Eva Hesse Retrospective

This issue of October is devoted, in part, to the projected image, a newly predominant form of artistic practice, that has brought about a change of artistic milieu. In simplest terms, this means that to view a show of contemporary art now often means entering a situation that offers no explicit protocol for the body. It means encountering unseen others in a shadowy space, then finding a place to stand, or lean, or sit uncomfortably, so as to attend, for an uncertain length of time, to images that flicker or flash, cling to the wall or crawl along it. The new situation imposes certain constraints. There is a perceptible pressure, having once entered the scene, to remain, despite the evident fact that there is no place for you: The room seems empty, but you are in the way. You try to flatten yourself against the wall, or sink down onto the floor, or fold your body into the juncture between the wall and the floor-unless the projections fill all the walls, in which case you stand at the center of the room, shifting from foot to foot, like some wretched thing that the work has caught. This change in the gallery situation is a significant effect of the projected image as a practice. After all, as the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche observes, ends up getting used to a milieu, no longer noticing it.' One artist who developed this insight as a structural principle in her art was Eva Hesse, whose work played a pivotal role in the transformation of the gallery situation-and, more broadly, the milieu of art-in the late sixties. This shift shares something in common with the recent turn to the projected image. For Hesse's work, too, altered the milieu such that the place of the viewer's body was no longer

Art · Art, Politics, and Modernism