Eva Hesse
“EVA HESSE” My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 23 at the Tivoli)
108 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Eva Hesse” is a pedestrian documentary about a major artistic figure.
Go for the information, not for the telling.
A child of refugees from Naziism, Eva Hesse in her brief life more or less created the post minimal art movement by incorporating into her pieces mass-produced objects in plastic, latex, fiberglass and other nontraditional (for art, anyway) materials.
Her goal, according to one admirer, was “to make art on the borderline of uncontrollability.”
Eva’s private life was a mess (“There’s not been one normal thing in my life. Not one.”) and she died of cancer in 1970, when she was only 33. Yet she opened up untold possibilities for her fellow artists.
Ironically, the unconventional materials she employed now pose big headaches for museums that display her work. Many of her pieces are literally decaying before our eyes — a conservatorial nightmare that she seems to have foreseen and approved of.
“She didn’t just manipulate materials, she was the material,” an admirer says. That philosophy extends to the temporary nature of her art. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Marcie Begleiter’s documentary covers most of the salient elements of Eva’s story, both personal and artistic.
Of particular interest is her early feminism in the face of a male-centric art establishment.
“The way to beat sexism in art is art. Excellence has no sex.”
Hesse’s ex-husband, fellow artist Tom Doyle, is on hand to obliquely discuss his intense drinking (they divorced after only a few years of marriage), competitiveness and ego. Former lovers add their two bits.
Selma Blair provides the artist’s voice, reading from Eva’s letters and publications.
And yet this doc struck me as a rather plodding, anti-dramatic retelling of a hugely interesting life.
It’s not bad. It just needs to be more.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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