Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu

Author(s): Mignon Nixon

Source: October, Vol. 104 (Spring, 2003), pp. 149-156
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu

MIGNON NIXON

One notices a milieu less when one is plunged

in it; more so when it is rather briskly altered
or when one leaves it.

-Jean Laplanche

This issue of October is devoted, in part, to the projected image, a

predominant form of artistic practice, that has brought about a change
milieu. In simplest terms, this means that to view a show of contempora
often means entering a situation that offers no explicit protocol for th
means encountering unseen others in a shadowy space, then finding a
stand, or lean, or sit uncomfortably, so as to attend, for an uncertain
time, to images that flicker or flash, cling to the wall or crawl along it
situation imposes certain constraints. There is a perceptible pressure, ha
entered the scene, to remain, despite the evident fact that there is no
you: The room seems empty, but you are in the way. You try to flatten
against the wall, or sink down onto the floor, or fold your body into th
between the wall and the floor-unless the projections fill all the walls,
case you stand at the center of the room, shifting from foot to foot,
wretched thing that the work has caught.
This change in the gallery situation is a significant effect of the p
image as a practice. After all, as the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche
"One ends up getting used to a milieu, no longer noticing it."' One arti
developed this insight as a structural principle in her art was Eva Hess
work played a pivotal role in the transformation of the gallery situati
more broadly, the milieu of art-in the late sixties. This shift shares so
in common with the recent turn to the projected image. For Hesse's w
altered the milieu such that the place of the viewer's body was n

1. Jean Laplanche, "Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst," in Essays on Otherne

trans.John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 217.

OCTOBER 104, Spring 2003, pp. 149-156. ? 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute

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 Right: Eva Ilesse. Hang Up. 1966. Far
right: Installation view of Eva Hesse:
Chain Polymers, Fischbach Gallery, New
York, 1968. Courtesy The Estate of Eva
Hesse, Galerie IIauser & Wirth, Zurich.

secure. Hang Up, for example, which Hesse regarded as her first "important
statement," projected from the wall into the space of the room, seeming to trip
the viewer up, as in a Duchampian Trebuchet, with a noose around the feet.2
Other pieces were hung or propped against the wall, were laid flat on the floor,
or scattered across it. An installation photograph of Hesse's 1968 Chain Polymers
exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery shows works sparsely arranged: the rubber
mats of Schema and Sequel hug the floor, while another latex square, Stratum,
stippled with rubber threads, hangs billowing and dented against the wall.
Works such as Sans I and Area, as one critic observed, began on the wall and
ended up on the floor.3 Hesse's art both reiterated the frame of the gallery-its
walls and floor, its corners and surfaces, its height and depth-and intersected
with the viewer's body as it moved through that terrain. As such, it exacted a
close attention to the viewing situation.
Surely one of the most imposing challenges for the curator of any exhibition
of Hesse's work therefore must be to evoke its treatment of the milieu. For if

2. Quoted in Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Eva Hesse" (1970), reprinted in Eva I-ess
Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 7. Trebuchet (Trap) of 1917 is a set of clothes h
that Duchamp nailed to the studio floor.
3. Emily Wasserman, "New York: Eva Hesse, Fischbach Gallery," Artforum (January 1969); rep
in Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall, eds., The New Sculpture 1965-75: Between Geometr
Gesture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), p. 94.

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Hesse altered the gallery situation of the late sixties through her particular use of
materials, and by situating works in a contingent relation to the body of the viewer,
these techniques ran counter to the expectations of an audience formed by the
viewing conventions of late modernism, and by the phenomenology of
Minimalism-an audience, in short, very different from the one that the work
addresses today. Contemporary viewers responded to the undoing of sculpture as a
medium with "aesthetic shock and subsequent relief," observed Benjamin
Buchloh.4 Loss was coupled with exhilaration. In the historical reception of Hesse's
work, however, the susceptibility of the latex works in particular to deterioration
has assumed an oppressive metaphorical significance. The fate of her art has been
to attract the melancholic projection not only of curators and historians, but also
of artists. To put it another way, Hesse's work has been absorbed into other milieus.
The last major Hesse retrospective, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992
(and in particular its catalog), constructed an "abject" Hesse whose oeuvre, bound up
with bodily suffering, resonated with a moment of deep cultural anxiety about illness,
death, and mourning, and about the decimation of a generation of young artists.5 At

4. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture" (1980), in
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2000), p. 10.
5. Ilelen A. Cooper, Eva Htesse: A Retrospective, with essays by Maurice Berger, Anna C. Chave, Maria
Kreutzer, Linda Norden, and Robert Storr (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University
Press, 1992).

