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.

Transcript of is against gestural, personal painting like Abstract...

Page 1: is against gestural, personal painting like Abstract ...faculty.uml.edu/ksmith/58.350/Documents/PomoReview5.pdf · Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field, 1960s, sewn

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.

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David Smith, Cubi II, 1960s

Formalist sculpture- contextless, unrelated

to site or viewer, Modernism

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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

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Boxes), 1960s

Minimalism, Meaning-as-context, space between the

boxes belongs to the viewer, Modernism straddles

Postmodernism

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A Postmodern Beginning:

Postminimalism and Process art

Critiques of art-as-object from the 1960s through the 1970s

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“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

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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

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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!

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Eva Hesse, Sans II, 1960s, latex

Postminimalism and Process art, A postmodern beginning

Sans II refabricated

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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

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Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1960s, fiberglass and polyester resin, latex on

cheesecloth

Postminimalism and process art, A Postmodern beginning

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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

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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