拍品專文
Hesse began the present work in the spring of 1966. This was a difficult period in the artist's life: in January she turned thirty and in February she and her husband Tom Doyle separated for the last time. The entries in her diary reflect the emotional turmoil she was then experiencing:
I feel I have nowhere to turn. All my stakes are in my work. I have given up in all else... Where do I go from here? (Quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New Haven, 1992, p. 36)
But despite the great personal stress she endured, this was also a time of enormous creativity. She later looked back at the sculptures from this period as her first important works. Beginning late in 1965, Hesse explored a new and idiosyncratic sculptural idiom that she was to make uniquely her own. She combined industrial materials with anthropomorphic imagery and she used the suspension of her sculptures as a means of intensifying the viewer's sense of the works' physicality. A contemporaneous photograph of her studio illustrating eleven sculptures from the period, including the present piece reveals her fascination with the possibilities of this new idiom (see Lot 21, fig. 1).
Hesse began planning Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet in late 1965. A sketch for it appears on the back cover of her journal from that year (fig. 1). An undated note from the spring of 1966 also refers to the project: "Not yet possibilities inside, more mysterious, epoxy a surface, try paper wrapping from Sol [Lewitt]. (Tried something, so far too like Christo)." She must have quickly resolved the difficulty mentioned here, for she finished the sculpture in March. At the same time, she also completed Vertiginous Detour (fig. 2) and two untitled works featuring cord-wrapped balloons (Barrette, nos. 26 and 27; Private Collections). Of these sculptures, only Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet is still in private hands.
Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet displays the fundamental characteristics of Hesse's art. The forms are simple and minimal, yet evoke the human body. The sacks, made of dyed bags filled with weights and wrapped in polyethylene, suggest something visceral, perhaps even breasts or scrota. They are like the dangling ganglia of cord in her version of the Laocon (see Lot 21, fig. 3). At the same time, the anthropomorphic reading of the sculpture is undercut by the impersonal and industrial nature of the materials. As Lucy Lippard, a friend of Hesse at the time, has remarked:
Evocative qualities or specific organic associations are kept at a subliminal level... Ideally a bag remains a bag and does not become a uterus, a tube is a tube and not a phallic symbol. Too much free association on the viewer's part is combatted by formal understatement, which stresses a non-verbal response and often heightens sensuous reactions by crystallizing them. (L. R. Lippard, op. cit., p. 83)
Hesse spoke of her attraction to contradiction in her art:
It has to do with contradictions and oppositions. In the forms I use in my work the contradictions are certainly there. I was always aware that I should take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites... I was always aware of their absurdity and also their formal contradictions and it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion... (Interview with C. Nemser, Artforum, May 1970, p. 62)
Mel Bochner, who was extremely close to Hesse at the time, has added:
I think she was trying to say that there were contradictions in her work that could never be resolved. There was the impropriety of her self-obsession and her attempt to turn that into a formal object...the confrontation of erotic content and minimal form. (Quoted in E. Hesse, Drawing in Space, Ulm, 1994, p. 94)
A year before making Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet, Hesse quoted a passage from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad:
To give birth to an idea--to discover a great thought...to be the first--that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something before anybody else--these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. (Quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New Haven, 1992, p. 32)
In Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet, Hesse attains this ideal.
(fig. 1) Inside back cover of Eva Hesse's bound notebook begun March 26, 1965, with Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet on the lower right Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
(Gift of Helen Hesse Charash)
(NO FIG #) Eva Hesse with Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet
Courtesy H. Landshoff
(fig. 2) Eva Hesse, Vertiginous Detour, 1966
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund)
I feel I have nowhere to turn. All my stakes are in my work. I have given up in all else... Where do I go from here? (Quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New Haven, 1992, p. 36)
But despite the great personal stress she endured, this was also a time of enormous creativity. She later looked back at the sculptures from this period as her first important works. Beginning late in 1965, Hesse explored a new and idiosyncratic sculptural idiom that she was to make uniquely her own. She combined industrial materials with anthropomorphic imagery and she used the suspension of her sculptures as a means of intensifying the viewer's sense of the works' physicality. A contemporaneous photograph of her studio illustrating eleven sculptures from the period, including the present piece reveals her fascination with the possibilities of this new idiom (see Lot 21, fig. 1).
Hesse began planning Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet in late 1965. A sketch for it appears on the back cover of her journal from that year (fig. 1). An undated note from the spring of 1966 also refers to the project: "Not yet possibilities inside, more mysterious, epoxy a surface, try paper wrapping from Sol [Lewitt]. (Tried something, so far too like Christo)." She must have quickly resolved the difficulty mentioned here, for she finished the sculpture in March. At the same time, she also completed Vertiginous Detour (fig. 2) and two untitled works featuring cord-wrapped balloons (Barrette, nos. 26 and 27; Private Collections). Of these sculptures, only Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet is still in private hands.
Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet displays the fundamental characteristics of Hesse's art. The forms are simple and minimal, yet evoke the human body. The sacks, made of dyed bags filled with weights and wrapped in polyethylene, suggest something visceral, perhaps even breasts or scrota. They are like the dangling ganglia of cord in her version of the Laocon (see Lot 21, fig. 3). At the same time, the anthropomorphic reading of the sculpture is undercut by the impersonal and industrial nature of the materials. As Lucy Lippard, a friend of Hesse at the time, has remarked:
Evocative qualities or specific organic associations are kept at a subliminal level... Ideally a bag remains a bag and does not become a uterus, a tube is a tube and not a phallic symbol. Too much free association on the viewer's part is combatted by formal understatement, which stresses a non-verbal response and often heightens sensuous reactions by crystallizing them. (L. R. Lippard, op. cit., p. 83)
Hesse spoke of her attraction to contradiction in her art:
It has to do with contradictions and oppositions. In the forms I use in my work the contradictions are certainly there. I was always aware that I should take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites... I was always aware of their absurdity and also their formal contradictions and it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion... (Interview with C. Nemser, Artforum, May 1970, p. 62)
Mel Bochner, who was extremely close to Hesse at the time, has added:
I think she was trying to say that there were contradictions in her work that could never be resolved. There was the impropriety of her self-obsession and her attempt to turn that into a formal object...the confrontation of erotic content and minimal form. (Quoted in E. Hesse, Drawing in Space, Ulm, 1994, p. 94)
A year before making Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet, Hesse quoted a passage from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad:
To give birth to an idea--to discover a great thought...to be the first--that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something before anybody else--these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. (Quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New Haven, 1992, p. 32)
In Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet, Hesse attains this ideal.
(fig. 1) Inside back cover of Eva Hesse's bound notebook begun March 26, 1965, with Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet on the lower right Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
(Gift of Helen Hesse Charash)
(NO FIG #) Eva Hesse with Unfinished, Untitled, or Not Yet
Courtesy H. Landshoff
(fig. 2) Eva Hesse, Vertiginous Detour, 1966
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund)