Eva Hesse

I love the fragility. Much of her work makes me think of Richard Tuttle, particularly works included in his NY Public Library show a few years back.

They could have been brother and sister.

Perhaps she's more about excoriation than he is.

There's so much shedding and blistering of matter.

And then I suppose one's bound to connect the work to Kiki Smith. Carolee Schneemann. And others taking the body apart.

One could make the argument that art once again was following technology (how can it not?) and as the body's interior became a legitimate battleground (gender-wise and in many other ways) artists felt it necessary to externalize and geographize it.

If you think how much art got obsessed with such dissections and mappings (Damien Hirsh or Matthew Barney being radical examples) you begin to realize it was one of the major obsessions before the next great leap towards the new bodilessness, the new cybernetic tendencies, where artificial intelligences and simulations, simulacra, started to displace these themes with new sorts of beings and embodiments that are often only accidentally us, or only sometimes.

Not that we're going to do an end zone sneak around mortality that way, but it seems to promise that.

A new form of alchemy in art.

It certainly has its appeal and some contemporary artists have thrown their lot in with such strategies.

It's unfortunate Hesse was removed so early from her bountiful explorations.

She seemed to often find such purity of forms; she seemed to be in the process of defining a new classicism.

She makes me think of other sculptors who achieve a similar sense of classical embodiment through countless distillations, alembicizations: artists like Louise Bourgeois or Barbara Hepworth (granted, Hepworth worked in a tradition more circumscribed by Modernist ideas than either of the other two women).