Eva Hesse and Color

BRIONY FER

John Ruskin recalled in his autobiography how on a trip to Italy he painted a scale of cobalt blues “to measure the blue of the sky with.” Ever keen to measure and calibrate, he called his handmade scale a “cyanometer”1—as if color would be systematically gauged according to its gradation of tones. For all the elaborate the- ories that have been developed to systematize color, I know of no more concise example of the historical drive to control its effects than this brief image of Ruskin, planning his painting trip to the Swiss mountains, mixing his own colors to correspond with the exact blue on his strip of blues, which he matched against the intense blues of an alpine sky. Yet it is an image with a double edge, which both illustrates a positivistic belief in the possibility of measuring color and hints at what is really at stake in the desire to calculate it. Ultimately what is most interesting about Ruskin’s would-be purely technical instrument is precisely that which escapes the system of external and verifiable equivalence that he ostensibly wishes to fix in place, the sheer pleasure that overwhelms the measure. Revealed in the process is Ruskin’s own agitated, almost nervous, hypersensitivity to color. In Modern Painters (1843), he would devote long sections to the painting of the sky, which however pure and blue, he writes, is never flat and dead but a “trembling transparency” and “a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air.”2 What trembles but the optical sensation of perception? An instrument intended to measure the color of the sky is instead an instrument to calibrate levels of affect and sensation. That is to say, rather than a system of objective measurement, this scale of gradated color reflects back on the subject to betray a body, like a color swatch gauging a sensual encounter of rising and falling intensities. Even though Ruskin’s pictorial sensibility is admittedly as far removed from Eva Hesse’s world and, more generally, the American art world of the 1960s as is possible to imagine, the anecdote provides a useful image to think with: a graded color sample. Imagine an array of color swatches, for instance, little pieces of fabric

1. John Ruskin, Praeterita (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 141. 2. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1906), p. 197.

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cut from a roll or a scale of paint samples, and it is clear that color is both attached to and detached from a referent, embedded in and cut off from experience. Think of it as an instrument—an instrument commensurate with a living, moving, phenome- nological body rather than with a world to be pictured—which can gauge the more elusive yet tenacious effects of color (as well as the powerful effects of so-called noncolor or the apparent absence of color) in experience. Entirely insensitive to straight binary oppositions between the systematic and the asystematic, the objective and the subjective, it registers instead ambivalence and inﬁnite difference and so is all the more alert to the movement of unconscious psychic and bodily drives. What happens if I hold up a color swatch to that moment in the mid-1960s when color took on a kind of hallucinatory contemporary vividness at the same time as it became subject to a series of prohibitions—strictures that would only intensify with conceptualism? To draw a dividing line between Pop and Minimalism as colorful and colorless, respectively, would be obviously and entirely wrong, as both movements deployed both chromatism and achromatism amply and strategically. David Batchelor coined the term “chromophobia” in his book of the same name where he argues that fear of color is ultimately interchangeable with its opposite, chro- mophilia.3 Perhaps because of the critical emphasis on Hesse’s materials and processes and on her work as a sculptor from 1965 on, her use of color, which she would abandon that year just as enthusiastically as she had earlier embraced it, has been largely overlooked. Her interest in color, on the other hand, which of course includes her interest in black and white and gray, never left her.4 By focusing on it here I certainly don’t want to turn her back into “Albers’s little color studyist”5 (as she mockingly described herself) or turn my back on her processes of making, but I would like to highlight that moment when she abruptly gave color up. Whether or not a long time in preparation, when it came, the break was sudden. Art historians are often inclined to imagine that such moments of rupture are dramatic when in reality art does not work like that; “turning points” are rarely so clean. But in this case it is no exaggeration to claim that there really was some kind of volte face, a turning against color on Hesse’s part that was both extreme and unequivocal. The change can be dated to the month if not the day. It was September 1965, when Hesse returned to New York after a year spent in Germany with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle. A German industrialist had given Doyle what we would now call a residency and Eva accompanied him to Karlsruhe, where they both had

