C101 Article
San Francisco:
Eva Hesse at SFMOMA
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Eva Hesse: Untitled,
1965, drawing and gouache on paper,
49.6 x 64.7 cm; courtesy Tate ©Estate of Eva Hesse
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Retrospectives can be dull, educational
affairs. A history-lesson-sense can attach itself to the progression
of works. And worthy tours through an artist's career development
sometimes mute the wonder that a more curatorially creative environment
can release. Eva Hesse at SFMOMA (previously on show in Wiesbaden,
and coming to Tate Modern in November) is a different experience
altogether. There is a freshness and immediacy to even the earliest
pieces, which work to whet the appetite for the amazing breakthrough-sculptural
forms which are to follow. Even more amazing when you realise that
these earliest pieces, the works on paper, were made in the sixties
- and that the entire exhibition is the result of an intensely creative,
incredibly brief artistic career - a span cut short with the artist's
death from a brain tumour in 1970.
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Eva Hesse: Untitled
or Not yet, 1966, net bags, clear polythene sheeting,
paper, metal weights, and string, 180.3 x 39.4 x 21cm;
courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth,
Zurich/Tate Modern
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An inevitable air of mortality hangs over
the exhibition. The pace of Hesse's creative development speaks
of a frantic desire to find a suitable form for her ideas. "Must
paint soon," she wrote in 1960. "Drawing is not enough." But, by
1965, painting was not enough either. She had worked through monochromatic
pieces, and bursts of colour, and now her abstract expressionist
canvases and drawings were reaching beyond their frames in collages
that soon shed the frame altogether and became the sculptures which
form the finale to this exhibition - these are astonishing, especially
when you pause to consider that all these major works were conceived
and completed in just five years.
Eva Hesse was born in Germany in 1938 and
brought up and educated in America. She then returned to Germany
in 1965 for a year's residency. Her work therefore is a marriage
of the then-emergent American and European artistic trends, trends
which came to characterise a transatlantic artistic dialogue which
predominated throughout the sixties and seventies (and still lingers).
Hesse's sculptures are an intellectual fit for the minimalist mould
of Donald Judd, and yet they carry the playful physical and sexual
surrealism of Louise Bourgeois' explorations. And Hesse cannot be
quantified by a single material tradition either: she was one of
the first artists to experiment with 'new' materials like fibreglass
and resin. Thus the freshness of her sculptures can seem disconcertingly
recent - and even seem to represent the culmination of creative
processes which some contemporary artists are still undergoing,
more than thirty years later.
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Eva Hesse: Untitled,
1966, ink and pencil on paper,29.9 x 22.9cm;
courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth,
Zurich
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It is these materials which add a layer
of fragile poignancy to the sense of truncated creativity which
attaches to these pieces. Many of Hesse's works are actually decaying.
Falling apart. And therefore it is impossible to look at the exhibition
without the sense that this is the last time many of these works
will be on public display, and definitely the last time that such
a survey of Hesse's output will be gathered together.
The curatorial and conservation issues
which this raises were discussed in a roundtable convened as the
exhibition was being organised. Curators, family, conservators,
collectors and artist friends of Hesse considered the implications
of showing work which was not now as the artist had made it; and
the showing of which could hasten its decay. The conclusions of
this discussion (which is reproduced in the excellent accompanying
catalogue) were naturally inconclusive, and yet explore interesting
points as to the value of art collected and hoarded away from public
view. They make for valuable reading in the context of contemporary
patterns of large, global, touring shows, and the fragility of much
of today's new-media work.
"Something valuable?" asks collector Werner Kramarsky, "Are you
talking about monetary value, or are you talking about the value
of large numbers of people who are interested in seeing something?"1
The experience of seeing this exhibition answers that question (at
least) conclusively. When it comes to Tate Modern, don't miss it.
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Eva Hesse: Ringaround
Arosie, 1965, pencil, acetone, varnish, enamel,
paint, ink and cloth-covered electrical wire on papier mache
and Masonite,
67 x 41.9 x 11.4.cm; courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse,
Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich
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Gemma Tipton is a writer.
Eva Hesse, SFMOMA, San Francisco, February
- May 2002 and at Tate Modern, London, November 2002-March
2003
1Eva
Hesse, edited by Elisabeth Sussman, SFMOMA, San Francisco 2002.
p310.
