Two catalytic figures: a woman born in 1936, a man born in 1938. Located artistically at a moment of change in the New York art scene from the painterly, expressive abstraction of the 1950s to the cool and rational minimal forms and conceptual plans of the 1960s and early 1970s, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson independently set off in other directions that profoundly changed the course of contemporary art. Her introspective obsessively handmade works created in her studio; his reshaping of the land with earth-moving equipment on site. An inventor of installation art; of earth art: Hesse died of brain cancer at age 34; Smithson died in an airplane crash at age 35 while working on Amarillo ramp in Texas.



Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse's art is of the body: the female form outside, her own psyche inside. It is a deliberate absorption into self: consuming self to find identity-not in the cultural sense of the 1990s, but in a deeply personal way-then materializing it in art. "Art is an essence, a center."¹ The abstract expressionist painter's search to express his inner pathos, which had taken on mythic proportions since the 1950s, was a precedent for Hesse's reflections on identity. Yet she needed to break away from those male progenitors and out of the square: the expressionist painting frame, her teacher Josef Albers's colored squares-within-squares, the minimal square and cube of her colleagues and contemporaries, the container of art styles, the image of the male artist. In her search for self and the female, she needed to find forms as yet unknown, forms that resisted being permanently fixed. Thus, she transformed the emotive power of abstract expressionism, the "scientific" formalism of Albers, and the purity and rigidity of minimalism into a personal ("eccentric," critics called it at the time) vocabulary. Consuming and metabolizing art history, through her work she made a place in the art world for herself, and for generations of women after her.

For Hesse, the ingestion and digestion of the past was a total, internal, self-defining act. "I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed. Oh, how they penetrate throughout and all over."² Like Louise Bourgeois, she revolutionized art by revealing the inner self in sensuous and sexual sculptures referencing the body; as in Lygia Clark's sensual body-sculpture constructions, this path began by breaking away from the picture plane and moving into space. Hesse's way out of the past was through the use of materials for which there was no history in established artmaking. She absorbed painting into sculpture: painting became wall constructions, moved to the floor, then back to the wall and in relation to the surrounding space. Her sculptural surfaces have a painterly sensibility, too. Their luminous, rich surfaces are built up in layers; Hesse worked spontaneously by hand, the way an abstract expressionist moved paint around a canvas. Absorbing and reworking the idea of painting for her own purposes, she was able to maintain the mark and evidence of the hand, as well as the expressionist tendency toward emotional quality. This direction stood in opposition to her generation's post-studio practice, its abandonment of the artist's touch, even the art object.

Hesse was of the avant-garde, possessed by the modern need to create through breaking down rules, propelled to articulate her individual identity as an artist and a person, driven to create a new whole from the parts she had inherited. She knew she had to succeed first in the conventional art system-learning to paint, being within the New York art world. By working inside the structure of art, she could discover art's limits, locate its edges, and subsequently move outside them. Working without fixed rules, she could bring into art and artmaking that which had previously been defined as outside. Working at the edge of the art system, she was led to fundamental questions that challenged the idea of art: What is the work of art? When is something art or not? Thus, Hesse was able to assume a position of power because she functioned both within and without, making art that derived from others and by her own unique invention.

Hesse had to construct a new system for her art. However, she resisted having it take on a totalizing effect, becoming a closed and fixed universe. Such a system, albeit an alternative, would have ultimately contained and consumed her. Not prescribed by established rules, Hesse's art remained in a state of becoming, between its individual materiality and an organic whole, beautiful and ugly, the abstract and the figurative, at times, between the female and the male. "She wanted to preserve visibly the threshold where parts begin to enter a system but have not done so completely."³

The transparency of her material means and their manner of construction kept their actuality evident, revealing sculpture as parts and joinings rather than presenting a seamless whole. Making, for Hesse, was a nonillusionary act. "Illusions could not be further reduced without materials becoming the mere undesignated material of unconstruction."⁴ The evidence of process, too, gave her work the appearance of matter in flux: an object caught in a momentary state with the possibility of being transformed again to another state. Parts could be rearranged, expanded, or contracted within a given space; their relationship, though interdependent, remained in flux with each installation being of a temporary order. Hesse's fugitive, impermanent materials also defy systems of a fixed order; they show the effect of natural processes and gravitational forces-drooping, collapsing, as parts fall out of a state of wholeness or are subject to effects of decay and deterioration. Containment and control were temporary at best; planned and uncalculated aspects combine: "[. . .] there is a lot that I'll just as well let happen [. . .]"⁵ Change occurs and chaos overtakes permanence. But in the fragmentation of parts and changing nature of material substances, there occurs "the disintegration of one order in favor of a new one,"⁶ and art takes on new meanings.

1960 three Untitled paintings. She begins with paint, the rectangle of the painting frame, figures made of circular forms, breasts and distended bellies, rounded shapes within a square. 1965 Ringaround arosie. A rectangle, the figure is gone, the circles remain and become concentric patterns, vortexes of energy, breasts with nipples, breast and belly, The Venus of Willendorf, umbilical cords, "a breast and a penis"⁷Ṗmale and female becoming one. This is a sculptural painting, the juncture between painting and sculptural installation. But this is also the nourishing of the self through the making of the nurturing female body, round and pregnant; tying oneself to this identity with cords, while destroying the image of the bodyṖerasing resemblance, cutting it into piecesṖthe cannibalistic disintegration of the whole.

The square becomes the sculptural frame, a receptacle for the body, her body in personal and associative layers. Simple, hard elements produced by others contain her sensuous elements; her hand combines with those of others, they are absorbed into her own art. 1967 Washer table. Its base, made by minimalist artist-friend Sol LeWitt, is an ordering device into which were placed, but not rigidly fixed, industrial rubber washers whose surfaces are worn and varied, individually defined. 1967 Accession II. This perforated hard metal box, fabricated by a company on order by the artist, served as the matrix into which Hesse cut and threaded over 30,000 soft and pliable plastic tubes, a chaotic array of hairlike bristles. 1968 Aught. Four sheets hang on the gallery wall; their surfaces are painterly yet their form sculptural, stuffed and sagging, but contained within rectangular frames. 1970 Untitled ("Wall piece"). Now ill, working from her bed, she directed the hands of others. In the year of her untimely death, she still confronted the duality of being: serial geometry and organic formsṖcontainment and chaos. Less minimal than before and repositioned off the floor and back on the wall, each rectangular frame has its individual uniqueness, existing outside a rigid system of relationships: four units, each different in size and depth, with varied textures. From each leap out cords, veins streaming in energetic vitality onto the floor, and springing back up.

The use of the square and cube for Hesse was a format in which to contain art, a system to fix form, to hold chaos at bay. Square and cube were places to experiment with serial processes but not be bound by them; places in which to express the personal; a container to break in order to dissolve the whole, and then to make whole again. It was a container for bits of reality, parts of the body and the psyche, to contain them and attempt to retard their change and disintegration. But the parts eluded containment: marred washers, unruly tubes, extended tentacles. Showing evidences of entropy through material decomposition or degeneration, her art is absorbed back into a state of nonart. Hesse was resigned to, even philosophical about, inevitable loss: "Life doesnËt last, art doesnËt last, it doesnËt matter."⁸ All order is ephemeral; permanence is an ideal illusion. Chaos eats order. Yet chaos possesses a structure and, even if not revealed to us, has its own order. Of one of her last works, Hesse said: "Its order could be chaos. Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock."⁹ In her art Hesse made visible the image of the order of chaos.