The Tangled Web She Wove—Eva Hesse’s Metronomic Irregularity II
At the end of 1966, Eva Hesse wrote in her diary, “Almost one year’s work. There is lots. It is good! Very good. A most strange year. Lonely, strange— But a lot of growth and inward search.”[1] 1966 had been a year rife with emotional distress for Hesse. Her tumultuous marriage to the sculptor Tom Doyle ended, and her father, with whom she had a painfully complex relationship, died in Switzerland. Although the year was emotionally trying, it was also immensely fruitful for Hesse professionally. She met, among others, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Carl Andre, and Mel Bochner, and participated in two major gallery exhibitions— “Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism” and “Eccentric Abstraction.” In the former, two works from 1965, Ishtar and Long Life, and one from early 1966, Hang Up, were shown to great acclaim. In the latter she displayed Ingeminate (1965) and Several (1965), and created specifically for the show one of her most stunning masterpieces in Metronomic Irregularity II (1966). The piece was preceded by a smaller version and would be succeeded by a larger, darker piece to create a series of three with the same name, but the second is the benchmark of the series. Metronomic Irregularity II is particularly significant not just for its relation to abstract-expressionism and minimalism, but for its centrality in Hesse’s development as an artist, its engagement with themes of obsession, absurdity, and blankness, and finally, its meticulous creative process.
The art critic Lucy Lippard conceived of her “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery as a response to the prevailing artistic discourse of minimalism embodied by Donald Judd and Carl Andre. She endeavored to showcase new work by artists who were using the vocabulary of minimalism to create art but were infusing it with the “emotive or ‘eccentric’ or erotic alternatives to a solemn and deadest Minimalism which still retained the clarity of that notion.”[2] Works from Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, and Louise Bourgeois did not suggest organic sensuality and human anatomy on a conscious level; it was often challenging to pinpoint such components, which could often only be registered subliminally by the viewer. This emphasis was clearly a product of the historical context in which the show took place— a 1960s New York art scene where repressed sexuality was beginning to experience desublimation.[3] Lippard found herself rather disappointed with Hesse’s ultimate contribution of Metronomic Irregularity II primarily because it did not correspond with her promulgation of the sexual or organic as a presiding concern in the featured artists’ works. Hesse’s previous work like Ringaround Arosie (1965), 2 in 1 (1965), Ishtar (1965), and Untitled (Not Yet) (1965) were all apposite examples of the sort of work Lippard sought, but Hesse did not adhere to the prescribed tenets of the show when fashioning this new piece. To be sure, she was conversant with the discourse surrounding the organic eroticism of her work and the others with whom she was linked, even writing notes on the sexual elements of some of Robert Morris’s and Claus Oldenburg’s work.[4] Nevertheless, Metronomic Irregularity II did not immediately conjure such sentiments. Originally constructed and shown because another piece, Laocoon (1966), would not hang correctly from the gallery’s ceiling, the work was assembled from painted wood, sculpmetal, and cotton-covered wire; it was so heavy that upon its first installation for Lippard’s show the piece burst from the wall from the pressure and understandably caused Hesse much distress. Despite the installation problems and Lippard’s mild dissatisfaction the work went on to elicit widespread attention and positive critical responses. It remains one of Hesse’s most fascinating creations, a piece that Sol LeWitt proclaimed as “stupendous, probably the most realized of her works.”[5]
Metronomic Irregularity II deftly engages previous artistic movements in a fluid dialogue. To begin with, it adopts some of the vocabulary of the abstract expressionist painters, now seen as veritable Old Masters in the modernist narrative. In his review of “Eccentric Abstraction,” Hilton Kramer pointed this out rather derisively— “Miss Hesse’s intricate labyrinth of slender white wires on painted plywood simply adapts the imagery of Jackson Pollock’s drip painting to a three-dimensional medium.”[6] For him, there was nothing innovative or intrinsically compelling about Hesse’s work; it merely replaced the canvas with metal slabs and the skeins of paint with wire. Its monumental scale, painterly appearance, “all-over” visual presentation, and affixation to the wall suggested the compositions of Pollock, Clyfford Still, and William de Kooning. To be sure, Hesse freely admitted that she considered Pollock one of the greatest painters and had learned a great deal from his writings and paintings. One of her most famous statements was that “chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.”