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152 OCTOBER

the level of display, the Yale exhibition evoked a studio milieu, presenti
much as photographs show them in the artist's studio, hanging togeth
many possibilities, so many propositions to be picked up and, as Hesse so
expanded, inverted, reworked. Such an installation can hardly be imagin
Not only has the student Hesse been displaced in the critical literature b
artist of more embracing historical significance, but the requirements
and insurers for such accoutrements as protective plinths and cases dict
formal, museal presentation. Too often, these devices actively disrupt th
continuity between the viewer and the work that is so fundamental to H
A roundtable discussion in the catalog of the current retrospective, cu
Elisabeth Sussman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, tak
question of preservation, which has become a central theme of Hesse stud
Sol LeWitt, who assisted Hesse with the making and installation of som
calls for particular pieces to be refabricated, underscoring the value of seeing
"as they were meant to be seen, and not as mummified fragments."6 T
Francisco show, against the trend of conservationist zeal, did manage to
both the immediacy of Hesse's work in the late sixties and the aesthetic
its subsequent deterioration, the slippage from one milieu to another
distinctive feature of its historical legacy.
Hesse's art operates on Laplanche's principle that one notices a mili
when one is immersed in it; more so when it is altered or when one leaves it.
Even in the brief span of time (1965-70) between her break with painting and
her death, Hesse continually devised new ways of making and displaying a
work-all concentrated on sustaining a level of instability in the milieu. Her
later works, including Right After and the Untitled (Rope Piece), bring the studio
situation itself into the gallery, underscoring the provisional character of works
that now seemed to occupy a social space between the studio and the gallery as
much as a physical space between, for example, the wall and the floor. Rather
than reconstruct the display of works as documented in the artist's studio, or in
contemporary exhibitions, Sussman devised a flexible framework that allowed
for the propositions of Hesse's art to be sustained without being petrified.
Untitled (Rope Piece), for example, occupied an open corner of the final room.
Rarely exhibited by the Whitney where it resides, the work is known primarily
through photographs showing it installed in a corner, as it was in Hesse's studio.
Slicing into the corner not only offered a new way of looking at the work-of
looking through it or looking at it askance-but also freed it from the indelible
frame of the photographic image.
The photographic dissemination of Hesse's work also militates against the
randomness that was integral to her rethinking of the milieu of the exhibition as a
contingent space. Works made from multiple elements, such as Repetition Nineteen,

6. Quoted in "Uncertain Mandate: A Roundtable Discussion on Conservation Issues," in Eva Hesse,

ed. Elisabeth Sussman (San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale
University Press, 2002).

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 i:

! X +

i!f I
i~~~~~
I , I

I
F

/l,
:~
\LLb

I \",,
I

4^
Top: Hesse. Untitled (Rope Piece). 1970. Collection Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York. Bottom: Eva Hesse's Studio, 1966.
Courtesy The Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

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154 OCTOBER

Tori, and Accretion, are so well known from photographs that to fo

instructions for a random arrangement requires the curator to overcome a
photographic superego. More problematic still, the construction of p
floor pieces, and even for works such as Ingeminate that trail from a
the floor, prevents even the most easily exhibited works from being
were meant to be seen." At Tate Modern, the third venue of the exhibition (it
spent the summer in Germany at the Museum Wiesbaden), the installation
alternated between floor pieces (raised on plinths) and wall pieces. The fiberglass-
covered bramble of Connection, for example, that plunged into a congested space
in San Francisco, was hung as a brilliant curtain against the wall at the Tate. This
more formal presentation contributed to a studied consistency in the Tate
installation that at times seemed excessively clinical, an effect exacerbated by the
necessity for platforms and even prophylactic Plexiglas cages to cover the open
cubes of the Accessions. Not only did these devices block viewers from leaning over
the densely tufted interiors of the open cubes-and so from experiencing the
powerful projective identification that surprised and somewhat displeased Hesse
herself-but, on an even more basic level, an open cube set on the floor is not
adequately represented by a closed cube set on a platform.
If it is worth mentioning these details of installation, it is because the ques-
tions of how and whether to display particular works had a central place in the
debates that surrounded and informed both the San Francisco and London shows.
In the catalog and in the symposia and workshops that accompanied the exhibition,
conservators, former assistants, and technical specialists commented extensively on
the material properties of the fiberglass and, in particular, the latex pieces, which
were not shown in London at all, with the exception of the latex-dipped rope
piece. Crucially informative as these discussions were, a certain material fetishism
(complete with substitutes of various kinds, including samples for the visitor to
handle) set in, which tended to obscure other potential values carried by Sussman's
declaration that "Our first priority is to allow museum visitors to see the work first-
hand."7 One of these values, inextricably bound to materiality, but by no means
synonymous with it, was the significance of the milieu.
The milieu to which Laplanche refers begins in the analytic setting but ends
somewhere else, in the "surrounding environment." What Laplanche means by
the surrounding environment is not the context, or the real world-terms criticism
often falls back on when trying to consider the milieu of an art practice-but is
instead a dynamic tension between the analytic situation and others that impinge
on it. These other scenes or relationships-so-called lateral transferences-that
exist alongside the analysis, are situations in which the analysand is an actor, and
not only a speaker. The task of analysis is to draw such relationships back into the
analytic setting, to make them part of its milieu.8 Laplanche refers to this process

7. Sussman, "Letting It Go as It Will: The Art of Eva Hesse," in Eva Hesse, p. 18.
8. On this point see also Luciana Nissim Momigliano, "The Psychoanalyst Faced with Change," in
Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis, trans. Philip P. Slotkin and Gina Danile (London: Karnac, 1992).

