- Barrette, Bill. Eva Hesse Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Timken Publishers, Inc., 1989.
The introduction to this text briefly outlines events of Hesse’s life that are pertinent to the development of her sculpture. This is followed by a discussion of Hesse’s choice of materials and working processes. Enclosed is featured as catalogue number 88. Each catalogue entry includes a color photograph of the sculpture.
- Berger, Maurice. “Objects of Liberation: The Sculpture of Eva Hesse.” In Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, 119-135. Edited by Helen A. Cooper. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Berger examines how Hesse’s abstract forms provoke for the viewer a strong visceral identification with the object. He then explains how the eroticism and seductiveness of Hesse’s art branches from the Anti-Form strategies of the art world in the sixties.
- Chave, Anna C. “Eva Hesse: A ‘Girl Being a Sculpture.” In Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, 99-117.
Chave recognizes Hesse’s work as a demonstration of écriture feminine, or the practice of woman “writing the body”. She examines Hesse’s use of formal elements such as line, the circle, and the box as well as her “feminine” practices of sewing, wrapping, and knotting to explain how her work articulates elements of her repressed feminine experience.
- Corby, Vanessa. “Don’t look back: reading for the ellipses in the discourse of Eva Hesse.” Third Text 57, Winter 2001/02, 31-42.
Corby discusses the “omissions” and oversights in two well-known feminist writings about Eva Hesse in order to introduce another aspect of the artist’s work that can be facilitated through more recent feminist theory and discourse regarding the psychological trauma of second-generation Holocaust victims. Corby uses the transcript from Cindy Nesmer’s edited interview with Eva Hesse printed in Artforum, May 1970 to reveal an ellipsis in Hesse’s statement about Carl Andre’s work which Hesse explained evoked a feeling of “the concentration camp.” According to Corby, Nesmer failed to interpret the ellipsis as an expression of the Hesse’s legacy of displacement and insecurity instilled within her since her escape from Nazi Germany at the age of two as a Jewish refugee. Corby then refers to Lucy Lippard’s article, “Eva Hesse: The Circle,” printed in Art in America in the May-June 1971 issue to discuss how the previous critical feminist model has diminished Hesse’s work to a simple metaphor of her life. Corby explains, “To approach the historical texture of Eva Hesse and her work we need to read its different dimensions through the procedures and moments of its practice, through issues of history, geography, genealogy, and ethnicity.” (p. 42.)
- Danto, Arthur Coleman. “Growing up absurd.” ARTnews 88, November 1989, 118-21.
Danto explains that the incoherence established by the juxtapositions of formal elements in Hesse’s work represents the unification of her art with the absurdity of her life. He interprets several of her works as a humorous mockery of this absurdity.
- Fer, Briony. “Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism.” Art History 17, no. 3, September 1994, 424-448.
Fer relies on Freudian theory of “narcissistic injury,” or loss of self-identity to analyze the symbolic procedures at work in the sculpture of Eva Hesse that in effect propose a psychic dimension in the interpretation of Minimalist sculpture. According to Fer, Hesse presents the unconscious and the “non-logical self” in her work as well as a motive exchange between the two poles of desire and loss.
- ———. “Objects Beyond Objecthood.” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2, 1999, 25-36.
The sculpture exhibited in Lucy Lippard’s “Eccentric Abstraction” show at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966 has perplexed critics, including Lippard, who have tried to articulate the subject-object relationship established by the nebulous “objecthood” of these works. In this article, Fer examines sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse that were exhibited in this show and suggests a theory about the encounter between subject and object experienced when viewing of each artist’s work. According to Fer, the viewer’s encounter with these objects is defined by a sense of detachment as opposed to a sense of meaninglessness. Fer explains, “Detachment ends up being not just a necessary cost but also a gain – a condition of viewing objects that would deal not with bodily empathies so much as what gets lost in the very processes of identification, lost in the sense of falling into pieces of a subject in disintegration, as in Bourgeois, or a subject who is effaced and rendered invisible in Hesse.” (p. 36).