3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000). 4. Black, white, and gray are colors, of course, but their somewhat complicated status as noncolors or, alternatively, as marking an absence of color, particularly in the monochrome tradition, has a cul- tural valency that is the topic of this essay. Also, I should note that while noncolor signiﬁes a negation of color and the achromatic signiﬁes an absence of color, these two categories are often treated syn- onymously. Finally, although monochrome, strictly speaking, connotes a picture of a single uniform color, it is also a term commonly used to describe art works that are either black or white or grisaille— and I have occasionally kept this loose usage here. 5. Eva Hesse, in Cindy Nemser, “A Conversation with Eva Hesse” (1970), in Eva Hesse, October Files 3, ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 5.

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Eva Hesse. Oomamaboomba. 1965. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

studios in a former textile factory. When she returned to New York from Europe, she took with her not the fourteen highly colored reliefs she had made there but instead fourteen three-by-three-inch transparencies of the work she left behind. Back in New York, she would abandon color and turn to monochrome grays and blacks. In a famous photograph of her Bowery studio, taken some six months after her return, a wall is hung with a host of abstract sculpture, some attached to the wall, some freestanding, all of it evocative of sexual body parts in shape and texture, all of it monochrome. Most of this work, moreover, had been ﬁnished within three months, that is, by the end of the year. This marked a pivotal point for Hesse, but a question that has not been adequately addressed, surprisingly enough, is what role color, and the loss of it, played in this radical shift.6 One work not shown in the photo but that would have been in her studio at the time was the last colored piece she made, a purple-painted wall-hung serial arrangement of screw threads attached to a wooden post. The grading of mauve through purple, light to dark, corresponds to the way she was then using gray through black, but also recalls the pungent, bright colors she had used in Germany. It is not exactly a throwback, especially given its seriality, but neither is it an accident that it is left out of the group of monochrome works that she carefully arranged on her studio wall for the photograph. There is also a relief that she made in Germany, which is all grisaille colors but for a single pinhead of pink plastic punctuating its center; but these exceptions, if we can call them that, do little to make the about-face on color seem any less dramatic.

6. The exception to this is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s recent essay on Hesse’s drawing, “Hesse’s Endgame: Facing the Diagram,” in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York: Drawing Center; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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To understand how extreme was Hesse’s refusal of color, it is necessary to stress the extremity of her color, particularly the way she had used it in her German reliefs. It is well known that while working in her makeshift studio in the textile factory in Karlsruhe Hesse picked up machine parts and string off the floor to incorporate into her reliefs. She assembled these found materials in star- tling ways, often protruding awkwardly outward or beyond the framing edge. Their spindly mechanical parts, meticulously bound with string, have a certain insectlike elegance, but they are ungainly as well. The body part has absolute pri- macy at this point, and commentators have stressed the sheer bodily terrain that the reliefs occupy, from Lucy Lippard on, and none so elegantly as Mignon Nixon, who has discussed them in terms of the phantasmatic world of the Kleinian part-object.7 But what of the color? And what, in particular, of the color grading from light to dark that Hesse seems to prefer in many of these works? Of course she was not by any means the only artist to opt for “extreme” color and then to go on to renounce it. In some respects her move was symptomatic of a larger tendency within art at that time of alternating between the far poles of color and noncolor, the chromatic and the achromatic. But in other ways, the specificity of her color and the precise form her renunciation took were more dramatic and more idiosyncratic. Her use of commercial, synthetic colors could be compared, for example, to the way Pop and Minimalist artists were working with readymade color, like Warhol’s use of the kinds of color found in advertising, or John Chamberlain’s metallic pink chassies, or Donald Judd’s colored Plexiglas. As much as they, Hesse seems to have liked contemporary-looking colors, but rather than find them readymade, she preferred to make her colors, often mixing by layering or by grading them from light through dark—all of which undermined the idea of an even, pregiven color taken straight from the can. In her reliefs, she tends to layer the color like she is layering the papier-mâché with which she builds up its bulk. In one relief, called H ±H (1965), she noted the layers on the back for good measure: first a bright yellow gouache, then varnish, then a wash of purple ink, then more varnish, then more pink and orange gouache. For others, she used the industrial enamel paints which Doyle, who found German paints “dismal,” had sent from the U.S. to use on his metal sculpture. The way she built up the color to make a texture, like a hard shiny carapace, was reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s enamel painted plaster objects made for The Store (1961). There was always something awkward and handmade in her reliefs, often allowing the pieces of papier-mâché to show through, that stopped far short of the mass-produced tex- tures of a Chamberlain or a Judd. Still, the color quality of her reliefs gives them a hard exteriority, a sense of being all outside and no inside, all surface and no interior, which invokes a commodity culture no less aggressive than those artists

