Eva Hesse and Color

BRIONY FER

OCTOBER 119, Winter 2007, pp. 2136. 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Ruskin recalled in his autobiography how on a trip to Italy he painted ascale of cobalt blues to measure the blue of the sky with. Ever keen to measureand calibrate, he called his handmade scale a cyanometer1as if color would besystematically gauged according to its gradation of tones. For all the elaborate the-ories that have been developed to systematize color, I know of no more conciseexample of the historical drive to control its effects than this brief image ofRuskin, planning his painting trip to the Swiss mountains, mixing his own colorsto correspond with the exact blue on his strip of blues, which he matched againstthe intense blues of an alpine sky. Yet it is an image with a double edge, whichboth illustrates a positivistic belief in the possibility of measuring color and hintsat what is really at stake in the desire to calculate it. Ultimately what is most inter-esting about Ruskins would-be purely technical instrument is precisely that whichescapes the system of external and verifiable equivalence that he ostensibly wishesto fix in place, the sheer pleasure that overwhelms the measure. Revealed in theprocess is Ruskins own agitated, almost nervous, hypersensitivity to color. InModern Painters (1843), he would devote long sections to the painting of the sky,which however pure and blue, he writes, is never flat and dead but a tremblingtransparency and a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air.2 Whattrembles but the optical sensation of perception? An instrument intended to mea-sure the color of the sky is instead an instrument to calibrate levels of affect andsensation. That is to say, rather than a system of objective measurement, this scaleof gradated color reflects back on the subject to betray a body, like a color swatchgauging a sensual encounter of rising and falling intensities.

Even though Ruskins pictorial sensibility is admittedly as far removed fromEva Hesses world and, more generally, the American art world of the 1960s as ispossible to imagine, the anecdote provides a useful image to think with: a gradedcolor sample. Imagine an array of color swatches, for instance, little pieces of fabric

1. John Ruskin, Praeterita (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 141.2. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1906), p. 197.

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cut from a roll or a scale of paint samples, and it is clear that color is both attachedto and detached from a referent, embedded in and cut off from experience. Think ofit as an instrumentan instrument commensurate with a living, moving, phenome-nological body rather than with a world to be picturedwhich can gauge the moreelusive yet tenacious effects of color (as well as the powerful effects of so-callednoncolor or the apparent absence of color) in experience. Entirely insensitive tostraight binary oppositions between the systematic and the asystematic, the objec-tive and the subjective, it registers instead ambivalence and infinite difference andso is all the more alert to the movement of unconscious psychic and bodily drives.What happens if I hold up a color swatch to that moment in the mid-1960s whencolor took on a kind of hallucinatory contemporary vividness at the same time as itbecame subject to a series of prohibitionsstrictures that would only intensify withconceptualism? To draw a dividing line between Pop and Minimalism as colorfuland colorless, respectively, would be obviously and entirely wrong, as both move-ments deployed both chromatism and achromatism amply and strategically. DavidBatchelor coined the term chromophobia in his book of the same name wherehe argues that fear of color is ultimately interchangeable with its opposite, chro-mophilia.3 Perhaps because of the critical emphasis on Hesses materials andprocesses and on her work as a sculptor from 1965 on, her use of color, which shewould abandon that year just as enthusiastically as she had earlier embraced it, hasbeen largely overlooked. Her interest in color, on the other hand, which of courseincludes her interest in black and white and gray, never left her.4 By focusing on ithere I certainly dont want to turn her back into Alberss little color studyist5 (asshe mockingly described herself) or turn my back on her processes of making, but Iwould like to highlight that moment when she abruptly gave color up. Whether ornot a long time in preparation, when it came, the break was sudden. Art historiansare often inclined to imagine that such moments of rupture are dramatic when inreality art does not work like that; turning points are rarely so clean. But in thiscase it is no exaggeration to claim that there really was some kind of volte face, a turn-ing against color on Hesses part that was both extreme and unequivocal.

