 I'm Elizabeth Sackler and I'd like to welcome you to this wonderful panel. I'm very excited about it and it's a real pleasure. I just want to start by saying the following that when I finished reading Susan Fisher Sterling's exacting, and they were exacting words in the foreword with the title off the wall, and when I finished Todd Alton's Resolute Essay, Transformation Event Context, Eva Hesse, 1965, I found myself in a state of major anxiety and I was really anxious by these two pieces of writing and then I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this absolutely glorious catalog and Eva Hesse's genius that is coming after this and I'm starting to think, alright, what's going on here with these two pieces of work. Susan's statement and question, Eva Hesse was a painter in 1962. She was talented and she loved painting and drawing so how is it that four years later she would become one of the first and best post-minimalist sculptors and Todd's observation, the asymmetry of Hesse and Doyle's art world positions then and now is the elephant in the room of many accounts of Eva Hesse's career development and these are but two of the points that were world-winding for me as departure into the vortex of relationship, creation, gender, disparity and the pains and pleasures of course of artistic evolution, omission, commission. So I had to sort of stop there and take a very deep breath and thought to myself how fitting to be able to make opening remarks today because it is because of this vortex that we have and it is the wine wherefore of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and it's really a very fitting and exacting and exciting opportunity because today's panel discussion on Eva Hesse 1965 marks the sixth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. So I'm particularly delighted about that. It comes to mind a cliche and I don't like cliches and an advertisement but there it goes the more things change the more they stay the same and you've come a long way baby. So I think a lot of that I think there's feedback happening here. So the Eva Hesse 1965 reveals as Todd said the elephant in the room and I feel like we have to revel in your reveal. I know that Barry Rosen revels in this reveal and I will join him. He's generalizing on this very specific not to mention gorgeousness is the book's success in universalizing female artists experience. Hence the Feminist Art discourse and Hesse's debut as a sculptor that year was as Todd noted in a single loosely folded insert in her husband Tom Doyle's catalog and this is profound and it's startling image especially in hindsight yet yet to get this shared studio space in Germany in 1965 cannot be overlooked and their relationship and this segues me into a tip of the hat to Catherine Morris the curator of the Sackler Center who's here as well and she's expanded conversations of the content of feminist art of theory of culture of philosophy and of activism to all art whether contemporary or ancient and whether male or female and so we have come a long way baby and we have miles to go before we sleep. Today brings together friendships and colleagues intellectual artistic and cultural goals and it's a moment for me of revelation as much as it is of celebration and I celebrate and where is she Rebecca Taffel who without her she is the program director programming at the Elizabeth Sackler Foundation without her foresight and enthusiasm this panel wouldn't be happening I want to thank you very much Rebecca we all owe you a nod of approval and appreciation I thank you for that my love and thanks of course also to Barry Rosen for bringing to life great books great ideas great art and great friendship thank you Barry. Helen Cherish is here with us and I'm delighted that she is Ava's sister and I said oh well she's cherished the cherish has cherished Eva Hess's oof and her memory and we owe a gratitude of debt to you as well Helen and it's our good fortune today of course to have Elizabeth Sussman at Gilman Curator Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art as moderator and a pleasure a true pleasure to have our panelists Todd Alden to immediately to my right Susan Fisher Sterling Kirsten Swenson and of course William Wilson and Elizabeth will be introducing the panelists when I finish so I will now formally begin having unloaded myself of the angst anxiety and anxiousness produced by thinking about all of the things that there are to think about in the world of creation and creativity and art our panel coincides well not exactly because it just closed with the exhibition of the same name Eva Hess in 1965 which was at house and worth in London the Yale University Press publication which accompanied the exhibition will be more widely available this summer and it is from that publication Eva has 65 that we owe a debt to our writers and to our panelists today both the exhibition and publication of Eva Hess 1965 reconsideres Eva Hess's legacy by focusing on the transitional year of 1965 Hesse is considered a sculptor but started as a painter the exhibition and the Yale publication offers a new perspective on how and why she made the transition from painting to sculpture in 1965 points that have not been fully explored in other Hesse scholarship Elizabeth Sussman our moderator has curated and co-curated a score probably easily of exhibitions including the 2012 Whitney biennial the award winning Paul Tick diver a retrospective William Eggleston Democratic camera photographs and video in 1961 to 2008 and Gordon Mata Clark you are the measure to name but a few Elizabeth has organized many Whitney exhibitions since 1993 and that year's biennial right including remote viewing invented worlds in recent paintings and drawings Mike Kelly and David Armstrong and Keith Harry in 1997 there's a very long list on Eva Hesse Elizabeth co-curated two exhibitions one of Hesse's drawings at the drawing center and a glorious exhibition of Eva has a sculpture at the Jewish Museum here in New York in 2000 also in 2006 as well as the Hesse retrospective in the Beast Bottom Museum in Beast Bottom Germany she's the author of many publications is taught at MIT in Tufts and is here to moderate this discussion so please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Sussman in our panel and thank you very much for being here today and celebrating in this way the sixth anniversary of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Federalist Art. Thank you. Thank you so much. I hope this is working. Thank you Elizabeth for all your support in opening this wonderful center which is just has been so strong and powerful and will continue to be of immense importance I think to all of us in our field going forward so and to the many many friends I had in the audience who have been with me for this long long journey that I've been fortunate enough to have with Eva Hesse. Today belongs to people that one of whom Bill Wilson actually knew Eva Hesse which I did not and the others are people who have thought about her a great deal and who we are indebted to for very very fresh looks at her work that are published in the wonderful book that Elizabeth referred to and that you can actually see a copy of around here. I just wanted to start by talking briefly about this year that the exhibition in London at Houser and Worth Folks is on which is the year or over a year that Hesse spent in Germany which will be the topic of this afternoon's talks and I wanted to to bring to the conversation just a few thoughts that I had thinking about this and they come from somewhat of a biographical point of view which I don't think the other talks will share but I want to mention the two things that I think are very very important to think about with her in 1965-66 and the first one has to do with her own family and the second one has to do with the Scheit family the family that invited Tom Doyle and Eva Hesse to Germany. So on the one hand as you all know Hesse was born in Germany and had left under the circumstances of the Nazification of Germany and what became the Holocaust and her family had lived through this and I'm not going to go into that history at all only to say that before she left on this return which was the first return that any of her family had made to Germany in 65 her father wrote her very detailed and specific letters which I've read some of and they they are very clinical and clear and directive and they in the background of these letters is the fact that the Hesse family left and that along with many many people at this moment they were going to be able to to receive reparations from from Germany but this in order to receive reparations for what they had been through that is to have some of their financial loss restored to them they were going to have to do a little bit of investigation and documentation of their losses and that this was Eva's responsibility because she was the first person back there and so he very specifically put together a list that she had to go to the hometown of her mother she should have to go to visit the people still living in that hometown that knew her mother and her mother's family she had to visit the family store and he goes on through several groups of people still living in Germany and Holland that have been involved in the so-called escape from Germany that Hesse and her family had been through and that she should make re-contact with when she was there and actually some of this she actually did so this was not the thing that occupied her entirely of course as you're going to hear there was lots to occupy this enormously a talented young woman but it was in the background of what she was trying to do pick up these pieces of her family that and to to to put somehow this story back together so that was one background thing I wanted to call attention to the other one is the to the person who invited her and this is a shite Arnhardt shite who at this point when you will encounter him in today's talks is will emerge as a philanthropist the person who invited her over and he was at in point of fact but actually Arnhardt shite was also one of the most established and in a way a very very wealthy successful person whose family had lived in this particular town in Ketwig Germany on the war since the early 18th century and the the contrast between the the shite family in Ketwig and the Hesse family leaving under these circumstances were the sort of background to Hesse's experience and I think that the environment obviously didn't produce the art but it does form a sort of tapestry a landscape an actual place that she was living and thinking about on a daily regular basis and I think it's it's a it's those sort of tangible parts of history that I think we have to mix in a little bit with the art history to try to plummet the great depth of Eva Hesse so without further remarks of my own I want to introduce all the panelists briefly and then they will each talk for 10 minutes first of all we're going to hear from Susan Fisher who is the director of the is the official title is the Museum National National Museum of Women's Art and who has of women in art sorry and who in in whose collection there are actually some notable as a pieces that she will maybe reference she's a writer herself and has written on Brazilian postmodernism and feminist photography and has worked on Karen May Weems one of my favorite artists and Sarah Charlesworth and Alice Neal all my favorite artists so congratulations and I look forward to hearing you next I think have we decided it will be I'm lost oh you're lost okay so I think next actually is Todd Todd is lives in New York and is the director of of Alden projects he has written extensively on Marcel Broder's and is currently working on an exhibition about Broder's he is also written interestingly about Sonic Youth I'd love to know more about that and Lee Lozano so thank you for coming then Kirsten Swenston who I was actually lucky enough to know when she was working in at the Whitney