Constantin Brancusi. The Newborn. 1915.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and

Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. 2007
ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

Marcel Duchamp. Bottlerack. 1961.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Jacqueline,
Paul, and Peter Matisse, in memory of their
mother, Alexina Duchamp, 1988. 2007
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London/Succession
Marcel Duchamp.

o+x

MIGNON NIXON
(age 3.5) X IS FOR X. He calls it a cross. He substitutes different letter names for the same marks. It
seems to mean writing in general. X is arbitrary but
not indifferent. X is the body repressed, represented, enjoyed. X is for ALLIGATORS X-ING XS.
X IS FOR A XENURUS HAVING AN X-RAY.
GOODNIGHT LITTLE X. XENOPHON XERXES
XEPHOSURA. GOODNIGHT LITTLE X.
(age 3.6) O IS FOR ORANGE. When he writes O he
says a round and an O. It seems to be set up in
opposition to X which is not round, not closed, not
orange and not eatable. O is for orifice, for pleasure
for fullness and forever not enough. O IS FOR ALLIGATORS ORDERING OATMEAL. O IS FOR AN
OPTICIAN GIVING AN EYE TEST TO AN OWL.
OLGA OPHELIA OWL. GOODNIGHT LITTLE O.
Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document,
Documentation VI, 197778

The part-object belongs to the psychoanalytic logic of the body and to the
manic repetition of the infantile drives. Seriality, conversely, corresponds to the
industrial logic of repetition encapsulated by the readymade. Or so we believe. Yet
the cleavage of the part-object and the readymade in modern art is contested from
the beginning, even in advance, through insistent combinations of the autoerotic
and the machinic, the primal and the multiple, the corporeal drive and the production system. In the early twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi and Marcel
Duchamp dwelled, almost obsessively, on a peculiar reciprocity between these two
trends, submitting the infantile part-object to serial repetition and, in a reversal of
this movement, placing the industrial object under the sway of the infantile drives.
Brancusis deep involvement with serialization is itself a version of industrial
method, Rosalind Krauss has notedeven if the object of that serialization is so
OCTOBER 119, Winter 2007, pp. 620. 2007 Mignon Nixon.

OCTOBER

often, as in The Newborn (1915),

the sensuous and vulnerable infantile body.1 Duchamps invention of
the readymade, meanwhile, is
bound up with the (auto)erotic
circuitry of the bachelor machine,
project ing the ser ial logic of
industrialization onto the body in
the grip of the drives. Still today,
the complex task of accounting
for a pattern of obsessive splitting
and coupling of o and x
the part- object and the readymade, repetition and seriality,
circular and sequential time
that is a defining characteristic of
twentieth-century art, remains
unfinished.
O, then, is for object in its
psychoanalytic sense of an object
of the drives. O is for the oscillat ion of Precision Opt ics in
Duchamps Rot ar y Demisphere
(1925). O is for originary orifice,
the eye-mouth-anus of the infantile blob in Louise Bourgeoiss
Amoeba (196365). X, meanwhile,
Louise Bourgeois. Amoeba. 196365. Collection of the artist,
is for the multiple, for extra and
courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. Photo Peter Moore.
excess, for Brancusis Princess X
(1916), that gleaming object o exhibited under the sign of seriality. X marks the
spot, the bulls eye, where the drives converge on the part-object. And so, over the
concentric rings of Jasper Johnss Target with Plaster Casts (1955) resides a row of
cast bodily fragments, part-objects in the grasp of serial reproduction.
Exponentially increasing the inventory of Brancusis and Duchamps combinations of the readymade and the part-object, Bourgeois and Johns, Yayoi Kusama
and Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and Robert Gober, among so many others, have
proposed permutations of this elastic theorem. In the late 1950s, Kusama, for
example, introduced the Infinity Nets, reticulated abstract patterns in which a unit

1.
Rosalind Krauss, 1927, in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Y ve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004),
p. 218. Krauss advances the argument for Brancusis involvement with the readymade in Passages in
Modern Sculpture (1977) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). See the editors note in this issue.