The change can be dated to the month if not the day. It was September 1965,when Hesse returned to New York after a year spent in Germany with her husband,the sculptor Tom Doyle. A German industrialist had given Doyle what we wouldnow call a residency and Eva accompanied him to Karlsruhe, where they both had

3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).4. Black, white, and gray are colors, of course, but their somewhat complicated status as noncolorsor, alternatively, as marking an absence of color, particularly in the monochrome tradition, has a cul-tural valency that is the topic of this essay. Also, I should note that while noncolor signifies a negationof color and the achromatic signifies an absence of color, these two categories are often treated syn-onymously. Finally, although monochrome, strictly speaking, connotes a picture of a single uniformcolor, it is also a term commonly used to describe art works that are either black or white or grisailleand I have occasionally kept this loose usage here. 5. Eva Hesse, in Cindy Nemser, A Conversation with Eva Hesse (1970), in Eva Hesse, OctoberFiles 3, ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 5.

studios in a former textile factory. When she returned to New York from Europe,she took with her not the fourteen highly colored reliefs she had made there butinstead fourteen three-by-three-inch transparencies of the work she left behind.Back in New York, she would abandon color and turn to monochrome grays andblacks. In a famous photograph of her Bowery studio, taken some six months afterher return, a wall is hung with a host of abstract sculpture, some attached to thewall, some freestanding, all of it evocative of sexual body parts in shape and tex-ture, all of it monochrome. Most of this work, moreover, had been finished withinthree months, that is, by the end of the year. This marked a pivotal point forHesse, but a question that has not been adequately addressed, surprisinglyenough, is what role color, and the loss of it, played in this radical shift.6 One worknot shown in the photo but that would have been in her studio at the time was thelast colored piece she made, a purple-painted wall-hung serial arrangement ofscrew threads attached to a wooden post. The grading of mauve through purple,light to dark, corresponds to the way she was then using gray through black, butalso recalls the pungent, bright colors she had used in Germany. It is not exactly athrowback, especially given its seriality, but neither is it an accident that it is leftout of the group of monochrome works that she carefully arranged on her studiowall for the photograph. There is also a relief that she made in Germany, which isall grisaille colors but for a single pinhead of pink plastic punctuating its center;but these exceptions, if we can call them that, do little to make the about-face oncolor seem any less dramatic.

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6. The exception to this is Benjamin H. D. Buchlohs recent essay on Hesses drawing, HessesEndgame: Facing the Diagram, in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York: DrawingCenter; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Eva Hesse. Oomamaboomba.1965. The Estate of Eva Hesse.Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

To understand how extreme was Hesses refusal of color, it is necessary tostress the extremity of her color, particularly the way she had used it in herGerman reliefs. It is well known that while working in her makeshift studio in thetextile factory in Karlsruhe Hesse picked up machine parts and string off thefloor to incorporate into her reliefs. She assembled these found materials in star-tling ways, often protruding awkwardly outward or beyond the framing edge.Their spindly mechanical parts, meticulously bound with string, have a certaininsectlike elegance, but they are ungainly as well. The body part has absolute pri-macy at this point, and commentators have stressed the sheer bodily terrain thatthe reliefs occupy, from Lucy Lippard on, and none so elegantly as MignonNixon, who has discussed them in terms of the phantasmatic world of theKleinian part-object.7 But what of the color? And what, in particular, of the colorgrading from light to dark that Hesse seems to prefer in many of these works? Ofcourse she was not by any means the only artist to opt for extreme color andthen to go on to renounce it. In some respects her move was symptomatic of alarger tendency within art at that time of alternating between the far poles ofcolor and noncolor, the chromatic and the achromatic. But in other ways, thespecificity of her color and the precise form her renunciation took were moredramatic and more idiosyncratic.

Her use of commercial, synthetic colors could be compared, for example,to the way Pop and Minimalist artists were working with readymade color, likeWarhols use of the kinds of color found in advertising, or John Chamberlainsmetallic pink chassies, or Donald Judds colored Plexiglas. As much as they, Hesseseems to have liked contemporary-looking colors, but rather than find themreadymade, she preferred to make her colors, often mixing by layering or by grad-ing them from light through darkall of which undermined the idea of an even,pregiven color taken straight from the can. In her reliefs, she tends to layer thecolor like she is layering the papier-mch with which she builds up its bulk. Inone relief, called H H (1965), she noted the layers on the back for good mea-sure: first a bright yellow gouache, then varnish, then a wash of purple ink, thenmore varnish, then more pink and orange gouache. For others, she used theindustrial enamel paints which Doyle, who found German paints dismal, hadsent from the U.S. to use on his metal sculpture. The way she built up the color tomake a texture, like a hard shiny carapace, was reminiscent of Claes Oldenburgsenamel painted plaster objects made for The Store (1961). There was always some-thing awkward and handmade in her reliefs, often allowing the pieces ofpapier-mch to show through, that stopped far short of the mass-produced tex-tures of a Chamberlain or a Judd. Still, the color quality of her reliefs gives thema hard exteriority, a sense of being all outside and no inside, all surface and nointerior, which invokes a commodity culture no less aggressive than those artists