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Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu 155

by which transference moves in and out of the analysis itself-spirals away from it, is
drawn back into it, ultimately separates from it-as a "transference of transference."9
The essay in which Laplanche takes up the question of milieu concerns,
more particularly, this movement or transference of memories and affects from
one situation to another. In psychoanalytic discourse, transference describes the
relation between analysand and analyst, a relation that is informed by other intimate
contacts, by the analysand's relation to parents and siblings, for example.
Transference however also opens onto a cultural field; for transferences are
brought into the analytic setting from outside. "Perhaps we are looking the long
way round," Laplanche observes, "we wish to transpose the model of clinical
transference onto what lies beyond it (psychoanalysis 'outside the clinical'), but
maybe transference is already, 'in itself,' outside the clinic." Transference is
extramural, outside the clinic; analysis brings it in, only to return it to the site of
culture. "Perhaps the principal site of transference, 'ordinary' transference,
before, beyond or after analysis, would be the multiple relation to the cultural, to
creation or, more precisely, to the cultural message," Laplanche proposes.l0
In this account, the viewer or reader (the "recipient") is the one who
"welcomes in, gathers up, the cultural work."l1 Crucial for Laplanche is the
enigmatic character of the work, which appears on the horizon of the recipient's
attention like a message in a bottle, "without having been explicitly addressed to
him."12 In the cultural domain, "a constant proposition," Laplanche contends, is
this: "It is the offer which creates the demand."13 Hesse's work, as critics have consistently
noted, confronts the viewer with enigmatic objects: objects that bear the imprint of
corporeality without actually representing the body; objects that "act symbolically"
without being fully legible as symbols.14 By altering the milieu of art-by constructing
a terrain in which objects appear, or are offered, at unexpected sites, such as the
meeting point of wall and floor-Hesse's work engages the body, as Laplanche
suggests culture invades it, saturating it "from head to foot" in a manner that is "by
definition intrusive, stimulating and sexual."15
Yet, if Hesse's work activates this intrusive, stimulating, and sexual solicitation
of the body in the cultural domain, it also contains it. As such, it instigates a dynamic
that is structural to the praxis of psychoanalysis. In the analytic scene, the trend

9. Laplanche, "Transference," p. 214.

10. Ibid., p. 222.
11. According to Laplanche, the critic is the recipient-analyst who produces another cultural work
based on interpreting the one s/he receives.
12. Laplanche, "Transference," p. 224.
13. Ibid., p. 225.
14. This phrase appears in Leo Bersani, "Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie
Klein," in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 17. Here Bersani
considers Melanie Klein's 1923 essay "Early Analysis" and its account of sublimation, in which "the
displacement of libido onto other object and ego activities can be called symbol formation only if we
specify that these objects and activities act symbolically without symbolizing anything external to them"
(emphasis in original).
15. Ibid.

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156 OCTOBER

toward unbinding (the "zero principle" of dissolution) is counte

Laplanche observes, by "the constancy of a presence, of a solicitude, th
attentive constancy of a frame."16 Hesse's work similarly uses the fra
frame, as in Hang Up, or the frame of the gallery itself as in the installat
Polymers-to contain the unbinding that is enacted precisely there, at the i
the body and the surrounding environment. The terms Laplanche us
these countervailing trends find repeated echoes in Hesse's art, in its c
of binding and loosening, knotting and unraveling, hanging and gathering
and scattering. This body of work, in Laplanche's terms, both "guard
and provokes the transference."17 It acts on the viewer as a proposition, b
is enigmatic, a proposition that provokes transference because it is enigma
Transference, for Laplanche, may be "filled-in" or "hollowed-out
replete with apparent meaning or as hollow as "the originary infantile
What analysis offers, he contends ("and perhaps in this it is allied t
culture"), is to reopen "the dimension of alterity," the unknowability of t
of the self, which is hollowness.19 Laplanche's spatial metaphors invite
with Hesse's. For her art, too, alternates between filling in and hollow
moves inexorably toward the hollow, or in Hesse's terms, toward "nothing
Hesse's work altered the milieu of art by hollowing it out.

16. Ibid., p. 227.

17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 229.
19. Ibid., p. 230.

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