Eva Hesse Retrospective: a Note on Milieu

Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu

MIGNON NIXON

One notices a milieu less when one is plunged in it; more so when it is rather briskly altered or when one leaves it. —Jean Laplanche

This issue of October is devoted, in part, to the projected image, a newly predominant form of artistic practice, that has brought about a change of artistic milieu. In simplest terms, this means that to view a show of contemporary art now often means entering a situation that offers no explicit protocol for the body. It means encountering unseen others in a shadowy space, then finding a place to stand, or lean, or sit uncomfortably, so as to attend, for an uncertain length of time, to images that flicker or flash, cling to the wall or crawl along it. The new situation imposes certain constraints. There is a perceptible pressure, having once entered the scene, to remain, despite the evident fact that there is no place for you: The room seems empty, but you are in the way. You try to flatten yourself against the wall, or sink down onto the floor, or fold your body into the juncture between the wall and the floor—unless the projections fill all the walls, in which case you stand at the center of the room, shifting from foot to foot, like some wretched thing that the work has caught. This change in the gallery situation is a significant effect of the projected image as a practice. After all, as the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche observes, “One ends up getting used to a milieu, no longer noticing it.”1 One artist who developed this insight as a structural principle in her art was Eva Hesse, whose work played a pivotal role in the transformation of the gallery situation—and, more broadly, the milieu of art—in the late sixties. This shift shares something in common with the recent turn to the projected image. For Hesse’s work, too, altered the milieu such that the place of the viewer’s body was no longer

1. Jean Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst,” in Essays on Otherness, ed. and trans. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 217.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322031758 by guest on 03 October 2021 Right: Eva Hesse. Hang Up. 1966. Far right: Installation view of Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers, Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1968. Courtesy The Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

secure. Hang Up, for example, which Hesse regarded as her first “important statement,” projected from the wall into the space of the room, seeming to trip the viewer up, as in a Duchampian Trébuchet, with a noose around the feet.2 Other pieces were hung or propped against the wall, were laid flat on the floor, or scattered across it. An installation photograph of Hesse’s 1968 Chain Polymers exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery shows works sparsely arranged: the rubber mats of Schema and Sequel hug the floor, while another latex square, Stratum, stippled with rubber threads, hangs billowing and dented against the wall. Works such as Sans I and Area, as one critic observed, began on the wall and ended up on the floor.3 Hesse’s art both reiterated the frame of the gallery—its walls and floor, its corners and surfaces, its height and depth—and intersected with the viewer’s body as it moved through that terrain. As such, it exacted a close attention to the viewing situation. Surely one of the most imposing challenges for the curator of any exhibition of Hesse’s work therefore must be to evoke its treatment of the milieu. For if

2. Quoted in Cindy Nemser, “A Conversation with Eva Hesse” (1970), reprinted in Eva Hesse, ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 7. Trébuchet (Trap) of 1917 is a set of clothes hooks that Duchamp nailed to the studio ﬂoor. 3. Emily Wasserman, “New York: Eva Hesse, Fischbach Gallery,” Artforum ( January 1969); reprinted in Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall, eds., The New Sculpture 1965–75: Between Geometry and Gesture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), p. 94.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322031758 by guest on 03 October 2021 Hesse altered the gallery situation of the late sixties through her particular use of materials, and by situating works in a contingent relation to the body of the viewer, these techniques ran counter to the expectations of an audience formed by the viewing conventions of late modernism, and by the phenomenology of Minimalism—an audience, in short, very different from the one that the work addresses today. Contemporary viewers responded to the undoing of sculpture as a medium with “aesthetic shock and subsequent relief,” observed Benjamin Buchloh.4 Loss was coupled with exhilaration. In the historical reception of Hesse’s work, however, the susceptibility of the latex works in particular to deterioration has assumed an oppressive metaphorical signiﬁcance. The fate of her art has been to attract the melancholic projection not only of curators and historians, but also of artists. To put it another way, Hesse’s work has been absorbed into other milieus. The last major Hesse retrospective, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992 (and in particular its catalog), constructed an “abject” Hesse whose oeuvre, bound up with bodily suffering, resonated with a moment of deep cultural anxiety about illness, death, and mourning, and about the decimation of a generation of young artists.5 At

4. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture” (1980), in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 10. 5. Helen A. Cooper, Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, with essays by Maurice Berger, Anna C. Chave, Maria Kreutzer, Linda Norden, and Robert Storr (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 1992).

