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textures coarse, rough, changing.
See through, non see through, consistent, inconsistent.
Enclosed tightly by glass-like encasement just hanging there.
then more, other. will they hang in the same way?
try a continuous flowing one,
try some random closely spaced,
try some distant far spaced.
they are tight and formal but very ethereal. sensitive mostly.
not painting, not sculpture. it's there though.
I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. from a total other reference point. is it possible?
I have learned anything id possible. I know that. that vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipilne.
I will do it.

today, another step, on two sheets we put on the glass.
did the two differently.
one was cast-poured over hard, irregular, thick plastic;
one with screening, crumped, they will all be different.
both the rubber sheets and the fiberglass.
lengths and widths.
question how and why in putting it together?
can it be different each time? Why not?
how to achieve by not achieving? How to make by not making?
it's all in that.
it's not the new. it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched but really what is not. and that is."24

At this moment two options were left to Eva Hess; one, of a purely physical art, the other of an intellectual - mystical art; the conjunction is startling, but I mean it in the sense of ultimate choice, in the way that Still's is a mystical - intellectual art, or more clearly, Reinhardt's.

The first option is affecting but, however startling the untitled work of 1970 is (it is sometimes called 7 Poles) it still may fall within the purview of the organic evolution of Hesse's career. I believe Mel Bochner to be correct when he told me that on seeing the work in progress in Hesse's studio, the fiberglass over polyethylene was being worked as a kind of physical exercise, squashing, or hand-over-hand manipulation, executed largely as the physical expression still open to the artist at this time. But do not be mislead by the remark; 7 Poles is not an art of physical therapy. Its familiar name is revealing: Pollock's Blue Poles is the source. In the same way that Pollock was at last able to get past history and culture to a kind of prehistory, the ultimate stylelessness which both Pollock and Newman regarded as equal to, if not superior to, the art of "culture," so too does Hesse's 7 Poles have the bedrock fundamentalism of neolithic sources.

The second option projects Abstract Expressionist "all-over" into actual space, a cosmos so to speak, an attitude realized in the Right After works. During the creation of the Contingent series Hesse had undergone several surgical interventions. After these she returned to a piece that had hung fire in her studio for more than a year, suddenly recognizing in it a number of possibilities that had eluded her before, calling the work Right After, that is, a work resumed immediately upon her release from the hospital. "The idea," she told Cindy Nemser, "totalled before I was sick. The piece was strung in my studio for a whole year. So I wasn't in connectiveness with it when I went back to it, but I visually remembered what I wanted to do with the piece and at that point I should have left it, because it looked like a really big nothing which was one of the things that I so much wanted to be able to achieve. I wanted to totally throw myself into a vision that I would have to adjust to and learn to understand. . . . But coming back to it after a summer of not having seen it, I felt it needed more work, more completion, and that was my mistake. It left the ugly zone and went to the beauty zone. I didn't mean it to do that. . . . My original statement was so simple and there wasn't that much there, just irregular wires and very little material. It was really absurd and totally strange and I lost it. So now I am attempting to do it in another material, in rope, and I think I'll get much better results with this one."26

It was in working Right After in rope that Eva Hesse gained her widest, if unaware, public as she was photographed through this work for Life magazine in connection with an article on Post-Minimalism that was called "Drip Art," acknowledging in this way the resurgence of Abstract Expressionist qualities in much of the newer painting and sculpture of 1968-1970.27

Eva Hesse was no longer making easy or ingratiating Abstract Expressionist statements —— she had moved beyond considerations of style. The "decorative." she had told Nemser, "is the only art sin." Life magazine had described the rope version of Right After as an unfinished work. Yet in the article Eva Hesse is quoted as saying that "this piece is very ordered. Maybe I'll make it more structured, maybe I'll leave it changeable. When it's completed, its order could be chaos. Chaos can be as structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock."

The plastic version of Right After was included in a large traveling exhibition which documented the use of plastic in contemporary art (organized by Tracy Atkinson for the Philip Morris Company) which, when it came to New York City, was installed at the Jewish Museum. I then wrote that "anyone who has watched the evolution of newer American sculpture is aware of Eva Hesse's central contribution to this development. Her work, whose forms are strong, suggestive and intellectually focused, surpasses any piece in the show."28 I still think so —— even more, world sculpture.

