It was also a way of allowing her thoughts on the one to bleed into the other: “This is where art and life come together... I have confidence in my understanding of the formal. . . Those problems are solvable, I solve them, can solve them beautifully. In fact, my idea now is to discount everything I’ve ever learned or been taught about those things and to find something else. So it is inevitable that it is my life, my feelings, my thoughts. And there I’m very complex.”⁵

We do not know if the two artists ever met, although from 1965 to 1970 they both lived and worked in Manhattan: Hesse in her loft at 134 Bowery and Wilke up on East 88th Street and then in the West Village.⁹ They were just four years apart in age (Wilke the younger) and had both grown up in New York: Hesse made a traumatic escape from Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport when she was two and settled with her observant Jewish family in Washington Heights, while Wilke (originally Arlene Hannah Butter) was born into a Jewish family who lived on the Lower East Side, in Queens and then in Great Neck, Long Island, her grandparents having emigrated from Hungary and Poland around the turn of the century. There was profound loss in both families: Hesse’s mother committed suicide when she was ten and Wilke’s father died suddenly when she was twenty. In an interview Wilke described how “immediacy is very important to me, I guess I’ve experienced so much death that I’m interested in life, and affirming life... A lot of people who haven’t experienced death don’t really know what it is to live. . . we had a very large family and so once I started counting, I think there were about twenty-two people I knew that died.”¹⁰ Both women also married and divorced young: Wilke to the industrial designer Barry Wilke from 1960 to 1965 and Hesse to the artist Tom Doyle from 1961 to 1966, separating the same year her father died.

She wrote excitedly in her diary about “Plaster! I have always loved the material. It is flexible, pliable, easy to handle in that it is light, fast-working. Its whiteness is right.”¹⁷ She began to make reliefs using papier-mâché and cord on Masonite, the first of which was Ringaround Arosie (1965) [PLATE 1], a sexually ambiguous composition with two protruding circular forms, one atop the other. “Actually looks like breast and penis—but that’s ok and I should go on with it maybe,” she wrote to her friend the artist Sol LeWitt, prompting his famous encouragement to “Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts whatever—make them abound with nonsense [FIG. 3].”¹⁸

Hesse and Wilke shared in the desire to adopt and subvert the strict geometries of Minimalism; softening the language of cool detachment with a sense of physical touch. The dialogue was explicit in Hesse’s Washer Table (1967) [PLATE 9], a white coffee table with a grey grid that LeWitt had made for her, which she decided to paint black and cover with neat rows of rubber washers, an industrially produced component with suggestions of the body since they are used to seal against leaks (fellow artist Mel Bochner called this Hesse’s allusions “to the body as a sewer system”).²⁵ The work relates to her circle drawings from 1966–68, which feature concentric rings, washed in modulating shades of grey, mostly contained by a grid, although in some a single “target” presses up against both edges of the page [PLATE 2]. She made a series on graph paper with a mass of tiny circles meticulously drawn into the middle of each square. They smack of the laboriousness of their making and imply the history of artists demonstrating their prowess by free-handing a perfect circle (a gesture doubly exaggerated by the compressed size and the obsessive repetition). Wilke also used the grid to structure works such as her Needed-Erase-Her pieces [PLATES 12-14]—groups of soft rubber erasers that she worked into small labial forms and then glued onto painted boards (again, the self-imposed labor). In both instances, repetition highlights the slight disparities between forms, which carry a sense of organic rather than mechanical reproduction. “Repetition does enlarge or increase or exaggerate an idea or purpose in a statement” explained Hesse; while Wilke reflected that “the most subtle differences are very important to me... it’s those variances, those subtle differences that human beings are about.”²⁶

The availability of liquid latex in the late 1960s was a critical development for them both [FIG. 2]; its sensual qualities, as Lippard put it, offered “expressive vestiges shunned by Minimalism.”²⁷ Hesse experienced such a surge of energy that her first solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery had to be postponed by six months to accommodate new ideas and experiments. She used LeWitt’s table to cast the sheet for Schema (1967) (“it’s a long process, painted on with brush and having to wait ½ hr. to one hr. between coats” she wrote in September 1967) and a muffin tin for the 144 individual components, which she placed but did not fix on top [FIG. 9].²⁸ Later, she would coat wire mesh and cheesecloth with latex, dip rope and canvas into it, mold with it and sew it and suspend it, but a central problem remained: it was falling apart. Wilke faced the same trouble and the correspondence in her archives with chemists at the latex manufacturers shows her efforts to arrive at a medium that would last (eventually she found that adding Liquitex helped durability).²⁹ Her early latex works were tear-shaped forms that she hung in clusters or pinned to the wall, each unit made by pouring the liquid onto a Plaster of Paris floor so that the moisture would be absorbed and the edges of “the pour” arrested in solid form. She must have felt pleased with these new works because she selected In Memory of My Feelings (an homage to the great New York School poet Frank O’Hara, as well as a reference to the tender, skin-like finish of dried latex) for the Whitney Biennial in 1973.³⁰