and who helped me a great deal when I was trying to do too many things at the same time she is now an assistant professor of contemporary art and aesthetics at UMass in Lowell and she is writing I'm so glad to hear on Eva has and saw the whip a book that she's calling irrational judgments which we look forward to and then finally the respondent to today's panel will be William Wilson who I have been fortunate enough to know for the many years I worked on Hesse he knew Eva Hesse throughout the period under discussion today but also before and after that and he has written about Hesse and lectured about her many times as well as as other artists and principally the artist maybe not principally but major work on the artist Ray Johnson so I think we're going to start with Susan who's going to talk from the podium thank you Elizabeth uh good afternoon everyone and congratulations and happy birthday to the Sackler Center it's just great to be here on the sixth anniversary I enjoyed also being here for the fifth okay let's see perfect always good so I thought I would try and set the stage a little bit for you to talk about Eva Hesse's metamorphosis in 1965 I thought you'd like to see what Ketvig under RER actually looks like now from thanks to Google Maps and also to show you a couple of images of the on the your lower left of what the factory would have looked like some years ago and then on your lower right the women working in the Zanella factory when the factory was in operation 97 women who worked in the maidship who worked in the factory and lived in the maidschenheim the women's housing that was on the shite factory property I also show you in the middle a beautiful image of the entry to that factory and it is now available for condos in case you would like to buy a condo there it also is used right now as a as a space for art and so some of the perp-purposing that it was used when in Doyle and Hesse's time as artist residents continues to the present day in setting the stage we are recognizing today that 1965 marks a turning point in Eva Hesse's work when as Elizabeth said both Elizabeth have said she moves from being a painter in her artistic practice toward becoming a sculptor a couple of comments on that when she went to Germany she went as the artist's wife it was Tom Doyle as I think Todd will talk about who was really the the artist who was asked to come to be part of the residency and Doyle was supportive of having his wife Eva Hesse be part of that and be treated properly as an artist as well the first eight months that she spent in Kettwig under R was the time when she really started that critical revisioning of what I feel was to some degree her new york myopia she had an opportunity to travel and I wish that I had had time to put him do a map a stitch map perhaps of all the places or a dot map of all the places that she was able to go to and I know that Todd will probably talk a bit more about that as well so I wanted to ask a few questions how many of you in the audience know Eva Hesse's work well or know Eva Hesse's work okay great and how many of you know the early work and how many of you are Hesse scholars okay so this should be okay because what I thought I would do is I thought I do a run through of the of the time the critical time that she was in Germany in the works that she produced there so I'd like to quickly look at the three main bodies of work and this really is what I would call a screenshot show we're going to look first at what she did in 1962 she's thinking she's she and her husband are both abstract expressionists or that's how they refer to themselves this is Hesse in 64 also 64 where she starts to create a set of works that are drawings and paintings of more contained forms and then here's where she starts to go with those with those works that next works that you'll see are very different from what the abstract expressionist paintings look like and what we'll see revolves around the use of machine-like forms and what I would call simple mechanics when we look at these contained form works and this personage in the middle just looks like totally is looks to me like a woman who is showing all her goodies it's just a wah sort of work and I I would love to be able to have spent time analyzing all the imagery in these contained forms but let's just take a look at a few of them oh by the way I mean don't fail to notice the penis-like form on one side and this woman-like form with which looks like an opening of vagina in the middle it's all it's all very relevant and important when I look at these works what I think about is the use of the machine pieces you have body parts or their suggestions and it reminds me an awful lot to some degree of I don't know if you all remember Picasso's dream and lie of Franco that series of etchings that is like a storyboard but it also reminds me of the Cadavra Esquise game that the surrealists would play when they would take a piece of a drawing and then the next person wouldn't see the drawing and would add something else and then another person would add something else all these pieces don't necessarily fit together but she creates separate pictorial worlds for each of her images and then it's up to us to try and put the meaning to it pick of what she created pictorial and a lot of the forms that you see in these works will come to bear on images that she or objects that she creates starting in late 1965 and 1966 so it's great to take a look at this I also wish that someone would take a look at the importance of perhaps European pop art on this work of Hess's I think of the way Adami created different sorts of split or elided images so the next pieces I wanted to also show you another set of works that starts with painting like no title where you have this very diffused kind of drawing but then somehow in some of the drawings those kinds of images that were once floating images become much larger and cropped and then there are images that even look like that the actual objects are floating in space perhaps a reference to her own studio objects that look like lights in other forms of in a space that could be constructed as being an actual space that's been pictorialized and then these mechanized figures so we have figures that look like sculpture we have some drawings like this of mechanisms that are that are in action we have drawings of spaces and then we also have drawings of pseudo organic objects and these pseudo organic objects especially have a very interesting symbiotic relationship with the reliefs are all these images familiar to you so just quickly the reliefs one of the things about these relief sculptures is the physical labor of them and I think that's a big difference that we should think about when we talk about the relief sculptures that there was actually some heavy lifting that Hessa had to do where the drawings were very fluid and they were something that she was able to do many many of when it came to these actual reliefs there was a lot of physical intent and a lot of strength that she needed to do to create them and very likely she created them laying down so that she could screw things in and tighten things up and move things around and then make holes and and all the like I know someone will talk about ring round the rosy because it seems to be seen as a generative work these were begun at the suggestion or at least we as we understand that the reliefs were begun at the suggestion of Tom Doyle her husband and she keeps a meticulous record of these pieces as they move along he says he at least the way he describes it he talked with her about trying to use the materials the detritus that was in the factory to create these works and I did want to go back when you look at this work here I know it's not called C clamp blues but this object underneath here that looks like a C is actually that kind of clamp that C clamp these are very these are very different than the drawings because they have that relief quality to them and I just thought it was great to take a look you have the first set of images that she does from about 19 March through June 65 that are much more anthropomorphized that speak maybe have a single abstract object in them that have lots of color or partial images and then starting in July with works like this she really develops with a much higher degree of abstraction and then fewer and simpler objects till she gets to cool zone which is the least compelling image pictorially but the most successful if you think of it as a sculpture and that's just because the piece is a gear and a rope that is completely relieved of any pictorial background and then this last work which I'm actually wearing close to the color of the work that's on the left the left hand side on the in the picture of Eva Hesse I just wanted to say that it would be more than a year before she would begin to embrace the serial form and also the grid and it would not be till 67 before she started to work with latex but even so when she created the pieces that you've seen on the screen so far in 1965 she really was coming to what I would call an awkward understanding of the bodily mechanics of what her compositions required and actually by body mechanics I also mean the physicality that it took to create the reliefs moving from drawing into sculpture and when she talks about the works of the especially the the relief sculpture she talks about them in words like dumb and nonsensical crazy weird and absurd but through that those sorts of works it's really true that she took those steps that took her work off of the drawing table and then off of the wall anyway I'd like to thank Elizabeth Sackler for making this panel happen and for having me here thank you Elizabeth um I'm glad Susan showed some of those works from um from Germany because the fact remains this is these are obviously um death notices that one on the left is from the village voice and that's the New York Times on the right and uh Eva Hesse when she died and to this day basically was remembered mostly as being having been a sculptor who made you know who made work in in uh in new materials and in uh non non art materials and uh the fact of the matter is um nope she started out as a painter and you know the question remains how did how did painter end up making all these such incredible um sculptures and it didn't come out of nowhere and the fact of the matter is a lot of the works you know these works that were done from when she before she before 1966 and this is the work here in the middle there this is hang up from 1966 which she thought of as her first kind of successful work um you know basically has the same tension between the two and three dimensionality that a lot of the German reliefs have um but this work that she made that she's famous for the sculpture didn't kind of come out of nowhere it came out of these days from you know from from well from having been in Germany this is these these are um this is repetition 19 uh the third version of which was which was in fiberglass was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art uh during her life and this of course is um Lucy LaParde's book which is LaParde of course was the defining uh was it was was the defining historian for Hessa this book came out in 1976 and uh she was obviously friends with Eva and this was this book ended up was basically one particular take on Eva Hesse's work um significantly defined through the lens of the minimalists that she was herself friends with um and from here um she obviously also organized the eccentric abstraction show in 1966 that Hesse was in um so Hesse so I wanted to um just start reading from my I'm sorry I'm a little bit nervous here apologies there but I'm gonna start reading from um my essay here which is in the book which no one's read so I thought I'd just just have a go from here um so here we are this is uh Lucy LaParde's Eva Hesse of the famous book sometimes it's good for an for an American artist to gather of America Lucy R. LaParde