is against gestural, personal painting like abstract...
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Minimalism is against gestural, personal painting like Abstract Expressionism
and against referential Pop art but like formalist painting, specifically color field
painting, it is a self contained object, separate from anything external, and thus
autonomous and present in its entirety immediately.
A Minimalist work of art interpreted as art-as-object that increasingly focused
on rightness of proportion, scale, and surface was soon interpreted as an “open
ended situation” (Morris) and the derogatory evaluation of Minimalism as
“theater” (Fried) was embraced.
Minimalism was then interpreted as a critique of art-as-object.
David Smith, Cubi II, 1960s
Formalist sculpture- contextless, unrelated
to site or viewer, Modernism
Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1960s
Minimalism, Meaning-as-context, the work stakes everything on the
context in which they surface into the experience of the viewer;
although each L-beam is identical in dimension, thickness, and
weight, we cannot see all three of their shapes as the same because
of real space’s effects (sense of gravitational pull on one, sense of
light on another) Phenomenology of Perception- meaning as a
function of the body’s immersion in the world
Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Boxes), 1960s
Minimalism, Meaning-as-context, space between the
boxes belongs to the viewer, Modernism straddles
Postmodernism
A Postmodern Beginning:
Postminimalism and Process art
Critiques of art-as-object from the 1960s through the 1970s
“Conceptual”
Postminimalism and process art:
-piled or scattered materials;
organic and ephemeral- “anti-form”
-emerged in part out of and
against Minimalism and in part as
alienated and radicalized responses to
American life in the 1960s- against
familiar, restrained, “bourgeois” middle
class- leading to
-direct and free involvement with
changeable materials and actual space!
Site-Specific works
Conceptual
movement proper
Body art
Happenings, Fluxus
and Performance art
Post-1965, much art can be loosely defined as “conceptual” because:
it attacked art-as-object and art-as-commodification;
it is Dada-like in its absurdities, and its self-determination, and in its challenge
of traditional Western values including war
Works included in the “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in
1966, curated by Lucy Lippard; “formal muddling”
Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning
Eva Hesse, Ingeminate, mixed mediaLouis Bourgeois, Portrait, latex wall
piece
Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1960s, mixed media
Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning
Subverts Minimalism’s rigidity, rationalism, and formalism in favor of malleability,
absurdity and eccentricity, the anti-form and material instability; Hesse’s work has
deteriorated incredibly since the 1960s and this is part its meaning!
Eva Hesse, Sans II, 1960s, latex
Postminimalism and Process art, A postmodern beginning
Sans II refabricated
Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, 1960s
In 1969 it’s a flexible, ethereal, multipaneled piece composed of fiberglass
and latex, sheets of rubberized cheesecloth; it was able to lean against a wall
and shudder with a passing breeze; by 2008, too fragile to be lifted out of its
horizontal fittings, its rubberized cheesecloth is too hardened to shudder and
the work deemed completely unexhibitable
Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning
2008
Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1960s, fiberglass and polyester resin, latex on
cheesecloth
Postminimalism and process art, A Postmodern beginning
Louis Bourgeois, La Fillette (Little Girl), 1960s, latex over plaster
Postminimalism, A Postmodern beginning
Absurd eroticism, evoke the body but ambivalent; hung by wire=castration vs.
cradled by Bourgeois in a famous photo by Robert Mapplethorpe=object of love
Feminism (textbook pp. 114-124)- feminist appropriation of the symbolic phallus,
which in Freudian psychology represents the female lack which she can only
compensate for by having a male baby; this work’s title is “little girl”! Owns
patriarchal symbols and then denies patriarchy in her transformation of them
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field, 1960s, sewn stuffed fabric,
plywood mirrors, dimensions variable
Postminimalism, A Postmodern beginning
Accumulation (of phalli), repeated ad infinitum; “obsessive repetition”- hybrid of
regular Minimalist units and serial Pop images
Feminism- a different kind of critique of patriarchy through the symbolic phallus
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