The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Eva Hesse · eight hanging units, each a long sheet of cheesecloth worked with latex, with rigid, translucent sections of fibreglass, hung from the ceiling in a row, each sheet standing edge on to the wall at a regular interval · made in 1969, the year Hesse was operated on for a brain tumour, with assistants working to her direction · National Gallery of Australia, Canberra · scored as the eight hangings as one installation as they now stand, with what the latex has become: the pale, translucent appearance of 1969, known from photographs, is weighed as the work as made, and the darkening and stiffening since is weighed on survival only
Mode
Post-Minimal sculpture in hanging, perishable materials: the serial unit and the regular interval kept, the industrial material and the permanent object refused
Mythos
Shroud, veil, banner and hide, brought by the viewer; built only in the material itself, a made body that ages, darkens and will fail
Phase
Made in 1969 with assistants working to Hesse’s direction, the year of her illness; she died in May 1970; in Canberra; the latex since yellowed, darkened and stiffened, and scored as it now stands
Presentation
Eight sheets of cheesecloth and latex with rigid, translucent fibreglass, hung from the ceiling in a row, edge on to the wall at a regular interval, neither floor-bound nor wall-mounted
Register
Quiet, intimate and withheld; as made, pale and lit through like veils; now graver, the colour of old vellum or tanned hide
Scale
Eight sheets, three materials, the height of a standing person and a little more, one walk along the row
Governing Proposition
Eight long sheets of cheesecloth soaked in latex and stiffened in part with fibreglass hang from the ceiling in a row, each edge on to the wall, at a regular interval. The interval and the repeated unit are Minimalism’s; everything else is turned against it: soft for hard, translucent for opaque, the hand for the factory, the perishable for the permanent. The wager of the work is that serial order can be held in matter that will not hold still, and that a thing which is neither painting nor sculpture can stand in the space between them. Its title names the condition it has since shown: the latex has darkened and stiffened, and the work’s being has depended on what it could not control.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Eva Hesse, born in 1936, made Contingent in 1969, the year she was operated on for a brain tumour. Assistants worked to her direction; that much is certain, and who did what on this work is not known in detail. She died in May 1970, aged 34. The work is eight hanging units, each a long sheet of cheesecloth worked with latex, with rigid, translucent sections of fibreglass. They hang from the ceiling in a row, each sheet standing edge on to the wall at a regular interval, so that the viewer walks along a file of upright membranes. It is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Hesse wrote of the work that it was “not painting, not sculpture,” and the hanging is where the phrase is made good. The sheets are not floor-bound and not wall-mounted. Hung flat on the wall they would be paintings, which the work is at pains to say it is not; laid on the floor they would be remnants, a heap of cloth. Hung edge on, they stand in the room as bodies stand, and the viewer moves among them and sees each one from the side, as a skin of uneven thickness, before seeing the next.
Almost nothing in the work can be taken away. Without the fibreglass the sheets go slack and lose the play of rigid and soft that each holds within itself; without the latex the cloth is drapery; without the cheesecloth there is no skin to coat. The irregular edges, the drips and the uneven saturation are not decoration but evidence of the process the work is about. What gives is the count. Seven sheets or nine would know little less: the number belongs to the serial grammar, and is permitted rather than compelled.
Movement II
Three orders of material make the work: cloth, rubber and glass-reinforced resin. The latex is laid into the cheesecloth so that the weave shows through in some places and is sealed in others. The fibreglass gives each sheet a rigid part that curls against a slack body. The edges are left ragged and the surfaces uneven, and the unevenness is controlled, not careless. What the work knows is in the handling of these materials, and the handling is exact.
Change the form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. Cast in steel or acrylic, the eight sheets would keep the serial order and lose the argument against it, which is that the order is held by material that sags, drips, curls and lets light through. One law governs the whole: a serial order held in matter that departs from order. The rigid fibreglass and the slack latex, glassy and soft, are degrees of the same skin, hardening or yielding. The eight sheets differ in their drips, their edges and their thickness, and the differences are all of one kind.
The command did not extend to permanence. The latex was known to be impermanent, and its failure was accepted rather than mastered: a choice the work makes, and not a mastery of the material. The making was also shared, under the conditions of Hesse’s illness, with assistants working to her direction. Both hold the work’s making at the level where it stands, and neither touches what is visible in the sheets, where the cloth, the rubber and the resin are handled as one decision.