o+x

o is repeated ad infinitum over a rectangular field, the expanding cluster of rings

subject to the multiplicative logic of an endless splitting. And this x-drive of o painting became, in turn, the operative principle of Kusamas Accumulations,
art icles of furniture and clothing, object s of ser ial consumpt ion, densely
encrusted with soft phalli, lumpy protuberances fashioned by stuffing cloth sacs
with cotton batting. Kusama extended this sculptural aggregation of the partobject and the multiple, the body part and the commodity object, into the register
of industrial reproduction when, in the early 1960s, she began to exploit the
reproductive potential of photography, constructing photocollages in which her
accumulations were compressed into faux tableaux of impossibly congested space.
With room-sized installations such as Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963)
and Infinity Mirror RoomPhallis Field (1965), photography duly became the
instrument of a fully spatial mise en abyme. In collages and installations alike,

Yayoi Kusama. No. C.A.9. 1960.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Purchased with funds provided by the
Modern Contemporary Art Council,
Robert and Mary Looker, Robert H.
Halff, The Hillcrest Foundation, the
Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable
Foundation, Blake Byrne, Helen N.
Lewis and Marvin B. Meyer, Barry
and Julie Smooke, Bob Crewe,
Sharleen Cooper Cohen, and Robert
W. Conn. Photograph 2007
Museum Associates/LACMA.

10

OCTOBER

Kusama. Compulsion
Furniture (Accumulation).
ca. 1964. Courtesy the artist.

Kusama employed photography to produce an infinity-effect, a compulsive splitting in which the multiple, colonized by the part-object, came under the sway of
manic repetition, propelling o toward its endless now-mechanical reproduction.
Yet despite so many intersections of o and x, the psychic and social implications of their repeated crossing remain to be fully explored. One explanation for
this omission may be a discursive splitting. Psychoanalysis offers a theory of the partobject (elaborated most comprehensively in the writings of Melanie Klein) but,
until recently, has proposed no explicit theory of serialitywhich might lead one to
conclude that the serial and the psychic are in some way incompatible. Minimalism
and Conceptual art, by contrast, are seen to be underpinned by philosophical and
political theories of seriality and to deploy rigorous governing logics, as Mel
Bochner once wrote, that eschew subjectivity, or at least subjective aesthetic
choicewhich might again suggest that the serial and the psychic are at odds.2 Yet,
the evidence of art objects as part-objects, to borrow a phrase from Annette
Michelson, and serial art, to adopt one used by Bochner, is that the two trends not
only converge historically but are connected, even co-articulated, theoretically.3
The example of Eva Hesse offers a particularly clear case in point. The trends
o and x emerge in her work at precisely the same time, in November 1964. Living
temporarily in Germany, where she would produce her first sculptural works, Hesse
found herself pursuing two lines of thought in drawing, different just enough to
make her wonder where she was going as an artist.4 On the one hand, she was
2.
Mel Bochner, Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism (1967), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 100.
3.
Annette Michelson, Where Is Your Rupture? Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk, October 56
(Spring 1991), p. 48.
4.
Eva Hesse as quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (1976) (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 27.

o+x

11

Eva Hesse. Untitled. 1965.

The Estate of Eva Hesse.
Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

working on a series of fluent expository ink drawings of corporeal machines, bodily

plumbing, suggestive of infantile fantasies of the body, out of which her first,
brightly colored relief sculptures would soon be generated. On the other,
prompted in part by her friendship with the children of her host, the industrialist
Arnhard Scheidt, she experimented with alphabet and number drawings in which
elementary serial systems began to emerge as a structural principle. In midNovember, her notebook therefore records 3 drawings for children, alphabets
and then two days later another child drawing, numbers, and adult drawing
like childs.5 They are clear, direct, powerful, Hesse reflected. It set me off again
because they are different, just enough, to make me wonder where am I going, why,
and is there an idea, or too many different ones?6
5.
Eva Hesse Papers, Archives of American Art, datebook entries, November 14 and November 16,
1964. Hesse was an experienced childrens art teacher and would resume teaching upon her return to
New York in 1965. For a discussion of the dynamic interaction between Hesses rigorous pedagogy and
her drawing, see my Child Drawing, in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York:
Drawing Center; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 2756.
6.
Eva Hesse Papers, diary entry, November 16, 1964. Hesses alphabet and number pieces, suggested Lucy Lippard, may have been a conscious reference to Jasper Johnss number and alphabet
paintings or may simply have arisen from the childrens play (Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 27). These possibilities are equally plausible, and probably inseparable, given that Hesse followed Johnss work closely
and had been involved with childrens art since the mid-1950s. That Hesses alphabet and number
works were informed by Johnss investigation of those same serial systems must, it seems, be considered
in tandem with the evidence that Hesses experimentation with the part-object was conceived in dialogue with such works as Target with Plaster Casts.