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7. See especially Mignon Nixon, Ringaround Arosie: 2 in 1, in Nixon, Eva Hesse, pp. 195218.

who addressed it more overtly. Hesse operates her own kind of absurd chromaticmachine as she cranks her color up a few notches as if turning a handle too tight.Lippard referred to the whiplash of pink in one of the reliefs,8 which gives asense of the assault of color. This is color whose brightness can grate, as if it has aheightened pitch. The pink and yellow of Eighter from Decatur (1965) are garishagainst the bright white of the ground. Elsewhere, pinks and acid greens or duck-egg blues jostle for attention. The color is a lure, mobilizing the typical doubleaction of modern advertising and the commodity form itself: the lure of brightshiny things, the aggressive demand for attention.

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8. Lucy Lippard offers the description of the cloth-wrapped protruding wire section of Oomamaboombain Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 41.

Hesse. Eighter from Decatur. 1965. The Estateof Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

Working in Europe, and cut off from the New York art scene, Hesse quicklyassimilated a great deal of European art. Jean Tinguelys ludicrous machines mayseem less interesting to us now but they impressed Hesse, and the absurdity oftheir elaborate jangling, motorized fetishes is not without echoes in her reliefs(pull here, push there, cacophony everywhere). But I think the more tenaciousand immediate problem that Hesse was still working through in the reliefs was thelegacy of Willem de Kooning, along with Arshile Gorky, the Abstract Expressionistpainter who had always meant most to her. From the point of view of the way shewas using color, the reliefs hark back to that earlier and ongoing preoccupation (itis sometimes forgotten that the art you carry around in your head is even moreimportant than the art that you see as you see it). Rather than a retardataire adher-ence to expressive painting, cutting out de Koonings color from the context ofhis painterly technique has surprising consequences. Well before Pop, he had ofcourse drawn on the commercial color of advertising in his grotesque, grinningvedettes, voracious and threatening. In the drawings and collages that she madein 1964, before she went to Germany, Hesse dismantled what was by then anarchaic lexicon of femininity rooted in the 1940s and 50sscattering and rear-ranging it across the spare surface of a sheet of paper. In these works, there arepatches of pink that reverberate with echoes of the pink fleshiness of de Kooningsnudes but are themselves fairly starkly cut from that context and set to work in anew network of connections. Color becomes shorthand for the meeting of fleshand commodities. It is as if de Koonings trademark artificial pink of his Womenseries is recast as that whiplash that strikes out into the spectators space inOomamaboomba (1965). Long after she had rejected his touch, the acid greens andpinks that de Kooning characteristically used together, as well as the smears of red

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Hesse. Untitled. 1965. The Estate of EvaHesse. Hauser & WirthZrich London.

of his violently gestural nudes, are recycled in her even more strident combina-tions. And the more synthetic, chemical even, the effect of her color, the greaterthe effect of bodily disintegration and the more comic its edge (like the titles thatjoyously spill syllables rather than sense). This is cosmetic color: candy pink,lemon yellow. It is as if the traces of de Kooning ultimately become a mere pretextto raid the realm of the cosmetic counter, creating in the process not a homage tode Kooning but rather her very own parody of femininity, her own cosmetic com-edy. Can color be funny? Yes, Hesse suggests that it can.

