In 1969 Eva Hesse was commissioned by Rosa Esman to participate in a project entitled 7 Objects/69 that included multiples by seven process artists including David Bradshaw, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier.ⁱ Hesse’s contribution consisted of one hundred shriveled sleeves, each of which she made by applying wallpaper tape and three coats of latex to a blown balloon that she then deflated. To preserve the wrinkled appearance of the object she applied a fourth coat of latex and finished the process by powdering it. In producing these objects she was assisted by the painter Martha Schieve and her technical advisor Doug Johns who had worked with Hesse from the summer of 1968 up until the time of her death.ⁱⁱ

Hesse’s use of industrial-fabricated materials has affinities to contemporary minimalist works. The literal shapes of objects such as Enclosed initially seem to invoke the sterile, non-conscious, non-subjective content of minimalist forms as well. However, by applying the latex by hand as if it were paint, Hesse infused her pieces with sensuousness, overriding the anonymous associations with the standard, manufactured material and the emptiness of the inorganic minimalist form.ⁱⁱⁱ Like the minimalist form, Hesse’s sculptures still give precedence to the object over subjective viewer participation, but the curious absurdity of her visceral forms invite a subconscious identification between the viewer’s body and the object.^iv

The process Hesse employed to collapse the forms for Enclosed is ongoing. The viewer experiences the shriveled latex sleeves as objects that were once inflated and that have now shrunk. Hence, what Hesse has reinforced is the opposition between the object and its deflated counterpart – between form and non-form. Hesse denied the notion that her forms were gendered or represented male and female body parts,^v but the process of Enclosed connotes an absence that could also suggest difference through the dichotomy of identity and non-identity.^vi Throughout her career, Hesse struggled with a sense of non-identity when her work was often overshadowed by the achievements of her male colleagues, and complained that her identity as a woman prevented her from earning respect as an artist.^vii Enclosed as an individual form confronts this lack of recognition that Hesse experienced as a woman artist, while her obsessive repetition of the object represents the phantasmal inflation and subsequent release of the artist’s anxiety through a ritualistic process.<sup>viii


i</sup>Bill Barrette, Eva Hesse Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Timken Publishers, Inc., 1989), 202.
ⁱⁱLucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 126-127, 138, 150.
ⁱⁱⁱMaria Kreutzer, “The Wound and the Self: Eva Hesse’s Breakthrough in Germany,” in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, ed. Helen A. Cooper (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), 79.
^ivMaurice Berger, “Objects of Liberation: The Sculpture of Eva Hesse,” in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, ed. Helen A. Cooper (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), 119-120.
^vLippard, 205-206.
^viJames Meyer, “Non, Nothing, Everything: Hesse’s ‘Abstraction,’” in Eva Hesse, ed. Elisabeth Sussman. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002), 58.
^viiLippard, 205-206.
^viiiIbid., 209.


Jodi Kovach
MA 2003