The small but significant Eva Hesse show at the ICA in Boston is an occasion to whet or re-whet one’s appetite for the work of this significant American artist. But Hesse, of course, wasn’t from the US. Her home was Hamburg, Germany, where she was born in 1936. At the advent of World War II, Hesse’s parents, observant Jews, managed to get their two daughters–Eva was the baby–to the Netherlands via Kindertransport. Several months later, the family reunited in England before they emigrated to the US. There, they settled in Washington Heights, Hesse’s parents separating in 1944, with her mother committing suicide in 1946. A willed death is a terrible way to leave your children; their legacy is Why forevermore, and, more often than not, a questioning relationship to the body: How do we live? Why do we live? What makes a body–or a mortal coil? What makes loss? As a sculptor, Hesse could manufacture her own mortal coil, which she did, time and again, using materials that became her signature tools–fiberglass, latex, plastic–that helped form the basis of her aesthetic: an examination of the body in space as it performs various functions in space, iover and over again. But she didn’t confront that aspect of her thought process until she went back home. In 1964, the artist and her then husband lived for a time in an old textile mill in the Ruhr section of Germany. There, Hesse started making pieces out the cracked, industrial materials she found in the space. Returning to the US a year later, she never looked back, and was only silenced by death. (She was thirty-four years old when she died of a brain tumor in 1970.) The fifteen or so pieces in the ICA show indulge my fascination with what I call Hesse’s intellectual ickiness; looking at the work–particularly those pieces laying flat on exhibition tables–one is reminded of the exploding innards photographed so lovingly and graphically in the 1979 film, “Alien,” or the science fiction aspect of our collective imagination: How did we get here? What’s inside of us? Do we implode with feeling? With guilt? What would “exploding” with rage look like? Like a Hesse? The materials the artist used during the post-Ruhr portion of her career have aged badly–a terrible problem for any curator. But perhaps their yellowing is part of the effect Hesse meant to achieve before her own brain betrayed her, and fed violently on her consciousness. Who can say? Hesse’s invaluable notebooks show more than tell the kind of work she aimed to make, and did to make: sculptures that not only encourage to look at our bodies and thoughts differently, but find new metaphors to discuss them. Indeed, walking around the ICA after taking in the show, one can barely escape seeing the world through the eyes Hesse left us, which are strong and clear-sighted, having survived the delusions that come with fever dreams