12

OCTOBER

What the alphabet and number works were different from, but also connected to, was of course those lucid mechanomorphic diagramsclean, clear but
crazy like machines, as Hesse described them in a letter to her friend Sol
LeWittfrom which Hesse soon began to project a type of relief sculpture.7 Or, as
she also put it, with a distinctly Duchampian inflection, she began to fashion a
type of contraption, the first of which was Ringaround Arosie (1965), a work she
famously reported to LeWitt as a dumb thing which is three-dimensional . . . like
breast and penis.8 The contraptions and the corporeal conjugations they propose
recall the childs earliest fumbling attempts to make sense of the body, to grasp
the breast or to grapple with features of the body for which, as Lucy Lippard
judges some components of Hesses sculptures, there seems to be no reason.9
7.
8.
9.

Eva Hesse to Sol LeWitt, March 1965, as quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 34.
Ibid.
Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 42.

Hesse. Ringaround Arosie. 1965.

The Museum of Modern Art,
Fractional and Promised Gift of
Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.,
2005. The Estate of Eva Hesse.
Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

o+x

13

The part-object, as Jacqueline Rose has observed, inaugurates circular

rather than sequential time in psychoanalysis.10 In twentieth-century art, circular
time is figured not only in the bodily fragment but in the tautology of the pun,
the autoerotic circuitry of the bachelor machine, the cycle of endless consumption, and the concentricity of the mise en abyme, among other dizzying patterns.
The logic of art objects as part-objects is not, therefore, exclusively a matter of
the bodys reduction to so many rounded protuberances and hollows, so many
parts and holes. It is also a temporal mode, an order of repetition: oscillating, pulsating, the beat of the part-object is stubbornly resistant to Oedipal rhythms of
renunciation and progression.
Seriality, conversely, is a function of sequential time, but its temporality, too,
is outside the Oedipal register. Arising from sibling, or lateral, relations, seriality is
a psychical principle that finds its fullest expression in social experience, the psychoanalytic theorist Juliet Mitchell contends.11 Among a childs earliest social
discoveries, Mitchell observes, is its own position in the serial structure of the kinship group. The realization that one is subject to serialitythat one comprises a
single unit in a larger patternis, she contends, initially as traumatic as the loss
imposed on the subject by the order of sexual difference. (For the arrival, even
the fantasy, of a sibling threatens a childs sense of uniqueness and exclusive entitlement to parental love.) Heightened by the appearance of a host of sibling
surrogates in the form of cousins, playmates, and rivals, the anxiety of seriality,
however, also harbors a fear of death. For to be subject to seriality is not only to
accept ones place in a series of similar beings but is also to belong to a generation, and so to occupy a place in time. Alphabets and numbers are the serial
systems in which the psychic logic of seriality is written at the time of the childs
entry into the social world.
In twentieth-century art, repetition continually intersects with seriality, colludes or competes with it in resistance to Oedipal time, which is the time of
history. The part-object instigates a compulsive mode of repetition that is subsymbolic. Its quotient of resistance resides in its divergence from phallocentrism and
in the tenacity with which it grinds away at master narratives (such as the Oedipal
narrative of sexual difference), but perhaps especially in its ability to embody the
anxiety of aggression. The part-object is a constant reminder of the persistent
influence of the infantile drives. One danger of this o -trend toward fragmentation, repetition, and negativity, however, is the vicious circle of the drives
self-perpetuating defenses. This is where, in Mitchells schema, the x-factor of seriality can be usefully invoked. If you can symbolize . . . repetition or replication
into seriality, she writes, then youre not just going around in a huis clos.12
10.
Jacqueline Rose, Negativity in the Work of Melanie Klein, in Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics,
and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 163.
11.
Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
12.
Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon, A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell, October 113 (Summer
2005), p. 22.