In a cluster of mechanical drawings that she made alongside the reliefs,Hesse all but evacuated color. Large expanses of paper are left bare, yet what colorremains has a particular intensity and concentration. Notably she used coloredinks to draw out the fluid, simplified outlines, which seem almost negativeimprints or immaterial doubles of the awkward protruding bulk of the reliefsthemselves. The inks run into one another so a single and continuous line bleedsfrom one color to another. In the spareness of these drawings, we encounterstrange articulations reminiscent of the magnified joints of a crustacean. In hisfine and far-reaching recent essay on Hesses drawing, Benjamin Buchloh has dis-cussed the mechanical drawings as key to her fundamental understanding of whathe calls a new typology of the diagrammatic, which has largely been omitted fromthe history of abstraction but which he traces to Duchamps first fully diagram-matic painting, Network of Stoppages (1914).9 Indeed it is this space between thechromatic and the diagrammatic that Hesse radically mines from this point on.That Duchamp offers a model here is not in doubt, even though this may not siteasily with what I have just said about de Kooning. Even if we were to take asexemplar Duchamps Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912), which maintains its decon-structed skin of painted flesh tones alongside its diagrammatic dots and dashes,its painterly touches are still mute and inexpressive compared with de Kooningslater loud rhetorical flourishes. As David Joselit has put it, Duchamps Cubistpainting reveals the diagrammatic armature drawn from deep within the bodysarchitecture10butin terms of its colorit also parades on its surface the fullrange of readymade skin tones as anybody might have bought them in a set ofconte crayons from Senneliers, the art suppliers on the banks of the Seine.Despite the contradictions involved, it is as if, in her work up to September 1965,Hesse took de Koonings color and mobilized it diagrammatically in order tomake possible a new chromatic topography of the body. It is not just readymademachine parts that are made strange, but color, which is now put to work in anewly configured bodily mechanics.

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9. Buchloh, Hesses Endgame, p. 119. In this essay, he also discusses the way Hesse draws onGorky, especially the way Gorky had disintegrated traditional drawing, most notably through the sud-den separation of color from line, making both appear as isolated, if not desolate, elements of a for-mer unity (p. 128). 10. David Joselit, Dadas Diagrams, in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, D.C.:National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 71.

In an enigmatic note published in The White Box, which he produced in 1966,Duchamp wrote that perspective resembled color because neither could be testedby touch.11 Rather than the modernist stress on color as pure opticality, this insis-tence on color as an abstract, conceptual tool (and the very measure of anti-empiricism) reverses all the usual assumptions of expressiveness summed up inthe phrase a touch of color. In these notes, probably written in the early 1910s,Duchamp crystallized a problem that would continue to animate art for severaldecades to come: the relation between the chromatic and the haptic. This is theproblem that Hesse came to work through in her German reliefs, where she seemsto be trying to figure out a new sort of relationship between them that does notrevert to a painterly rhetoric of expression. Instead she puts the stress on thespace of the spectators encounter in front of the work. Rather than cutting intoher collages, she makes physical protrusions that jut out comically into this space,transforming the encounter through a knob of red plastic or a spike of pink oryellow. In the high chromatism of these works, Hesse is struggling with the possi-bilityor is it the impossibility?of making a kind of color you can touchbutwithout succumbing to the lure of purely optical color or signifying, either, as anexpressive, painterly touch.

Duchamp had speculated most vividly on color in his famous last painting,Tu m (1918), which, as Buchloh has put it, dispatches color in outright opposi-tion to the work of Matisse.12 The array of industrial colors that rains down fromthe top left-hand corner laid color out as an industrial commoditythe colorstaken straight from an artists catalog of oil paints. The engagement of a signpainter to paint the pointing finger at the center made this even more emphatic.Tu m codifies in schematic form the earlier readymade Apolinre enameled(191617), which actually is an enamel sign. This has less to do with the sacrificeof color to an anti-aesthetic strategy so much as the death of color by color. Atstake here is the renunciation of a certain kind of aesthetic color, not color itself.After all, The White Box is so full of lists of color that it is hard to imagine Duchampwants to abandon color entirely. Instead, he seems to want to dismantle it intoparts and recycle it. When he fabricated his various Botes en Valises containingmeticulously produced reproductions of his works, he hand-colored them in aprocess he called coloriages originaux. Adding color became a way of disman-tling color and detaching it from an expressive pictorial language.

