(jazz music) Voiceover: We're in the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York and we're look at a late Eva Hesse. This is from 1970 and like so much of
her sculpture, it's simply untitled. Voiceover: It's rope hung
in the corner of the room. Different sizes and textures
hung from the ceiling, almost like a hammock. Voiceover: When this sculpture
was made right before Hesse died, she was only 34 years old, it was in 1970. This sculpture was still
hanging in her studio. Voiceover: Part of what this
work is about is the way that this can be hung in different ways. Hesse left that open. Voiceover: We have rope that she's handled in all kinds of different ways. Voiceover: Unraveled it. Voiceover: Right, it remains
braided in certain areas and then its been unraveled. Voiceover: The rope's
been treated, obviously. It's not raw rope. Voiceover: Right, it's
been dipped in latex, which is a material that
she used quite often. The latex has this wild quality. It's almost flesh-like, slightly
translucent, and a little bit rubbery. The rope is, of course,
completely flexible, malleable, but with the latex coating,
it becomes a little stiffer. The rope does maintain some of
its original turn and arabesque and arching, on the other
hand, we can reorganize it. That seems, to me, to be very much a part of the intention of the sculpture, so it exists both physically,
in a sense, conceptually. The sculpture has its
original organization and it can be reformed, to some
extent, though not entirely. Voiceover: Which is a really
radical idea, it seems to me. The whole idea of art, often, is
the artist's intention realized in the work of art and that
sense of self expression and as soon as someone else can come in and hang it slightly differently or
do something else differently to it, it seems to me that that's
a radical break with the way that we conceptualize
what a work of art is. Voiceover: Think about the art
that was being made at this time, the art that she was responding to, the people that she was
spending her time with, people like Donald Judd and others. You have a kind of
intentionality that is absolute and a very fixed form, heavily
machined industrial materials that can't be changed in any way. Voiceover: It's hard not to tie
some things that we see here back to the fact that she's a woman, that she makes something
that's more malleable. If we think about coming
after abstract expressionism, maybe there's some anti-heroic movement against the heroicism of Jackson Pollock. Voiceover: Who's certainly
quoted here in some (crosstalk) Absolutely. That's really interesting and clearly
the art history criticism written about Hesse gives her that intentionality. She is opening up these issues
of what it means to be a woman and an artist in an intensely
male environment in the art world in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. This will have an enormous
impact on later artists. In thinking about Kiki Smith and others, she's really brilliant in the
way that she has found a means to represent the physical, the
body, in a way that is not literal, but metaphoric and visceral. Voiceover: It has a feeling
almost of being intestines that have been taken out of the
body and handled and manipulated. There's something that
feels like innards here, that I think speaks to what
will be a real engagement on the part of feminist
artists in the 1970s with body. For all its draping and its
recalling of Jackson Pollock's drips, we have a really complicated work. Voiceover: This really
fascinating visual web. (jazz music)