Vulnerable Ugliness

By ROBERT HUGHES

"I have learned anything is possible...that vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipline. I will do it." When Sculptor Eva Hesse wrote this exalted sentiment three years ago, she was already dying; her larger works had to be executed by student friends at her direction; she did not live to see her reputation expand beyond a small coterie of New York City artists and critics.

Born a Jew in Germany in 1936, wounded by the separation of her parents in America and the later suicide of her mother, Hesse may be said to have been shaped by crisis. Her diaries are of a lacerating candor. Her history is reflected in the tough-mindedness of her sculpture. Eva Hesse's work exerted a steady, underground pressure on the look of New York art. The galleries are stuffed with artists whose products are unacknowledged variants on hers. Last week, a posthumous retrospective of her work opened at Manhattan's Guggenheim--if "retrospective" is not a pompous term for a view of five years' work. We will never know what Hesse might have done if the tumor had not rioted in her brain, killing her in 1970 at the age of 34.

Because she died at an age when most artists are only getting into their stride, it is not surprising to find that Hesse's main dialogue was with her contemporaries in New York: the spiky or woolly boxes of Lucas Samaras, Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, Jasper Johns' borderline works between sculpture and painting. The remarkably intense exchange recalls, like a lost epoch, the temper of New York in the '60s.

Hesse's work oscillated between fundamentalism and funk: on one hand, a reductive, seemingly casual approach to sculpture, which also lay behind the scatterings and floor pieces of artists like Richard Serra and Carl Andre (shavings, or planks, or tiles, or indeed anything except a figure on a base); on the other, the use of droopy, cracked, hanging, bandaged, sprawled, repetitive and otherwise un-ideal forms as references to the human body, its vulnerability to age and gravity, its indelicate openness. Hesse's role in providing American art with an exit from the minimalist impasse was crucial. Her ambition was to go in below the level of style, making art whose sensuous appeal was obliterated by its coarse, laconic materials: latex, cheesecloth, scrap metal.

Indeed, some of her best pieces hardly become "art" at all. Hangup, 1965-66, is a rectangular frame, "tied up," as Hesse put it, "like a hospital bandage." A long loop of metal emerges from one corner, traces a wambling arc in the air, flops on the floor and creeps back into the opposite corner. It is articulately made but looks stumbling and impoverished, like a Beckett tramp. It still seems daring, but was vastly more so six years ago, when Minimalism still imposed its demands of geometry, scalelessness and high industrial polish on most new American sculpture.

Hesse called Hangup "the most ridiculous structure I ever made, and that is why it is really good. It has a kind of depth of soul of absurdity." The form of her later pieces--ragged sheets of latex, irregular fiber-glass cylinders strewn at random on the floor, tangled webs of rubbery cord hanging from the ceiling like a three-dimensional version of Pollock drips--is partly an effort to give sculpture the fluidity of abstract-expressionist painting and partly a direct celebration of incongruity. Decoration, she believed, was "the only art sin." It was not a peccadillo she ever committed: ugly, difficult and raw though Eva Hesse's work is, it constitutes one of the most forthright statements in 1960s art. .Robert Hughes

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