- ———. “Treading Blindly, or the Excessive Presence of the Object.” Art History 20, no. 2, June 1997, 268-288.
Hesse’s floor-bound sculptures, including Repetition Nineteen III and Area, are in need of rethinking, according to Fer, who examines the impact these sculptures have on the field of vision. Qualities of these works such as the close proximity of the sculptural objects to the floor, the excessive repetition of the objects, and the objects’ translucent surfaces all contribute to a “lack” within the field of vision. Fer explains how this lack is relevant to the Freudian metaphor of blindness in the Oedipal structure as it pertains to feminine subjectivity: “What I want to register here is an economy which lurches between visibility and opacity, of seeing too much and seeing too little, put in such close proximity with the (unresolved, permanently unresolved) question of femininity.” (p. 278)
- ———. “The Work of Salvage: Eva Hesse’s Latex Works.” In Eva Hesse, 79-95. Edited by
Elisabeth Sussman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Fer recognizes three ‘salvaging’ processes essential to Hesse’s latex works: undoing, layering, and imprinting. Rather than functioning consecutively, these processes are intertwined and infinite in order to continually reconfigure the material nature of the object.
- Kreutzer, Maria. “The Wound and the Self: Eva Hesse’s Breakthrough in Germany.” In Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, 75-83. Edited by Helen A. Cooper. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Kreutzer discusses how the work of European artists such as Beuys and the Zero group influenced the development of Hesse’s minimalist sculpture during the fourteen months she spent in Kettwig-am-Ruhr. She explains how because of these influences Hesse’s minimalism departs from the characteristically minimalist embodiment of the wound of Western civilization through the visual representation of increasing anonymity and loss of subjectivity: “This was an essential theme for Hesse as well; but her European affinities are apparent in her use of wounds and lesions to counter rather than express the inorganic and insentient.” (p. 79) Kreutzer locates this counteraction in the polarities Hesse presents in the form and content of her work as a symbolic system of the Lacanian “fragmented body”.
- Lippard, Lucy R. Eva Hesse. New York: New York University Press, 1976.
In this biographical account of Hesse’s life, Lippard explains how Hesse’s work was deeply integrated with her life and how her sculpture evolved through long periods of philosophical struggle with sophisticated notions about art as an expression of the essence of self. With this text, Lippard opens up a line of discourse about Hesse’s work that asks the reader to carefully consider the personal and psychological depth of her art without sensationalizing the tragic events of the artist’s life (as has often been done by the press since her death). Lippard explains how Hesse’s obsessive processes, sensuous textures, Minimalist syntax, and absurd, whimsical forms create a primitive and phantasmal incarnation of the artist’s self: “Hesse worked out from a body identification into a physical identification with the sculpture itself, as though creating a counterpart of herself and the absurdity of her life as a way to survive it.” (p. 197)
During her lifetime, Hesse complained that her work did not receive the serious critical examination that the work of her male colleagues had, and she remained convinced that traditional conceptions of women’s roles prevented her from achieving respectful status as an artist. Lippard recognizes that Hesse was expressing these nascent ideas, most often privately, without support of the Women’s Movement, which did not have a recognizable effect on the art world until after Hesse’s death. She discusses how Hesse denied the significance of gender in art and how she might reconsider this idea within more contemporary theoretical contexts.
Included in this text are numerous plates and image reproductions of Hesse’s sketches, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, several of which are accompanied by interpretive texts. Lippard has also added a chronology of the artist’s life and catalogue raisonné of sculpture.
- Meyer, James. “Non, Nothing, Everything: Hesse’s ‘Abstraction.’” In Eva Hesse, 57-77. Edited by Elisabeth Sussman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002.