7. See especially Mignon Nixon, “Ringaround Arosie: 2 in 1,” in Nixon, Eva Hesse, pp. 195–218.

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who addressed it more overtly. Hesse operates her own kind of absurd chromatic machine as she cranks her color up a few notches as if turning a handle too tight. Lippard referred to the “whiplash of pink” in one of the reliefs,8 which gives a sense of the assault of color. This is color whose brightness can grate, as if it has a heightened pitch. The pink and yellow of Eighter from Decatur (1965) are garish against the bright white of the ground. Elsewhere, pinks and acid greens or duck- egg blues jostle for attention. The color is a lure, mobilizing the typical double action of modern advertising and the commodity form itself: the lure of bright shiny things, the aggressive demand for attention.

8. Lucy Lippard offers the description of the cloth-wrapped protruding wire section of Oomamaboomba in Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 41.

Hesse. Eighter from Decatur. 1965. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

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Working in Europe, and cut off from the New York art scene, Hesse quickly assimilated a great deal of European art. Jean Tinguely’s ludicrous machines may seem less interesting to us now but they impressed Hesse, and the absurdity of their elaborate jangling, motorized fetishes is not without echoes in her reliefs (pull here, push there, cacophony everywhere). But I think the more tenacious and immediate problem that Hesse was still working through in the reliefs was the legacy of Willem de Kooning, along with Arshile Gorky, the Abstract Expressionist painter who had always meant most to her. From the point of view of the way she was using color, the reliefs hark back to that earlier and ongoing preoccupation (it is sometimes forgotten that the art you carry around in your head is even more important than the art that you see as you see it). Rather than a retardataire adher- ence to expressive painting, cutting out de Kooning’s color from the context of his painterly technique has surprising consequences. Well before Pop, he had of course drawn on the commercial color of advertising in his grotesque, grinning vedettes, voracious and threatening. In the drawings and collages that she made in 1964, before she went to Germany, Hesse dismantled what was by then an archaic lexicon of femininity rooted in the 1940s and ’50s—scattering and rear- ranging it across the spare surface of a sheet of paper. In these works, there are patches of pink that reverberate with echoes of the pink fleshiness of de Kooning’s nudes but are themselves fairly starkly cut from that context and set to work in a new network of connections. Color becomes shorthand for the meeting of flesh and commodities. It is as if de Kooning’s trademark artificial pink of his Women series is recast as that “whiplash” that strikes out into the spectator’s space in Oomamaboomba (1965). Long after she had rejected his touch, the acid greens and pinks that de Kooning characteristically used together, as well as the smears of red