Movement III
The inheritance was Minimalism at its height in New York: the serial unit, the regular interval, the industrial material, the object that refers to nothing within itself, and the friends who made it, LeWitt above all, and Judd. Hesse kept the unit and the interval. She turned everything else: soft for hard, translucent for opaque, the hand for the factory, hanging for standing, the perishable for the permanent, and an object that is neither painting nor sculpture.
The stake was real. She was a young woman in a field run by men, working with untested materials known to decay, and she put at risk on purpose the claim of permanence that the market and the museum required. The turn itself was shared and already under way. Robert Morris had made pieces of felt that fall to the floor by gravity and had published his essay “Anti Form” in 1968; Lippard’s “Eccentric Abstraction” dates from 1966; and Hesse’s own Accession, Repetition Nineteen and Expanded Expansion had broken the ground before this work extended it.
What Contingent adds is distinct. Morris’s soft works lie where gravity leaves them; this one keeps the Minimalist series upright and translucent, in file, at its interval, so that the order is visibly the order of LeWitt and the matter visibly not his. It is one of the clearest demonstrations that the serial order of the decade could be kept and made soft, bodily and mortal, and that demonstration is a real reorganisation of what sculpture could be in 1969, made inside a turn that others had begun.
Movement IV
As made, the work reached a quiet height. The eight sheets were pale, honey to milk in colour, and light passed through them; they stood in file like banners or veils in a room, and as the viewer walked the row they overlapped and parted, so that the height recurred across the eight rather than gathering at one place. The register was intimate and withheld. It did not reach for terror or grandeur, and the scale was that of a person standing, not of a space that overwhelms.
A thing made by hand from cloth and rubber reads, whatever its maker intended, as skin, bandage and hide, and through it the body entered an art that had sworn it off. The viewer brings the rest: the shroud, the veil, the banner, the flayed hide, the cloth of Veronica that keeps the trace of a face. The work keeps its particulars, the cheesecloth, the latex, the ragged edge, stubbornly literal, and none of those patterns is built in its arrangement. Much of the force of the encounter is mood, fragility, tenderness and unease, and the condition it discloses is held largely in the terms of sculpture rather than of a life.
What is built is in the material. The work is a made body that ages, darkens and will fail, and its title names the condition: its being depends on what it does not control. The reading of the work through its dying maker is reception, not construction, and it lends the work nothing. The mortality is in the latex, which was chosen knowing what it would do, and that choice is load-bearing in a way the evoked archetypes are not.
Movement V
Fifty-seven years on, the latex has yellowed, darkened and stiffened. The sheets have turned amber to brown and read as old vellum or tanned hide, and the translucency and pallor that carried the work’s light are much reduced. That is a loss of its defining appearance, of form as well as of material, and it continues. The elevation has not gone; it has grown graver, a relic’s rather than a veil’s. What survives whole is the structure: the eight sheets, their hanging, their serial order, and the record of 1969 in photographs and in Hesse’s words. The work is shown with care and within limits, travels little if at all, and its future display is uncertain.
The questions it raises have stayed open. Is it the last statement of post-Minimalist process, or the first of a sculpture centred on the body? Is the reading through Hesse’s life a feminist recovery or a reduction? What is the work now: the object, the photographs, or the intention? Should it be remade, or allowed to fail? The conservation literature uses it as a case, and Lippard’s monograph of 1976 and the later writing of Anne Wagner and Briony Fer return to it. The feminist writing of the 1970s onward made Hesse a central figure, but this work’s own reach is limited by place: it is rarely lent, and most know it through photographs. The orders it holds are few, the body, mortality, the history of art, industry and the viewer’s space, and the family, the state and history beyond the studio are absent.
Beside it on this desk stand Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, at 8.5, of the same moment and the same turn from Minimalism to process and change, with the larger reorganisation and the wider reach; Bourgeois’s Maman, at 8.3, which builds the myth that this work only evokes; Rothko’s Untitled (Black on Grey), at 8.0, of the same years and the same late register, a tenth below, and The Rothko Chapel at 8.6; and Duchamp’s Fountain, at 8.0. Plath’s Ariel, at 8.7, a body made into form under mortal pressure and read through its maker’s life, is close in kind and well above it; Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, at 8.3, keeps a regular pulse and lets the material work within it. In Canberra the eight sheets still hang in file at their interval, and the light that once passed through them now stops in the skin.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is put to a serial work, and it bites first at the count. Seven sheets or nine would know little less: the number belongs to the serial grammar Hesse shared with LeWitt and Judd, and is permitted rather than compelled. Everything else resists removal. Without the fibreglass the sheets go slack and lose the play of rigid and soft that each holds within itself; without the latex the cloth is drapery; without the cheesecloth there is no skin to coat. Hung flat on the wall the sheets are paintings; laid on the floor they are a heap. The drips, the ragged edges and the uneven saturation are evidence of the process the work is about. Only the count is loose.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What comes into the open can be stated, and some of it is meaning. A work of serial order can be made of matter that will not hold still: the grid of Minimalism kept, its industrial permanence refused. A thing made by hand from cloth and rubber reads, whatever its maker intended, as skin, bandage and hide, and the body enters an art that had sworn it off. And the title says that the work’s being depends on conditions it does not control; the latex, darkening and stiffening as a body ages, has since shown it. That last is disclosed by the object over time, and it is real. Held at 8.0 because much of the force is mood, fragility, tenderness and unease, and the condition is held largely within the terms of sculpture rather than of a life.