14

OCTOBER

Hesse. Left: Untitled. 1967.

Facing page: Untitled.
1967. The LeWitt Collection,
Chester, Connecticut. The
Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser
& Wirth Zrich London.

As we have already seen, seriality is always already inscribed in the logic of

the part-object in modern artin the cast, the multiple, the photograph. Most
often, however, the reciprocity of the part-object and the readymade, far from
symbolizing the repetition of the object o into seriality, reinforces a subsymbolic
resistance to symbolizationto hierarchical, Oedipal lawbut also to the cultural conformity exacted by mass production. When the part-object exploits the
multiplicative power of serial reproduction in Kusamas work, for example, an
endless cycle of repetition and consumption ensues. Or, as Benjamin Buchloh
has observed of a series of drawings on graph paper Hesse would produce in
1967, in which a printed grid becomes the standardized repository of rows of delicately inked Os and Xs: Paradoxically, it is precisely from these seemingly
infinite repetitions of Os and Xs that an unexpectedly subversive force of utter
contingency emerges.13
13.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hesses Endgame: Facing the Diagram, in Eva Hesse Drawing, p. 149.

o+x

15

For Hesse, it has often been observed, seriality has a psychic basis. The serial attitude, as her friend Bochner explained in 1967, is an ethos of artistic
practice that radically excludes subjectivity in the usual sensesubjectivity as an
expression of personal feeling or taste. 14 Displacing the psyche as source, the
operative model for expressionist painting, the serial attitude instead represents
the psyche as system. Antisubjective in orientation, Bochners writings on seriality
nevertheless explicitly claim Hesse as an artist who used serial methodology
even if the demand that serial art be executed systematically, without adjustments
based on taste or chance, might initially seem to exclude an artist renowned for
her eye and her touch.15 Most critics have accepted Bochners description, characterizing Hesses art in terms of a serial methodology alleviated, or complicated, by
what Lippard has called personal tactile confrontations.16
14.
15.
16.

Mel Bochner, The Serial Attitude, Artforum 16, no. 4 (December 1967), pp. 2833.
Bochner, Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism, p. 100.
Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 192.

16

OCTOBER

Yet, despite a consistent emphasis on the dynamic interaction of the somatic

and the serial in Hesses art, criticism, including Lippards preeminent study, long
tended to conceive seriality alone as a productive logic. Writing in the 1970s, she
observed,
Whereas most expressionist artists with a nostalgia for the organic in
either texture or image are ideologically unwilling to accept an ordered
framework, or are unable to deal with its rigorous discipline, Hesse
intuited early that this approach would allay her inclinations toward a
private fetishism. Until 1965, her obsessive inner-directedness had
lacked a method of commensurate intensity.17
The implication of this statement is that one trend in Hesses art, the o principle
of art objects as part-objects, is disorganized and regressive, only becoming effective once subject to x, the rigorous methodology of seriality. Lippard allows that
when Hesse ultimately found her methodthe then much-abused notion of a
systemshe saw it for something as simple as it was: not a grandiose intellectual
construction but a graspable additive principle (she declares Hesse more interested in adding than subtracting).18 In retrospect, however, it seems possible to
understand the dynamic of Hesses art as conjoining two principles, o and x, to
arrive at an unexpectedly subversive force of utter contingency.
In most account s of post war art that are in any degree alert to what
Michelson portrays as a dominant trend toward this representation . . . of what is
in Kleinian theory termed the part-object, the discursive splitting of the partobject and seriality is reinforced by a historical divide: a mode of artistic
production typically called Neo-Dada, emerging in the mid-1950s, is superseded
by Minimalism, or serial art, a decade or so later.19 The reception of Hesses work
has traditionally subscribed to this view, conceiving the artists exceptional development as an accelerated, intensive, and concentrated movement from art objects as
part objects to serial art and beyond it to the condition of extreme contingency
in her final works. Writing in the catalog of the most recent Hesse exhibition,
Y ve-Alain Bois, for example, divides the artists production into a part-object
phase, encompassing works produced from 1965 to 1966; a late style, inaugurated, in this account, with Metronomic Irregularity II in 1966; and a more advanced
late phase, designating the final two years of her work, from 1968 to 1970.20 For
Bois, if repetition, one of Hesses major formal devices, was initially linked to this
logic [that of the part-object], it is also what prompted her to move away from it
(away from the literal level) in her later work.21 It is the de-localization of the
17.
Ibid., p. 188.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Michelson, Where Is Your Rupture?, p. 48.
20.
Y ve-Alain Bois, Dumb, in Eva Hesse Sculpture, ed. Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman (New
York: Jewish Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 21.
21.
Ibid.