Hesse. Untitled. 1965. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

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of his violently gestural nudes, are recycled in her even more strident combina- tions. And the more synthetic, chemical even, the effect of her color, the greater the effect of bodily disintegration and the more comic its edge (like the titles that joyously spill syllables rather than sense). This is cosmetic color: candy pink, lemon yellow. It is as if the traces of de Kooning ultimately become a mere pretext to raid the realm of the cosmetic counter, creating in the process not a homage to de Kooning but rather her very own parody of femininity, her own cosmetic com- edy. Can color be funny? Yes, Hesse suggests that it can. In a cluster of mechanical drawings that she made alongside the reliefs, Hesse all but evacuated color. Large expanses of paper are left bare, yet what color remains has a particular intensity and concentration. Notably she used colored inks to draw out the fluid, simplified outlines, which seem almost negative imprints or immaterial doubles of the awkward protruding bulk of the reliefs themselves. The inks run into one another so a single and continuous line bleeds from one color to another. In the spareness of these drawings, we encounter strange articulations reminiscent of the magnified joints of a crustacean. In his fine and far-reaching recent essay on Hesse’s drawing, Benjamin Buchloh has discussed the mechanical drawings as key to her fundamental understanding of what he calls a new typology of the diagrammatic, which has largely been omitted from the history of abstraction but which he traces to Duchamp’s “first fully diagrammatic painting,” Network of Stoppages (1914).9 Indeed it is this space between the chromatic and the diagrammatic that Hesse radically mines from this point on. That Duchamp offers a model here is not in doubt, even though this may not sit easily with what I have just said about de Kooning. Even if we were to take as exemplar Duchamp’s Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912), which maintains its decon- structed skin of painted flesh tones alongside its diagrammatic dots and dashes, its painterly touches are still mute and inexpressive compared with de Kooning’s later loud rhetorical flourishes. As David Joselit has put it, Duchamp’s Cubist painting reveals the “diagrammatic armature drawn from deep within the body’s architecture”10—but—in terms of its color—it also parades on its surface the full range of readymade skin tones as anybody might have bought them in a set of conte crayons from Senneliers, the art suppliers on the banks of the Seine. Despite the contradictions involved, it is as if, in her work up to September 1965, Hesse took de Kooning’s color and mobilized it diagrammatically in order to make possible a new chromatic topography of the body. It is not just readymade machine parts that are made strange, but color, which is now put to work in a newly configured bodily mechanics.

9. Buchloh, “Hesse’s Endgame,” p. 119. In this essay, he also discusses the way Hesse draws on Gorky, especially the way Gorky had “disintegrated traditional drawing, most notably through the sudden separation of color from line, making both appear as isolated, if not desolate, elements of a former unity” (p. 128). 10. David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 71.

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In an enigmatic note published in The White Box, which he produced in 1966, Duchamp wrote that perspective resembled color because neither could be tested by touch.11 Rather than the modernist stress on color as pure opticality, this insistence on color as an abstract, conceptual tool (and the very measure of anti- empiricism) reverses all the usual assumptions of expressiveness summed up in the phrase a “touch of color.” In these notes, probably written in the early 1910s, Duchamp crystallized a problem that would continue to animate art for several decades to come: the relation between the chromatic and the haptic. This is the problem that Hesse came to work through in her German reliefs, where she seems to be trying to figure out a new sort of relationship between them that does not revert to a painterly rhetoric of expression. Instead she puts the stress on the space of the spectator’s encounter in front of the work. Rather than cutting into her collages, she makes physical protrusions that jut out comically into this space, transforming the encounter through a knob of red plastic or a spike of pink or yellow. In the high chromatism of these works, Hesse is struggling with the possibility—or is it the impossibility?—of making a kind of color you can touch—but without succumbing to the lure of purely optical color or signifying, either, as an expressive, painterly touch. Duchamp had speculated most vividly on color in his famous last painting, Tu m’ (1918), which, as Buchloh has put it, “dispatches color in outright opposi- tion to the work of Matisse.”12 The array of industrial colors that rains down from the top left-hand corner laid color out as an industrial commodity—the colors taken straight from an artist’s catalog of oil paints. The engagement of a sign painter to paint the pointing finger at the center made this even more emphatic. Tu m’ codifies in schematic form the earlier readymade Apolinère enameled (1916–17), which actually is an enamel sign. This has less to do with the sacrifice of color to an anti-aesthetic strategy so much as the death of color by color. At stake here is the renunciation of a certain kind of aesthetic color, not color itself. After all, The White Box is so full of lists of color that it is hard to imagine Duchamp wants to abandon color entirely. Instead, he seems to want to dismantle it into parts and recycle it. When he fabricated his various Boîtes en Valises containing meticulously produced reproductions of his works, he hand-colored them in a process he called “coloriages originaux.” Adding color became a way of disman- tling color and detaching it from an expressive pictorial language. Rosalind Krauss called Tu m’, memorably, a “panorama of the index.”13 The shadows of the readymades that hung from Duchamp’s studio ceiling and the

11. Marcel Duchamp, A l’inﬁnitif, a typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box, the Typosophic Society, Northend Chapter, 1999, p. 99. 12. Buchloh, “Hesse’s Endgame,” p. 17. Buchloh’s seminal discussion of color in “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (Summer 1986), pp. 35–52, has been formative in my thinking. 13. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977), p. 70.