Score: 8.0 / 10
As made, the work reached a quiet height: eight tall, pale sheets with light passing through them, standing in file like banners or veils in a room. The height is gentle and sustained across the eight rather than spiked in one place, and it recurs as the viewer walks the row and the sheets overlap and part. Now the latex has turned amber to brown and the sheets read as old vellum or tanned hide; the elevation has grown graver, a relic’s rather than a veil’s, and it is still there. What holds the axis below 8: the register is intimate and withheld, it reaches neither terror nor grandeur, and the scale is that of a person standing, not of a space that overwhelms.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The archetypes come readily and are mostly brought by the viewer. Shroud, veil, banner, skin, the flayed hide and the cloth of Veronica that keeps the trace of a face: each is summoned by hanging cloth that has been soaked and marked, while the work keeps its particulars, cheesecloth, latex, the ragged edge, stubbornly literal. Where something is built rather than evoked, it is the structure of mortality carried by the material: a made body that ages, darkens and will fail, which the title names. That is load-bearing, and it holds the axis above seven and a half. It stays short of the upper band because the pattern is carried by matter and circumstance, not built in the arrangement, and the reading through the dying maker is reception, not construction.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is Minimalism at its height in New York: the serial unit, the regular interval, the industrial material, the object without inner reference, and the friends who made it, LeWitt above all. Hesse kept the unit and the interval and turned the rest: soft for hard, translucent for opaque, hand for factory, hanging for standing, perishable for permanent. The stake was real: a young woman in a field run by men, working with untested materials known to decay, and putting at risk on purpose the permanence that market and museum required. Held below the gate because the turn was shared and under way: Robert Morris’s felt pieces and his essay “Anti Form” of 1968, Lippard’s “Eccentric Abstraction” of 1966, and Hesse’s own Accession, Repetition Nineteen and Expanded Expansion had broken the ground.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. Cast the eight sheets in steel or acrylic and the serial order survives, but the argument against it goes: what the work knows is that the order is held by material that sags, drips, curls and lets light through. Laid on the floor the sheets are remnants; hung flat on the wall they are paintings, which the work is at pains to say it is not. Hung edge on, they make the viewer walk among them and see each as a body of uneven thickness, the light passing more through some parts than others. Even the decay belongs to the form, which was chosen knowing it. Held below the top because the count and the exact spacing could change without the work knowing less.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: fifty-seven years of return, and the questions stay open. Is the work the last statement of post-Minimalist process, or the first of a sculpture centred on the body that later artists took up? Is its body Hesse’s, and is the reading through her life a feminist recovery or a reduction? What is the work now that the latex has changed beyond its maker’s sight: the object, the photographs of 1969, or the intention? Should it be remade, or allowed to fail? The conservation literature uses it as a case, and the monographs, Lippard’s of 1976 and the later writing of Anne Wagner and Briony Fer, return to it. Held below the upper band because that literature is narrower than the one around the central works of the century, and much of the return circles one question, the ethics of decay.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is American sculpture at the close of the 1960s and what followed it. Intrinsic force: high. The work is one of the clearest demonstrations that the serial order of Minimalism could be kept and made soft, translucent, bodily and mortal, a real reorganisation of what sculpture could be in 1969. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, but carried in part by Hesse’s body of work rather than by this piece alone; the feminist writing of the 1970s onward made her a central figure, and retrospectives of her work carried her into the account of the period. This work’s own reach is limited by place: it is in Canberra, rarely lent, and known to most through photographs. Delayed and diffuse, credited and discounted, and below the gate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Fifty-seven years, and more than fabric is charged. The latex has yellowed, darkened and stiffened, and the translucency and pallor that carried the work’s light are much reduced: that is a loss of the work’s defining appearance, of form and not only of material, and it continues. Presence is charged as well: the work is shown with care and within limits, travels little if at all, and its future display is uncertain. What survives whole is the structure, the eight sheets, their hanging and their serial order, and the record in photographs and in Hesse’s own words. The decay was foreseen and in a sense belongs to the title, which lightens the charge on meaning but does not prove survival. The figure is set below what the span alone would give, and held loosely.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Command of an unstable medium. The latex is laid into the cheesecloth so that the weave shows through in some places and is sealed in others; the fibreglass is set so that each sheet holds a rigid, curling part against a slack body; the edges are left ragged and the surfaces uneven, and the unevenness is controlled, not careless. The making is load-bearing: what the work knows is in the handling of these materials. Held at 8.0 for two reasons, read to the same standard as any medium. Part of the making was done, under the conditions of Hesse’s illness, by assistants working to her direction, and who did what is not known in detail. And the command did not extend to permanence: the failure of the medium was accepted rather than mastered.
