Top photo: Louise Bourgeois, "Destruction of the Father"

middle photo: Eva Hesse, "Ring Around"

bottom photo: Eva Hess, "Untitled not yet"

In, Objects Beyond Objecthood, Briony Fer uses a show put together by Lucy Lippard, titled, 'Eccentric Abstraction,' to move us from the 'dead-set Minimalism' and 'rigors of structural art' to the organic, erotic, sensous work of of Hesse and Bourgeois. 

Lippard saw Hesse's work as moving the object away from the literalness itself into a realm of excessive, bodily materiality. The show was held together by hanging work that used the vocabulary of body parts or bodily functions. It was Lippard's sense to place the body and the erotic, (abstractly not figuratively) at the center of contemporary art. 

But Fer find's it more interesting to ask, where is the subject to be placed?  He uses Bochner, who comments on Hesse's work that some of it is found as being empty. The viewer enters the physical embodiments but finds at this center a detachment of bodily empathies. Our subjectivity upon entering the work, gets lost. 

Fer turns to the critic, Kozloff, who talks about the soft-sculptures of Oldenburg who is being considered "anthropomorphic." Oldenburg transformed a fan into a giant, collapsing bodily form-suggestive of fatigue, inertia, deterioration...yet what if all this squirming stuff makes the spectator feel not more but less organic?"

In 1968, Lippard again shows work by a core group, including Hesse and Bourgeois and now, also, Oldenberg. So now we have a controversy over work being seen as organic, or as Fried interjects, "a theatrical encounter involving a monstrous body," and a superficial anthropomorphism that Hesse and Bourgeois were trying to distance themselves from.

On the one hand, Lippart's 'Eccentric Abstraction' was emphasizing the organic, the embodiment. On the other hand, there is an exaggeration of body parts, to the point of removing us from bodily empathy. 'The lost object-me.' There is a detachment. "Detachment is anything but neutral. Rather, it is the very presence of the object that heightens the sense of losing a portion of oneself."