The Absurd Worlds of Eva Hesse: Conceptual Art, Performance, and Skins

Building on Hal Foster’s article (2022)—about the absurd qualities of the sculptures of Eva Hesse (1936-1970)—this is the first article-length study which explores the thematic and formal affinities between the artist’s abstract sculptures and the work of playwrights, plastic artists, and performance artists associated with an aesthetic of absurdism. In part one, I place Hesse’s art in line with Conceptual Artists of the 1960s who were interested in absurdity as well as with the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd of the post-war period. I argue that Hesse’s bodiless, sculpted simulacra of human skin stage the failure (failure being a quality of the absurd) of selfhood and identity: this process I call “de-selfing” counters the male figure and stereotypes about women that abound in the male-artist dominated world of absurd art and theatre. In part two, I pinpoint the conceptual and formal elements that connect Hesse to the post-absurd performance tradition of the happenings, centering on the abundant displays of skin in both art forms. This second part focuses analysis on a comparison of Hesse’s work with Carolee Schneemann’s. While both women’s struggles in a male-dominated countercultural artworld of 1960s New York reflect their aesthetic explorations of gender, I posit that Hesse’s work indulged in, and lays bare, what the happenings disavowed: aging as an aesthetic object. By virtue of the comparison of Hesse with the contemporary counterculture of the happenings, which she was exposed to in 1960s New York, the article enriches recent scholars’ turn to Hesse’s explorations of a genderless body by arguing that a de-racializing gesture may also be discerned in the artist’s investigation of synthetic skins on a “gray scale”, a term deployed by art historian Bryony Fer to describe Hesse’s turn to neutral colors after her period of exploring chromatic vibrancy.