Histo

ry o

f 20

th Cen

tury

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

Vs.

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

Abstract Expressionism vs. Minimalism

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

• Like in painting (the figure & ground), artists desired to dismantle illusionism in sculpture

• To resist the figurative and Surrealist qualities of 40s and 50s sculpture

• Inspired by previous styles and movements, including the Readymade and Russian Constructivism

• The Readymade (the florescent light tube) multiplied to create a “near-serial generation of structures”

• Flavin assembled these in a pyramidal structure to pay homage to Vladimir Tatlin & his Monument for the Third International (a Russian Constructivist monument to modernity and industry ca. 1920)

• Flavin’s Catholic background adds a spiritual component to his sculptures (as cathedrals bathed in light?)

• The material and the immaterial

Dan FlavinMonument for V.Tatlin, 1969

Chartres Cathedralca. 1200

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument for the 3rd International, 1919-20

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, Readymade

From the Constructed Object to the Found Object

• Sculptor Carl Andre also interested in Constructivist transparency of materials

• 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)

• 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

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

Gestalt: a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts.

• 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

• Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction exhibition opened in 1966 (same yr. as Primary Structures)

• 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)

• Process important• An “emotive or erotic

alternative to minimalism”? (in the way they echo the body)

• As masculine or feminine? (e.g. Serra’s aggressive, labor-oriented works)

Post-Minimalism 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

Sculpture as building

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

• Hesse also a sculptor

• 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

Post-Minimalism Hesse

Hang-Up

1965-66

Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966

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

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

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

• Signed, legally notarized statement next to an object in relief

• Refers to small sculpture called Litanies, which he had sold to architect Philip Johnson, who had not paid him for the work

• Statement says that he is then withdrawing all “aesthetic content” from the work

• Challenges the traditional definitions of art

• Art as no longer self-contained and autonomous

Conceptual Art – Art as Idea

Robert Morris, Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal, 1963

• Photo-conceptualism

• Image and text combined

• Shows single-family homes in American suburbs

• First exhibited in 1966 as slideshow

• Then combined with text in his “Homes for America” article, published in 1966 in Arts Magazine

• Examined various combinations in style and color of row houses

• Serial object as mass subject during dawn of suburban sprawl

• Deskilling

Conceptual Art – Art as Idea

Dan Graham, Homes for America, from Arts Magazine, 1966

http://vodpod.com/watch/1502271-dan-graham-performeraudiencemirror-1975

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

• Month-long installation at Pomona College Art Gallery

• Transformed main exhibition space, including lobby and front doors into two isosceles triangles connected by 2’ passageway

• Ceiling lowered from 12’ to 6’10”

• Doors became opening onto street accessible 24 hrs. a day

• Site-specificity as an extension of Minimalism

• Extends interrelationships between the object, the viewer, and the environment

• Critiques Minimalism because it resists becoming a commodity

• Institutional critique?

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

Michael Asher, Pomona College Project, 1970

• 1500’ long, 15’ wide spiral made of black basalt and earth extending counterclockwise into reddish hued Great Salt Lake, Utah

• To introduce entropy into Minimalism in the “expanded field” (reclaimed by lake, periodically reemerges)

• Anti-monument

• Reflects artists connection with nature (likened to cosmos)

• Cyclical nature of time & history (return to primordial beginnings)

• Reflects Earthwork artists interest in American Southwest as canvas

• Difficult to access (pilgrimage)

• Now owned by Dia Art Foundation; efforts to protect it from nearby exploratory drilling (oil), which would alter nature of work

Site-Specific Art – Earthworks

Hikmet Loe, Spiral Jetty, 2002

Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCfm95GyZt4&feature=related

Site-Specific Art – Earthworks

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76

James Turrell, Roden Crater, ca. 1970-present Arizona

Andy Goldsworthy