Histo

ry o

f 20

th Cen

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Art

1965

- 70

1965 - 70

Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968

“It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.”

-MLK Jr., from I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, read on April 3, 1968

John Filo, Kent State University, May 4, 1970

Woodstock festival, August 1969

Word Presentations

• Anti-illusionism

• Deskilling

• Other important concepts addressed today: serial forms, voyeurism, part-object, entropy

Vs.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965Mark Rothko, No. 3/No.13 (Magenta, Black Green and Orange), 1949

1965: Abstract Expressionism vs. Minimalism

Group Discussion Questions(write down answers and hand in at end of class)

1965: Minimalism Close Read

• In his article “Specific Objects” (1965), artist and critic Donald Judd outlined the essential characteristics of Minimalist art. What are these? See pp. 536-37 in your textbook.

• Fellow artist Robert Morris wrote that this new art shouted “…no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience.” What do you think explains this defiance against past art forms? Do you see the same in other art of 1960s? If so, how?

• Then, review your observations about your assigned focus artwork and be prepared to share it with the class.

Minimalism – “Being in the World” (Merleau-Ponty)

• To reject art made from an “a priori system” (Judd’s term for a preconceived idea or concept)

• To “present” not represent• Tenets of Minimalism outlined by

Donald Judd & Robert Morris

Characteristics of Minimalism1) radical simplification of shapes2) abandonment of pedestal3) “death of the author” – impersonal

quality (no “innerness”)4) Industrialized, serialized character

(plywood, plexiglas sometimes forged in a metal shop, acc. to artist’s instructions

5) No “original” (endlessly reproducible simulacrum)

6) No distinction between painting and sculpture (anti-Greenbergian)

7) Anti-illusionist and anti-compositional8) Context/site important

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963

JuddUntitled

1982Marfa

Texas

• Sculpture as place• To resist composition by arranging

objects in a logical, orderly fashion as dictated by their inherent properties

• Flavin and Andre (also Judd, Morris & LeWiit) included in Primary Structures, an seminal Minimalist exhibition in 1966 at Jewish Museum in New York

• Reflected a continued movement away from illusionism, spiritual transcendence, and beauty in art

• A move away from “heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact” (Robert Morris), all pertinent to Abstract Expressionism

Minimalism – “Just one thing after another” (Donald Judd)

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII , 1978

Brancusi, Endless Column, 1937-38

Minimalism – “Being in the World” (Merleau-Ponty)

• 3 L’s placed 3 different ways• Meaning and form are relative, different depending on placement & perspective (of viewer)• “Quality of unitariness”

Robert MorrisUntitled (L-Beams)

1965-67

Conceptual Art – Duchamp’s Last Word

Duchamp, Etant Donnés (Given: #1 The Waterfall2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66, PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art

• Thought to have given up art for chess• Resurgence in popularity in 1960s (major

retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum in 1963)

• Secretly made this assemblage over 20 yr. period; intended for it to be unveiled in Philadelphia one yr. after his death (in 1968)

• Elaborately crafted (consists of brick wall, mannequin, motorized waterfall, gas lamp, assorted twigs, hand-painted background)

• Result of numerous drawn and sculpted studies

• A commentary on the historical nature of art (the Renaissance window) and its relationship with its viewer

• Viewer can’t be a detached observer, but a voyeur (must stare into peephole like peeping tom)

• Viewer’s gaze aligns with female genitalia (vanishing point)

Conceptual Art: Duchamp’s Last Word

Duchamp, Etant Donnés (Given: #1 The Waterfall2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66, Philadelphia

Museum of Art

“Caught in the Act”

Durer, from Four Books on HumanProportions, 1528

Gazing at Manet’s Olympia, Musee d’Orsay

Postminimalism

Bourgeois, La Fillette, 1968 (above) and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room (1965)

Robert MapplethorpeLouise Bourgeois, 1982

• Eccentric Abstraction exhibition in 1966 (Lucy Lippard)

• More interested in the inherent properties of materials (industrial and organic) than in abstract forms

• Allowing the forms to be what they want to be (succumb to gravity/chance—Serra)

• Process important• Often gendered

Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969, cheesecloth, latex, fiberglass