wrote in the opening line of a 1965 catalog essay published the time of Eva Hesse's first museum exhibition at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf at the time LaParde wrote this she could not possibly have known from New York just how fitting this description would really prove to be for Eva Hesse quote I have a real sense of freedom here LaParde continues quoting her subject to try anything and I'm happy about what happens the studio is alive with things going up all around LaParde subject in 1965 said however her subject was not Eva Hesse it was American sculptor Tom Doyle Hesse's husband now legions of black ink have been spilled about what could be called Eva Hesse's traumatography escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 by a kinder transport to Holland age two the murder of many family members by the Nazis her parents divorced in 1944 her mother's suicide in 1945 her husband's noted drinking and philandering Hesse's protracted illness culminating in death from a brain tumor in 1934 and so on battalions of black ink have also been spilled conflating the relationship between Hesse's life and art confusion in which the artist's last interview published just weeks before her death appeared only to encourage but is this approach really sufficient for grappling with the intricate contradictions infinite play and absurd eccentricities of Eva Hesse's body of work well I do while I so this is um this is uh her Tom Doyle there whoops I just clicked ahead that's Tom Doyle her husband there on the left and that's obviously what it is well I do not propose that we turn a blind eye to the traumatic punctures pressures and wounds of German history in general or to the knowable facts of Eva Hesse's actual history in particular including the anxiety she said to have had in returning to the vicinity of so much family trauma 20 plus years earlier this essay attempts to examine the artistic and professional context of the artist returned to Germany in 1964 and 65 together with Tom Doyle suggesting that the actual facts point to one inescapable conclusion the european sojourn was filled with idiosyncratic discoveries unusual access to european art and its professional network extraordinary introductions exceptional working conditions exhibition opportunities sales all of which exerted a transformative impact upon the artist's work and professional direction the asymmetry of Hesse and Doyle's art world positions then and now is the elephant in the room of many accounts of Hesse's career development in her last interview Hesse remembers Doyle now remember he was eight years older than her so that was quite a big difference with considerable understatement as having been quote a more mature and developed artist mostly forgotten today Doyle enjoyed a very different position during his rising years together with Hesse in 1961 and 1965 he went on to become a Duane gallery artist during the mid 1960s yeah i'm not sure if i went too fast or too slow he he wanted to become a major Duane gallery artist during the mid 1960s because this clicker only goes forward so i've got to be careful i'm not sure if i'm beyond her or before but anyway uh Doyle was uh went on to become a Duane gallery artist in the mid 60s which is if you don't know Duane was sort of the place especially for the for the minimalists um uh during this he's showing alongside many of Hesse's closest friends and peers and it was a place where she felt she belonged and in fact she you know she she wrote in her diaries Duane is my whole life and you know Virginia Duane doesn't take me seriously as an artist and uh what is more um Doyle had participated in multiple signal exhibitions of minimalism just before returning to America including kinesin mcshine's primary structure show at the german at the jewish museum in 1966 even prior to the german sagern however Doyle had been included in the dialogue shifting new forms new media one and two exhibitions at the marfa jackson gallery and it's shown repeatedly at allen stone in new york where the couple met at the at Doyle's first one person exhibition in 1961 that last slide which is not up actually shows uh which i can't go back to but um one Hesse's the first item on her biography was a show at the brooklyn museum in fact um so it's a it's a little sort of coming full circle here this is a poster from tom Doyle from 1967 and he had shows in 1967 and 66 uh at Duane but he also had showed at um he also had shown at the allen stone gallery which was a at the time it was an abstract expressionist gallery and they met in fact at a tom Doyle opening at the gallery and according to Doyle it was through him that uh allen stone came to her studio that's how she ended up having her first show which is uh this is her show drawings from 1963 at the allen stone gallery this is it actually happens to be addressed to the jewels of litsky um but um so anyway um at the earliest stages both Doyle and Hesse had one foot in the door at least one foot in the door of abstract expressionism both artists work work both artists work transformed however in germany but Doyle's work was by no means an easy fit with the minimalist with whom he later exhibited his large-scale abstract sculptures were described in 1965 as quote a valid strain of romanticism connecting him with desuvaro and al held but also with freet frederick keesler quote i love bridges like walt wittman loved animals Doyle told lapard acknowledging the facts of Doyle's professional presence impact and even instrumentality for hesse inconvenient for some does not diminish hesse's private and hard one achievements but allows us to understand something closer to the actual coordinates of intentions within the arc of hesse's artistic development in germany this includes an acutely self-aware competitiveness that she had understandably felt with the older more experienced rising sculptor making vertically inclined masculine art in what was already so much in man's world the extent of Doyle's actual role in nurturing her early art and experimentation and dare i say this out loud Doyle's early influence not to mention his role as a foil or artistic countertype for hesse remains critically speaking an unweeded garden what is more other in other inconvenient facts about hesse's life and art have been under registered some have been ignored because they do not fit neatly into dominant narratives of hesse as wound which i hope part of this thought does some work against extending other facts about hesse's european encounters have been have been simply left out because they were not witnessed or shared by any of her new york contemporaries whose own exposure to in america was strikingly different what set hesse's european experience apart from all of her new york contemporaries with whom she would later be officially associated louis andre bachner smithson or even her unofficial friends including michael todd paul tech peter hujar joe joe rafael and jean swenson was the fact that she was more deeply immersed in the european modern and contemporary strains of art and art history that differed from american advantages some of hesse's european contacts and encounters have remained until recently mostly on earth unknown or under accounted for by her current audiences um fast-forwarding particularly intriguing is hesse's fraternity with uh the historically my minded herald simon who was the curator of the famous when attitudes have become form show from 1969 which would have made her an international superstar um well to some degree anyway early on simon had organized a number of daughter related exhibitions including mechanical serial and diagrammatic works although it preceded her european visit simon precede produced a catalog for a picabia exhibition uh in 1962 and during her stay in in germany organized an exhibition of her Yale teacher joseph albers in 1964 simon also hosted her the first major retrospective of duchamp's ready maze including the newly reissued editions published by arturo schwarz in 1964 the rare opportunity for hesse to encounter a version of duchamp's bachelor machine and the other mechanical erotic contraptions firsthand not to mention the marchand du sel's punning inventory is worth further consideration and particularly so with regard to the timing of the duchamp exhibition from 1964 hesse had begun only begun had begun her pen and ink drawings in which her mechanic erotic and mechanical parts were conjoined by a deadpan mechanical line and that's in yoan nixon's uh only in 19 in february 1965 so basically she went to the duchamp show and whether it's a coincidence or not uh she started she started making her own kind of works with there were had many punning titles and which were deeply indebted to uh the mechanical erotic uh combinations duchamp's signal influence of on hesse of course has been widely acknowledged in in 19 in october 1964 the same month that duchamp show opened in burn hesse had also noted seeing tangley's fantastic absurd duchamp inspired machines in basal followed by an all night party although she miss seeing warhol's debut exhibition at castelli in 1964 the following month hesse traveled to the to berlin to see the noya rey listan in pop art show where she saw among others duchamp arman kline and dubu fe paired with john's oldenburg warhol and lichtenstein european and american juxtaposition european and american juxtapositions that overall would have been impossible to see in american receptions of pop in other words what hesse saw in germany was an experience that all of her minimalist and post-minimalist friends you know did not didn't see except for the ones that were traveling hesse had her fair share of serendipitous encounters too within the space of three days in june 65 hesse notes one meeting the lady in 1965 who made the furline teacup and that's obviously marit marit hot offenheim traveling to colmar with sigmar polka to see grunewald's isenheim altarpiece and three taking the night train to amsterdam uh to an opening at the stedlick to see james baldwin's amen corner a play after which she she quote sat next to all evening james baldwin i was thrilled went to party after party for the cast um so when you look through all the date books from 1965 you see that while while there are all these narratives of eva hasa as woman eva hasa as constantly being a sick person when you really look at the facts on the ground this was a woman who was filled with life and while these may have been her conscious uh writings in her inner in her own private notebooks this is a woman who had it who lived who burned with a hard gem like flame and had a very beautiful and in many ways life affirming existence um and i hope that more work is done towards looking this at this other side of hasa's work uh in her life um how did hasa end up returning to europe rewind to 1964 the circumstances leading up to hasa's european sojourn were set in motion by al hell doyle's friend who'd recommended a studio visit from a group of visiting collectors and museum curators in switzerland and germany according to doyle uh arnold rudlinger the curator from the kunsthala basal offered doyle the museum show on the spot due to the difficulties of transporting doyle's large-scale sculptors across the ocean uh collector uh friedrich arnhard schyte who we heard about earlier uh was also present at the studio visit and invited doyle as an alternative to use one of his buildings in ketwig which were conveniently also the same type of bluestone slabs which the artist had been working it was evidently cheaper to import doyle than his sculptures for which schyte had proposed trade and provisions and lodging etc once doyle arrived in germany however the artist stayed straight from his original plans to use stone there preferring to use instead the steel and welders at his disposal at schyte's factory to explore making large-scale constructions out of wood and painted steel although hasa was included in the invitation to