The table top is gridded as if to anchor the objects upon it: an ashtray from ‘’Persia.’’ a kaleidoscope, a pencil, a thick-headed metal spike, a small pitcher and matching cup, each with some small object tucked inside. There is a roll of paper secured with a paper clip, and a small paper box, and a flip book by Robert Breer, and two squarish pieces of plastic - one of these is clear. Nearly invisible is a bristle of clear plastic tubing, standing up like a porcupine’s spines. There is a bowl with wrapped candies, and a a pile of books and sketchbooks, and a compartmentalized plastic box, its twenty-four hoppers filled with Canal Street trove - nails and washers and grommets and the like. There is another gridded lucite box, all order rather than diversity: a potlatch gift like the table itself, this is a work by Sol LeWitt. In and around and on top of these objects are bits of material that Hesse has put to the test: folded and poured and pinned and wrapped and skewered, fourteen such objects in all. Sandwiched between the grid and the things upon it is one further layer: words and pictures, each one chosen as if to stand for still other stages in the transformation from things to art. There is a typewritten list of titles for sculpture and a copy of the periodic table - elemental listing of the starting place of form. This is no impersonal inclusion; it is a handwritten object, signed and dedicated from Carl Andre to Eva Hesse. Is its strictly squared presence why the word ‘’Anti-Form’’ is nearby, legible though dimmed by a sheet of tracing paper? Next to it, even closer to the elements, is a photograph of an artwork - Repetition Nineteen I - as it was printed up to be used as the invitation to its maker’s first solo exhibition.
Meanwhile, the reproduction on another invitation stands in for its subject, the sculptor Ruth Vollmer, while playing a game of resemblance with the real works next to it. There are two clippings, one from the Times, on from the Village Voice. They are reviews of Hesse’s show; John perreault’s column, ‘’The Materiality of Matter,’’ is still half legible, but Hilton Kramer’s response has been wholly obscured by a vomit-like screen of plastic - ‘’Anti-Form’’ seems to be having its say.
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