The following quote (in blue) is from the book, "American Visions" by Robert Hughes
The rest (in green) is by Xoe Kingsley.
Eva Hesse inspired me more than I realised...
through her work I found a strength in my own ideas,
and in that strength (o v e r t i m e) I realised that I didn't want to be an artist any more.
It certainly wasn't that I didn't want to create any more (I still don't consider my conscious move away from the art world as 'giving up' on my own art),
I am more productive now in so many, Many, MANY ways... that I often hardly have the time to...
I suppose... I view it more like... running, full pelt, away from an ever engulfing quagmire of shit - and mostly,
the realisation that there really MUST come a point when you stop trying so desperately to be what it is you think you are meant to be, and just let it happen...
all the strangeness. all the excellence. all the sex. all the art.
The artist who did the most to humanise Minimalism without sentimentalizing it was Eva Hesse.
Dying of brain cancer at thirty-four, an age at which most artist's careers are barely under way, she left a truncated body of work but one of remarkable power: an instrument of feeling that spoke of an inner life, sometimes fraught with anxiety...
Backing away from its 'male' rigidity of sculpture, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, she allowed her fascination with the 'female' and the inward, including what was grotesque and pathetic, to enlarge.
The phallic mockery in Hesse's work can be comically obscene: black salamis wound with string, slumping cylinders of fiberglass. Even when it looks entirely abstract, her work refers to bodily functions.
Hang Up, 1965-66, looks at first like a query about illusion and reality - the big rectangular frame hanging on the wall with no picture in it, but with a loop of steel tube spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's top left to its bottom right corner. But again, there's a fleshy metaphor. Both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube might be circulating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies?
Even in absence, the body is somehow there, as an ironically suffering presence; the title phrase, 'Hang-Up,' means both what you do to pictures and (in 'sixties slang) a mental block, a neurosis.
However, Hesse wasn't an art martyr and her images are very much more than mere enactments of illness or oppression.
They reflect on identity, sometimes with wry wit or an angry fatalism; but to see Hesse as a precursor of 'victim art' does her a disservice.
She never wanted to see her work smugly categorized as 'women's art.'
Quite the contrary; Hesse wanted it to join the general discourse of modern images, uncramped by niches of gender or race.
'The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art,' she brusquely replied to a list of questions a journalist sent her.
'Excellence has no sex.' Very old-fashioned of her, by today's standards of cultural complaint.
Minimalist Artist