Score: 8.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: a serial order held in material that departs from order. The two most distant elements, the rigid fibreglass and the slack latex, glassy and soft, obey it alike, each a different degree of the same skin hardening or yielding. The eight sheets differ from one another in their drips, their edges and their thickness, and the differences are of one kind; nothing breaks the register. The range is wider than it first looks: industrial resin and household cloth, order and chance, light and opacity, the geometric and the bodily. Held below the upper band because the narrowness of the means helps the coherence: the work does not have to hold together elements as remote from one another as a large painting or a building does.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: the body, as skin, bandage and hide, present in the work whatever its maker intended; mortality and time, in the decaying material and the title; the history of art, Minimalism kept and answered, in an object that is neither painting nor sculpture; labour and industry, the factory resin beside the household cloth; and the space of the viewer, who walks among the sheets. Left out: the family, the state, history beyond the studio, the natural order except as decay, the sacred except by allusion. This is the lowest of the twelve, and what holds it here is the form: a small form held well rather than a world. The low mark describes the form, not a failure in it.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.4. A form whose knowledge is that serial order is held by material that sags, drips, curls and lets light through, so that steel or acrylic would keep the order and lose the argument; one law, order held in matter that departs from order, governing fibreglass and latex, the eight sheets and their differences; a turn that kept Minimalism’s unit and interval and refused its hardness, opacity and permanence at real risk; and questions about decay, the body and what the work now is that fifty-seven years have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, mortality, the history of art, industry and the viewer’s space are held, and the family, the state and history beyond the studio are absent; a small form held well rather than a world. Below the rest of the twelve, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: shroud, veil and hide are brought by the viewer, and only the mortality of the material is built. Then The Sublime at 7.9: a quiet height, intimate and withheld, at the scale of a person standing. They are one fact: the work holds its argument in its matter and does not reach beyond it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Swerve at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, The Imperishable at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5, the nearest by a tenth and the farthest by nine tenths; the turn was shared, the reach is carried partly by the maker’s body of work, the latex has lost the light the work was made to hold, the disclosure is part mood, and the archetypes are brought rather than built. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.7, an average of 8.06 that displays 8.1, in the Canonical tier and well short of the 9.0 the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work from photographs of 1969 and of its later state, from the literature on Hesse (Lucy Lippard’s monograph of 1976 and the later writing of Anne Wagner, Briony Fer and others) and from the conservation debate in which the work is a central case; the work was not measured, and its exact dimensions, the precise sequence of its making and its display record year by year are not known, so that where a judgment turns on them, on survival and on the making, it is held more loosely. The work scored is Contingent, by Eva Hesse (1936 to 1970), 1969, cheesecloth, latex and fibreglass, in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: the eight hangings as one installation, as they now stand, with what the latex has become. The pale, translucent appearance of 1969, known from photographs, is weighed as the work as made; the yellowing, darkening and stiffening of the latex since is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes from the work, and on no other axis. The share of Hesse’s assistants in the making, working to her direction, is credited to the work. Her other works, the work of Morris, LeWitt and Judd, and the literature are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title and Hesse’s phrase “not painting, not sculpture”. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of each sheet and the spread of the installation, where on each sheet the fibreglass lies, the number of layers of latex, where and when the work was first shown and the rest of the statement Hesse wrote for it, when it was acquired, the division of labour between Hesse and her assistants, and which later artists have named it.