"I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing, everything, but of another kind of vision, sort. . . ." The voice no longer speaks to us, but beyond us. In her last year Eva Hesse discovered the sublime, another place and time at which the critic only guesses and of which the historian maps only these superficial paths. She had left her Post-Minimalist colleagues and friends, and joined Newman, Still, Pollock, and Reinhart. ☐

1. "It's All Yours," Seventeen Magazine, Sept. 1954, p. 140. Eva Hesse's illustrations appeared on pp. 140-141 and p. 161 of the issue.

2. An opinion I expressed in my essay, "The Disintegration of Minimalism: Five Pictorial Sculptors," for Materials and Methods: A New View held at the Katonah Gallery, New York, Spring 1971, p.5.

3. The sister of the artist who as possessor of these documents generously allowed me to study them free of any hampering stipulations.
 
4. Artforum, May 1966, p. 54.

5. I believe as well that this painting is a source for one of Bruce Nauman's films, Black Balls, in which the artist is seen to slowly apply a black cosmetic to his testicles.
 
6. The April 1966 notebook. 

7. The subsequent relations between the director and the artist were very close. It was at Droll's loft, in the early summer of 1969, that Eva Hesse first collapsed. He saw her through her medical attentions. I am indebted to Donald Droll for allowing me to examine the Hesse Estate now managed by Knoedler, Inc., a firm which Droll joined in 1970. I appreciate as well the fact that he facilitated my access to Hesse's private papers and provided the color and black and white photographs of the present article.

8. In a study of the evolution of Keith Sonnier's work I have previously expressed my admiration for Lucy Lippard's role in the exhibition. "Keith Sonnier: Materials and Pictorialism," Artforum, Oct. 1969, pp. 34-45. In this article I indicated that many of the changes sensible in Sonnier's work were also to be seen in the work of Eva Hesse and Richard Serra.

9. The April 1966 notebook. Kertess opened the Bykert Gallery in September of 1967. It quickly became a center of Post-Minimal experimentation, although Hesse never became an affiliate.
 
10. The essay gained a broader audience when it was republished in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York, Dutton, 1968, ed. Gregory Battcok. I quote from p. 218 of this paperback. Eventually, to view Hesse's work as a fusion of contradictions became the standard way of handling it critically. In the exhibition catalog, Anti-Illusion: Procedure/Materials written by Marcia Tucker and James Monte for the influential exhibition of the same name held at the Whitney Museum of American Art between May and July 1969 (at which Post-Minimalism was awarded museological and historical prestige after a studio art gallery existence), James Monte wrote of Hesse's work in dualistic terms concluding with the observation that "whether her [Eva Hesse's] works are diminutive and intended to be hand-held, or made on a grand scale, her finest sculpture has a unique animus which is anthropomorphic in quality if not in intent. Her work alludes to human characteristics such as the softness of skin, the swell of muscle or the indeterminate color of flesh fading under clothing after exposure to summer sun." (p. 11)

Distressed by a facile dualistic argument, Laurence Alloway observed in the exhibition catalog Trio; Delap, Gallo, Hesse (Owens-Corning Fiberglass Center, New York City, May-September 1970), that "one of our ingrained habits of thought is to arrange the world dualistically, in such pairs as right and wrong, us and them, North and South, In art, Classical and Romantic is one such pair; geometric and organic form is another. It is a sign of Hesse's originality, and to some people a cause of difficulty, that her sculptures do not conform to the latter pair. For example, the sculptures have a curious way of consisting of modular units which, even as we recognize their repetition, become knotted and collapsed. John Perrault described her work as 'surreal serialism,' ["Art," The Village Voice, November 28, 1968] a phrase that catches very well the ceaseless play of systematic and organic elements in her work."

11. Artforum, November 1966, pp. 65-7. The review had the positive result of reproducing Ingeminate full-page.

12. In April of 1970, while reviewing an exhibition of drawings held at the Fischbach Gallery, Hilton Kramer gathered that the works were "drawn from the structure of windows... all soft-focus and atmospheric, at times Whistlerian." (The New York Times, April 18,1970.) This return to a broader drawing

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