cup that attempts a collision of the domestic and sexual, mundane and weird. Yet Hesse’s sculptured experiments do not possess the same eager effort, not striving to embody a precise concept. They seem, and are, experimental. The ‘test pieces’ accumulated by Hesse in her studio have been curated by Hesse scholar Professor Briony Fer, and Barry Rosen, Director of The Estate of Eva Hesse as a statement of their importance beyond essential technical exploration. Each object appears as thoughtful and enchanting – the startling result of a meditation on appearance and material as interlocking – as it does bold.


The distinct character of each is so apparent that the viewer might know their tone of speech if they weren’t so quietly expressive. A black sack holds something lumpen. Other black sacks hang in triplet, each weighted internally by a heavy sphere. In the most ominous tone of the exhibition the dark masses pulling on their constraints are unnerving and sound a warning. Contrastingly, there are the comically corporeal things, like the flaccid cotton batons. Distended pears and half-blown balloons, slightly stretched, recall lungs. Hesse described her preoccupation with ‘the bodily nature of vision’ and ‘tactility’. It is true that the impression is one of looking with fingers and the abstract palpability of half-memories.


Perhaps the least potent (and exhibited in public for the first time), are the papier mâché shells we find upstairs, which have a ‘mending’ look: reminiscent of reparations made to comfort and homeliness. In their simplicity they report to their origins and a distance from excess. Back downstairs, on a slightly smaller-scale, a stuffed starfish-shaped canvas sits complacently, straightforwardly pleasing. With loopy spaghetti offshoots it really wouldn’t be out of place falling from a pram. The careful placement informs the viewer throughout. Thus the process of hanging becomes sinking and disuse, in turn suggesting use and choice, and finally, abandonment. (As the objects first described, placed carefully in cases, have the found look of curios and the cared-for aspect of the chosen.) Outside of the studio Hesse’s sculptures appear incongruous, discarded, and daring: resembling fragments of our bodies and world they also recall their maker. Hesse’s concentrated and intricate actions and gestures can be imagined from the pieces as stark evidence of their own production: the gallery cites, ‘folding, pinning, piercing, cutting, stapling, layering, threading, wrapping, moulding and casting.’ Within the gallery setting they exert their independence yet they also call out. Or so we imagine, when their physical evocativeness is enough to insist we allocate our own voices to them; maximising the rich silence you find in most exhibition spaces.


Hesse inhabited her studio constantly, a two-storey loft apartment on the Bowery, New York that was both home and workplace. As recreated within the gallery’s own layout, she carried out larger works on the upper floor, and the smaller studiowork on the lower floor. A remarkable photograph taken by her friend Mel Bochner, displays endless items covering a table made for her by companion and artist Sol LeWitt. Her friendships with other artists (also including Ruth Vollmer) leading up to and throughout the 1960s, when she was most prominent, were integral to her work. Louise Bourgeois used latex to make, ‘a series of radical small sculptures in the early sixties’, suggesting a common fascination with Hesse’s own attraction to the versatility and lightness of the material’s layering.



The artist gave some of the small table pieces to friends, raising them from the test surface also littered with exhibition reviews, gallery cards and appealing objects that acted as prompts. Resembling the containers on The Fruitmarket's ground floor, she utilised the glass cases you might encounter in a pastry shops. (Perhaps comically there is no great disparity between the light layering of glazed pastry and some of her most ephemeral pieces.) The test pieces perpetually transcended this status due to Hesse’s adaptability: exhibiting one of them (as Claes Oldenburg had in 1961) in a solo exhibition in 1968 at the Fischbach Gallery, New York. Hesse then placed the work on shelves lining the studio. In the gallery some pieces are displayed on table-like plinths, roughly alluding to their positions within the Hesse’s studio. The evolving arrangement of clusters on the worktable signals the artist’s fluid approach and awareness of transience.


The extensive range of sculptural materials and shapes forms the exhibitions’ air of curiosity. There is a manipulation of materials such as wire-mesh, sculpt-metal and cheese cloth through the drawing out of their inherent properties and the mouldings to which they lend themselves. In the pursuit of delicacy or formlessness and density Hesse pushed unconventional materials such as polyester resin, rubber tubing and fiberglass, to their limits. Not only consequently but crucially, she produced works that are both fragile and possibly subject to disintegration. The intention was that these temporally dependent materials make clear the same aspect of art: they have time as part of their substance. As Hesse plainly stated in an interview with Cindy Nemser in 1970, ‘Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.’


Part of this contingency consists in Hesse’s treatment of light. For Hesse, as for sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth, light was not additional and dispensable within sculpture but was ‘there as part of its anatomy’. The capture and control of light was enabled by layering, which allowed for the implementation of more flimsy, translucent materials. The build-up of layering could engorge materials like wire into hefty, awkward masses, or when rendered sparsely, could reduce a piece to its most vital elements. Liquid latex was painted on in layers resembling the wash that Hesse applied to her paper sketches. The Fruitmarket names Contingent (1969) as ‘her most ephemeral, spectacular and iconic work’; ‘consisting of a series of eight banner like panels of cheesecloth, latex, polyester resin and fibreglass hung at right angles to the wall.’ To the artist every panel was distinct, ‘in itself is a complete statement’. The panel displayed here sees a length of cheesecloth painted with latex in a long stripe-like section, cut across by a fibreglass and polyester resin strip at both top and tail of the stiff hanging: inflexible and softer surfaces create a deviating array of clear coatings that reflect, capture, and recast the light.
The panel’s fibreglass and resin sheen has aged, mellowing to a range of deep amber colours. Indeed throughout the exhibition these organic shades endure as a motif. Varied (while always muted) tones of black, cream, russet and gold – of different opacities and sheens, create the look of the holy and honey-like, or autumnal and earthly. Despite the ambitious reach of the test pieces each one succeeds in uniting all its elements to form a strong sensation in the viewer. This then is their sense: the creation of a surprising and minimalist thing that is nonetheless recognizable. If adults played like children these objects could be the focus of that play, the matter they’d reach for, and pick up.

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