work in germany tom was the original draw hessa recalls um was lucy lepard recalled was thrown in as a legnab um that's not just take anything away from ava hessa obviously but the point is tom was a huge star and she what she as lepard herself remembers uh even to lucy lepard at that moment ava ava hessa was tom's wife to her she only she only began seeing her uh differently when when she returned to new york um rudelinger anyway didn't end up liking tom doyle's new sculptural direction but schyte was open to the new experiments and so was herald simon then the director of the consola baron where the show wound up what we did not mention earlier is that doyle fell into some luck with the change of venue simon fit doyle into three section conceptual exhibition positioning the young sculptor within an historical lineage following quote three pioneers of contemporary art joined with the constructivist element of joseph albers the catalog was jointly titled marcell duchand vasily kondinsky kazemar melievich joseph albers tom doyle and contains an essay by simon doyle presented six sculptural abstractions which the swiss curator brilliantly identified as quote the creation of colorful places and i was just i was rereading that earlier and i thought you know if hessa's complete uh eschewing of color later in later in her life i wonder i just wondered personally if that had something to do she doyle said that he she helped her immensely with color and i wonder whether her her eschewing of color had something to do with uh with tom's affirmation of color uh in that work that they had they made what way they were together anyway doyle's extraordinary good fortune in being the young sculptor sharing the historically themed stage with the the titans of 20th century abstraction including hessa's yell mentor joseph albers must have made an impression so this year is uh this is the insert from the cattle the cattle the the tiles of tom doyle catalog that was printed in 1965 that lucy lapard wrote the essay for and um this is a four page it's a fold out and what's interesting about this is uh you know the difference between the way the two the two artists chose to be identified you know doyle in the first photograph he's got he's got he's doing man's work and he's it's very much of a it's very much of a of a you know a male looking um pose where this is just very this is completely not the way a formal painter was was to be pictured with their art at this particular time this completely violated the photographic codes and that you can see the way that she's holding um ring around a rosy here um this the painting right in front of her with her with her legs wide open you've got this sort of the cross between the machine and the erotic and it's this in this very sort of in your face way and um obviously my take is uh while I believe that it was certainly important that she was reading Simone de Beauvoir at the moment right before that she was making this I think it's also important for people to remember that she had just seen the Duchamp show and it probably just been familiarizing herself with Picabia through at Simon at the time and the combination of the erotic and um and the body here I think clearly there's more to be unpacked in terms of the relationship to those two particular receptions that she had in in Europe which at the time you have to remember that Duchamp's ready-mades had never been seen in this country at least not not in the not in the complete manner that they were shown at this show that she saw in Germany which Tom Doyle was in I mean the Duchamp way was clearly breaking but she had it she had a chance to see all these works that it just had not no one else over in here was seeing in that quantity um so uh with that I will pass the torch focus in my talk on dimensions of gender in the work from this period which was a really intense working through not only of abstract expressionism and Hess's history and training as a painter but also negotiations with her marriage the reading of Simone de Beauvoir lots of issues that I think really importantly bring out the the substance of the work that she made between 1964 and 1965 I'll leave this up for a second just because it reminds us of the extent to which she identifies these works with her body um you know in a very lewd kind of comical way of placing and ring around Rosie which is placed between her legs if you've ever seen it if you see it from the side it's actually a maybe a four inch perturbrance it's very phallic it's very comical it was the first of the reliefs that she started making in 1965 and it was named after a pregnant friend so it embroidered a great deal of associations both in terms of of gender politics femininity pregnancy dada and so forth so I think it's just an extraordinary image to have and of course the performing of gender in a way that must have she must have anticipated would be seen as somewhat in your face somewhat absurd in the context of the you know all the all the men that she was exhibiting around um perhaps a little bit like Rose Sellaby and Duchamp so this is the first image that I brought this is one of the uh what I really will focus on today are the mechanical drawings that she created starting in 1964 which I see as containing a lot of a lot important associations regarding gender um the mechanical drawings initially were a process of what she hoped would be returning to painting she became very very frustrated with painting when she arrived in Germany in the late summer of 1964 she really strongly self-identified as an abstract expressionist painter which I think in itself is significant of a young woman artist saying my heroes are Willem de Kooning and Arshel Gorky and I'm going to um she was very ambitious and in some sense it seems very significant that she would identify herself in that mode not many women did um the the drawings initially came out of a an attempt to return to painting she was very frustrated with the her abstract expressionist process her paintings in the abax mode were were very large scale and she just didn't seem to be able to return to the kind of ambitious large scale abstractions she'd been doing in 1962 and 1963 in New York some of the early what we call mechanical drawings what she referred to as mechanical drawings actually involve collage and they involve her sort of cannibalizing her own paintings as you can see here cutting them up and reconfiguring that which I think is very telling um suggesting a kind of documenting in a sense her frustration with painting at this critical stage ultimately of course she she moves on to sculpture these these facilitated facilitated transition to three dimensions rather than back into two-dimensional compositions and that's also suggested by the collage the kind of building up in the more kind of transitory elements of these um of these compositions another thing I want to really focus draw attention to is the affinity with Duchamp and Bacavia which Todd already did for us quite nicely but I would mention also that the drawings that she saw the work that she saw of Duchamp's in addition to the ready-made's included a suite of preparatory drawings for the large glass which I think is important she also at Yale would have been very familiar with Bacavia's work through the Société Aminine collection that was housed at Yale so I think that she's looking to these two paradigms of of Dada that in particular Duchamp and Bacavia were fascinated by this sense of the kind of objectification of the body the transformation of the body into the machinery of industry in a sense often a spoof of the commodity producing machinery of industry with these machines that that break down in malfunction and are absurd so I think that that is a very significant touchstone for the emergence of the mechanical drawings the very fact that she calls the mechanical drawings suggests an alignment with Bacavia and who refer to his drawings as it doesn't meant it a mechanics mechanical drawings Bacavia's drawings were specifically female subjects often one of the better known ones was a daughter born without a mother or a universal prostitution and both of these the drawings with those titles are actually machines so I think that this sense of kind of merging or layering this notion of female reproductive organs or sex the sexual functions with machines is really kind of at the core of these mechanical drawings they they she worked through a number of different styles of mechanical drawings in 1964 and 1965 some of them they become very bizarre some like the one that we looked at before kind of instructional they have they seem like diagrams they have arrows they suggest perhaps machine drawings or other mechanical even medical drawings and they become more and more I would say bodily they seem to suggest organs more directly rather than machines another exhibition that she saw in 1964 in Essen was a great what she called a great drawing a great exhibition of drawings by Arshel Gorky and I think that Gorky's drawings the ways in which he's able to create an abstraction that limbs the body that strongly suggests the body while remaining abstract is another touchstone for her something that she's working with this kind of how can I address the body but also not be explicit be absurd be nonsensical which were significant concepts for her by 1965 she the drawings become more sort of clear and confident she describes drawings such as the one that you see here as a third stage of drawings clean clear but crazy like machine forms larger bolder articulately described so it's weird they become real nonsense these drawings from 1965 are very clean outlines that seem to describe organic forms often sacks or tubes with fleshy folds increases or machine derived devices comprised of interconnected parts the confident rendering of detail achieves a kind of authoritative presentation calling to mind medical diagrams of the body's internal systems or technical drawings or mechanical systems talking to Tom Doyle he recalls this kind of watershed moment saying they got very sexy mechanical yet they're organic and he said the mechanical drawings were a real breakthrough there was this sense of confidence she got out of them she really had something she had found herself at this moment he recalled to me I'd like to also spend a minute talking about the relationship between these machine drawings and her reading of Simone de Beauvoir's second sex which was exactly contemporaneous and there's some wonderful juxtapositions in her journals in which she quotes Simone de Beauvoir and then talks about her drawings in a very fluid manner one just kind of runs into the next so let me read you some of these passages from her journals in which she creates this direct connection between Simone de Beauvoir's concepts of imminence and transcendence and the machine drawings that we're looking at here a journal entry from November 19th 1964 repudiates the ambivalence of the earlier painterly collage technique quote if crazy forms do them outright strong clear no more haze has continues on to note quote Simone de Beauvoir writes woman is object has been made to feel this from first experiences of awareness she has always been made for this role it must be a conscious determined act to change this and quote a few days later on November 22nd Beauvoir comes up again in Hess's journals she writes quote transcendence to arise above beyond into another space imminence is inevitability she gives us the page number 291 from second sex and then quotes Beauvoir again in boldly setting out toward ends one risks disappointments but one also paints unhoped for results caution condemns to mediocrity it's the same with my drawings she writes and then goes on again to quote de Beauvoir what woman essentially lacks today for doing great things is forgetfulness of herself but to forget oneself is first of all it is first of all necessary to be assured that now and for the future one has found oneself