From The Village Voice:
In 1967, Walter Brooke famously asked Dustin Hoffman to consider “just one word,” a word that had come to represent, for many of the era, a sleek soullessness: plastics. Whether or not a young, soon-to-be-famous sculptor named Eva Hesse saw The Graduate that year, she would shortly take the advice, but in ways that upended the connotations. Hesse used plastics and rubber—specifically, resin, fiberglass, and latex—to transform the vogue of a cold, corporate-like minimalism into something softer and more approachable. A smartly comprehensive exhibit at the Jewish Museum reveals that Hesse’s sculpture, though physically deteriorating somewhat, still enchants.
Minimalism’s kingpins billed their movement as a thoughtful rebuke to overt expression, but the work often seemed manufactured—perfect forms that elicited little more from the viewer than they gave. White paintings received blank stares. Though strongly influenced by these artists (Sol LeWitt was a good friend), Hesse sort of rebuked the rebuke, introducing chance, defect, and variation—and thereby delightful flora and fauna elements—into geometry and repetition.
More here.