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pointing index finger of the sign painter’s hand registered an indexical relationship that, though it was a painting, met the condition of photography, and as such was an emblematic model for 1970s art. Symptomatic of that decade’s critical pri- orities, when Krauss’s seminal “Notes on the Index” was written, she barely referred to the color, though the color samples entirely support her argument: samples point to or indicate rather than represent colors, just as a shadow is an indexical trace rather than a representation or symbol of something. In the context of a discussion of color, her argument still holds. But looking through the lens of color also presses us to think of Tu m’ in terms of a rupture—first, as an historical rupture in the sense that the painting dramatically severs color from its past and asks what color can be in the future; and second, as the painting itself enacts a splitting into the two registers of the chromatic and the achromatic. With the color swatches raining down from the monochromatic gray scale through to the colors, such commodified colors are also set against the limbo of grisaille, which repre- sents the cast shadows. This is different from, say, Mondrian’s synthesis of the basic modernist lexicon of color (black-and-white grid versus primary colored planes), or Rodchenko’s antisynthetic laboratory of texture or faktura in his black monochromes. Duchamp seems deliberately to want the problems of color to breed here, on the surface of the painting, just as he had allowed the dust to accumulate on his Large Glass (1915–23). Hesse’s move in 1965 to abandon color can be seen as an acting out of the same historical process of splitting. Tracking the shift from Eighter from Decatur to the gray or black works that she made on her return to New York, it is tempting to see it as a step-by-step attempt to answer Duchamp’s challenge. But that would be too mechanical. Rather than think in terms of Duchamp’s influence—let alone a direct or conscious response—it is more to the point to see Hesse acting out the drive to dismantle color that had long animated the historical avant-gardes and neo- avant-gardes, which Duchamp vividly encapsulated but had no monopoly on. Hesse seems to have internalized and understood the key components of the historical problem in a distinctive way, not only as an imperative to break color down into

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parts, severing it from a pictorial aesthetic, but also to remobilize its parts as literal and often literally mobile components within a sculptural aesthetic. And if, thinking now through the lens of Hesse’s sculptural viewpoint, we try to imagine the space constructed in Tu m’, it is not only weird and convoluted but consists mainly of the space “in front” of the picture plane, with the shadows of the readymades apparently hanging in the illusory space behind us as spectators and, if that were not enough, the bottle brush literally protruding into it. The circular movement is set off by the pointing finger, and taken up in the spiraling rotational forms of the shadows. If Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly had, in their own distinct ways, internalized the “color problem” in painting in the 1950s, then it is Hesse who most vividly translates it into a sculptural problem in the mid-sixties.14 And if the previous generation concentrated attention on the readymade-ness of color, something taken up by Minimalists like Judd and Dan Flavin in relation to sculpture, then Hesse’s take was, in every sense, more “hands-on.” She wanted color filtered through texture, through an intensely haptic corporeal experience of the brittle or rough or shiny shells of the things that surround us. She used color the same way she used a bit of wire to jut out into the spectator’s space: to stick in the eyes of the viewer. The word “spiky” does not only describe the shape of the spokes but the effect of the color. Was this color that could be touched? And if so, what were the consequences of reconnecting the chromatic and the haptic in the German reliefs? I am not sure the answers to these questions are that clear-cut. After all, the consequence for Hesse of the experiment was to abandon color in favor of the gray scale, which would suggest that she had found a better way to dramatize a haptic space than high-octane color, however sassy and contemporary, could in practice offer. When Hesse abandoned color for monochrome, she did not give up her pref- erence for gradation. Instead, where she had graded a pink or red from light to dark, she now graded through the gray scale. Buchloh has seen these systematic gradations of gray as taking on “the diagrammatic order of color in a printing scale or the tonal chart of photography,” declaring “within the chromatic register (of col- orlessness) the same principles of mechanicity that the grid and the concentric circles enact in the formal and compositional registers of her drawing.”15 That is to say, she turned somersaults on the systematicity of color that she had first encoun- tered as a student in Albers’s color course at Cooper Union, where one of the exercises had been precisely the study of gradation through the “so-called gray steps, gray scales, gray ladders” to demonstrate a “gradual stepping up or down between white and black, lighter or darker.”16 The exercise consisted of collecting as many grays as possible from black-and-white pictures in popular magazines and arranging the little pieces to create a practically seamless gradation from light to