and she underlines the last part I'd like to propose that Beauvoir's notions of imminence and transcendence were quite resonant for Hess as concepts that could be enacted through her art a persistent theme in Hess's pre-sculptural work and writings is the legitimacy of her participation within the modernist tradition particularly abstract expressionism the status of her paintings in relation to abax as valid artistic achievement as mature or transcendent in the parlance of Beauvoir versus its imminence a hopelessly embodied female expression limited to the personal and particular the mechanical drawings it seems to me determinately eschewed caution and claimed a bold new direction for her art Hess's notes define transcendence as forgetfulness of oneself the ability to focus on abstractions or another space life beyond self-consciousness insecurity and frustration that has linked to the politics of gender within her marriage and her identity as an artist also at great length in her journals a little bit more conducts for the drawing some of this so of the drawings that some of this has already been covered so I'll be brief at this point but Doyle has described to many people the extent to which Hess is drawing from the machinery of the factory that they're working in and so so this is another significant way to actually flesh out in just a moment but I'd like to also include a quote here from from solid wit Hess wrote to him describing this process of drawings and he tells her tells her to let go of her insecurities he says stop it and just do do more do more nonsense called more crazy more machines more breasts more penises cunts whatever make them a bound with nonsense but taking a look at this drawing here you can see the kind of persistence of this sort of gear wheel shape and we see that over and over again in these mechanical drawings and that has actually been drawn quite directly from the shape factory my next slide here you can see the machinery here in the factory from this early 20th century promotional brochure and the you can imagine the the gear wheels collecting in her studio and that of Tom Doyle and a lot of the drawings look almost as if they're they're sketches of these mechanical contractions of the wool washing machines and the vending machines this is Doyle in his studio and he described to me creating a large collection of the detritus from the factory that both he would work he would work from and even has would work from and so here he is surrounded by the the detritus and he said that they worked actually with common materials and both collect and create a kind of store that they would draw from in their work it's also notable I think that they were working almost collaboratively at this time he was helping her construct the reliefs that we've seen and in fact some of them were she used the same paints the same enamels that he was using to paint his sculptures at the time that you can see here they were borrowing and interchanging materials she'd also use a lot of what he called fall-offs wood lathe pieces that he had discarded for his own work she would attach to her own reliefs the relief H and H that we saw that's actually of the yellow one if you'll recall that Doyle told me that that was H and H because it was half hers half his it includes a piece from his sculpture and it also refers to the brand of piped tobacco that he was smoking so they the reliefs have a very richly embroidered autobiographical significance as well to go back just to the reliefs to conclude by drawing a couple more connections between the machine drawings and the reliefs here's has in this wonderful pose photograph taken by Madan Fritisha for the brochure for her solo exhibition in Dusseldorf in 1965 again of directly aligning even the contours of her body with the reliefs the reliefs have this kind of these swelling surfaces and the relief in particular here on the left legs of a walking ball has a very direct relationship to many of the machine drawings and what I think is so interesting is that she actually works out the subcutaneous regions of these reliefs in the drawings here's legs of a walking ball again and you can see this kind of gently swelling surface you might think of the external exterior of the relief almost as kind of makeup these pastel tones and the very painstakingly layered kind of brocade that seem to suggest a kind of adornment or decoration but there are a suite of drawings that relate to what perhaps happens underneath the surface which I think is kind of fascinating and many of the machine drawings have these interrelated parts that recur again the gear wheel the kind of strange almost sort of mouth like form the lower left occurs again and again this is another drawing that we might relate to legs of a walking ball and so they depict this kind of absurd malfunctioning sexuality a kind of in a sense refusal of normative definition sense as a normative female identity and here's one that I've shown already in which you can see again the sort of mouth like form so a whole host of these recurring sort of evolving forms that often would get cut out and moved around and used almost like a surrealist exquisite corpse to create new bodies new kinds of nonsensical body machines and finally just one last drawing to show the although we know legs of a walking ball as a relief that really has a strong emphasis on on surface it was something that she had thought out in terms of its depth its internal systems as well so so I'll stop there thank you I'm so pleased to be here and so grateful for this institution that Elizabeth Sackler has made am I being heard raise a hand back there okay I have maybe too much to say when I was invited a few weeks ago I did not know that my knee was about to fall apart that when I read over my 20 years of notes about Eva that they would seem to me enigmatic obscure and promising but if I'd been my own dissertation advisor I would have said give up but I also I also did not know and here I'm so moved I did not know that another generation had come along and it's represented if I cry don't worry about that and it's represented in this in this book I can't tell you how thrilled I am to hear these voices and while we may have things to talk about someday nevertheless I'm so happy that these young people are carrying ideas images and experiences of Eva's work into the future I want to begin with this room and then I'll explain I'll explain why in this room we have Eva's sister whose son and grandchildren I met in London at Tate at Tate modern at Tate modern I thought I'll go look at the show one last time you can't say goodbye to art but I thought I'll never see them again and I'll have a moment alone and as I walked through I turned a corner and there was a Elizabeth Sussman standing weeping in this room we have an assistant to Saul Lewitt who's sitting here and I'll introduce him later we have Joan and Ruben Barron who written a brilliant brilliant essay I don't know if it's ever published on Eva and Samuel Beckett and you can see at a glance that through Beckett you can get some words some concepts that would apply to apply to Eva we have also in this room Eva certainly is a tragic figure and I'll talk to Todd sometime about the dimensions of that and we have in the room also a great tragic painter Barbara Freedman whose alliance with Eva would be spiritual entirely but not the less real for that my point is that in this room now with you with these marvelous people there's a mood and atmosphere of feeling there's no way to preserve that when we go on and when you tell about this later and I hope you'll be kind you'll say well something was something in the air there was a presence there was an immediacy something in the moment but I've lost it I'm using that to point back toward experiences with Eva maybe 15 years ago I was sitting talking with a friend about Eva and I said of all the people in my life who have died Eva is the one who has not receded I said she's as close as this and put my arm out Naomi Spector was standing nearby and heard me she walked toward me and she said no bill she's closer than that and that remains for me a problem not a difficulty or any just it remains evidence I should say not a problem it remains evidence of equality which I'm still trying to find words for that Eva had an immediacy and a presence that she did things to events which only Eva could have done I'll back up for a moment on our histories we were at the same time I didn't meet her there we were in the same rooms as we established later because the crits that were held by Joseph Albers were open to the public and I attended those and sat silently and overwhelmed in one spring at the end of the term a friend of mine at Yale driving to on the Merritt Parkway picked up a hitchhiker a woman in a dress on the Merritt Parkway hitchhiking and of course the hitchhiker was Eva Hess and that was in the spring and then in the autumn she turned up in our lives in the art world I have no particular memories of that except that when my wife and I had twin daughters she was fascinated by that that a woman artist could have twin daughters the domesticity that life went on I think I better hit a swig of this we knew Tom Doyle we knew Tom before he and Eva were married I feel like I almost should come to his defense but I think there's a very reasonable understanding of him he was an American guy extraordinarily sensitive American guy I thought quite brilliant not a superstar we did not have of course Walker terms like that in those days yes it certainly was but I'll say in relation to that but there wasn't one what wasn't one gallery it was like a university in the sense that you would you get one gallery and another and there seemed to be a conversation going on among artists they may not have been speaking but a smithson show seemed to answer or to speak to a show by Andre or Sarah or somebody or somebody else there was a feeling maybe it's like I'm saying the atmosphere in this room there was a feeling of of this conversation going on among the artists among the works of among the works of art anyway it was you're fine with your super don't get hung up on on a superstar um sorry about that um I'll come back to in 62 we had the twins Eva was such a presence in our house that there's still a corner of a room when I can't look at that without I feel Eva in that present there and in terms of her demeanor and understanding Eva what was extraordinary about her is that I knew a lot of funny people I knew several funny Jewish women and Eva was as funny as any of them but different and different in the sense that while she was petite she was about five one as she talked and there would be people surrounding her and as she talked and became funnier and funnier and as she seemed to become larger that it should have a sense of a tiny person as she seemed to become larger there was an expansion of herself so that you saw the comedy in the interface but you saw also within that the somberness underneath it she did not know and I witnessed this she did not know what her audience was seeing she did not know what she was showing inescapably uh the sorrow was there but and this is an important point in terms of understanding her in relation to tragedy if any Cedric entered a party that meant hell you don't have to be yourself you can be anybody you want to be just drop this authenticity crap forget Simone de Beauvoir and have fun if Freddy her co-entered a party that meant think about sex hold your stomach in and preen if Eva entered a party there was a sense of now we will make an effort to be happy I'm not sure these words are adequate but she resolved on happiness and we were only able to share in that participate in that so that any sadness and the sorrows were there were not part of her to be you know she'd not use those she didn't use her personal history in any way among her among her friends we knew very little about it but we of course we knew the large