Oh! More Absurdity!

'It sits on the wall,' Eva Hesse told her diary,'with a thin, strong, but easily bent rod that comes out of it... and what is it coming out of? It is coming out of this frame, something and yet nothing and - oh, more absurdity! - it is very, very finely done.'

Hang Up looks as odd as ever. In the current Eva Hesse retrospective, it seems the pivotal work the artist assumed it was: sexy, audacious, and (to use her own word) 'absurd'. From top and bottom of a painting a long metal rod protrudes. Or, looked

at another way, a rod bends so that its tips can be inserted into the top left and bottom right of a frame. Though the tension is obviously great, the fact that the frame is swaddled in linen makes the result seem pathetic, unsustainable. Neither drawing on the wall nor in the space before it, the work appears self-contradictory, for as relations between frame and wire are pushed to an extreme, a tension is established between weakness and strength, and the unexpected extrusion from an apparently frail support makes an effect like that of a bed-ridden invalid issuing unheeded commands. Put it another way: Oppositions have been pushed to the limit. Since both sides of a debate are argued at once, the debate itself is finally undermined. The result, paradox, is not simply destructive; it opens the way to new areas of thinking, to consideration of things that have no names. 'Para' means 'margin'. This work offers two: a drawn line turned solid and a solid line in disguise. It is less a matter of curves or right-angles than of impossibility: dual focus, lack of terminology, two simultaneous ways of looking. Confronted by depth and surface in equal amounts, one is left in doubt: is the result 'deep' or 'shallow'? Involved with paradox, we ourselves feel marginalised, placed in abeyance until doubt is dispelled by comprehension. Hesse's work involves this too, for the bandages and the title, both excrescences of sorts, indicate a defect to be strengthened, a secret to be concealed, a wound to be dressed. So something and nothing, 'finely done'; may relate to weakness, pain, obsession.

The Hesse legend is compounded of exactly these qualities; by the time Contingent appeared on the cover of Artforum in February 1970, the artist was dying of a brain tumour. She was always unwell. Perhaps faked sickness, a child's device for grabbing attention from a busy father, turned into actual depression. Or perhaps it was inherited; her mother committed suicide. Not surprisingly, while some critics hailed Contingent for its formal qualities, others saw real or supposed references to disease. Her materials had become frail and perishable, after all, a fact she acknowledged but refused to alter. This in turn contributed to that aura of sainthood which enveloped her reputation after her death. But whatever the biographical facts, a fascination with death spurred her on, as it did Sylvia Plath or Diane Arbus. (She differed from them in only one respect; while they seemed to want to die, she did not.) All three practiced one type of joking: black humour, which energises their work and gives it a nasty, pointless, anarchic edge. Arbus printed shots other photographers would have discarded, with contorted faces or hints of mental deficiency. Pictures of children in Arbus, or the word 'Nazi' for Plath, betray a degree of irresponsibility that gives their work energy, yet that energy leads nowhere. It is as if all three, blocked in their lives, felt compelled to vent their frustration, a sense of blockage so powerful that it was bound to express itself somehow. Hesse was so prone to psychosomatic illness that some days she was unable to walk. The opposite of this psychosomatic paralysis lay in patient process. 'It is compulsive work which I enjoy,' she told her friend Rosalyn Goldman, like the bandaging of a sick painting, perhaps. Behind this, through the 60s, lay the hopes of Marcuse or Norman O. Brown, for a revolution which would release repression. In this scenario the Underground was a thinly disguised version of the Freudian unconscious. Yet Hesse must have realised the folly of abandoning her 'hang-ups'; instead, she would bandage and protect them, while continuing to probe the wound beneath. It was the kind of stalemate that impelled her.

The early paintings were exercises in opposition. At Yale, she managed to find two teachers who were permanently at loggerheads. The influence of Josef Albers and Rico Lebrun persisted for as long as she continued to paint and even after. (That gradation of colour on the 'bandage' of Hang Up was simply an Albers 'interaction of colour' exercise, for instance, while Lebrun hovered, over Hesse's murky gouaches, with their rooms within rooms, boxes within boxes, as if art were a matter of personal relationships, a habitation or a haunting.) Hesse had begun in a style reminiscent of Asger Jorn, in which the freedom of the paintstrokes seemed to be tested against the blockages of life itself. In one painting, a woman held a conversation with a set of paintstrokes. The body became unstable, hovering between weightlessness and density, inflating like a balloon as we watch, as if testing the limits of the fiction paint is bound to create. Not only was it about an impasse; it was also about the state of impasse. 'Exasperated', Max Kozloff called the paintings, regarding them as an attempt to regain that 'conflicted' feeling particular to first generation Abstract Expressionists, 'but to ends that were subversive of their aesthetic'. No doubt, a charming gawkiness is there in all Hesse's styles between 1961 and 1964: her glutinous expressionism, her dissipated, rushing geometries or those moody gouaches, like haunted apartment blocks. A strong sense of desperation is felt throughout this period, a mood of incipient tragedy, or at least desperation. At one point the colours heighten, the compartmentalisation of the canvas takes on a playful air and the influence of Duchamp's Large Glass is felt, coupled with a pneumatic, Robert Crumb draughtsmanship. From this came the constructions, with their manic bindings and fashion colours - dull limes, warm pinks - their knobs and mounds, fetishistic bindings and bold protuberances. The effect was charmingly amateurish, like night-school homework, with nursery-rhyme titles and a desire to please. Now the sense of going nowhere had been put to good use, and the machines have revealed themselves as gentle nonsenses. Despite the undertones of bondage and defective plumbing, Eighter from Decatur, Ringaround Rosie or Legs of a Walking Ball are dadaistic, jazzy and sweet. Hang Up marked the climax of such charm. With characteristic suddenness, the colour disappeared.