14. For a discussion of color in Rauschenberg and Kelly, see the chapter entitled “Pedestrian Colors,” in Brandon Joseph, Random Order (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 73–119. 15. Buchloh, “Hesse’s Endgame,” pp. 146–67. 16. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 16.

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dark. Albers believed that because of modern printing technologies, the modern spectator was highly attuned to subtle tonal shifts in black-and-white photography or newsprint. But another lesson from this simple exercise must surely have been that the “lighter or darker” gray scale was not neutral but intensely material. If the shading colors of the gray scale traditionally gave depth or volume to bodies in space, Albers used them to produce a flat rather than a volumetric surface. Johns, though his results were more conceptually teasing, deployed precisely this simple technique of flattening out what conventionally functions (as chiaroscuro) to describe three-dimensional bodies in space in his gray monochromes. What Hesse did that was distinctive was to put this to use in her radical reworking of a sculptural project and in so doing dramatize the corporeal dimension of viewing. I cannot stress enough how different this was from the way gray figured as part of a deadpan minimalist rhetoric in the work of Robert Morris, whose gray painted boxes, according to Judd, were “next to nothing; you wondered why anyone would build something only barely present.”17 Nor did her use of monochrome have much to do with the “cool” sensibility that was thought to be such a feature of Minimalist art, and which attracted no small critical attention in shows like the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Black, White, and Gray (1964), which, apart from showing how ubiquitous the separation of black and white from the other colors had become, looks almost totally arbitrary. At any rate, Hesse’s gray scale was not cool. The glutinous and lumpy black ball, with strings straggling from its caked surface, entitled Vertiginous Detour (1966) shows how the negation of color can exacerbate rather than neutralize a visceral effect. It seems that for Hesse the point of abandoning color was to produce a greater sense of repulsion through a monochrome surface. It was not only Rauschenberg’s black paintings but also work by Lucio Fontana or by Zero Group artists like Günther Uecker or Otto Piene, whose work Hesse had seen while she was in Europe, that had demonstrated how the monochrome could activate the corporeal. Hesse took this into a sculptural dimension. Louise Nevelson had constructed elaborate painted wooden constructions within a still fundamentally post-Cubist idiom to show how monochrome black could expand spatially to open up rather than obliterate the complex faceting of planes. By contrast, Hesse mixed acrylic with polyurethane to encrust the surface of the ball, to make it look both glisteningly synthetic and a sculpture in ruins at one and the same time. Of course Hesse was not the first artist to discover black. In the hands of artists from Manet to Reinhardt, black has proved the most sensual and least uniform of colors, but Hesse uses it to render the depth of bodily and corporeal experience in sculptural form. When the Structuralist art historian Louis Marin described the paradox of Caravaggio’s dark grounds, he insisted on the way they functioned not as backgrounds but as black grounds. Defining black “as absolute

17. Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 117.