dimensions of it when it came around to going to Germany and no one has mentioned I would hope to hear from someone or any of you on the theme language I never understood the degree to which this woman who had aged two and a half or so had had to shift from learning German to also learning English the offense the wound to the mouth at that time has to have been severe to learn another language I don't know the degree to which she spoke German with her family I do think that she was that Tom was invited to Germany because Tom had a Jewish wife it was important that Tom why do you nod your head what Tom was invited on the basis of his being a star not Tommy star as the card notes in her own book that Eva the Hesse was just thrown in as a lag net she was not she was not part of the equation at all she was she was just Tom's she was Tom's wife that's what she was that's what the part says that she was in her book so she she just got thrown in on the deal she ended up ended up being the great artist but at the time she was just Tom's wife you were saying that and I'm saying something else I'm sorry you asked me I appreciate that I appreciate that I knew we knew Robert Ryman and Lucy I thought extremely well and when I when I talked with Bob a few years ago he had no recollection so maybe back to that point I think that there's a factor that must be taken into account although I don't know how we find the evidence the factor is the Germanness of Eva Hesse a German Jewish woman at a time the war has not been over that long and Jews are very welcome in Germany for many many reasons I'm not diminishing anything I don't put anything down Tom was certainly an extremely important artist important friend in my family but from our point of view within the group of the people I knew there weren't stars there were many many people there was a huge constellation but there was no one star it didn't work like that at all I'm sorry I have to have so what I'm questioning I don't know any fact is did Eva speak German in Germany if she did that made a huge difference I think it's a major fact of her experience there that she was Jewish at a time when Germans wanted Jews to visit and I know that from other experience there's a story which I'm going to tell as an allegory it is that Eva wanted to see the apartment her family had lived in she did not remember that apartment but there she is brilliant young woman who by the way studied mechanical drawing in high school and so if you want the background of the mechanical drawings there it is she had such training in Germany she's imagining not remembering but imagining fantasizing wishful thinking hopes which made me false hopes always but hopes to experience the apartment that her family had lived in so that if you imagine a door where's the door if you imagine an opaque door the imagination can go through that door read Francis Paul's the imagination can go through the door the materiality of the door does not matter when she comes to the apartment what she wants to see she's hasn't seen it since she was two and a half or so and she asks to be admitted so she can see where her family had lived she's turned away she's not allowed to enter to see the place which she has imagined for me in my allegory she approaches that door a woman who's becoming an artist a girl who's becoming an artist I really can almost say and I think that she is turned away and that she turns away as an artist as an artist who has learned to renounce illusions aesthetic illusions as well as deceptive illusions I don't differentiate delusions from illusions in the context like this I can give you another kind of little allegory by me and it depends upon language that is in English we say a screen a projection screen on which there's an illusion of a movie illusions of movement that's one kind of screen those are false illusions they're misleading though and taking that and then keeping the word screen this won't work in French moving over to her in a factory there's a screen a metal screen and she takes that material metal screen and she puts cords through it with plaster and there's no illusion involved with that with that process and what she comes out with is not seen in the same way that a paint that an oil painting is seen what she's done even though there will be an aesthetic illusion of wholeness she scratches the surface of that illusion with the materiality and so for me her sojourn in Germany is a constant critique of false illusions misleading illusions and those sadly include the illusions of romantic love and of marriage with with Tom Doyle not enough can be said he was a marvelous person that is as you all must know it's different from being a great husband it's a different a different category can we put on could you put on something here and then I'm not going to keep I want to hear what people have to say so I'll chop it shut up okay we're after the I'll speed up a bit here when Eva came back she was no longer with with Tom Tom around New Year's of 1965 my wife and I encouraged her we had a one wonderful friend he's alive and well in California who was having an opening at pace and we told her to go to that opening and she went and at that opening she met Michael Todd Michael was just back from Europe where he had a wonderful show but the way things were he just nothing sold nothing happened he just left the art he left and he left the show and came back to the America Mike had I won't say I didn't have to put this tactfully he came out of a religious background which left him with some shame and guilt about about sex and so he would be able to say to a young woman oh I can't be a very good lover I'm suffering such shame and such guilt and young women were volunteered to help him overcome shame and guilt I hope that doesn't sound too cheap on my part it was not on his part and we see my in this photograph I won't describe everybody in the photograph what happened in about March 1966 is that Peter huge are the photographer invited friends to bring some friend other friends young geniuses and they would all get together to make to contrive to devise an historic photograph the kind of those great photographs from the surrealists in the 1920s of course so and so they gathered now in the photograph and of course everybody in the photograph is a long long story and the photograph changed my life which I'm hoping I won't get into because I get interviewed all the time about a period I was not part of the art world I was on the margins of it but I'm alive I get I get interviewed I'm embarrassed because I sounds like I'm claiming position I did not have I did not seek it I was teaching medieval literature at Queen's College I was bringing up three children I was caring for a wife I had a wife so that I'm not sure where I was on that the photograph I've made a kind of moratorium it's 50 years ago okay I'll tell anything but and this is not quite 50 years but I'm very close to that I'll just tell you the power of photographs the photograph changed my life the photograph does not include my wife the photograph brought an end to my to my marriage so this is not trivial and none of these people in the photograph is trivial now the only person in the photograph who is pressing her weight on another person is Eva Hess she's sitting on the lap of Mike Todd her hands are not touching his hands her feet her weight is on him her she's balancing herself with her foot it's hard to see what you can see here and I submitted this to my son as an architect and he went over the dynamics of it she's a little bit cantilevered not and that term is huge because if you want to understand Tom Dorrell you'll understand that he worked with cantilevers and that he cantilevered a personality which I'm not going to explain here but I'll give you my email here's Eva then sitting the only one who has brought herself her body to bear upon the life of another of another person there are many interrelations among these people can we do another and again the blacks and the grays did not don't sort but you can you can sort of see this incredibly beautiful woman and there's Mike with his son he cracks me up with his sunglasses we'll go on to the next one now Eva has moved and her movement there are many of these photographs I have only a few her movement is now toward the floor I've talked about illusions if you look around this room I don't trust these walls if you want to know the ceiling could give in and that screen is entirely unreliable I don't know what's going on back there where's my foundation for my experience in this room well finally they're not going to take the floor away from me I don't I don't think anyway what I'm saying is that as Eva went through her critique of illusions the floor survived those criticisms and those were sharp and so here she is still she and Mike are together their hands are not touching other people are touching hands across other relationships now can you go on what sorry I hit the nerve I'm sorry her presence is just beyond no I have to finish with this I know I know your time I'll do the I'll go quick apologize for feeling this photograph is a lot of my life is in this photograph here my point immediately is here is Eva with the man Mike Todd their hands don't touch that for me is very significant I have a whole essay about that in 20th in 1993 in art space but where is she she's on the floor now if you look at the whole group of people there it could have been a rectangle that is that as they've assembled but as it turns out the way the people have gathered it's not a Euclidean rectangle it's an Eva Hess rectangle and what Eva has done is so typical Eva and then I'll you listen to other people please I hope when Eva entered a group and I witnessed these things I watched people all when she entered a group I may tell you something in discreet when she entered a group she wanted to be within that group she wanted to be accepted but if the group open and closed over her she wanted to get the hell out of there as quick as she could as quick as she could and so she did not want to be excluded but she wanted to be included only on her own terms and so with any system she took herself to the edge of the system where she was juxtaposed to another system Elizabeth's looking at her watch that's her job okay I hope I stated that clearly because it applies to the language when she goes into titles of words which we can understand in English but they're not English words she was asking me constantly I was a little bit of a of a Wikipedia and she would say okay what's solipsism and I would explain my version of something else and again and again she wanted a word clarified she seemed to feel at the edge of the English language she didn't make outright errors but sometimes when she was tired sometimes there were German locutions I never knew where those came from I never asked here my point is the floor that Eva has has come to rest she's not resting on Mike as a person she's Eva there and with one more minute I communicated with Mike it was live and well in California and asked him about Eva and he wrote to me we met on 57th street in New York during an exhibit of my work at the pace gallery she introduced she introduced herself to me and complimented me on the work she seemed really drawn to it as no one else was she invited me to her studio to see her work I was dumbstruck by the simplicity but full sexuality of it I immediately began courting her that's Mike I immediately began courting her sorrow and tragic women were always appealing to me sorrow and tragic women were always appealing to me and she had depths of sorrow that could not be plumbed I hope to save her from sorrow very naive of me she introduced me to Sol Whit who was also obviously madly in love with her I read that passage in London with Sol Whit sitting a few seats away to read who was madly mad obviously madly in love with her and so so graciously with such poise and you felt the whole generous spirit of Sol Whit