[7] Although some critics like Kramer considered Metronomic Irregularity II a debasement, a bore, and explicitly second-hand, the analysis was a rather ignorant one. Hesse was not simply adapting Pollock in three dimensions—she did indeed reference his ideas, but instilled her objects with categorically distinct modes of meaning. Pollock’s art was a metaphoric index for his personality, a projection of his innermost thoughts and emotions; it was also a blueprint for the primitive myths that underlie all of humankind. By contrast, Hesse sought to deconstruct the seemingly inextricable relationship between artist and his or her art by imbuing her art pieces with a life of their own. The wires do not have the supple, flexible nature of Pollock’s paint but are harder, finer, and elongated to produce a more crystallized, meticulous effect. While process was a factor for both artists, in Hesse’s piece the materials are more expressive and are recognized for both their individual characteristics and their relations with each other. The critic Briony Fer sums up the relationship with Pollock thusly—“Perhaps she did not so much adapt as distort Pollock…”[8]
Along with Metronomic Irregularity II’s suggestion of some modes of abstract expressionism, the work also fits firmly into the artistic trajectory that recently culminated in minimalism and was just expanding into post-minimalism and conceptual art. Hesse was remarkably engaged with other contemporary artists and their work. She befriended many, read the writings of most, and allowed their processes and ideas to speak to her. Rosalind Krauss noted Hesse’s total familiarity with the prevailing aesthetic discourse and the fundamental facets of minimalism, linking her various pieces to the work of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt.[9] Krauss was interested in how Hesse’s work could be so indebted to the minimalist legacy but still be perceived as absolutely original. Metronomic Irregularity II raises such a question, for many aspects of the piece are related to what the minimalists were articulating in their writings and implementing in their work. As discussed with the connection to Pollock, the work hangs on the wall, thus embodying Donald Judd’s feeling that while the best new works—“specific objects”—were neither paintings nor sculpture, they were closer to painting. Krauss recognized that Hesse, like other minimalists, found it difficult to give up an adherence to painting, that “although she had decided to contest its rules, and that in the most subversive way possible, she had not simply walked out of its discursive space and slammed the door.”[10] A tension is created in the three-dimensionality of a work that by all rights, with its placement on the wall, should be flat. This was similar to Judd’s “Untitled” works and Flavin’s various fluorescent light pieces. Minimal art was concerned with seriality as well, something Hesse addressed with the repetition of the three sculpmetal rectangles and the blank spaces between them. Those blank spaces can also be viewed in minimalist terms, for the activation of the wall was similar to Robert Morris and Carl Andre’s interest in transforming and appropriating the gallery space. Andre was in fact a close friend of Hesse’s and someone whom she ardently admired, telling the interviewer Cindy Nemser that she felt “emotionally very connected to his work. It does something to my insides.”[11] Both Andre and Hesse were extremely concerned with the materials that they worked with, allowing them to be expressive in their own right as well as work together to create the significant “whole” that some minimalists espoused; it is not a stretch to see the metal plates of Metronomic Irregularity II in relation to Andre’s metal floor pieces. Hesse was also like Andre in the sense that her work was not exactly an object that could easily be replicated and that suppressed the process of its creation (like a Judd box). Briony Fer saw Hesse’s work, especially Metronomic Irregularity II, as ultimately closer to “harder-edged” artists like Andre than those who Lippard grouped her with for the exhibition.[12] The precision, stiff tautness, and obsessive rationality evoke Andre, while the blankness that Fer discusses suggests the large, monolithic and blank gestalt shapes of Robert Morris. While all of Hesse’s work in some way or another expresses an understanding of and camaraderie with the minimalist aesthetic, Metronomic Irregularity II is perhaps one of the most effective pieces in exemplifying this relationship. Its placement on the wall, seriality, activation of the gallery space, blankness, and engagement with hard edges and materials place Hesse firmly within the artistic currents of her day.
