7 DECEMBER 2002, Page 52

Exhibitions

Eva Hesse (Tate Modern, till 9 March)

Iconic rebel

Andrew Lambirth

Many consider Eva Hesse to be one c f the most important sculptors of the second half of the 20th century, but on the evidence of the current Tate show — the largest ever of her work — she appears to be less of a real sculptor and more of an all-pervading influence. To put it another way, Hesse only lived to be 34, and was just beginning to produce relatively mature work in the last four or five years of her life.

The facts that she experimented widely with informal materials such as latex and fibreglass, that her work was often sexually suggestive in subject matter, that she died young and that she was a woman working successfully in a hitherto male-dominated preserve, all helped to make her a cult figure with art students. Her appeal is still largely to the young and, since her tragically early death in 1970 from a brain tumour, Hesse the iconic rebel has been virtually canonised, with her merest scribble elevated to the status of holy relic. The lavish Tate catalogue duly attests to this reverence, which is seemingly propagated by art historians. The trouble is that only a small percentage of Hesse's work deserves such attention. However, no doubt reassured by the blanket acceptance of her oeuvre by those who should know better, the young people flocking to this exhibition showed no signs of being able to distinguish the good from the weak and derivative.

In 1936, Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg of Jewish parents. Escaping the Nazis, her family came to London and then emigrated to New York. She graduated from the (high) School of Industrial Arts in 1945

before entering the Pratt Institute of Design to study advertising design. In 1954, she enrolled at the Cooper Union, graduated in 1957 and entered the Yale School of Art and Architecture to study painting under Josef Albers. In 1960, she worked part-time as a textile designer, and in 1964. when she returned to Germany for a year at the invitation of a rich patron, Hesse had a studio in an abandoned textile factory. This history of design experience in particular relation to textiles was to exert a lasting influence over her thought. In the old German factory she drew machine parts and pieces of cord, and moved definitively away from her early Expressionist self-portraits with heads like golf clubs. She began to make hybrid objects such as the corded and painted reliefs, which developed into the probing tubes and dented receptacles, the ropes and nets and shards of skin for which she is famous.

Hesse's best work has a frenetic tactility, though of course nowadays these objects cannot be touched (and will probably never travel again for exhibition) because they're so fragile. She claimed her subject was 'the total absurdity of life', a good example of how she illustrated this being 'Hang Up' of 1966. It consists of an lift rod describing an uneven loop from a vast empty frame. It's going nowhere, doing nothing — a closed circuit, like so many of Hesse's early drawings, such as the too-tidy zipped-up diagram 'Untitled' of 1965, now in the Tate collection. This negativity led inevitably to its logical conclusion. 'I remember I wanted to get to non art ... ' she said in 1969. All too probably she succeeded.

One gets the feeling that Hesse was more interested in breaking bounds, in a youthfully transgressive way, than in extending art's territory. She was well aware that the materials she was using would not last, and that their effects were ephemeral. Latex hardens and perishes; fibreglass discolours and becomes brittle. Yet these changes were not essential to her art. An artist like Dieter Roth, who made work which was intended to decay and change its nature over time, was actually being more honest about his intentions. Should copies of Hesse's most fragile sculptures now be made? A copy could never be more than an inauthentic threedimensional reproduction. for Hesse wanted the artist's touch visible in her work. So why didn't she make more permanent art? Perhaps because she lived in an adolescent dream world. She claimed she wanted to go beyond what she knew and what she could know. Art of any real stature achieves that by its very nature, but Hesse never came to realise that. If she had lived longer, she might indeed have developed into a considerable artist, a sculptor of rare accomplishment. As it is, she remains a dangerous role model for self-obsessed youth, for those who yearn to be different and original — like everybody else.