What would be progression in other artists' work took the form of constant reversal in Hesse. Whether this derived from wilful virtuosity, the star student syndrome, or sheer perversity may be irrelevant; for her, the entire nature of emotion seemed bathed in self-contradiction. Yet emotion repressed was bound to burst forth. Obscenity was part of this. One solution was to meet both head on. Confronted by a fecally coated grey box containing what resemble faeces, also grey, the viewer had two choices: acceptance or rejection. By situating herself in a position of stalemate, Hesse could encompass both. Similarly Ingeminate, with its learned title, consisted of two balloons covered in plaster, bound and connected with a piece of rubber tubing. Why bind shapes the size of blood sausages? To conceal them? To stop them growing? That long, fat balloons resemble breasts and penises at once is obvious. That they also resemble babies becomes evident from a photograph of Hesse with Ingeminate, grinning as she cradled the two parts side by side in her arms. Also from 1965, Purple Piece responded to the same impetus, an interest in Minimal structures. Perhaps age has altered it, but the finished version is so far from its graph paper drawing that it reads like a critique of precise structures, for its eight, purple wooden pegs screwed into one thick vertical reveal only a very approximate measuring system. To try to capture Hesse in the terminologies of the time would be folly. Too involved with the qualities of materials to be called Minimal, she corresponded to one definition of Arte Povera in the increasing poverty of her materials, without any of the political ramifications that the movement possessed in Italy. Perhaps the most flawed of contemporary titles, When Attitudes Become Form best describes the rift that lies at the heart of Hesse's practice from 1965 to her death, for in her work a Mannerist disparity between expression and cool measurement provided a permanent basis for experiment. In an interview with Cindy Nemser, she spoke of the 'total absurdity' of Duchamp. In future, she would turn to the absurdities inside herself. As she encountered one style after another, she had pushed each one towards its opposite, as if, somewhere near breaking-point, some truth might lie.

Working toward what she called 'a concept of order that could be chaos' may have been hastened by Hesse's stay in Germany. An industrialist called Scheidt had invited her husband Tom Doyle to work in an empty factory in Kettwig, near Düsseldorf. Hesse went too, though she must have realised the danger. Never mentally stable, a woman who had left her homeland at the age of three was returning there to confront not only her past, but the trauma the war had caused. Taken from their home in Hamburg on a special children's train to protect them from increasing Nazi attacks, Hesse and her sister had joined their parents in New York, where their life became poorer and sadder. Their mother and father separated, her mother took her own life, and the young Eva was prone to panic attacks which never disappeared. Returning to Germany meant confronting her Jewishness, her past and the possibility of a future, for very soon after they returned to New York, Doyle left her for another woman.

From these catastrophes plus a third - the death of her father in 1966 - the later work emerged. First came the Accession series, in which metal mesh and rubber or plastic tubing were employed. The alteration of light and space remains striking. Each of these open-topped boxes reveal a different texture, a different atmosphere and an intangible quality the work had not previously possessed. Yet the main innovation after the Kettwig interval, was the use of more malleable materials like fibreglass, and materials she knew would not endure. In a filmed interview her friend Mel Bochner described this new area of concern as 'the physical use of light as a medium', 'a contribution to how light, surface and scale could be used to experience an object'. Sans II in fibreglass resin and polyester, consists of three-sided trays, two-deep along a wall. The change of colour of some of the elements has not yet spoiled the effect of light held on a wall. There is a slowness about it that results from the uneven surface of the material, as well as a sense of measurement which cannot quite be grasped. Accretion, 50 fibreglass rods leaning against a top-lit wall, also varies with every showing. Pictured at the Kroller Muller Museum, Otterlo, the elements are arranged evenly. At the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the ordering was different: tubes formed groups and uneven intervals were left. It soon becomes evident that Hesse's use of Minimalism was idiosyncratic, a way of staging full-scale battles between ideas of order and disorder. Most striking, however, is the steady luminosity and the feeling of innerness they convey. These are far from being public works.

The late sculpture is decaying fast. Contingent was not on show in Paris, nor either of the two 'rope' pieces - critics in search of a masterpiece might well settle for both of these, one beautiful, the other ugly as she planned. Tori, a set of apparently randomly arranged tubes, split almost all the way up on one side, lying higgledy-piggledy on the floor, suggested a tragic dimension that Hesse seldom summoned. These too seem fragile, but Hesse knew what she was doing. (Any attempt to 'restore' these late pieces would be a travesty.) 'I was always aware that I would take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small,' she told Cindy Nemser in 1970, 'And I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites...Art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd.'