Art review: Eva Hesse

Published on Monday 7 September 2009 19:35

EVA HESSE: STUDIOWORK **** FRUITMARKET, EDINBURGH

WE LIKE to suppose that we are a pretty egalitarian society and mostly a secular one, yet in the cult of celebrity we have created an instant aristocracy as little deserving of respect for its merit or achievement as the original ever was. If perhaps we have not yet created new gods, we are certainly as enthusiastic about saints and the veneration of their relics as our medieval ancestors ever were.

This has nothing to do with the sanctity of their lives but everything to do with the powers we attribute to them and to their relics. For whatever reason, too, it is often our artists whom we elevate to that position. Perhaps we do this because they appear to stand outside the materialistic framework of our lives with its limited and manufactured choices: they seem to embody the freedom of choice that instinctively we know we are denied, however much we are told otherwise.

This elevation above the ordinary puts stress on the artist's person, rather than on their work, however. Hence the phenomenon of artists becoming celebrities and, more crucially, the blurring of the difference between art and relic. The latter confusion means that anything the artist touched can qualify for our admiration, irrespective of its aesthetic quality. Cannily, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, the two modern-day saints whose cult is in consequence most developed, manufactured their own myths and, in their lifetimes, cheerfully marketed their relics.

Both died relatively old, but to qualify for this kind of secular sainthood it helps greatly to die young. Eva Hesse, showing at the Fruitmarket, is a good example. She is a cult figure – and that phrase already invokes the veneration of saints – but she died aged 34 almost 40 years ago.

She did not need to manufacture her own myth. Her brief life was shaped directly by the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Born in Hamburg in 1936, she was an infant when she escaped with her sister on a train taking Jewish children out of Germany to save them from the impending Holocaust. Miraculously her parents also escaped a few months later and in June 1939 the reunited family arrived in New York.

Escape did not bring happiness, however. Hesse's mother was a manic depressive who divorced Hesse's father to marry again – and then in 1945 committed suicide. Her father also married again. Disturbingly, his second marriage gave her a new stepmother also called Eva Hesse. Against this troubled background, Eva Hesse was determined to become an artist.

Perhaps unconsciously she hoped to find sense in art. Consciously, her view was the opposite. She saw her life as absurd and that was the subject of her art. "If I can name the content," she once said, "…it is the total absurdity of life. Absurdity is the key word."

In 1964, courageously confronting demons, she went back to Germany when her then husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, was given a residency there. They lived near Dsseldorf, which brought Hesse into contact with the work of Joseph Beuys, Gnther Uecker and the Fluxus artists who were launched on to the international scene six years later in Richard Demarco's Strategy: Get Arts at the 1970 Edinburgh International Festival.

Their work proved crucial to Hesse's development. While she was in Germany, she gave up painting to become a sculptor and began to experiment with new materials, which frequently looked organic, even if they were not. From Beuys she also took the idea that art and life were inseparable. For the brief time left to her before her death from a brain tumour in 1970, her art became autobiographical, however obliquely this was expressed. Her life was such that she could easily have become a feminist martyr as well as a modern-day saint, but her robust attitude made it impossible to turn her into a victim: "The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art. Excellence has no sex," she said.

The work for which Hesse is best known, and which has been so influential on artists in the younger generation that it is familiar even if you have never encountered the originals, is characterised by fragility, transparency and a kind of radical informality.

She uses cheesecloth impregnated with fibreglass, latex, or resin so that it is translucent. String, rope or tubes serve as drawing. The shapes she arrives at suggest organic, even erotic forms, but this is rarely explicit, or even intentional.

Some of her work does not just look fragile. Mirroring life, perhaps – and she was ambivalent about the permanence of her art – it has deteriorated physically so much that it is too fragile to be exhibited. A retrospective is probably no longer possible, therefore, but this exhibition sidesteps that problem by showing work that has not been shown before.

As most artists do, Hesse left a lot of fragmentary things in her studio. They are presented now under the collective heading Studioworks, but that begs the question of their real status. They come from her studio, but it is not at all clear that they are works. Some may be sketches, others bits of work that were never taken further, or technical experiments that served their purpose and were then abandoned. But if Hesse has the status of a modern-day saint, as I have suggested, then none of this should matter. These are relics, not art works. They are to be revered for the ineffable quality that comes from their contact with the original. The approach to relics always was very uncritical, too. One of my favourite examples of the genre resides among a dazzling collection of revered fingers, toes, hair and other fragments of former holiness in a church in Dubrovnik and purports to be Jesus's nappy. Perhaps relics demand more, not less critical examination than ordinary art works.

The so-called Studioworks are supported by a number of things that are more clearly finished, however, and that gives us something to go on. No Title from 1966, for instance, is a phallic black sausage made of string. Nearby are black balls hanging in nets. Clusters of cut-off tubes suggest sliced up organs. Compass from 1967 is a small grey patterned relief that reveals Hesse's affinity with the work of Carl Andre. No Title from 1969 is a hanging sheet of transparent gold made of cheesecloth coated with resin, latex and fibreglass. Its physical beauty is reminiscent of the work of another New York contemporary, Jules Olitsky.

Beside these more resolved works, some are plainly fragmentary. There are strings and ropes and bits of translucent cast paper. Some look like cast-off clothing stiff with age, or like the stiffening that tailors stitch into clothes to give them shape. Others have the yellow, greasy appearance of Beuys's favourite tallow. In the upper gallery, an array of cast bits and pieces is laid out reverently on a low shelf. They are indeed seductively pretty, but they really are just relics, scraps of detritus that are meaningless without the personal association with the artist that goes with them here.

Presentation and context always mattered with relics; it was what made them persuasive. That is what we see here, the persuasive art of presentation changing the status of otherwise ordinary objects. The art gallery has become a church.

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