o+x

17

part-object (penis, breast, testicles) by its sheer serial (that is, Minimalist) multiplication that by this account sets up Hesses definitive swerve from o to x, from
repetition to seriality and from the infantile body of the drives to its serial substitute.22 If, however, the part-object and seriality can be grasped as two psychical
logicstwo modes, two registers, two ordersof psychic existence that twentiethcentury artists have habitually seemed compelled to combine, then it might seem
that Hesses problem, upon her return to New York from Germany, was to invent a
system of o + x in Minimalist terms. For Minimalism, arising from the logic of the
readymade, was a serial order, ostensibly a pure x system. Hesse added, or exposed,
its o principle. Rather than move away from the logic of the part-object, Hesse
imported the part-object itself into the order of Minimalism.23 For Bois, Hesses
Chain Polymers exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1968, the focal
point of the 2006 Jewish Museum exhibition, marked a point of no return, a
22.
Ibid.
23.
This is essentially the argument forwarded by Rosalind Krauss in Hesses Desiring Machines, in
Eva Hesse, October Files 3, ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). Hesse, Krauss
observes, no longer needed to fashion objects that looked like machines in the manner of the
German reliefs. She had constructed the system of desiring production instead (p. 53).

Hesse. Installation view of Chain Polymers exhibition, Fischbach Gallery, New

York. 1968. The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

18

OCTOBER

moment when everything has definitely tipped over and the part-object is not
only dissolved by repetition but one could say replaced by it.24 This might be
another way of saying that the part-object disappears as a recognizable feature in
Hesses work, only to survive as a structural principle of its production.25
Maybe, Briony Fer suggests, the circle becomes what we could think of as
a kind of binder, linking otherwise very different kinds of making, from the
winding of cord around papier-mch in Ringaround Arosie and the Comparts to
the little circular grommets that make up the surface of Untitled (1967), with its
steel washers enacting the grids and chains of the drawings.26 Circlingwinding,
wrapping, binding, all these circular movements commemorated by Bochner in
his famous word portrait of Hesse, centering on the word wrapeffectively
enact circular rather than sequential time. But if the circle binds, it also splits: it
dissolves, by repetition, even the part-object itself.
Examining Hesses 1967 ink drawings on graph paper, Fer has observed: It
is hard to imagine anything simpler, like a childs game or doodle. A repetitive,
obsessional kind of repetition, that is, the kind of doodle that fills in time and
finds a nice symmetry in the process. It fills in space and it fills in time.27 Here o
and x mark time, two kinds of time: repetition and seriality. The gridded paper
Hesse used, Fer points out, is itself a kind of industrial readymade. In the stark
economy of this particular o + x situation, the body is mapped onto the readymade
through the pressure of repeated handmade marks, simple graphemes that are,
as Buchloh observes, merely accumulated, forced, with exquisite precision, by
a compulsive hand.28 The level of difference these drawings articulate, is then, to
recall Mitchells description of seriality, minimal.29 Hesses almost microscopic
interference with drawing conventions, writes Buchloh, led her to a manifest differentiation of touch, foregrounding and figuring the differences of density
produced by different pens or by different amounts of pressure exerted on the
pens when circling the squares inner perimeter.30 The psychic mode of the drawings is, Buchloh suggests, one of concentrated restraint, performing a kind of
public anti-automatism that, rather than indulging in unfettered psychic

