I’d like to do a little more wrong. – Eva Hesse
An artist’s work can be attributed to a few things, three of them being training, personal inclination and experiences, and conversations with one’s contemporaries. Eva Hesse, a fine artist in the sixties, exemplifies all three traits. She studied art; she had a personal inclination to make art; her personal experiences and personality informed her art; and she conversed with her contemporaries.
The result of those things was an art that both nodded to and counteracted the minimalist movement. Her work was undoubtedly influenced by contemporaries and friends Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and others, but it was “wrong” according to the orderliness and intellectualism of minimalism. Her work was not fabricated as many of Lewitt’s pieces were; that is, she got her hands dirty when she made art. She didn’t send her pieces off to a manufacturer or send nebulous instructions for how her works were to be assembled. She did everything herself. For her, art was an expression of her life, not merely a mental exercise, and it produced work that was organic, biomorphic, exploratory, emotional.
Her work influenced her contemporaries; doing things “wrong” resulted in shifts and entire movements. Lewitt, for instance, began to explore a more organic line. He still didn’t do the work himself. He hired others to do the work, resulting in pieces that differed in look and feel from museum to museum. Others saw her installation pieces, many of which were made from substances like string, fiberglass, and latex, and began to experiment with non-traditional materials like bubble wrap. Female artists during the sixties and seventies also looked to Hesse for inspiration even though she would have both loved and hated the role. She did not view herself as a female artist. She was an artist, and she asked that every artist, male or female, treat her as one.
If Hesse is an example of anything, it’s of the artist who finds her inmost narrowness and sets herself free. Because she did, she produced a body of work that simultaneously conversed with and rebelled against the tidy borders of minimalism. She did things “wrong.” In so doing, she created works that were altogether right.