“If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects, but a moving limitlessly changing ensemble... an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that’s any more of a star than the others.”³¹

For her second solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1974, Wilke laid on the dark wooden floor 176 “one-fold gestural sculptures”—a carpet of light-pink terracotta forms, each shaped from a single circle of clay [fig. 10]. Edit DeAk echoed LeWitt’s letter in her review: “I cherish Wilke’s expressive potential. I hope she can hold on to it by being hysterical, loud, cheap, silly, funny, formalist, sarcastic, full of sorrow” (make them abound with nonsense).³² By this point, Wilke had become synonymous with what Lowery Sims called her “signature cunt / scar forms”: from the peachy labial shapes drawn in graphite and stained with watercolor in her works on paper [PLATE 17] to the pieces of gum that she chewed and twisted into little vulvic adornments for her face and body in S.O.S. Starification Object Series [FIG. 11].³³ These forms were washed with subtly shifting meanings: the act of mastication in S.O.S. suggests oral pleasure (accentuated by the near-rhyme to masturbation), while the word “starification” relates to the ritual scarification endured by African women as well as concentration camp tattoos—a razor’s edge between gratification and pain. Wilke developed her sculptural vocabulary against the backdrop of “women’s lib” and was explicit about her commitment to feminism. In a letter to The New York Times, she wrote that “vaginal imagery represents the only universal symbol of creation and the most important function of human existence [so] the unique possibilities of a new women’s art within the formalist context of a female iconography are infinite.”³⁴

Hesse felt more conflicted about bodily imagery. When Nemser suggested that “your works... seem, to me, to be filled with sexual impulses or organic feeling. I feel there are anthropomorphic inferences,” she replied, “it’s not a simple question for me” and went on to speak about the “total image.”³⁵ Later Nemser returned to the question of motifs—“I notice that you use the circle quite frequently. What does it mean to you?”—and Hesse took the opportunity to clarify that “I think the circle is very abstract. I could make up stories of what the circle means to men, but I don’t know if it is that conscious. I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don’t think I had a sexual, anthropomorphic, or geometric meaning. It wasn’t a breast and it wasn’t a circle representing life and eternity. I think that would be fake—maybe on an unconscious level.”³⁶ There are gentle vacillations in her reply; an acknowledgement of what Nemser is finding in her forms, conflicting with an understandable reluctance for them to be reduced to any singular meaning, especially if it has been imposed onto the work rather than emerging from within. Yet in grappling with why she felt Hang Up (1966) [FIG. 12] was one of her most important works to date, she could not resist the anthropomorphic: “It has a kind of depth I don’t always achieve—a depth and soul and absurdity and life and meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get.”³⁷

Hesse was not immune to the nascent feminist movement: in November 1964, she had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949, first translated into English in 1953), and had copied into her diary passages that particularly resonated with her, such as “what woman essentially lacks today for doing great things is forgetfulness of herself; but to forget oneself it is first of all necessary to be firmly assured that now and for the future one has found oneself.”³⁸ It was only when asked for an explicit statement on the topic that she demurred; when Nemser wrote to a number of women artists about their experiences of sexual prejudice, Hesse hand-wrote on the bottom of the letter “excellence has no sex” and “the way to beat discrimination is by art” and curtly sent it back.³⁹ Her ambivalence was shared by many critics at the time—Mignon Nixon points to Lippard’s use of scare quotes around “breasts” in her influential 1976 monograph on Hesse as a reflection of “the anxiety precipitated by a turn to the body in the work of a (woman) artist of the Minimalist generation.”⁴⁰ In her collection of essays, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (1976), Lippard generously acknowledged this reluctance, recalling an occasion of being walked around a feminist exhibition by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and finding herself staring “astounded” at the recurrent “central-core” imagery that they pointed to and that she had “vehemently resisted” seeing previously.⁴¹

The danger was that an artwork could get caught in this yonic honey trap; stripped of any subtlety or imminence of meaning. Wilke was conscious of this too and because she often appeared naked within her performances, she faced the added risk that her beauty would blind any acknowledgement of the formal qualities of her work. When in 1974 Art-Rite asked a number of women artists whether they believed in a “shared female artistic sensibility,” she playfully replied: “Since sexual issues still frighten, and male superiority complexes still flourish, leaving cunt queens quite lonely . . . could we possibly find a better name for my kittens? . . . If I am going to become Pubic Princess of a new movement, I sincerely hope it will also include the awareness of its being innovative sculptural form and not merely new subject matter.”⁴² Ultimately, when Hesse and Wilke felt driven to make forms that feel of the body, when they experimented with visceral materials like latex, when they spoke of their work in anthropomorphic terms, they did so because they strove (consciously and otherwise) to touch upon something human. In this respect, their work teems with the erotic as described by the poet Audre Lorde: “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.”⁴³