Rosalind Krauss called Tu m, memorably, a panorama of the index.13 Theshadows of the readymades that hung from Duchamps studio ceiling and the

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11. Marcel Duchamp, A linfinitif, a typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk of MarcelDuchamps White Box, the Typosophic Society, Northend Chapter, 1999, p. 99.12. Buchloh, Hesses Endgame, p. 17. Buchlohs seminal discussion of color in The PrimaryColors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde, October 37 (Summer1986), pp. 3552, has been formative in my thinking.13. Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, October 3 (Spring 1977), p. 70.

pointing index finger of the sign painters hand registered an indexical relation-ship that, though it was a painting, met the condition of photography, and as suchwas an emblematic model for 1970s art. Symptomatic of that decades critical pri-orities, when Krausss seminal Notes on the Index was written, she barely referredto the color, though the color samples entirely support her argument: samplespoint to or indicate rather than represent colors, just as a shadow is an indexicaltrace rather than a representation or symbol of something. In the context of a dis-cussion of color, her argument still holds. But looking through the lens of coloralso presses us to think of Tu m in terms of a rupturefirst, as an historical rup-ture in the sense that the painting dramatically severs color from its past and askswhat color can be in the future; and second, as the painting itself enacts a splittinginto the two registers of the chromatic and the achromatic. With the colorswatches raining down from the monochromatic gray scale through to the colors,such commodified colors are also set against the limbo of grisaille, which repre-sents the cast shadows. This is different from, say, Mondrians synthesis of the basicmodernist lexicon of color (black-and-white grid versus primary colored planes),or Rodchenkos antisynthetic laboratory of texture or faktura in his black mono-chromes. Duchamp seems deliberately to want the problems of color to breed here,on the surface of the painting, just as he had allowed the dust to accumulate on hisLarge Glass (191523).

Hesses move in 1965 to abandon color can be seen as an acting out of thesame historical process of splitting. Tracking the shift from Eighter from Decatur tothe gray or black works that she made on her return to New York, it is tempting tosee it as a step-by-step attempt to answer Duchamps challenge. But that would betoo mechanical. Rather than think in terms of Duchamps influencelet alone adirect or conscious responseit is more to the point to see Hesse acting out thedrive to dismantle color that had long animated the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, which Duchamp vividly encapsulated but had no monopoly on. Hesseseems to have internalized and understood the key components of the historicalproblem in a distinctive way, not only as an imperative to break color down into

Eva Hesse and Color 29

Marcel Duchamp. Tu m. 1918. 2007 Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.

parts, severing it from a pictorial aesthetic, but also to remobilize its parts as literaland often literally mobile components within a sculptural aesthetic. And if, thinkingnow through the lens of Hesses sculptural viewpoint, we try to imagine the spaceconstructed in Tu m, it is not only weird and convoluted but consists mainly of thespace in front of the picture plane, with the shadows of the readymades apparentlyhanging in the illusory space behind us as spectators and, if that were not enough,the bottle brush literally protruding into it. The circular movement is set off by thepointing finger, and taken up in the spiraling rotational forms of the shadows. IfJasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly had, in their own distinctways, internalized the color problem in painting in the 1950s, then it is Hesse whomost vividly translates it into a sculptural problem in the mid-sixties.14 And if theprevious generation concentrated attention on the readymade-ness of color, some-thing taken up by Minimalists like Judd and Dan Flavin in relation to sculpture,then Hesses take was, in every sense, more hands-on. She wanted color filteredthrough texture, through an intensely haptic corporeal experience of the brittle orrough or shiny shells of the things that surround us. She used color the same wayshe used a bit of wire to jut out into the spectators space: to stick in the eyes ofthe viewer. The word spiky does not only describe the shape of the spokes but theeffect of the color. Was this color that could be touched? And if so, what were theconsequences of reconnecting the chromatic and the haptic in the German reliefs?I am not sure the answers to these questions are that clear-cut. After all, the conse-quence for Hesse of the experiment was to abandon color in favor of the gray scale,which would suggest that she had found a better way to dramatize a haptic spacethan high-octane color, however sassy and contemporary, could in practice offer.