Postminimalism

Hanging.Rubberised, loose, open cloth.Fiberglass-reinforced plastic.Began somewhere in November-December, 1968.Worked.Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill.Statement.Resuming work on piece,have one complete from back then.Statement, October 15, 1969, out of hospital, short stay this time,third time.Same day students and Douglas Johns began work.MORATORIUM DAYPiece is in many parts.Each in itself is a complete statement,together am not certain how it will be.A fact. I cannot be certain yet.Can be from illness, can be from honestyirregular, edges, six to seven feet long.textures coarse, rough, changing.see through, non see through, consistent, inconsistent.enclosed tightly by glass like encasement just hanging there.then more, others, will they hang there in the same way?try a continuous flowing one.try some random closely spaced.try some distant far spaced.they are tight and formal but very ethereal, sensitive, fragile.see through mostlynot painting, not sculpture, it's there though.I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connotive,non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing,

everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.from a total other reference point, is it possible?I have learned anything is possible, I know that.that vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipline.I will do it.today another step, on two sheets we put on the glass.did the two differentlyone was cast-poured over hard, irregular, thick plastic;one with screening, crumpled, they will all be different.both the rubber sheets and the fiberglass.lengths and widths.question how and why in putting it together?can it be different each time? why not?how to achieve by not achieving? how to make by not making?it's all in that.it's not the new, it is what is yet not known,thought, seen, touched but really what is not.and that is.

From Finch College Museum of Art, 1969Catalogue statement

• Hesse also a sculptor• Identified with Post-

Minimalism due to materials used (latex, fabric, etc), anthropomorphic forms (Eccentric Abstraction exhibition, 1966)

• Worked with inflexible, geometric and organic, soft materials (cheesecloth, latex, fiberglass)

• Her anthropomorphic forms seen as expressive of the human body

• Works read as clever comments on artistic conventions and on manifestations of erotic desire and longing

• Inspired later Feminist art

Postminimalism HesseHang-Up

1965-66

Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966

Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969

Serra, Close Pin Prop, 1969

Postminimalism

Sculpture as building

Postminimalism http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/87

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/audio/107?autoplay=true

Richard Serra, Splash Piece: Casting, 1969

Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/87

Site-Specific Art – Being in the “Expanded Field”

• Earthworks a type of site-specific

art • Took the Minimalist concept

of the “expanded field” into nature

• Challenged the limits of the art market

• Explored boundaries between public and private realms

• Primarily concerned with the “law of entropy”

• Akin to Pollock’s drip process on a large scale extended into the landscape

Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AmpyiR6kj8

• Matta-Clark also interested in entropy

• Encountered Smithson’s work at “Earth Art” exhibition at Cornell in 1969 while architecture student

• Aggression toward the built environment?

• Anarchitecture

Site-Specific Art – Being in the “Expanded Field”

http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_splitting.html

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque

I967 - Arte Povera

Giuseppe Penone, Eight Meter Tree, 1969, wood

Minimalism vs. Conceptual Art

Judd, Untitled, 1982, Marfa, Texas

Vs.

Sol Lewitt, Five Modular Units, 1971

• In 1968, first conceptual art exhibitions organized by Seth Siegelaub including the first “official” generation of conceptual artists

• Inspired by Duchamp & the Readymade (idea over aesthetic), Johns, Warhol

• The serial image and object (“just one thing after another”—Donald Judd)

• Not interested in uniqueness, favored mass-production

• Artist-book and text-based works • Sol Lewitt (father of conceptual art)

used the serial object in his modular grids

• Work as set of guidelines anyone can follow (no artist as auteur)

Conceptual Art – Art as Idea

“What the work of art looks like isn’t too important…The idea becomes a machine that makes the art…“It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting tothe spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become Emotionally dry.” – Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

Sol Lewitt, Five Modular Units, 1971

Ruscha, from Twenty-Six

Gasoline Stations1963

http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari_lewitt.html

Sol Lewitt – Something Along those Lines

Sol Lewitt “Something Along those Lines”, 1971, Boston Museum (left), and Eric Doeringer Wall Drawing #118, 2009 (right)

Conceptual Art – The Spectator Becomes Reader

Lewitt, Red Square, White Letters, 1963

Conceptual Art – The Spectator Becomes Reader

Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, Black Blue and Grey, 1920 Lewitt, Red Square, White Letters, 1963

• 60s Conceptual art was inherently self-referential—critiquing its own history, process, and form