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nonlight and noncolor achieved through a negation of all the others (and thus the negation of white, which is all the other colors combined)” he claims that it is not empty but a space that is “full, totally dense, and closed.”18 As a consequence he reformulates black and white as what he calls metacolors—that is to say, as colors that say something about color at the same time they negate it. So black figures as absolute density and also functions self-reflexively to refer to the very function of color itself. For Hesse it is not just black but also the whole gray scale that comes to perform this function—which become the colors at once the most material and the most conceptual. Some works, like Several (1965), consist of phallic tubes graded darker through lighter gray. Other pieces are uniform and monochrome. The photograph of her studio shows the way the connections expand beyond each piece to occupy the whole space of the wall and floor, as if the entire wall has become a libidinal machine, animated by mutual tensions and pressures, discharges and yields. You can track rotational movements across it. If one object is a small pale gray monochrome then it connects to another that is darker gray or denser black, and so gradations are activated across the whole surface of the wall. Rather than cool neutrality, the gray scale becomes, for Hesse, the color of heightened tactility.

18. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 160.

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In her work on paper, ink wash becomes the medium of choice to register surface differentiation. In one, she used it to vary the blackness of the circles and more or less distin- guish them from the thinner, slightly scumbled ground beneath. This creates not a uniform surface but one full of intricate, miniature frictions like, for example, the small section where ink lines are drawn over rather than under the wash. In another, done the same year, she used wash to make a continuous, almost seamless, gradation. Here the circles darken as your eye moves up the gradient, and the ground darkens as it moves down. Undoubtedly, Hesse is interested in the effects of light, but a kind of impure light. It is as if light were turned against itself to make instead a surface that invokes pure bodily substance. Dull brown or gray. Dirty light, but also, at the same time, sheer, voluptuous materiality. This is Hesse holding up her own cyanometer, not to the sky like Ruskin, but to her own bodily experience of the world. For of course the way latex and fiberglass filter light is also dependent on their thickness and entirely contingent on the con- ditions in which they are placed. Hesse’s circle drawings from 1966–67 may look so spare as to seem as if all of the body of her earlier work has drained out of it. But, on the contrary, they seem to me even more powerfully to refract the body through the semi-opacity and semi-transparency of the thin washes than does the awkward bulk of either the colored German reliefs or the more obviously corporeal works like Vertiginous Detour. Now the point is not, literally, to make a texture or even to make color have a texture but to dramatize the texture of seeing. When Hesse begins to work with latex and fiberglass in 1967, she finds materials that, though they behave very differently from ink Hesse. Top: Untitled. 1966. Bottom: Untitled. wash, could translate some of these properties 1966. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London. of veiling and layering and create a dynamic of

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impure, tactile vision. A comparison between the wash drawing for Contingent and the test piece for the same work, which is simply a latex covered muslin cloth hung over a piece of dowelling, shows this very clearly. The uneven folding of the latex sheet makes a series of different thicknesses whereby the gradient darkens as it ascends and lightens as it descends. The color of the latex itself has also darkened over time, from the light creamy yellow it was when it was new to the dark amber it is now. Other latex works, which have fared much less well than this one, have largely perished or have become a dark, syrupy brown. I don’t believe for one moment that Hesse wanted her sculpture to perish, but she did like, I think, the way it slowly changes color. After all, this process of discoloration is a kind of gradation in time. There is enormous variety in Hesse’s neutral zone—as if it were only in the neutrals and noncolors that she could draw out an amplitude that is more capa- cious, and less freighted with conventional meaning, than she could in color. It was not only that she turned away from wall-hung work, with its residual connota- tion of painting, for sculpture that was conventionally seen as a color-free medium. After all, the drawings that she made alongside her sculpture just as insis- tently refused color mixtures in favor of mute neutrals. It was as if, by the mid-1960s, color had been co-opted by high modernist optical painting and had to be reconﬁgured just as much as any formal lexicon of shape. She had started out, in her German reliefs, by mimicking the colors of a feminized commodity culture, overlaying a contemporary culture of color over an equally absurd cacophony of body parts. Giving that up and turning to monochrome was to take a rather different stance but not to abandon the project. It was as if she found that the clamor of bright color—which she always insisted on making rather than finding readymade—became at some level unnecessary or even burdensome to the intensely haptic, textural insistence of her sculptural project. Perhaps Duchamp’s comment that you could not touch color— mentally rather than physically touch color, that is—was not, in the end, entirely wrong. Or rather what I have called, following Marin, Hesse. Study for Contingent. ca. 1969. © The Estate the metacolors black of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

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and white plus the gray scale in between ended up more amenable to her interest in the material ground of vision—which, when all the rest has been co-opted, becomes the only ground for critical work.

