Telling An Inner Life

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: EVA HESSE: A RETROSPECTIVE

WHERE: HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, WASHINGTON

WHAT: MORE THAN 100 SCULPTURES AND OTHER WORKS

THE BOTTOM LINE: By making Minimalism personal and female, Hesse became a pivotal figure in American sculpture.

The retrospective of the work of Eva Hesse organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and now in its last weeks at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (it runs through Jan. 10) is one of the sleepers of the fall season. It deserves attention from anyone who cares about the history of art made by women in America -- and, in general, of sculpture since the 1960s. Hesse died of brain cancer in 1970 at 34, an age at which most artists' careers are barely under way. Yet no American sculptor in her generation has more to tell us, through her work, about being a woman. To an astonishing degree, she personalized Minimalism, the artistic context to which she belonged, taking it out of the constraints of theory and system and making it an instrument of feeling -- of telling an inner life.

If one had to pick a single object that epitomized the difference between Hesse's work and other images of the Minimalist movement, it would be Accession II, 1969. Quick first glimpse: a gray metal-mesh cube, 30 inches on a side, sitting on the museum floor like the rest of the industrially fabricated boxes -- Donald Judd's, for instance -- that typify Minimal sculpture. But a few seconds later, how differently it reads! Every pair of holes in the mesh has a strand of gray plastic tubing threaded through it, the ends pointing inward. The whole inside of the cube is lined with these enormous glossy hairs. You can't not see it as organic: sea anemone, vagina. And it refers back culturally too, since its obvious predecessor is that icon of oral sex in the Museum of Modern Art, Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined cup and spoon. What happens then to the famous hands-off character of Minimalism -- austere objects fabricated by remote control, factory-made to specifications issued by the artist?

Mental arithmetic, faced by this weird plastic plush -- seven inches or so of tube per hole, 80 holes on each side -- yields about 3 1/2 miles of plastic tubing; one imagines Hesse, who couldn't afford studio assistants, subjecting herself to a routine of repetitious semi-craftwork as punishing as any weaver's or assembly-line slave's, all in the interest of one restrained, tough, unappealing image that seems to oscillate between fear and desire, irony and alarm. There are boxes and boxes, but not many are as powerful as this one.

Probably Hesse's leaning to the personal, the bodily and the autobiographical would have come out in her art anyway -- she began as a painter of Expressionist heads, vaguely along the lines of Munch's The Scream -- but it was certainly helped by a year's visit to the German city of Dusseldorf in 1964-65. There Hesse came to know the work of Joseph Beuys and the post-Dada Fluxus group. From that point on -- accelerated by her admiration for artists like Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg -- she grew more and more interested in whatever did not pertain to sculpture as commonly understood. She backed away from sculpture's "male" rigidity, idealism and rhetorical clarity, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, and allowed her fascination with the female and the inward, not excluding the grotesque and the pathetic, to enlarge and eventually take over her growing image bank.

Even when Hesse's work seems entirely abstract, it refers to bodily functions. Hang Up, 1966, looks at first like a trope about illusion and reality -- the big rectangular frame hanging on the wall with nothing in it, but with a loop of steel tube spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's top-left to its bottom-right corner. But again, there's a fleshy metaphor -- both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube seems to be recirculating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies? Even in absence, the body is somehow there, not as a simple metaphor but as an ironically suffering presence.

Since her death, Hesse has been the object of some mythmaking. She kept diaries, mostly fragmentary. These served her not only as a way of working out ideas but also as a dump for emotional neediness, frustration, the difficulty of achieving clarity in her work, the fear of madness, pain and death. As an "explanation" of Hesse's art, they have limited value. It's not uncommon to run across people who imagine that Hesse, a highly intelligent artist with deep wells of melancholy and self-doubt, actually committed suicide or was in some way immolated on the altars of a sexist art world. But she wasn't an art martyr, and this sort of lumpen-feminist romanticism is totally beside the point of Hesse's life. She was avid to live and knew that the cancer was killing her just at the moment that her work was reaching its full eloquence. This knowledge was unbearable, but she refused to let it paralyze her as an artist.

Her images are more than mere enactments of illness, still less of oppression. She left a deep mark on American sculpture, which this show documents, but she never wanted to see her work snugly categorized as women's art. Quite the contrary: she was a sculptor who, like all serious artists, wanted her work to join the general argument of modern images, uncramped by gender or race niches. "The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art," she brusquely replied to a list of questions a journalist sent her for an article on women artists. "Excellence has no sex."

Very old-fashioned of her, by the standards of cultural complaint we have in the early '90s. Nevertheless, she marked out a territory of feeling that has % been assiduously mined by others since. Thus the work of her brief maturity still looks new. More than 20 years after her death, it is easy to see what was evident to only a few people during her life -- that Hesse was a marvelously gifted artist and a pivotal figure in American sculpture.