ArtReview discusses Eva Hesse: Studioworks with Briony Fer

Eva Hesse Studiowork at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Copyright The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009. Photo Alan Dimmick

by Laura McLean-Ferris

One of the undisputed highlights of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is Eva Hesse: Studiowork at the city’s Fruitmarket Gallery. The exhibition was curated by Briony Fer with Barry Rosen of the Hesse Estate, and is intended to be considered through the lens of contemporary art. The exhibition is remarkably beautiful, and full of never seen before works – many previously been kept in storage as ‘test pieces’.

There is a particularly illuminating record of an interview with Sol Lewitt in 1981, at the start of the thoughtful, elegant catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. Lewitt is asked to sort through Hesse’s studio works, and responds by deciding what is and isn’t work. “Yes, this is a piece”; “No, not a piece”; and “I think in the beginning she was just fooling around.” This emphasises the precarious place that these small have – a piece/not a piece. What is particularly striking about the show is that the viewer does not need an armoury of education or information to approach the work – everything is right in front of you. Fer’s book On Abstract Art (1997), which includes a chapter on Hesse, was a particularly important text in my art historical education. I met Fer at the opening of Studiowork to discuss how her interpretation of Hesse’s work has changed over these 12 years.

It seems important to ask about the logistics of getting these works together – I can’t imagine it was very easy.

Partly the problem is the fragility of them and their condition. So it’s always not easy to make an Eva Hesse show, just because of the nature of the materials. There’s a mixture of private collectors and quite a few works from the Berkley Art Museum and everybody has a commitment to making this work accessible, so I can’t tell you the unbelievable complications of the boxes for these things. The conservation issues, the packaging. But everyone’s worked so hard. They come in these amazing crates which you could virtually send a baby in – nothing touches anything, and each one has been designed specially for each objects, it’s been quite an experience in that respect.

Eva Hesse, Untitled Studiowork (1969) at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Copyright The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009. Photo Alan Dimmick

In putting this exhibition together there one work in particular that you would like to talk about – a discovery that you have made, perhaps?

There are a lot of small works, but one of the big revelations of the show is a large hanging work (Untitled Studiowork, 1969, pictured above), which has never been seen, apart from once in Germany. Hesse has never been shown in Scotland and we wanted to make a show that meant something to people that didn’t know about Hesse. But also there is a lot of new work. [Gesturing to the work pictured above] This one is obviously incredibly fragile, and relates to a big work that she did of eight panels similar to this, hanging perpendicular to the wall. This was a panel that she made that was originally much longer. But she writes in her notes that it becomes a piece in its own right. So a lot of the stories in these pieces are things which start off as experimental works and become pieces – and why was that? They’re neither preparatory works nor pieces in their own right. But this she does actually talk about as a piece. It becomes a piece in its own right. It has this combination of latex, fiberglass, cheesecloth. It’s flat in one sense but you can see at the edges that it’s actually flat and a volume at the same time. You can see how the materials have aged – it would have been much paler yellow and it’s gone deep umber – likewise with the fiberglass to a certain extent, but you still get a sense of the different gradations. It’s like one of her gouache and watercolour drawings, where she uses wash to grade light to dark – if you use a series of watercolour washes. And even though it’s now very fragile it still has this visceral effect I think.

I’ve been reading On Abstract Art on the train here from London, and the themes of loss - what you call Hesse's 'economy of loss' were very important in that text. What is the relationship between that text and that interpretation, and what you have come to today with this exhibition?

In terms of my interests that was an important piece for me to write, because it was really trying to engage with those questions of loss and also drawing on psychoanalytic tools of enquiry. I suppose now my own method or way of thinking doesn’t abandon those types of question, but I’m more interested in how the artwork itself does that. That the artwork itself is a kind of theoretical proposition, and you can think those sorts of questions without necessarily drawing on that kind of apparatus any more than in a socio-historical or formalist way. In this show what’s been important for me is that I’ve been working on Hesse for a long time, and these objects have always been there, have always been incredibly intriguing, but you don’t actually know what they are. In most art history you think you know what the object of your enquiry is, but what are these things? A lot of them are between preparatory stuff, and finished work – very much in limbo. Some of it might be debris of the studio or spare parts. To me they throw down the gauntlet, and say, ‘let’s get back to first principles’, how do you even describe these things? So in a way the impulse behind the exhibition is to lay out this works to say – these are precarious works.

This is because of the materials that they use and that’s very important - part of their visceral effect – that’s why they’re bodily, why they’re precarious. But their conceptual status is as precarious. What we make of them and how small things like this can have a big visceral effect, to me, says a lot about what art is and what art does to us. Why is it that these small things have that kind of effect? That’s why I wanted to do this exhibition, and it’s my way of writing a book about Hesse – through these really raw experimental works, not simply to fetishise them or say ‘here are a whole lot of new Hesses’, but on the contrary, to think about what the object of art is. Here we have an artist taking real risks with the object of art.

They’ve always been called ‘Test Pieces’ and I find that problematic. This is much more the language of industry. It’s much more minimalist – test pieces, prototypes, all that kind of language – when they are so organic and textural and so on. But in the end maybe if they test anything out, they test our capacity to see them as art objects. That is a big shift in my own way of thinking, not just about Hesse’s work but a range of contemporary artist’s work. I’ve written a lot recently about Gabriel Orozco’s working tables, for example. I see this work through the lens of contemporary artists, and the reason that I really wanted this show at the Fruitmarket, is that it is a public space that shows contemporary art. Rather than have it in a big museum, where it is going to look like we are adding to oeuvre of the canonical artist – we wanted that confrontation with the contemporary.

Eva Hesse, Studioworks, credits ibid.

Do you feel this is an important gesture, then, to rename them as ‘Studioworks’?

Any name is pretty inadequate, and I don’t want to suggest that these are not works in their own right, but to keep a sense of the precarious nature of them. So ‘Studioworks’ is kind of pragmatic, expedient.

So, your change in approach to writing and thinking about art, and looking at how the work of art does what it does, has an important link in terms of this show, looking at the process in which things are made and how they come to be.

Yes, when people talk about process, and Hesse’s work is often spoken about in terms of process, that’s about the way material is handled. But I’m interested in the effect that that has on us as viewers. How process figures to us.

How do you see Hesse’s influence on particular artists working today?

I think sometimes it’s quite indirect. Sometimes the work that takes up this kind of legacy doesn’t actually look like it at all. Some of it does. I think Claire Barclay’s does, for instance. Someone like Rachel Whiteread or any number of sculptors have a really acute sense of the major reconfiguration of sculpture that happens in the 60s. And more to the point, the influence of Hesse there, and how she did it differently – took that minimalist language and transformed it in terms of the body, of the bodily. In some ways, this is an exaggeration, but you could say, which artist hasn’t been influenced by Hesse. In some ways it’s about configuring the body. Making the body count, making depictions of the body. It’s about the question of touch in sculpture. It’s also about scale, how small things can have big effects. But also I think in particular it’s about the whole role of the handmade, without it being the expressive gesture of abstract expressionist painting. Because the handmade-ness or the physicality of the object, I think is what, to me, is really important. It doesn’t really matter necessarily whether she made it herself but that sense of handmade-ness is very different from that language of industry, and, how that can be a radical gesture.


Eva Hesse, Studioworks is at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until 25 October, 2009 as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2009, after which it will tour globally to Camden Arts Centre, London 11 December 2009 - 17 March 2010; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 13 May - 1 August 2010; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 10 September 2010 - 2 January 2011; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, University of California 26 January - 24 April 2011