Of course, Hesse’s interaction with the minimalist dialogue did not mean that her work was wholly minimalist. She was brilliantly original—subverting, challenging, and distorting minimalist themes to fashion pieces of sculpture that engaged the issues of femininity, the body, process, opticality, logic, and the unconscious. Metronomic Irregularity II is an interesting, almost anomalous piece in Hesse’s oeuvre, however. In the scope of her production it lies almost at the center, differing from the work that preceded it and making possible the advanced work that would follow. Earlier work like Several, Ringaround Arosie, and Ingeminate were more apposite examples of Lippard’s organic eroticism featured in “Eccentric Abstraction.” The pieces were representative of the curious sexuality that lay under the surface of post-minimalist art, visible in the phallus-like structures of Ingeminate and Several, and the “breast and penis” structure of Ringaround Arosie. These experiments with polysemous sexuality and the psychoanalytic concept of the “part-object” were coupled with subtle humor and “absurdity,” one of Hesse’s favorite words. Lippard wrote of Ingeminate, “whether the humor lies in the ‘funny’ (visceral or sexual) shapes, or in the helpless entwinement, the shiny surfaces, the uselessness, the double image, depends on where the viewer’s and the artist’s imaginations meet.”[13] Absurdity was a critical attribute of Hesse’s early masterpiece Hang Up (1966). In the Nemser interview, which took place in 1970, Hesse admitted that she now felt the title was dumb and that the piece itself was relatively naïve, but expressed approbation of its absurdity:
- It is also so extreme and that is why I like it and don’t like it. It is so absurd. This little piece of steel comes out of this structure and it comes out a lot. It’s about ten or eleven feet out and it is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous structure I ever made and that is why it is really good…it is surreal, very strange.[14]
While some of Hesse’s later work like Accession II (1967) and Schema (1967-68) and Sequel (1967-68) do retain some aspect of the absurd, humor does not seem such a salient part. Metronomic Irregularity II and Contingent (1968-69) are decidedly unfunny, and even in their oddness, Untitled (1970) and Accretion (1968) are not slickly and viscerally humorous like most of the earlier work. Metronomic Irregularity II is arguably the first example of Hesse’s art that seems to leave behind the amusing naiveté of latent eroticism to make a more profound statement on the nature of artistic creation. Of course, Hesse would not completely abandon such themes as she continued to play with bulbous shapes, hair-like tendrils of tubing protruding from objects, sheer materials that resembled skin, and the give-and-take between interior and exterior, softness and hardness, and smoothness and roughness. Nevertheless, there is a maturity present in Metronomic Irregularity II that would culminate in Right After (1969) and finally Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970), which many critics believe to be her finest achievement. Lippard wrote of Right After that “having used line with this much freedom, but still against a planar surface, she was later able to follow the implications [of Metronomic Irregularity II] into real space.”[15] Linda Norden wrote that Untitled (Rope Piece), “in my opinion the most inspired manifestation of Hesse’s hard-won battle to create a statement at once concrete, expressive, direct, and entirely unaesthetic…is one example of what Metronomic Irregularity II made possible.”[16] Untitled has also been called a Pollock in three dimensions, but that is not all that can be glimpsed of its debt to Metronomic Irregularity II. The former is unequivocally a process piece—a work that is not so much a finished product (indeed, it was technically unfinished) as it was a diagram of the steps taken to get it to its present state. It did not rely upon understated sensuality or immediately raise critical issues of Hesse’s femininity or the tragic events of her life that purportedly influenced the creation of so many of her sculptures and paintings. As aforementioned, Norden exalted Untitled (Rope Piece) as unaesthetic and direct, two readings that can also describe Metronomic Irregularity II. The latter is therefore a curious departure for Hesse, one that seemingly eschewed the issues she had been grappling with in her earlier work and that pointed to those she would seek to involve herself with in the mature works of the late 1960s.
Now that the piece is shown to be rather anomalous and indicative of Hesse’s new concerns, this paper will attempt to ascertain what is involved in terms of materials and process, and ultimately what the work endeavors to represent. Anyone who familiarizes themselves with the critical discourse surrounding Hesse finds a multitude of interpretations of her work as related to her personal life; i.e., her history as a Jew during the Holocaust, her mother’s suicide, issues of abandonment with her father, prolonged depression and feelings of inadequacy, the problem of being a female artist in the predominately male art world of the 1960s, her traumatic marriage to Tom Doyle, the discovery that she had a brain tumor, and the subsequent failed operations to remove it. It is not surprising that some of this creeps into the discussion of Metronomic Irregularity II, even though it is a piece that is not seemingly conducive to such ruminations. Critic Anna C. Chave equates the work to “a dysfunctional, overloaded switchboard, bespeaking the sculptor’s fears of losing contact with others—just as she had been separated from her family as a young child, and, later, lost her mother and her father in turn.”[17] Such an interpretation is indicative of what Hesse’s work is often reduced to—an absolute conflation of life and art. Hesse was quite aware of the way her reputation was being fashioned even during her lifetime. She scrawled across a preparatory piece of paper for an exhibition, “[it is] my responsibility to know as I am being categorized in a way that’s detrimental to my work.”[18] Even more than Hesse’s other works, Metronomic Irregularity II can not be seen in purely psychological terms. She was indeed struggling with feelings of loneliness, but the work is significant for a variety of other reasons that are almost wholly separated from personal concerns.
The title of the work sheds some light on what Hesse was interested in doing. After she constructed it, she played with the title, breaking up the two words onomatopoeically, “Met ro nom ic Ir reg u lar i ty.” This structuring allows the title to function as “a visual correlative to the positive-negative rhythm created through the sculpture’s structure.”[19] Metronomic is literally defined as being mechanically regular as in action or tempo, an apt description for the thin wires that connote manmade mechanical devices and almost evoke an electric musical pulsation as they move across space to terminate in the metal plates (Chave’s “switchboard” analysis comes to mind again, but not for the emotional sentiments behind it).