Roland Barthes presented some thoughts on color in the course of lectures called “The Neutral” that he gave at the College de France in Paris in 1977–78. It is significant that his discussion, which bears the title “color,” is immediately subtitled “the colorless”—as if only in that negation could the fullness of the problem be worked through. The theoretical move echoes the move made by Hesse that I have described here. The example Barthes chooses is Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Rather than noting the intense and jewel-like color of the famous panels of the altarpiece, he talks about the fog-bound and fantastic transparent spherical world that is painted in monochrome gray on its outer wings and only visi- ble when the panels are closed. And it turns out that this colorless world interests him more than the richness of color hidden behind it. He discovers in that cloudy indis- tinction a panorama all the more intense because it is there that the first differences emerge from an original state of nondifferentiation. He calls grisaille the “color of the colorless” because, he says, it points to “another way of thinking the paradigm” and where “nuance becomes the principle of allover organization . . . that in a way skips the paradigm.” He calls this nuanced space “the shimmer”—“that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject’s gaze.”19 Grisaille stands as a kind of shorthand for the blur- ring of binary oppositions and the undoing of prevailing systems of thought. And in this scheme of endless differentiation, now defined as between the marked and the unmarked, black and white “are on the same side (that of marked colors) and what comes to oppose them is gray (the muffled, the faded, etc.).”20 At the risk of taking this too literally, it seems to me to have a bearing on Hesse’s increasing preoccupation

19. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Hesse. Test piece for Contingent. 1969. Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 51. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & 20. Ibid. Wirth Zürich London.

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with the “unmarked”—where even black is ultimately sacrificed in favor of those less emphatic mid-tones that, in her hands at least, are far from mute or cool or neutral in the usual sense of the word. Barthes described the operation of the Neutral as “in fact a borderline thought, on the edge of language, on the edge of color.”21 It is this idea of the edge of color rather than the void of noncolor that seems to offer a pro- ductive way of thinking about Hesse’s work after 1965. When color does reappear, as it does in much of her work on paper, it returns like the specter of a lost object, perhaps merely glimpsed in the thinnest of furrows of orange through a white ground, or else as a small section of pink framed in neutrals. Two days before he gave the lecture, in an anecdote that he recounts as a pref- ace or “supplement” to it, Barthes went out to buy some paints. He bought sixteen bottles of Sennelier ink “following my taste for the names (golden, yellow, sky blue, brilliant green, purple, sun yellow, cartham pink—a rather intense pink).”22 As he put them away, he managed to knock one over, which turned out to be the color called “neutral.” Given that this had been his constant preoccupation over the course of his lectures, overcome by curiosity, he could not help but see what color neutral was. “Well,” he remembers, “I was both punished and disappointed: punished because Neutral spatters and stains (it’s a type of dull gray-black); disappointed because Neutral is a color like the others, and for sale (therefore, Neutral is not unmarketable): the unclassifiable is classifiable.”23 Of course, this is the opposite of the work of the Neutral, urging him to return to his speculations. But we might pause, finally, over his moment of disappointment. For in a way, this is my point: that the color neutral is not necessarily Neutral in Barthes’s radical critical sense of a scan- dalous and provocative operation of thought—just as it is not necessarily neutral in the weaker critical sense of affectlessness. There is no automatic guarantee either way, yet there is, I have suggested, a moment when the neutral zone did offer Hesse the possibility of a radical reworking of color, which she mined as a means to proliferate difference and heighten the bodily affect of her work. Spatial and temporal gradations allowed her to create endless nuance—but nuance no longer tied to the subtle chromatic shifts within a pictorial aesthetic or the doxa of a contemplative gaze— nuance that created, now, a multiplicity of frictions. This was nuance rescued from subtlety and salvaged for a radically corporeal and materialist aesthetic.

21. Ibid., p. 52. 22. Ibid., p. 48. 23. Ibid., p. 49.

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