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Eva Hesse, Metronomic Irregularity I, m/m, 12" x 18" x 1",1966

reference to the early Johns-like production of Robert Morris it seems doubtful to me that Morris' career ever had a decisive influence on Eva Hesse's work despite Morris' celebrated essay "Anti-Form" (Artforum, April 1968) a position paper to which Hesse's work is appended by virtue of her relationship to the movement Morris was describing.

From 1965 on there appears in Hesse's work constant motival configurations. One such figure would be the "ball" and "chain" motif of Long Life, that is, a large, round body from which a thin length depends or is extruded. Such a formal predicate remains constant throughout the remainder of Hesse's short life - abandoned perhaps only in the plastic and rope skeinings and ladderlike structures of her last year. The "ball" and "chain" appears first to have been realized in a piece of 1965, an untitled work, somewhat inner-tube-like in shape from which a short swirl escapes. It appears again, in altered rendition, in the widely reproduced Hang-Up of 1965-1966. I think the motif is sexually connotative, possibly generative, carrying with it an abortive note as well, as it infers both uterine container and slashed umbilicus. While, on some levels it seems clear that such innuendos correspond to the troubled private life of the artist, such a line of inquiry  must remain speculative as it falls into the province of trained analysis. But that Hesse thought along such lines is substantiated throughout the notebooks in terms of jottings and dream notations. The notations indicate that Hesse was attracted to Freudian analytical patterns because they are so potently simple and seemingly true. In a notebook dated April 1966 (although it covers a broader period of time), for example, the basic statement of the conflicts besetting her were recorded as the "Underlying Theme [of the] conflicting forces inside Eva" - in her notebooks she often refers to herself in the third person - viewed as an ongoing sadomasochistic multivalence within a Mother-Father polarity:

"1. Mother force: unstable, creative, sexual, threatening my stability, sadistic-aggressive.
2. Father, Stepmother force: good little girl, obedient, neat, clean, organized-masochistic."

Later, through 1967-69, the motif of the trailing cord may be construed in the context of plasma bags and intravenous tubing, although by the period of her life when the surgical reading ought to be most evident, in the last year, this motif had, in fact been displaced. Still, if these biomorphic indications are present, these motifs are not interesting because they may lend themselves to elaborate extrapolations of meaning but simply because their forms are interesting apart from any thematic obliquity. The forms infer, but they do not depict. Their essential ambiguity attests as well to a stylistic evolution out of Johns and through him to a still larger distillation of Surrealist theory, combined with, in Hesse's usage, ruggedness, pragmatic resourcefulness and an implacable regard for the nature of the material. These last qualities were those of Robert Rauschenberg's work of the period 1958-62, and for a European-minded American artist, Rauschenberg, who carried off the first prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, would certainly be a preoccupation. The doughnutlike apertures of some of Hesse's pieces of 1965-66 point to the automobile tires of Rauschenberg's combine paintings, the very term which Hesse had used in German - Materialbilder - to describe her works on the cover of the brochure for her first one-woman show.

The compulsive coiling of these early pieces - a kind of pleasure-inducing craftswork - indicates a curious methodology. in this connection, I have tried to indicate that the influence of Lucas Samaras is sensible in the tendency toward pictorializing sculpture which marks the later '60s and announces the Post-Minimalist phase, although this emphasis appears to run countercurrent to an emerging official history of the evolution which places Post-Minimalist squarely at the conjunction of a meeting between Oldenburg's soft sculpture and the gestural tradition of Abstract Expressionism, discounting thereby the long continuity, from late Surrealist theory. But my intuitions are borne out by an important note: "I met Sol [LeWitt]," Hesse wrote, "at the Whitney [Museum of American Art]. Saw recent acquisitions (Held, Johns, Kelly) & Lipman Collection. Lot of mediocrity along with few fine pieces. One beautiful

Samaras (2 inferior ones), a fine Morris & Judd. The Samaras I loved was a box covered with pins, cover slightly ajar, with bird's head forcing its way out from under cover. Old cords and rope dropping out from front."6

In addition to the dangling, stray appearance of the sculpture, Hesse also must have responded to the fact that the characteristic surface of a Samaras box is formed by a network of parallel strands of multicolored knitting yarn. The obsessive nature of Samaras' work of the period - both in subject and method - must be emphasized as another means of altering the idiom of Post-Minimalism. The conjunction of the psychological strain to a less sensuously appealing art sustained by the lucid theoretical positions of her friends Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and Robert Smithson, may have accounted for the enormous psychological persuasiveness of Hesse's manipulation of the otherwise spare rigor of Minimalist and serial structures to which she was already being drawn. Certainly LeWitt and and Bochner both as artists and theorists have contributed to our understanding of this evolution. Some of the essential reference works in the movement, say Mel Bochner's "The Serial Attitude" (Artforum, December 1967) include pictorial samples of Hesse's work without specifically dilating upon the way in which her more psychologically attenuated art elucidated the theory.

Taking into account the organic reference, the mixture of media and the fact that Marisol is

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