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the level of display, the Yale exhibition evoked a studio milieu, presenting works much as photographs show them in the artist’s studio, hanging together like so many possibilities, so many propositions to be picked up and, as Hesse so often did, expanded, inverted, reworked. Such an installation can hardly be imagined today. Not only has the student Hesse been displaced in the critical literature by a mature artist of more embracing historical significance, but the requirements of lenders and insurers for such accoutrements as protective plinths and cases dictate a more formal, museal presentation. Too often, these devices actively disrupt the physical continuity between the viewer and the work that is so fundamental to Hesse’s art. A roundtable discussion in the catalog of the current retrospective, curated by Elisabeth Sussman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, takes up the question of preservation, which has become a central theme of Hesse studies. There, Sol LeWitt, who assisted Hesse with the making and installation of some works, calls for particular pieces to be refabricated, underscoring the value of seeing works “as they were meant to be seen, and not as mummified fragments.”6 The San Francisco show, against the trend of conservationist zeal, did manage to encompass both the immediacy of Hesse’s work in the late sixties and the aesthetic import of its subsequent deterioration, the slippage from one milieu to another that is a distinctive feature of its historical legacy. Hesse’s art operates on Laplanche’s principle that one notices a milieu less when one is immersed in it; more so when it is altered or when one leaves it. Even in the brief span of time (1965–70) between her break with painting and her death, Hesse continually devised new ways of making and displaying a work—all concentrated on sustaining a level of instability in the milieu. Her later works, including Right After and the Untitled (Rope Piece), bring the studio situation itself into the gallery, underscoring the provisional character of works that now seemed to occupy a social space between the studio and the gallery as much as a physical space between, for example, the wall and the floor. Rather than reconstruct the display of works as documented in the artist’s studio, or in contemporary exhibitions, Sussman devised a flexible framework that allowed for the propositions of Hesse’s art to be sustained without being petrified. Untitled (Rope Piece), for example, occupied an open corner of the final room. Rarely exhibited by the Whitney where it resides, the work is known primarily through photographs showing it installed in a corner, as it was in Hesse’s studio. Slicing into the corner not only offered a new way of looking at the work—of looking through it or looking at it askance—but also freed it from the indelible frame of the photographic image. The photographic dissemination of Hesse’s work also militates against the randomness that was integral to her rethinking of the milieu of the exhibition as a contingent space. Works made from multiple elements, such as Repetition Nineteen,

6. Quoted in “Uncertain Mandate: A Roundtable Discussion on Conservation Issues,” in Eva Hesse, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2002).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322031758 by guest on 03 October 2021 Top: Hesse. Untitled (Rope Piece). 1970. Collection Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bottom: Eva Hesse’s Studio, 1966. Courtesy The Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

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Tori, and Accretion, are so well known from photographs that to follow Hesse’s instructions for a random arrangement requires the curator to overcome a powerful photographic superego. More problematic still, the construction of plinths for floor pieces, and even for works such as Ingeminate that trail from a pedestal onto the floor, prevents even the most easily exhibited works from being seen “as they were meant to be seen.” At Tate Modern, the third venue of the exhibition (it spent the summer in Germany at the Museum Wiesbaden), the installation alternated between floor pieces (raised on plinths) and wall pieces. The fiberglass- covered bramble of Connection, for example, that plunged into a congested space in San Francisco, was hung as a brilliant curtain against the wall at the Tate. This more formal presentation contributed to a studied consistency in the Tate installation that at times seemed excessively clinical, an effect exacerbated by the necessity for platforms and even prophylactic Plexiglas cages to cover the open cubes of the Accessions. Not only did these devices block viewers from leaning over the densely tufted interiors of the open cubes—and so from experiencing the powerful projective identification that surprised and somewhat displeased Hesse herself—but, on an even more basic level, an open cube set on the floor is not adequately represented by a closed cube set on a platform. If it is worth mentioning these details of installation, it is because the ques- tions of how and whether to display particular works had a central place in the debates that surrounded and informed both the San Francisco and London shows. In the catalog and in the symposia and workshops that accompanied the exhibition, conservators, former assistants, and technical specialists commented extensively on the material properties of the fiberglass and, in particular, the latex pieces, which were not shown in London at all, with the exception of the latex-dipped rope piece. Crucially informative as these discussions were, a certain material fetishism (complete with substitutes of various kinds, including samples for the visitor to handle) set in, which tended to obscure other potential values carried by Sussman’s declaration that “Our first priority is to allow museum visitors to see the work first- hand.”7 One of these values, inextricably bound to materiality, but by no means synonymous with it, was the significance of the milieu. The milieu to which Laplanche refers begins in the analytic setting but ends somewhere else, in the “surrounding environment.” What Laplanche means by the surrounding environment is not the context, or the real world—terms criticism often falls back on when trying to consider the milieu of an art practice—but is instead a dynamic tension between the analytic situation and others that impinge on it. These other scenes or relationships—so-called lateral transferences—that exist alongside the analysis, are situations in which the analysand is an actor, and not only a speaker. The task of analysis is to draw such relationships back into the analytic setting, to make them part of its milieu.8 Laplanche refers to this process

7. Sussman, “Letting It Go as It Will: The Art of Eva Hesse,” in Eva Hesse, p. 18. 8. On this point see also Luciana Nissim Momigliano, “The Psychoanalyst Faced with Change,” in Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis, trans. Philip P. Slotkin and Gina Danile (London: Karnac, 1992).