When Hesse abandoned color for monochrome, she did not give up her pref-erence for gradation. Instead, where she had graded a pink or red from light todark, she now graded through the gray scale. Buchloh has seen these systematicgradations of gray as taking on the diagrammatic order of color in a printing scaleor the tonal chart of photography, declaring within the chromatic register (of col-orlessness) the same principles of mechanicity that the grid and the concentriccircles enact in the formal and compositional registers of her drawing.15 That is tosay, she turned somersaults on the systematicity of color that she had first encoun-tered as a student in Alberss color course at Cooper Union, where one of theexercises had been precisely the study of gradation through the so-called graysteps, gray scales, gray ladders to demonstrate a gradual stepping up or downbetween white and black, lighter or darker.16 The exercise consisted of collectingas many grays as possible from black-and-white pictures in popular magazines andarranging the little pieces to create a practically seamless gradation from light to

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14. For a discussion of color in Rauschenberg and Kelly, see the chapter entitled PedestrianColors, in Brandon Joseph, Random Order (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 73119.15. Buchloh, Hesses Endgame, pp. 14667.16. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 16.

dark. Albers believed that because of modern printing technologies, the modernspectator was highly attuned to subtle tonal shifts in black-and-white photographyor newsprint. But another lesson from this simple exercise must surely have beenthat the lighter or darker gray scale was not neutral but intensely material. If theshading colors of the gray scale traditionally gave depth or volume to bodies inspace, Albers used them to produce a flat rather than a volumetric surface. Johns,though his results were more conceptually teasing, deployed precisely this simpletechnique of flattening out what conventionally functions (as chiaroscuro) todescribe three-dimensional bodies in space in his gray monochromes. What Hessedid that was distinctive was to put this to use in her radical reworking of a sculp-tural project and in so doing dramatize the corporeal dimension of viewing. Icannot stress enough how different this was from the way gray figured as part of adeadpan minimalist rhetoric in the work of Robert Morris, whose gray paintedboxes, according to Judd, were next to nothing; you wondered why anyone wouldbuild something only barely present.17 Nor did her use of monochrome havemuch to do with the cool sensibility that was thought to be such a feature ofMinimalist art, and which attracted no small critical attention in shows like theWadsworth Atheneums Black, White, and Gray (1964), which, apart from showinghow ubiquitous the separation of black and white from the other colors hadbecome, looks almost totally arbitrary. At any rate, Hesses gray scale was not cool.

The glutinous and lumpy black ball, with strings straggling from its caked sur-face, entitled Vertiginous Detour (1966) shows how the negation of color canexacerbate rather than neutralize a visceral effect. It seems that for Hesse the pointof abandoning color was to produce a greater sense of repulsion through a mono-chrome surface. It was not only Rauschenbergs black paintings but also work byLucio Fontana or by Zero Group artists like Gnther Uecker or Otto Piene, whosework Hesse had seen while she was in Europe, that had demonstrated how themonochrome could activate the corporeal. Hesse took this into a sculptural dimen-sion. Louise Nevelson had constructed elaborate painted wooden constructionswithin a still fundamentally post-Cubist idiom to show how monochrome blackcould expand spatially to open up rather than obliterate the complex faceting ofplanes. By contrast, Hesse mixed acrylic with polyurethane to encrust the surfaceof the ball, to make it look both glisteningly synthetic and a sculpture in ruins atone and the same time.

Of course Hesse was not the first artist to discover black. In the hands ofartists from Manet to Reinhardt, black has proved the most sensual and least uni-form of colors, but Hesse uses it to render the depth of bodily and corporealexperience in sculptural form. When the Structuralist art historian Louis Marindescribed the paradox of Caravaggios dark grounds, he insisted on the way theyfunctioned not as backgrounds but as black grounds. Defining black as absolute

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17. Donald Judd, Complete Writings 19591975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 117.

nonlight and noncolor achieved through a negation of all the others (and thus thenegation of white, which is all the other colors combined) he claims that it isnot empty but a space that is full, totally dense, and closed.18 As a consequencehe reformulates black and white as what he calls metacolorsthat is to say, as col-ors that say something about color at the same time they negate it. So blackfigures as absolute density and also functions self-reflexively to refer to the veryfunction of color itself. For Hesse it is not just black but also the whole gray scalethat comes to perform this functionwhich become the colors at once the mostmaterial and the most conceptual. Some works, like Several (1965), consist ofphallic tubes graded darker through lighter gray. Other pieces are uniform andmonochrome. The photograph of her studio shows the way the connectionsexpand beyond each piece to occupy the whole space of the wall and floor, as ifthe entire wall has become a libidinal machine, animated by mutual tensions andpressures, discharges and yields. You can track rotational movements across it. Ifone object is a small pale gray monochrome then it connects to another that isdarker gray or denser black, and so gradations are activated across the whole sur-face of the wall. Rather than cool neutrality, the gray scale becomes, for Hesse,the color of heightened tactility.

