Staged at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the exhibition’s apparently contradictory title, Materialbilder—Material Picture—invokes two of the questions this essay explores.¹ What is a “material picture,” and what does such an object depict? But more than this, I also suggest that the materiality of the works Hesse made in Kettwig was not only a product of the post-industrial context of their production, or at least not in a straightforward way. The same complexity is characteristic of the pieces she would go on to make in New York. 

Finally, this essay broaches a further question: is it possible to clarify what the contexts of her work’s production meant for the bodily concerns of Hesse’s art? Although historians and critics have often discussed Hesse’s material experiments, the art historian Briony Fer goes further. She maintains that the artist’s interest in a range of media, whether readymade or modified, recycled or remaindered, increasingly became a matter of juxtaposition, even accumulation; in any case, a way “to join things without joints.”² What sorts of embodiment do such additive alignments evoke? 

Kettwig comes first. By Hesse’s own account, finding her feet there was painful, until she began to deploy materials—lengths of cord, machine parts—scattered about in the abandoned textile factory where she and Doyle had been given space to work. “What really got her going,” he remembered, “was the string.”³ Hesse began to explore its possibilities on December 4, 1964, as reported in a diary entry that includes this cryptic note: “Started sculpture, lead wire through a huge screen, shortage of wire forces change to plaster.”⁴ Ten days later, she was prepared to describe the new work, as she did in a letter to Rosie Goldman, a friend back home in New York.

I want to explain what I have been doing. And although I already question validity, worth, meaning, antecedent etc. I have been enjoying the newness and the work. In the abandoned factory where we work there is lots of junk around. . . I have all these months looked over and at much of the junk. I finally took a screen, heavy mesh which is stretched on a frame like so and taken cord which I cut into smaller pieces. I soak them in plaster and knot each piece through a hole and around wire. It is compulsive work which I enjoy. If it were really a new idea it would be terrific. But it is not. However I have plans with other structures and working more with plaster. It might work its way to something special. I will try to draw what it looks like. On the other side it’s the knots that are seen. It is all white.⁵

True to her word, Hesse did try to convey “what it looks like.” Alongside her description are two rough-and ready sketches [FIG. 2] that taken together just about manage to suggest not only how the work was put together, but also how it was meant to be seen. First, she drew an upright mesh screen. Then came a close-up of its diagonal grid, with “before” and “after” views presented cheek by jowl. The contrast is stark. The functional order of the screen yields to its opposite, in the form of a bristling thicket of short white cilia, each made from a length of plaster-soaked cord both knotted and stiffened with wire: the “compulsive work” Hesse became known for, and which she said she enjoyed.

Why did such processes seem pleasurable? Was it because tasks like these are clear cut? Keep at it, and sooner or later, you come to an end. So much is obvious. Perhaps less so is the possibility that while casting around for a way of working, Hesse discovered that a merely material process—the “one thing after another” so fundamental to minimalist practice—meant immersing, even losing herself in her work. Aren’t such techniques famous for freeing the mind? In any event, everything that is so unexpectedly bodily, so animate, in Hesse’s sculpture starts here. As others of her contemporaries were discovering, simple repetition has the capacity to produce unpredictable results. Perhaps this is the minimalist’s way of chanting “Om.”⁶

A second report of the lost screen sculpture returns us from these heights. It comes from a description Doyle provided to Hesse’s great friend and first biographer Lucy R. Lippard. “Doyle recalls,” she wrote, that this lost relief “was based on a green screen-like machine guard that ‘stood by itself like sculpture, was three-dimensional but also a two-dimensional surface, which was familiar to her and easier to begin with.’”

Does its absence really matter? It might simply speak to the fact that pace Doyle, Hesse doesn’t seem to have been drawn to the screen guard project because it was ...what? Money for old rope? On the contrary, everything suggests that Hesse brought to this, her first gridded work, an unprecedented and utterly deliberate approach.⁸ Through each gap in the grill’s surface, she first threaded short lengths of cord, then stiffened them with wire and white plaster. The grill’s original green surface, in other words, was beside the point. What mattered were the dead-white strands of cord, and the deliciously compulsive drive to bring them to life.⁹ She would indulge it again in what is one of her most uncannily animate sculptural formats, the series of open ciliated cubes to which she gave the collective title Accession [FIG. 3]. In 1967 and 1968, she made five in all, each of them a realization of the screen-guard idea. Its stakes were high. Apparently Hesse’s first sculpture to use a grid, it is also the first to qualify as an assisted readymade, as well as the first she described in terms of the pleasure she found in “compulsive,” i.e. repetitive, techniques. More such pleasure lay ahead.

