In terms of my interests that was an important piece for me to write, because it was really trying to engage with those questions of loss and also drawing on psychoanalytic tools of enquiry. I suppose now my own method or way of thinking doesn't abandon those types of questions, but I'm more interested in how the artwork itself does that. That the artwork itself is a kind of theoretical proposition, and you can think those sorts of questions without necessarily drawing on that kind of apparatus any more than in a socio-historical or formalist way. In this show what's been important for me is that I've been working on Hesse for a long time, and these objects have always been there, have always been incredibly intriguing, but you don't actually know what they are. In most art history you think you know what the object of your enquiry is, but what are these things? A lot of them are between preparatory stuff, and finished work - very much in limbo. Some of it might be debris of the studio or spare parts. To me they throw down the gauntlet, and say, 'let's get back to first principles', how do you even describe these things? So in a way the impulse behind the exhibition is to lay out these works to say - these are precarious works. 

This is because of the materials that they use and that's very important - part of their visceral effect - that-s why they-re bodily, why they-re precarious. But their conceptual status is as precarious. What we make of them and how small things like this can have a big visceral effect, to me, says a lot about what art is and what art does to us. Why is it that these small things have that kind of effect? That's why I wanted to do this exhibition, and it's my way of writing a book about Hesse - through these really raw experimental works, not simply to fetishise them or say 'here are a whole lot of new Hesses', but on the contrary, to think about what the object of art is. Here we have an artist taking real risks with the object of art. 

They've always been called 'Test Pieces' and I find that problematic. This is much more the language of industry. It's much more minimalist - test pieces, prototypes, all that kind of language - when they are so organic and textural and so on. But in the end maybe if they test anything out, they test our capacity to see them as art objects. That is a big shift in my own way of thinking, not just about Hesse's work but a range of contemporary artist's work. I've written a lot recently about Gabriel Orozco's working tables, for example. I see this work through the lens of contemporary artists, and the reason that I really wanted this show at the Fruitmarket, is that it is a public space that shows contemporary art. Rather than have it in a big museum, where it is going to look like we are adding to oeuvre of the canonical artist - we wanted that confrontation with the contemporary.