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18. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), p. 160.

Hesses studio. 1966. Vertiginous Detour hangs from the center. The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

In her work on paper, ink wash becomesthe medium of choice to register surface differ-entiat ion. In one, she used it to vary theblackness of the circles and more or less distin-guish them from the thinner, slightly scumbledground beneath. This creates not a uniformsurface but one full of intricate, miniature fric-tions like, for example, the small section whereink lines are drawn over rather than under thewash. In another, done the same year, she usedwash to make a continuous, almost seamless,gradation. Here the circles darken as your eyemoves up the gradient, and the ground dark-ens as it moves down. Undoubtedly, Hesse isinterested in the effects of light, but a kind ofimpure light. It is as if light were turned againstitself to make instead a surface that invokespure bodily substance. Dull brown or gray.Dirty light, but also, at the same time, sheer,voluptuous materiality. This is Hesse holdingup her own cyanometer, not to the sky likeRuskin, but to her own bodily experience ofthe world. For of course the way latex andfiberglass filter light is also dependent on theirthickness and entirely contingent on the con-ditions in which they are placed. Hesses circledrawings from 196667 may look so spare as toseem as if all of the body of her earlier workhas drained out of it. But, on the contrary,they seem to me even more powerfully torefract the body through the semi-opacity andsemi-transparency of the thin washes thandoes the awkward bulk of either the coloredGerman reliefs or the more obviously corpo-real works like Vertiginous Detour. Now the pointis not, literally, to make a texture or even tomake color have a texture but to dramatize thetexture of seeing.

When Hesse begins to work with latex andfiberglass in 1967, she finds materials that,though they behave very differently from inkwash, could translate some of these propertiesof veiling and layering and create a dynamic of

Eva Hesse and Color 33

Hesse. Top: Untitled. 1966. Bottom: Untitled.1966. The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser &Wirth Zrich London.

impure, tactile vision. A comparison between the wash drawing for Contingent andthe test piece for the same work, which is simply a latex covered muslin cloth hungover a piece of dowelling, shows this very clearly. The uneven folding of the latexsheet makes a series of different thicknesses whereby the gradient darkens as itascends and lightens as it descends. The color of the latex itself has also darkenedover time, from the light creamy yellow it was when it was new to the dark amber it isnow. Other latex works, which have fared much less well than this one, have largelyperished or have become a dark, syrupy brown. I dont believe for one moment thatHesse wanted her sculpture to perish, but she did like, I think, the way it slowlychanges color. After all, this process of discoloration is a kind of gradation in time.

There is enormous variety in Hesses neutral zoneas if it were only in theneutrals and noncolors that she could draw out an amplitude that is more capa-cious, and less freighted with conventional meaning, than she could in color. Itwas not only that she turned away from wall-hung work, with its residual connota-tion of painting, for sculpture that was conventionally seen as a color-freemedium. After all, the drawings that she made alongside her sculpture just as insis-tently refused color mixtures in favor of mute neutrals. It was as if, by themid-1960s, color had been co-opted by high modernist optical painting and hadto be reconfigured just as much as any formal lexicon of shape. She had startedout, in her German reliefs, by mimicking the colors of a feminized commodity cul-ture, overlaying a contemporary culture of color over an equally absurdcacophony of body parts. Giving that up and turning to monochrome was to takea rather different stance but not to abandon the project. It was as if she found thatthe clamor of br ightcolorwhich she alwaysinsisted on makingrather than findingreadymadebecame atsome level unnecessaryor even burdensome tothe intensely hapt ic,textural insistence ofher sculptural project.Perhaps Duchampscomment that youcould not touch colormentally rather thanphysically touch color,that iswas not, in theend, entirely wrong. Orrather what I havecalled, following Marin,the metacolors black

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Hesse. Study for Contingent. ca. 1969. The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

and white plus the gray scale in between ended up more amenable to her interest inthe material ground of visionwhich, when all the rest has been co-opted, becomesthe only ground for critical work.

