Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration · Chapter 04 · Fail gently
Eva Hesse
Hesse made nineteen of a thing, by hand, so that no two would match. Then she left the arrangement to whoever installed it.
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Nineteen open cylinders stand on the floor, roughly bucket-sized, translucent and slightly amber. They were made from the same intention and not from the same mould. One leans. One is a little taller. One has a lip that has slumped outward, because the resin was still moving when it set.
The title says Repetition Nineteen, and the piece is a demonstration of what happens when a person, rather than a machine, is asked to repeat. You get nineteen versions of an idea, each carrying the record of one attempt at it. The variation is not sloppiness. It is the content.
Hesse worked in latex, fibreglass, cheesecloth, resin, cord — materials borrowed from industry and used against their own logic. Latex especially: she knew it would darken, stiffen and crack. Some of her latex works have aged so far that they can no longer travel. The museums that hold them are conserving objects that were made in full knowledge of their own decline.
The variation is not sloppiness. It is the content.
This is where Hesse turns the issue's argument. Kusama's repetition dissolves, Martin's steadies, Bourgeois's encloses. Hesse's sags. Her forms do the thing bodies do — they hold their shape approximately, they give at the edges, and they get more themselves as they fail.
The same logic runs through Addendum, a 1967 wall piece now at Tate Liverpool: a row of hemispheres in ascending and descending sizes, each trailing a length of cord that hangs down the wall and pools on the floor — cords the artist explicitly left free to tangle however installation left them. Repetition again, and again a refusal to let the repeat be identical or tidy.
Pick two units and compare their rims. Then step back and look at the group as a group: the spacing is somebody's judgement, made this year, in this room. The piece is partly the decision of whoever put it down.
Hesse is the chapter where repetition stops being clean. Nineteen tries at one form, none of them the winner, and a material that will not hold still — this is what it looks like when a system is allowed to be as unreliable as the body running it.
