Liquid Latex

I ask for liquid latex. “Up front,” the guy says. I head back towards the entrance where a wall of aging plexi divides the front door from the office; the office, with its battered desk, grey metal shelves and piles of paper looks like it dates to 1954 when the store opened.

I’m in Canal Rubber, a narrow box of a shop, dense with objects piled on shelves and dangling from above. Rolls of rubber floor matting, stacks of cut foam blocks, shelves of white cardboard boxes with latex tubing in different widths and wall thicknesses, translucent neon sheets of vinyl hanging over a light, tubs of colorful foam shapes a kid might play with, big jars of black stoppers, boxes of blocky anti-vibration pads. In time the basic shapes reveal themselves, the tube, the sheet, the block. Everything in here resolves to the forms of manufacture and use. 

I’m here in search of Eva Hesse, not her ghost but her mind, or a part of it: the part externalized into this place, where she came for both materials and inspiration. Up front I look at the plexi showcase of mysterious objects partly occluded by dangling hoses. I can’t help but think of Eva’s vitrine displays. Towards the back of the store there are signs with her name on them, at first startling: “E. V. A.,”which turns out to be ethylene-vinyl acetate, a rubbery foam in bright sheets. At a huge table three men are measuring and cutting from rolls of material under fluorescent lights.

Being in Canal Rubber feels like being inside a sculptor’s body: corrugated tubing, tangled and tracheal; thin skin-like sheets of amber latex that are at once tender and powdery in the hand. Like Eva, I just want to play with all these things, take them home, sit on the floor, combine and arrange them until something new emerges.

Years ago I would come to New York and go down to Canal to visit Pearl Paint and to be dazzled by the density and abundance of Chinese entrepreneurs and industrial supply stores. I’d peer in the DJ outfitters with their whirling disco lights, and stand at the window of the rotary motor store wondering what use I might find for the constant turning. I walked into almost every shop, studying the overflowing bins of objects with unfathomable purposes. At Canal Plastic I bought plastic spheres (“bird balls,” they were called) for an aquatic installation. I picked up curiously shaped odds and end in the hardware and lighting stores. And when I finally got an apartment, a tiny space that also doubled as my studio, I went to Canal Rubber for industrial floor matting.

Today much has disappeared. As I walk Canal I see the tiny Chinese stall shops emptied out and and waiting for a real estate developer to transmogrify them. The big bank building on the corner is boarded up. Pearl Paint is gone, half renovated for condos, half graffitied and decaying. Only a few of the old industrial suppliers are left, but one of them is Canal Rubber.

The liquid latex comes from behind the counter in an unmarked white one-gallon tub. I carry the bucket on the 6 train up to my studio in the Bronx, wishing I could just go around the corner to the Bowery, to Eva’s place. This, the distance between the Bowery and the South Bronx, the scattering of artists into the outer boroughs, is itself measure of the city’s change. There is no such material abundance near my studio. For me, the sculptural materials of the South Bronx are aural: the sounds of cars on the Bruckner Expressway, the sound of trains rattling north and south on the Amtrak lines, kids buzzing on dirt bikes, bird song in spring and clanging pipes in winter.

In the studio I open the windows wide and rig suspension lines. I’m going to use my liquid latex for a small reenactment, a practice of experimental art history.  The piece of Eva’s I’m most fascinated by is her Untitled (Rope Piece), the large suspension of latex-saturated rope and cord which was the last piece she worked on physically (a later work was completed by assistants and students).

Eva made Rope Piece between hospital visits in the last months of her life. She was physically weak and needed help making large work, but found herself interested in the process of collaboration that this required. Collaboration was another form of tension between control and chance and she embraced it.

It was early 1970, and Life Magazine was coming to Eva’s studio for a photo session. She asked her friend David Magasis to come over and help make something with her. 

A few months before she had made a sketch with these typed annotations: 

ropes rubberized with filler all sizes widths colors connected to plastic one i made but reaching closer to what i had envisioned for that piece the way it had started before i got sick. hung irregularly tying knots a really letting it go as it will. allowing it to determine more of the way it completes itself. make it with at least 2 or 3 of us, connecting from wires from ceiling and nails from walls and other ways let it determine more itself. how floppy or stif[f] it might be. colors. how much rope / must be rope piece

As David Magasis said some years later: “It was something she’d had in mind….I went to my uncle’s place and got cable cord of all sizes. I came back and she said, ‘Do something.’ ‘What?’ ‘Whatever you feel like doing….Do you want to make a knot?’ ‘Yes.’ So I made a knot.” 

They soaked the rope in latex and suspended it in arcs and tangles across her studio. In a documentary about Eva there’s a few seconds of footage where she’s swishing in the bathtub and pulls up a tangled mass of string—was that rope piece? When Life came, a few days later, Rope Piece was still unfinished and unnamed, but the photographs of the work stretched across the studio are striking.  Another section was later added by Hesse with the help of her student Bill Barrett, and her assistant Doug Johns said he and Barrett did a “touch up.”

In Life’s description, “The sculpture…consists of skeins of rubber-dipped string and rope, suspended by wires from the ceiling….The knots are fixed, but the rest of the piece is totally flexible and potentially rearrangeable.” Eva adds, “This piece is very unordered. Maybe I’ll make it more structured, maybe I’ll leave it changeable. When it’s completed, its order could be chaos, which is an order in itself. Chaos can be as structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.”

Prying open the white bucket of latex I inhale the sharp ammonia scent and just after that, the surprise of the familiar odor of latex paint. In its liquid state the latex is creamy and thick, a buttery white I admire as I pour some into a smaller container.

I cut lengths of string and partly unravel them, letting the twist of the string form tangles and knots. I’m going to make a miniature, a “string piece” only a few feet across. I’ve decided not to look again at pictures of Eva’s Rope Piece for reference, and instead find intimacy with it in the process of making. How deep is Rope Piece in me now? How much deeper can it be? I let a length of string soak in the latex, poking it down to saturate the whole tangled mass. I pull it out, dripping and congealed, and arrange it into suspended loops. I do it again. And again. The more I do it, the less I want to stop. As I work the latex dries quickly. The thin film on my fingers rubs off easily into little balls of rubber. The smell fades as the latex is exposed to the air.

The string arcs and dangles, half graceful, half bodily, effortlessy arranging itself into a state Eva liked to call “uckiness,” (“not yucky but ucky,” as her friend Sol LeWitt put it). She wanted to keep things a little absurd, to pull back from the “beauty zone.”  And yet, as I add more, as I arrange and rearrange, I do find beauties. It feels as if the materials are making the work themselves, the materials and what they have learned from being in Eva’s hands.

I will come back in a few days to see what happens to the latex as it dries and cures.  Then weeks, months, years. I imagine it will darken, turning from cream to amber. I know it will eventually grow brittle and flakey; it may ooze and fall apart like an old rubber band. If the latex has made the piece, it will also unmake it. 

Sources

David Bourdon, "Fling, Dribble and Dip." Life Magazine, February 27, 1970, 62.

Doug Johns, “Eva Hesse Connection,” http://dougjohnssculpture.com/index.php/eva-hesse-connection-2/.

Sol LeWitt speaks about uckiness in the documentary film directed by Michael Blackwood, 4 Artists: Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1989.

Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse, (New York: Da Capo, 1992).

Mignon Nixon, ed. Eva Hesse (October Files), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

Elizabeth Sussman, “Letting it Go as It Will: The Art of Eva Hesse,” in Eva Hesse, Elizabeth Sussman, ed., San Francisco and New Haven: SFMOMA and Yale University Press, 2002), 25.