There is a plethora of different tensions present in Metronomic Irregularity II for viewers to come to terms with. First, the wires appear light and graceful as they dance across the smooth metal plates that are apparently easily affixed to the wall; in reality, the piece was very heavy and difficult to construct because of the interplay of stubborn materials, which led to the aforementioned snafu during its installation for “Eccentric Abstraction.” The interplay between actual mass and perceived weightlessness is echoed in the juxtaposition of the thin, delicate nature of the wires that are incongruously attached to monolithic blocks of metal; it is almost like Pollock painting over a Richard Serra. Furthermore, the dark opacity of the metal plates and the white blankness of the wall allow the shimmering wires to achieve greater brilliance in contrast as they span the length of the work. Light was a concern for Hesse just as it was for the minimal artists Flavin and Judd, who looked to their materials to embody, reflect, or absorb luminosity. In Hesse’s piece, the light from the gallery makes the wires cast elegant, criss-crossing shadows across the wall, skillfully letting the three-dimensional work produce a two-dimensional one behind it. This activation of the wall was a crucial component of Metronomic Irregularity II. Unlike a traditional painting, it did not cover the wall but utilized, altered, and brought this space to the viewer’s attention. Such an action was characteristic of the minimal artists as well as the post-minimalists like Serra and Robert Smithson, who sought to employ and alter the space of the gallery. Briony Fer discusses another aspect of Hesse’s piece, stating that the “relation between blank space and the interlacing of lines produces the effect of symbolic exchange. That is to say, the work shows not a development from a to b, but rather a back and forth movement between the two poles…it enacts and kind of give and take.”[20] The give and take is remarkably apparent. The work reverberates with tension and tremulous movement—the wires seem to be constantly sending energy back and forth, a process that never seems to terminate even when the wires have a clear endpoint in the holes they enter/exit from. There is endlessness in this self-contained yet boundless masterpiece.
Metronomic Irregularity II also offers up a tension between chaos and order, rationality and irrationality. On the one hand, it appears disordered and frenetic—the wires seem to become entangled as they messily jostle themselves across the plane of the composition. A closer look, however, yields a slightly different interpretation. There is a graceful order even in the perceived chaos of the threads of wire, all of which move more or less horizontally to terminate in the grid-like holes perforating the metal plates. The size of the metal squares is mirrored by the size of spaces between them, creating a harmonious linear effect. Rationality competes with irrationality, an outcome that Mel Bochner noted in his review of “Eccentric Abstraction”: “The result [of Metronomic Irregularity II] is not chaos but a structure ordered in itself yet unavailable for comprehension. The totality is mind-boggling. It is a fabrication of entanglement, a logical fiction.”[21] According to Bochner Hesse had fashioned an illusory creation that sought to undermine the preconceived notions that it would be met with. His use of the word “structure” is appropriate for the work because it can be said to resemble the innards of some mechanical device, the basis for which the actual product would later be built on top of its latticed wires. Thus, the sculpture is starkly exposed and unapologetic about its unaesthetic nature and its meticulous, precise directness.
A final point of consequence in Metronomic Irregularity II is Hesse’s engagement with materials and the visibility of her process of making the work. These issues are ubiquitous in the dialogue surrounding the post-minimalist artists who lifted their materials to greater prominence and integrated the singularity of such materials into their final products. Richard Serra’s lead throwing, Louise Bourgeois’s tensile moldings of plaster, and Lynda Benglis’s supple, amorphous blobs of polyurethane foam exemplified this contemporary artistic concern. In Metronomic Irregularity II, Hesse’s process of piercing the panels, wrapping the wires with cotton, and then obsessively threading the wires through their preordained holes is manifest. Like Untitled (Rope Piece) the piece has been disassembled and reassembled several times for exhibitions, a task that has sometimes proven arduous for those directly involved in its restoration. That Metronomic Irregularity II is not a single, simple shape like Flavin’s diagonal light beams or Morris’s blank forms and must be assembled anew reinforces the pervasive importance of the process of its making.
A cursory summary of Eva Hesse as an artist might skip over Metronomic Irregularity II in favor of some of her more recognizable pieces, like Accession II or Untitled (Rope Piece). Nevertheless, Metronomic Irregularity II is a singular piece in Hesse’s oeuvre, a stunning visual manifestation of her evolution as an artist and of the prevailing artistic concerns of the time in which she worked. None of her other sculptures fit quite so neatly into the center of her artistic trajectory, developing out of early work and making possible the advanced work of the late 1960s. It was also both a product of its time and a searingly original composition. The tensions presented in the work bespoke Hesse’s probing mind and her delight of juxtaposition and paradox, and the materials used represented her concern with touch and process. Lippard might have been slightly disappointed when Hesse presented Metronomic Irregularity II for inclusion in the “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition, but by the time she wrote her famous biography on Hesse, she had bemusedly recognized her own shortsightedness and now exalted the work as an unquestioned masterpiece.[22] It is not difficult to see why she altered her opinion.