24.
Bois, Dumb, p. 21.
25.
I develop this point in Ringaround Arosie: 2 in 1, in Nixon, Eva Hesse. Bois is not quite so certain
(as I) that the part-object is of great use for most works done by Hesse after 1966. He suggests that in a
way I agree with him that as far as the late work is concerned the part-object reading does not yield
much (Bois, Dumb, pp. 1921). I am here in turn suggesting that, in a way, Bois agrees with me: the
logic of the part-object helps to specify how Hesses work, while exceeding the fragmentation of the body
per se, encompasses the circular time of the drives.
26.
Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), p. 124.
27.
Ibid., p. 122.
28.
Buchloh, Hesses Endgame, p. 149.
29.
Mitchell, Siblings, chap. 5, pp. 11129. Mitchell distinguishes specifically between maximal difference as sexual difference and minimal difference as gender difference.
30.
Buchloh, Hesses Endgame, p. 149.

o+x

19

propulsion, is instead tightly wound.31 This is in keeping with the ethos of serial
art, which constrains gesture within the confines of serial systemsbinds it to the
order of seriality. If the gestural painting of an earlier generation, exemplified by
Jackson Pollock, dramatizes the individual claim to subjective autonomy32 and
radical singularity, the psychic trend of serial art is toward the anxiety, and acceptance, of minimal difference.
For Mitchell, psychoanalysis as a discipline is trapped in a vertical paradigm.
Excessively preoccupied with the Oedipal trianglewith the desire and rivalry a
child feels for parents (and, by extension, that a disciple feels for the master)
psychoanalysis has, she contends, historically neglected the aggression and
attraction felt between siblings and peers.33 This lateral, intergenerational axis of
siblings, she maintains, is also the temporal axis of seriality; and so with the recognition of minimal difference from the sibling other comes the foreboding of
death. For to accept that one is subject to serialityto the annihilating sensation
of being eclipsed by the other and, ultimately, of being extinguished by deathis,
in these terms, to be able to live, to tolerate rivalry, exclusion, and mortality as
realities of social life.34 And it is, Mitchell suggests, to be able to turn the others
existence into something useful to oneself.35
A culture of dialogic exchange emerged as a defining feature of the
Minimalist and Conceptual circle of artists to which Hesse belonged, a circle in
which drawings and small objects were regularly exchanged as tokens of friendship and artistic affiliation. Hesse, for example, bestowed two small reliefs
cord-covered breasts reminiscent of Ringaround Arosieon Bochner and
LeWitt, and presented Ruth Vollmer, the older German migr sculptor who
shared the younger artists interest in childrens art, with a stuffed canvas hanging
bag trailing tangles of string: tokens of o inscribed in a serial system of x-change.
This social practice has sometimes been interpreted in terms of a resistance to the
commodity logic of the gallery system that Minimalism and Conceptual art also
critiqued and defied in other ways. It also defied the hierarchy of Oedipal, or
intergenerational, models of artistic transmission, the culture of discipleship from
which Hesse, famously a protg of Josef Albers, was unbound by the lateral structures of social and artistic seriality she helped to create in New York in the late
1960s. (Brothers and sisters, Mitchell observes, represent the minimal distance
between people, and this minimal distance defines gender, as distinguished from
sexual, differencea suggestive distinction in the sexual and cultural economy of
31.
Ibid., p. 150.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Siblings, Mitchell maintains, are only subsidiary characters in psychoanalysis. Theyre not an
autonomous area within the theorythere isnt a theory of siblings, a theory of the horizontal axis.
Garb and Nixon, A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell, p. 15.
34.
You need siblings for thinking about death, Mitchell observes, and death for thinking about
siblings. Ibid.
35.
Juliet Mitchell, Theory as an Object, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 2938.

20

OCTOBER

Minimalism.)36 As exemplified in social terms by her involvement with the circle

of artists who collectively, or dialogically, conceived serial arther artist siblingsand in theoret ical terms by her psychosexual elaborat ion of ser ial
systems alphabets and numbersHesses art is, as Bochner suggested, as profoundly serial as any Minimal form. Embodying a serial attitude, it conceives the
subject as neither art history nor psychoanalysis was yet able to imagine it: as o + x,
or, in the title of one early Hesse work, as 2 in 1.

36.

Mitchell, Siblings, p. 111.