in that in the way in his response to that she introduced me to Sol Whit who was obviously madly in love with her at this time Eva was putting a long bandage on a large frame in her studio it was like a winding cloth on the mum on the mummy of minimalism I had the feeling that she was rejecting the cold sterility of the minimalism system she was attracted to the clarity and simplicity of the minimalist thought thoughts but she could not deny her emotions and sexuality which were so powerful her grief was ultimately more than I could bear her grief was ultimately more than I could bear and I stopped seeing her I ran into her many years later at the Museum of Modern Art after one of her operations for a brain tumor it was heartbreaking to see her with that of hoeing the voice of Mike survives my reading of it I returned to Elizabeth and hope that you'll have some participation well thank you all I'm torn now about whether you have pressing questions for one another because you have never sat on the stage just been in the same book and I'd also like to have time to open this to the audience so does anyone want very much to answer one of the other speakers Tom looking at you well that was very moving and I certainly don't want did not want to underestimate the the pain or the trauma that Eva Hesse might have had or certainly had during her life my point in my essay was simply that the traumatographers have had their day in the sun and that there are other stories to tell as well so I don't think you ever meant to wipe one out with another I don't think I ever did but I felt the need to to answer to that suggestion actually that it's it was very interesting to be able to be an outsider who has worked on other artists and their early careers my my dissertation was on Ken Nolan when I was in graduate school and I really took a look at Hesse's work from 65 and wanted to try and understand why she was doing what she was doing not just from the art historical influences but but also what kinds of things were going on and it's great when you have a moment to go back to a formal analysis because it does give you a sense of different systems that she was already developing a sense of seriality that maybe you didn't see so much in the work before that was more abstract expressionist and also what can happen when somebody is perhaps in a in a situation where there is a lot of cognitive dissonance where she does try to go into the studio and think differently but also try to quell certain things or allow those ideas to well up in her in different ways and so to look at 65 and to take some lessons from that year and then see what she does does when she when she immediately comes back in 66 is just a dramatic difference so spending a bit more time even on the formal aspects of that work and staying try to sort of void out some of the others gives you a different way of seeing Hesse and that's sometimes a good thing to do to just try and step back and look at the work. Well I think it's important to not to resist the temptation to constantly conflate her art with her life and to by constantly looking at her art through the lens of her having been sick I think does not do justice to her genius as an artist and to an artist an artist of lucid intent and I think when you look at her art as a as the symptom of her illness then it takes away I think it takes away from her genius as an artist. Things about being able to hone in on this year is that she was well she was to be sure suffering the aftermath of trauma for upbringing she wasn't sick she was she was vibrant and and there wasn't you know we can try to I think separate this out from the tragic history to follow so I do think it's important not to look at it as everything is a kind of evolution inevitably. But also this the point of being 1965 just sort of why we're here also it was such an extraordinary moment when abstract expression is that where pop you know pop was rising and and happenings and and the abstract expressionists were falling away and everything was changing and an artist like Tom Doyle or Eva Hesse you know they had to they quickly they had all grown up and art school had grown up making art in the abstract expression but people were had to sort of quickly choose sides and sort of figure out which way you know their their careers were going to go and I don't mean that just in terms of a career but in terms of their ideas and I think focusing in 1965 in Europe was I think the time was very different than it is now um just in the the the art that was going on in Europe in 1965 was very different from the art that was available now whereas now it's one world all the time everyone knows what's going on everywhere whereas in Europe but these things there's a lot of those artists there were many of you some of those Europeans were shown at Dwan and where you could have seen some of them some of the Castelli but a lot of them were not you couldn't see a lot it was going on she had a unique vantage on to uh both this the the historical avant-garde through the lens of historic through dot through data and surrealism whether it was meeting Merritt Oppenheim or whether it was encountering Marcel Duchamp or Peccabia or talking with Harold Zeeman about the legacy 20th century avant-garde those were the experiences that American artists did not have and um that moment being 1965 is really kind of I think in order to understand how she got to where she was in 66 and it sounds like the work you might have been describing there that that Michael Todd was describing was hang up because that that word was made in January 1966 so that was right when she got back that work didn't just come out of nowhere she didn't just all of a sudden start making sculpture uh you know because she's in America it didn't just come because she was talking with uh Saul Lewin or with you know with Mel Botner it came out of her experiences in Germany and also so you know a lot more needs to be focused a lot more attention needs to well I think that um obviously the import of your essays has been um to detach Hessa from a whole sort of generations of people that have that have been um you know attached her to the group of minimalists that she hung out with when she came home. Salawit's probably the most important of all of them um to her um and so you've kind of taken her away from the part and given her back to Doyle given her back to Europe taken her away from the sort of tragic history of her life which long precedes her illness I must say um and so I think that's that's very good restructuring but however of course obviously a restructuring one way doesn't prove truth and disprove everything else that we have to say that work however I want to just point out uh if we're talking about the sort of Europeanization of this moment with Eva Hesse that it's kind of unfair to say that she's the only one who has that experience because after all she is brought to Europe or this connection is made for her by Al Held. Al Held is first of all a Jewish artist to bring bring us back to what Bill Wilson has to say he's also strongly connected with Europe and Switzerland through the figure of Saint Francis and he's a very good friend of Hesse and the Doyles and so she was she was more intern she was more international and then the second thing I wanted to bring up about this your Europeanization that I find a little curious is that no one's mentioned voice um at all and there's been so much made in Europe of the possible connections the importance of voice because this is the moment of voice this I mean voice is hugely important it's more important than Duchamp in retrospect from I mean it from our perspective that she becomes a Duchampian is terrific and interesting and puts her closer even to John's than we thought and so on but I mean she's there in Europe when voice is emerging and in addition to that when she comes back and Tom Doyle is out of her life as Bill has pointed out she comes into this circle of the through mic Todd of people who have known voice and that is in this picture Paul Tech who has been in and out of Europe many times and is Eva's very close friend at this moment for several years afterwards so to I think yes we you've disengaged her from them from the exclusive minimalist and is great and but on the other hand it's it's the whole picture is enormously complicated and absolutely yeah absolutely but they're it's curious I mean Tom Doyle speculates that that voice was an influence for her uh in in I think it's in La part but I could find no proof anywhere in all of the literature that I read and I read a lot of it uh that she met voice or that she had even had any comment about it I think actually there is proof now there's an interesting documentary team that's working on HESA and they've actually established this now well I mean when you read the date books she also had contact with hundreds of people so I mean that it would surprise me that she did not run I mean she was very close to Dusseldorf so it would be hard to not be aware of Joseph Boyce but on the other hand how do you measure what what what that impact would be I mean it would it would also be interesting to look at somebody like Valter Valter Valter Valter no Franz Ehrhoff Valter yes because because also some people caught into some kinds of work and other people caught into other kinds of work and perhaps that's a at least she certainly we know she she knew them she was close with Hans Hecker who's in Kettwig at the time and Kett he was associated with zero group and so he was she probably would have known known Ucker and and uh Pina and Mack from from being there and with that proximity but uh yeah I I also couldn't I mean I I don't I don't know whether their friendship goes back to to Europe or whether with Valter or whether it goes back to after coming back to New York I think that remains work needs to be done in terms of unpacking but that's that's an artist that Barry Rosen spoke with me about and his show New Museum was it MoMA MoMA yeah sorry that um you know just to the I think what's really great about looking at 65 and is that there is a lot to be done in that era and but what you want to ask yourself is how how does this interweave with the art that then came after it and so to establish that fuller picture even when it comes to some of the the iconography of the work being able to really unpack that as as well and see how it all flows together um Barry also said another interesting thing to me a few a little while go out there you hope I don't mind you don't mind if I say this but he actually did speculate on the issue of uh how uh sort of how minimalist or how post minimalist Hessa really would want it wanted to be and it's an open I Barry maybe phrased it better than that but it wasn't interesting it was interesting question to ask I think it's the major question actually I think somebody will it's a very major question yeah and so I think that one answer comes to mind just recently something that I read about repetition 19 where Hessa was asked whether that's the that's the murk the scenes you've modern art and the fighter glass and one of one of the pieces is bent they're not all the same and she's asked oh are you you know are you are you making are you riffing on making fun of minimalists you know with that with this work and she says if anything I'm punning on you know I'm punning on myself so I mean of course she leaves the mystery open as to what what the real answer is and I think I think the probably who knows what the real answer is but so as to say everyone in Germany all of those artists were discussing a manual count and ideas of purpose in art purposefulness purposelessness and evo takes up the concept of purpose and I won't explore that now I'm mentioning that as part of the background anyone who read Simone Durovar was in touch with the with those themes and there was no way in 1965 to talk to a German artist who was not working over counts aesthetics that