In a subtly layered essay about Ringaround Arosie, Mignon Nixon has pointed to the fact that when Hesse’s Kettwig reliefs were exhibited in Düsseldorf, the brochure accompanying the show used a photograph which locates Ringaround Arosie front and center, between the artist’s knees [FIG. 5].¹⁵ That placement alone suggests its special status, while underscoring its difference from the rest of the group. Ringaround Arosie not only looks forward to the great cord Comparts of 1966 [see PLATES 3 and 4], but also shows compulsive pleasure in a sexy new light. Finally, like the screen piece, Ringaround Arosie mines the unruly implications of systematic repetition. Any child knows that even the most ordinary word, when repeated, sounds increasingly strange. I can hear my brother’s voice even now, insisting I say “parrot” really fast seven times. This way lies if not madness, then certainly difference, even defamiliarization. This is one lesson Hesse learned from sculpting with cord. Perhaps she also learned, after years spent painting, that repetition allowed her to evoke the body—its order, its chaos—with a quasi-mechanical eroticism that elides female and male.

In August 1965, Doyle and Hesse returned to New York. Five months later, by January 1966, their marriage had come to an end. Doyle moved out, though not far: to Hesse’s dismay, he set up a studio in a loft across the street, while she took sole possession of the space they once shared. A nondescript structure at 134 Bowery in Lower Manhattan, the building still stands. Ironically, these days it houses a gallery.¹⁶ When Hesse lived there, its 19th century industrial fabric was only beginning to be colonized by studios and lofts.

As in Kettwig, the nature of Hesse’s work and living space had immediate implications for her sculpture. When Hang Up was first installed there, in January 1966, she gave a coat of white paint to the dingy rectangle framed within it, the better to insist on the blank expanse its borders reveal [FIG. 6].¹⁷ A few years later, in 1969, Right After, with its delicate skeins of fiberglass and polyester resin, floated from the loft’s beams and corners, only to be replaced a year later by the tangled ganglia of Rope Piece. Remember too that the square latex mat made as the basis of Schema, 1967, was cast on the surface of the table Sol LeWitt made to help equip the loft. In other words, here, as in Kettwig, context matters. Canal Street was just a block to the south, a short walk to the hardware and plumbing stores that displayed their wares for blocks along its north side [FIG. 7]. Such places sold a bit of everything—brooms, beach umbrellas, trash cans, shovels—with many of their wares priced by weight, not by unit. Nails, grommets, washers, staples—all were unceremoniously scooped into a brown paper bag, then put on the scale. Then, back in the studio, the purchaser sorted them out. True to form, Hesse opted for the gridded order of a clear lucite box [FIG. 8].

Hesse’s work of the mid-1960s is nothing if not a response to these fundamental questions. Consider the new range of her approaches to the surface: for the first time, tactility is not only a resource, but also a theme. Wood shavings flesh out acrylic and Sculp-Metal, while knotted cords dangle provocatively, as if asking to be touched. Even drawings make tangibility their theme. Here Hesse rings the changes on the multiple implications of the circle. Among them are orifice (mouth and navel, anus and vagina); planet (sun, moon and stars). And lastly, emblem of artistic authority: the legendary proof to pope or potentate of preeminent skill.²⁰

As the sheer range of these categories suggests, Hesse’s circle works concern much more than the straightforward mastery of form. For the first time in her brief career, she engaged in a systematic deconstruction of tactile illusion, using drawing as her principle tool [see PLATE 2]. In the circle works, not only was the subtle salience of the Kettwig panels summarily flattened, but their Kool-Aid colors were also a thing of the past. Instead the artist opts for a diagrammatic clarity, a dark/light opposition, that meticulously disarticulates the traditional means of figuring fullness. Hesse’s circle drawings take chiaroscuro apart. Yet once dismantled, light and dark do not lose their signature force. On the contrary, as the circle drawings declare, fullness and flatness look remarkably the same.

In retrospect, it is clear that the play of illusion and materiality guided this new phase of Hesse’s work. But neither preempted her concern with surface and touch. This is where the Canal Street washers come in. Their steel and rubber circles, aligned edge to edge, row on row, both insulate and violate the integrity of the surfaces they cover. Panel or table, vertical or horizontal, the washer implies some further place or dimension, but allows access to it only through a contained enclosure—a hole [see FIG. 9, PLATE 9].