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by which transference moves in and out of the analysis itself—spirals away from it, is drawn back into it, ultimately separates from it—as a “transference of transference.”9 The essay in which Laplanche takes up the question of milieu concerns, more particularly, this movement or transference of memories and affects from one situation to another. In psychoanalytic discourse, transference describes the relation between analysand and analyst, a relation that is informed by other intimate contacts, by the analysand’s relation to parents and siblings, for example. Transference however also opens onto a cultural field; for transferences are brought into the analytic setting from outside. “Perhaps we are looking the long way round,” Laplanche observes, “we wish to transpose the model of clinical transference onto what lies beyond it (psychoanalysis ‘outside the clinical’), but maybe transference is already, ‘in itself,’ outside the clinic.” Transference is extramural, outside the clinic; analysis brings it in, only to return it to the site of culture. “Perhaps the principal site of transference, ‘ordinary’ transference, before, beyond or after analysis, would be the multiple relation to the cultural, to creation or, more precisely, to the cultural message,” Laplanche proposes.10 In this account, the viewer or reader (the “recipient”) is the one who “welcomes in, gathers up, the cultural work.”11 Crucial for Laplanche is the enigmatic character of the work, which appears on the horizon of the recipient’s attention like a message in a bottle, “without having been explicitly addressed to him.”12 In the cultural domain, “a constant proposition,” Laplanche contends, is this: “It is the offer which creates the demand.”13 Hesse’s work, as critics have consistently noted, confronts the viewer with enigmatic objects: objects that bear the imprint of corporeality without actually representing the body; objects that “act symbolically” without being fully legible as symbols.14 By altering the milieu of art—by constructing a terrain in which objects appear, or are offered, at unexpected sites, such as the meeting point of wall and ﬂoor—Hesse’s work engages the body, as Laplanche suggests culture invades it, saturating it “from head to foot” in a manner that is “by deﬁnition intrusive, stimulating and sexual.”15 Yet, if Hesse’s work activates this intrusive, stimulating, and sexual solicitation of the body in the cultural domain, it also contains it. As such, it instigates a dynamic that is structural to the praxis of psychoanalysis. In the analytic scene, the trend

9. Laplanche, “Transference,” p. 214. 10. Ibid., p. 222. 11. According to Laplanche, the critic is the recipient-analyst who produces another cultural work based on interpreting the one s/he receives. 12. Laplanche, “Transference,” p. 224. 13. Ibid., p. 225. 14. This phrase appears in Leo Bersani, “Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 17. Here Bersani considers Melanie Klein’s 1923 essay “Early Analysis” and its account of sublimation, in which “the displacement of libido onto other object and ego activities can be called symbol formation only if we specify that these objects and activities act symbolically without symbolizing anything external to them” (emphasis in original). 15. Ibid.

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toward unbinding (the “zero principle” of dissolution) is counterbalanced, Laplanche observes, by “the constancy of a presence, of a solicitude, the flexible but attentive constancy of a frame.”16 Hesse’s work similarly uses the frame—an actual frame, as in Hang Up, or the frame of the gallery itself as in the installation of Chain Polymers—to contain the unbinding that is enacted precisely there, at the interface of the body and the surrounding environment. The terms Laplanche uses to evoke these countervailing trends find repeated echoes in Hesse’s art, in its combinations of binding and loosening, knotting and unraveling, hanging and gathering, ordering and scattering. This body of work, in Laplanche’s terms, both “guards the enigma and provokes the transference.”17 It acts on the viewer as a proposition, but one that is enigmatic, a proposition that provokes transference because it is enigmatic. Transference, for Laplanche, may be “filled-in” or “hollowed-out,” may be replete with apparent meaning or as hollow as “the originary infantile situation.”18 What analysis offers, he contends (“and perhaps in this it is allied to the site of culture”), is to reopen “the dimension of alterity,” the unknowability of the other and of the self, which is hollowness.19 Laplanche’s spatial metaphors invite comparison with Hesse’s. For her art, too, alternates between filling in and hollowing out, but moves inexorably toward the hollow, or in Hesse’s terms, toward “nothing.” Hesse’s work altered the milieu of art by hollowing it out.

16. Ibid., p. 227. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 229. 19. Ibid., p. 230.

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