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[[newpaper article]] the village VOICE, November 28, 1968 art [[underlined]] THE MATERIALITY OF MATTER [[/underlined]] by John Perreault Countless "colorless" fiberglass tubes, displaying an "accidental" variety of subtle colors and translucencies lean up against a long white wall. An open-topped plastic cube is lined with transparent plastic "straws" that seem to bristle. There is also a large fiberglass "ice cube try" which takes up an entire wall and there are many smaller works made out of latex. Modular mess. Messy neatness. Eva Hesse, seen in Lucy Lippard's Eccentric Abstraction show in 1966 and in numerous group shows since then finally has her first one man show at the Fischbach Gallery, right on schedule, exactly at the proper time. It's the kind of show that makes one nervous: all that unfinished fiberglass, all that mush. It's surreal surrealism, I suppose, or "anti-form." It isn't a question of liking these pieces or of being amused by them. They are not amusing. It is a question of finding them interesting and difficult as opposed to finding them pleasant. The more you look at them the uglier and the more interesting and more challenging they become. At first glance, the large pieces in particular seem coldly attractive. The box lined with "straws" could almost be glamorous. But then one notices the uneventful and outrageous way in which the "straws" overlap and collide with each other in the corners of the box. Accident (the irregularities of unfinished, unpainted fiberglass and randomness (the contortions of knotted rubber pulled through a latex mat) are utilized with a casual adventurousness. Miss Hesse's new works are odd and disturbing and elude simple definitions or descriptions. One could call them Minimal Funk, a union of opposites that might illuminate the opposites of orderly repetition and banal mess that Miss Hess often achieves. Or one could call these new works Pathetic Objects or Anxious Objects. The works are completely abstract and resist any kind of single-leveled interpretation or response. Because of their harsh illegibility they provoke bizarre anthropomorphisms. The kind of queasy uneasiness they evoke makes one want to stroke them gently to soothe them and smooth them down and reassure them that they will not really disintegrate entirely into a supremely undifferentiated formless ooze. Having one of these pieces would be like having a very, very neurotic pet, a threat to visitors, but completely dependent upon its owner's perceptual attentions to hold it together and keep it in from slipping away into nothingness. Whether Miss Hesse intends it or not, her sculpture (or her anti-sculpture) causes very complicated emotions in the viewer. She forces upon us a stringent consciousness or self-consciousness of our bad habits of indentification and psychological projection. The rapid-fire flip-flop from perception of her anti-form forms to perception of our perception and perception of our emotional reaction to these forms and textures is an experience that involves a marriage of attraction and repulsion, passivity and agression. Her works are questions rather than answers. They are bundles of eccentric contradictions, impossible to resolve on any merely intellectual level and therefore disturbing, tough, and a meaningful assault upon our notions of both form and good taste. Eva Hesse's works fall somewhere within that new category called "Anti-form." Anti-form as a term, like all other catch-phrases - Pop, Op, Minimal, etc. - is not really what it seems to mean, but what it is made to mean. It means what it describes, but is not necessarily a definition of what it describes. It is a simplification that almost amounts to a noise. On the surface it seems to mean formlessness, but the meaning one attaches to the word "formlessness" somewhat depends upon what one means by "form." Everything visible has form. In art, however, form tends to mean acceptable or expected form, more than anything else. In terms of the kinds of works that the term anti-form is being used to describe, this phrase means new forms, unexpected forms. Anti-form could also be translated as anti-structure or anti-composition. It involves the use of chance and accident in an intentional way. Eva Hesse is an important new artist. Her works are anti-form insofar as she allows her materials to determine her forms or the accidental textures of those forms. Her distinction as an artist is determined by how and why she lets her materials determine her forms. ***
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The only complete article from the newspaper pages is transcribed. The remaining material on the scan comprises parts of two articles and advertisements.
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