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Eva Hesse Retrospective: a Note on Milieu

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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. OCTOBER 104, Spring 2003, pp. 149–156. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322031758 by guest on 03 October 2021 152 OCTOBER 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.
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