*

Roland Barthes presented some thoughts on color in the course of lecturescalled The Neutral that he gave at the College de France in Paris in 197778. It issignificant that his discussion, which bears the title color, is immediately subtitledthe colorlessas if only in that negation could the fullness of the problem beworked through. The theoretical move echoes the move made by Hesse that I havedescribed here. The example Barthes chooses is Boschs painting The Garden ofEarthly Delights. Rather than noting the intense and jewel-like color of the famouspanels of the altarpiece, he talks about the fog-bound and fantastic transparentspherical world that is painted in monochrome gray on its outer wings and only visi-ble when the panels are closed. And it turns out that this colorless world interests himmore than the richness of color hidden behind it. He discovers in that cloudy indis-tinction a panorama all the more intense because it is there that the first differencesemerge from an original state of nondifferentiation. He calls grisaille the color ofthe colorless because, he says, it points to another way of thinking the paradigmand where nuance becomes the principle of allover organization . . . that in a wayskips the paradigm. He calls this nuanced space the shimmerthat whose aspect,

perhaps whose meaning, is subtlymodified according to the angle ofthe subjects gaze.19 Grisaille standsas a kind of shorthand for the blur-ring of binary oppositions and theundoing of prevailing systems ofthought. And in this scheme of end-less differentiation, now defined asbetween the marked and theunmarked, black and white are onthe same side (that of marked colors)and what comes to oppose them isgray (the muffled, the faded, etc.).20At the risk of taking this too literally,it seems to me to have a bearing onHesses increasing preoccupation

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19. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, t rans.Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York:Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 51.20. Ibid.

Hesse. Test piece for Contingent. 1969. The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser & Wirth Zrich London.

with the unmarkedwhere even black is ultimately sacrificed in favor of those lessemphatic mid-tones that, in her hands at least, are far from mute or cool or neutralin the usual sense of the word. Barthes described the operation of the Neutral as infact a borderline thought, on the edge of language, on the edge of color.21 It is thisidea of the edge of color rather than the void of noncolor that seems to offer a pro-ductive way of thinking about Hesses work after 1965. When color does reappear, asit does in much of her work on paper, it returns like the specter of a lost object, per-haps merely glimpsed in the thinnest of furrows of orange through a white ground,or else as a small section of pink framed in neutrals.

Two days before he gave the lecture, in an anecdote that he recounts as a pref-ace or supplement to it, Barthes went out to buy some paints. He bought sixteenbottles of Sennelier ink following my taste for the names (golden, yellow, sky blue,brilliant green, purple, sun yellow, cartham pinka rather intense pink).22 As heput them away, he managed to knock one over, which turned out to be the colorcalled neutral. Given that this had been his constant preoccupation over the courseof his lectures, overcome by curiosity, he could not help but see what color neutralwas. Well, he remembers, I was both punished and disappointed: punishedbecause Neutral spatters and stains (its a type of dull gray-black); disappointedbecause Neutral is a color like the others, and for sale (therefore, Neutral is notunmarketable): the unclassifiable is classifiable.23 Of course, this is the opposite ofthe work of the Neutral, urging him to return to his speculations. But we mightpause, finally, over his moment of disappointment. For in a way, this is my point: thatthe color neutral is not necessarily Neutral in Barthess radical critical sense of a scan-dalous and provocative operation of thoughtjust as it is not necessarily neutral in theweaker critical sense of affectlessness. There is no automatic guarantee either way, yetthere is, I have suggested, a moment when the neutral zone did offer Hesse the possi-bility of a radical reworking of color, which she mined as a means to proliferatedifference and heighten the bodily affect of her work. Spatial and temporal grada-tions allowed her to create endless nuancebut nuance no longer tied to the subtlechromatic shifts within a pictorial aesthetic or the doxa of a contemplative gazenuance that created, now, a multiplicity of frictions. This was nuance rescued fromsubtlety and salvaged for a radically corporeal and materialist aesthetic.

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21. Ibid., p. 52.22. Ibid., p. 48.23. Ibid., p. 49.