Telling An Inner Life

EXHIBIT: EVA HESSE: A RETROSPECTIVE

WHERE: HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, WASHINGTON

WHAT: MORE THAN 100 SCULPTURES AND OTHER WORKS

THE BOTTOM LINE: By making Minimalism personal and female, Hesse became a pivotal figure in American sculpture.

The retrospective of the work of Eva Hesse organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and now in its last weeks at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (it runs through Jan. 10) is one of the sleepers of the fall season. It deserves attention from anyone who cares about the history of art made by women in America -- and, in general, of sculpture since the 1960s. Hesse died of brain cancer in 1970 at 34, an age at which most artists' careers are barely under way. Yet no American sculptor in her generation has more to tell us, through her work, about being a woman. To an astonishing degree, she personalized Minimalism, the artistic context to which she belonged, taking it out of the constraints of theory and system and making it an instrument of feeling -- of telling an inner life.

If one had to pick a single object that epitomized the difference between Hesse's work and other images of the Minimalist movement, it would be Accession II, 1969. Quick first glimpse: a gray metal-mesh cube, 30 inches on a side, sitting on the museum floor like the rest of the industrially fabricated boxes -- Donald Judd's, for instance -- that typify Minimal sculpture. But a few seconds later, how differently it reads! Every pair of holes in the mesh has a strand of gray plastic tubing threaded through it, the ends pointing inward. The whole inside of the cube is lined with these enormous glossy hairs. You can't not see it as organic: sea anemone, vagina. And it refers back culturally too, since its obvious predecessor is that icon of oral sex in the Museum of Modern Art, Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined cup and spoon. What happens then to the famous hands-off character of Minimalism -- austere objects fabricated by remote control, factory-made to specifications issued by the artist?

Mental arithmetic, faced by this weird plastic plush -- seven inches or so of tube per hole, 80 holes on each side -- yields about 3 1/2 miles of plastic tubing; one imagines Hesse, who couldn't afford studio assistants, subjecting herself to a routine of repetitious semi-craftwork as punishing as any weaver's or assembly-line slave's, all in the interest of one restrained, tough, unappealing image that seems to oscillate between fear and desire, irony and alarm. There are boxes and boxes, but not many are as powerful as this one.