In an attempt to articulate the “nothingness” of Hesse’s art, Meyer discusses the dichotomies and contradictions present in her aesthetic system that cancel out any affinities her work may have with contemporaneous abstract and minimalist strategies. To demonstrate the compelling opacity of Hesse’s sculpture, Meyer comments on the irresolvable tension she establishes between abstraction and figuration, her conjoining of order and disorder/ organic and geometric, and the absurdity of her forms that suggest content without denoting it.
- Morgan, Robert C. “Eccentric Abstraction and Postminimalism: from biomorphic sensualism to hard-edge concreteness.” Flash Art 144, 1999, 73-81.
In 1966 Lucy Lippard organized an exhibition of unrelated sculptors including Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, Eva Hesse, Frank Lincoln Viner, Alice Adams, Don Potts, Gary Kuehn, and Louise Bourgeois to introduce a new movement within the realm of Minimalist art. She described it as having the strong formal basis of non-objective art as well as surrealist attributes. Morgan refers to this exhibit along with a more recent exhibit of “American Eccentric Abstraction” in 1985 at the Blum-Helman Gallery in Soho to discuss the differing conceptions of “Postminimalist” sculpture, which he describes as located, “ in that tenuous zone between the literalness of space and the imagination of form.” (p. 81).
- Nesmer, Cindy. “An Interview with Eva Hesse.” Artforum, May 1970, 59-64.
This last interview with Eva Hesse just before her death is frequently quoted in a number of secondary texts on Hesse.
- Storr, Robert. “Do the Wrong Thing: Eva Hesse and the Abstract Grotesque.” In Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, 85-98. Edited by Helen A. Cooper. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992.
In a letter to Sol LeWitt, Hesse explained the “weird humor” emerging in her drawings and sculpture as a convulsive, laughter-like response to the contradictory feelings that she experienced throughout her lifetime. According to Storr, what differentiates Hesse’s work from utopian modernist styles and the comic of Pop and Funk art is her effort to find “convincing and compelling forms to describe the fusion of wholly incompatible states of body and mind.” (p. 97). Hesse’s art, therefore, points out contradiction in the form of “grotesque” aesthetics.
- Sussman, Elisabeth. “Letting It Go as It Will: The Art of Eva Hesse.” In Eva Hesse, 17-39. Edited by Elisabeth Sussman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Sussman traces the development of Hesse’s career and focuses on Hesse’s decided use of latex and fiberglass for her most important pieces despite the fragility and inevitable deterioration associated with the materials. According to Sussman, the perishable quality of these materials reinforced her concept of “non-art” that she struggled to achieve in her work: “Her work emerged from a liminal space between control and freedom, between what she knew and what she couldn’t have known in advance, between coherence and fragmentation.” (p. 17-18)
- Wagner, Anne Middleton. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keefe. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press: 1996.
Wagner divides the section on Hesse into eight parts to explain the different ways in which Hesse’s art and career were shaped by her circumstance as a woman artist. The sections entitled “The Wound and the Window” and “The Cancellation of Difference” are particularly pertinent in developing an understanding of Hesse’s sculptural imagery. In “The Wound and the Window,” Wagner attempts to expand interpretive discourses on Hesse’s sculpture by identifying her work as an embodiment of unresolved polarities. Rather than illustrating one dimension of her conscious reaction to her life experiences (that she recorded in her diary), Wagner sees Hesse’s work as a metaphor of her subconscious response to life that is interpreted by the viewer as a system of tensions between wish and prohibition, like and dislike, absurdity and intellect, beauty and ugliness. In “The Cancellation of Difference,” Wagner confronts Hesse’s own notion that art forms should not be identified as male or female. By taking into consideration the male-dominated atmosphere of the art world in which Hesse was struggling to gain recognition, she gives credence to Hesse’s statement and suggests that what Hesse was trying to communicate was that her art could “admit to difference without that difference operating in ultimately disruptive ways.” (p. 281)
Jodi Kovach
MA 2003