may seem too abstract and too far away but it's it's as obedient as this as this microphone when we go to repetition 19 there's so much meaning in the prime number but more as important for me afterwards even does repetition 19 there's material left over it has no purpose it's to be thrown away she takes that material which is produced from her own systems and she makes area she makes another sculpture out of that if you do that history of that sculpture you don't reach a foundation in the history of sculpture you don't reach anything there it is that is it's entirely if I may use one word constructivist in that she produces something you've never seen before out of material which she has constructed herself there's no idealism in this it's so close to some sentences in Wittgenstein whom I'm reading reading him he's better than I thought um when I finished with him anyway um and maybe that's enough about repetition 19 except the point there is that she learns to make out of her own processes out of her own system and whether minimalist or post-minimalist I have an incredible photocopy of Donald Judd and Linda and excuse me Lucy LePard had the conversation but we don't call this stuff and it's marvelous because they do not have a classification into which they could slide a work of art they don't want to call it they don't have the language and that for me is very important there was a period before anybody said pop art before anybody said minimal when you had to look at that peculiarly peculiarly individual work and study it from every possible angle and think it and think it all the way through later you could say oh that's pop art or that's post minimalist those serve other purposes but until we had that language we had the experience of the of the art and it's that experience of the art that Eva was after an immediacy and so that when she worked with she worked with accidents and she liked errors and what was wrong as she would say because we have no rules if something's wrong how do we respond to that if there's an accident we don't have any instructions for what to do after an accident and she saw it in her life in her art moments when there was no plan no system no rules of instruction the the response had to be improvised spontaneously in that in that moment we'll have a lifetime a lot a lot we'll talk about maybe we should talk about the kirsten do you yes i'm sorry kirsten well just briefly just going back to this question of to the extent to which has wants to be minimal or post minimal um i think that she a number of times sort of calls out solo it on the fact that well actually your work is not as sort of austere and systematic it's irrational it's fragile it's subjective and i really think that the roots and abstract expressionism of both both has said and louis and a host of other minimalists is something that should be explored because in some sense they're devising a process and aesthetic that is in opposition to almost a kind of reaction formation to abstract expressionism but still insist in in writings and in louis sentences on conceptual art on the kind of leaving room for subjectivity and irrationality so just think that there's they're very clear really two sides of the same coin in a sense and that minimalism is not really what we think it is and conceptual art likewise that it's become a kind of dogmatic sort of doctrinaire um sort of too too cleanly and precisely defined thanks so i think we have some time for a few questions i see some people um is there a microphone or anything oh yes here it comes so you're sitting right next to each other you don't have to decide that's jonah and baron ruben who are volunteers jonah and ruben baron sorry um thank you uh thanks for the kind words in the uh dr remand let let me just start out by saying that uh iva hesse was both wave in part we do not choose she was this and that so in all of her work she was a feminist in all of her work she was a tragic figure with personal issues but ultimately what becomes most important is her aesthetic evolution and what i see there is at the end the work becomes as we know progressively less formally minimal what it also becomes is part of another current that's occurring in mathematics and physics which is going on at that time which is the gradual emergence of chaos theory the gradual emergence of systems and emergent processes complex systems and for me the greatness of her late work has to do with the extent to which her work literally becomes depicting or allowing us to see systems so that the parts in these later works may be starting with uh repetition 19 you have to ask yourself what are the relations between these parts and when you get through looking at the work the parts are important but there's also an emergent whole and she is somewhat conscious of that there's some indication in the lapar volume of her understanding of relationship between order and chaos so i think that's a metaphor that's at least a metaphor uh which is an important way to look at her work it's clear to me that she that she was doing painting and drawing before she left and she came back and she was doing sculpture when she came back so it's very clear that that year was like sorbet i mean it cleared her palate or did something to enable her to make this transition to be to change dramatically from one kind of an artist to another in terms of the media that she used so my question is this i mean she was friendly with all all of these sculptors before she left wasn't she i mean you know the sculptors in her life do we do you think that's actually not that's not true many some of the minimalist she became like smiths and she met after she came back and others so she was not well entrenched within the minimalist in fact she was only casually connected to lapar before leaving for europe so those friendships my understanding bill would have a much better understanding this than my my sense is that she those those friendships were were built after she came back i mean obviously the width is obvious she was close but let me phrase my question to you all of you is whether or not you think or there's any evidence that she would have become a sculptor had she not gone to germany that year one thing that salouette told me just carry very bluntly is he said she understood that the art world had changed while she was in germany and that she had to become a sculptor because there was no room for painting anymore so there was that there are also interesting ways in which lucifer hard is writing in art international and sort of prescribing this new kind of sculpture that grows out of painting and so uh you know i certainly don't want to put too much emphasis on that kind of instrumentalist approach but there was a sense that it was no longer really possible to paint there there also is this sense oftentimes that women don't do sculpture and when you think about the women who did do sculpture whether it's a bantuku or daner whose husband david smith wouldn't let him her do sculpture when she was living with him there is a certain scent her taking over the materiality of creating sculpture is very very important as a her woman's gesture but i also i one of the interesting things that i keep thinking about when i look at that factory and i think about her work and the idea that cloth was produced there and women produce cloth and a lot of those drawings have stitching in it and they look like patterns and all sorts of things and then i look at some of the later work where it's very unstructured and it's cloth that makes that happen i make a leap that i'm not allowed to make art historically but certainly feel in my heart about what she's doing and so i i i don't know enough about kettwig underhör and what's really available to her there but i can't help it that those sail those pieces of cloth keep coming back in my head so it's all those things together about the material that i keep going back to those reliefs and what she's doing there is there another question he's still my heart there's one i can speak up christin i was wondering if you would talk a little bit more about your research on the drawings and their relationship to the reliefs because i thought that visually that was really exciting and interesting this notion that a lot more information or material is either physically or psychologically embedded in them in the release right like i can speak very briefly of one of the things that occurs to me is that she's we know that the reliefs have this bodily association through the way that she's posing with them but then she seems to imagine interior systems for them as well which i think is really interesting the i don't really want to speculate on the degree to which that reflects her own she sees that as portraiture in any sense but it does seem to me that there's this it draws attention to the dialectic between exterior decor surface addressing makeup she's also writing extensively to her friends uh ethyl and honing and um rosy goldman who bring red rosie is named after about the repetitive chores of housekeeping and all the you know just the usual sort of betty free down and kind of grind her friends are trying to get her to read the feminine mistake and she won't but um she's clearly caught up in the sense of domestic labor and there's this sense in which the reliefs the kind of labor they involve is very anti-heroic it's a really you know it's a craft it's a minor sort of labor that suggests women's work i think and so that that's sort of where my thinking has gone on it is that real emphasis on decor surface makeup and then by contrast these malfunctioning interior systems so i'm not comfortable reading it from a through a kind of biographical lens particularly although one easily could i think i tend to think instead that it's a meditation on on data and it's legacy and a kind of transference of these male tropes to the female body by a female artist which is very significant the idea that a woman artist is um taking over these kinds of representations that are typically done by a male artist of a female body she's representing femininity herself i think is quite important uh you know i i would just comment on that i think it's it's a very important gendered reading of that work i agree with you but can you say something about the fact that she's living in a factory that's in decline that's itself a state of chaos that this family fortune that's been in place for over 200 years or more is just going to rack and ruin and in front of her very eyes and that this is in some way everything you say but it's also a portrait of a of an economic system that's that's in decline and that's germany and what what does that mean to her do you see any of those kinds of questions i do a little bit i mean you could take it back to kirchvaters in this notion of kind of repurposing junk also um taking found materials and um transforming them into um sort of assemblages and objects with a new identity she was surrounded by piles and piles of string the the the cord that you see on the reliefs is also something that she scavenges from her midst so they were really about scavenging and of course that history the photographs we saw these were women uh working in the factory for the most part it was a very gendered division of labor the men did certain tasks the women did the weaving and the the washing so it isn't a portrait in a sense of that um of that environment and this economics i think we have to stop unfortunately thank you all and thank you very much this was really wonderful um thank you all uh i invite you to go up to the elizabeth they sat there center for feminist art and see worked by hand and you will see some very glorious quilts in wonderful dialogue with the dinner party it's really very exciting and uh we will be honoring uh julie taymore this year on june 13th with the saklar center first award so if you're interested in coming to that i'd like to invite you there thank you all very much thank you