Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of the

Australian Government’s Australian Postgraduate Award, which was facilitated

through The Australian National University. The fieldwork component of this

research program, which was undertaken in the United States of America in 2010,

was made feasible through a generous travel grant from The Australian National

University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences. Participation in conferences and

additional fieldwork performed in England and Germany in 2011 was realised

through bursaries from The Australian National University’s Office of the Vice

Chancellor and conference funding from the College of Arts and Social Sciences.

Research facilities provided by the College of Arts and Social Sciences within the

Australian National University ensured the completion of this research program.

I thank foremost the Chair of my Supervisory Panel, Dr Andrew Montana, for his

critical insights and guidance over the course of my research program. His

academic enthusiasm towards my research topic and exegetic questioning of my

thesis drove me to set intellectual challenges and seek their theoretical and

rigorous resolution. Professor Sasha Grishin, in his service as an advisor on my

Supervisory Panel, provided sage advice at critical junctures in my research

program, garnered from his vast experiences and to this I am greatly appreciative.

I was fortunate enough to work with Mr Lee Cristofis, also an advisor on my

Supervisory Panel, at the National Library of Australia where Lee was Curator of

Dance collections. Lee’s passion and knowledge for dance benefitted my research

immensely by broadening my own knowledge in this field.

Ms Elizabeth Zimmer was kind enough to impart her wisdom on dance,

particularly as it related to my research focus, and invited me to accompany her to

dance performances in New York City. Dr Neil Ramsay and Mr James Cheatley

assisted in the proof reading of this thesis and for this I am thankful. The academic

and administrative staff of the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and my

former colleagues at the Australian War Memorial, were understanding and

supportive throughout my research journey and for this I am grateful. Library staff

at the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, and New York University’s Fales Library provided assistance when

I appreciatively researched their collections. Parish staff at the Judson Memorial

Church also made me welcome when I visited. I thank Associate Professor Frances

Joseph and the administrative staff at Colab in the Faculty of Design and Creative

Technologies at the Auckland University of Technology. Colab provided me with a

research space to complete the final stages of my dissertation to which I am

entirely thankful.

Finally, I would like to make my enduring thanks be known to my family. My

parents Cheryl Diggins and Glen Diggins for the unwavering support throughout

this journey and my sisters Phillipa and Chloe. I thank the many friends, colleagues,

and fellow PhD travellers that I have met along on the way. While this has been an

academic and intellectual journey, it has also been one of immeasurable personal

growth and development. At times, it would not have been realised if not for your

care and support. Thank you.

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the common grouping of Donald Judd and Robert Morris

within minimalism to renegotiate difference between their intervening strategies

into modernist art and criticism. When minimalism emerged as an avant-gardist

threat and discursive challenge to modernist art during the mid-1960s, many

contemporary critics missed the conceptual differences at play between Judd and

Morris’ practices. Instead dismissive critics emphasised commonage within the

rejection of modernist theory and formalism their art and writings signified. This

thesis re-evaluates this art historical pairing of Judd and Morris within modern art

by mapping out dissonances and resonances across their aesthetics.

The primary contention of this thesis is that the conceptual dissimilarities between

Judd and Morris’ minimalist practices extend from their formative artistic

explorations. For Judd, this is painting and art criticism, while for Morris it is

painting and dance. This thesis pursues a chronological examination of their

respective paths towards minimalism and then comparatively analyses their

minimalist practices from the early 1960s through to the end of that decade. The

respective formal and philosophical problems Judd and Morris engaged with in

their early transitory fields open to their conceptual dissonances between them at

the site of the minimalism’s contest of the modernist canon.

Table of Contents

i. Introduction 1

i.1. Judd 3

i.2. Morris 7

i.3. Dissonance 11

i.4. Resonance 14

1. Modernist Painting and its Challenge 23

1.1. Painting as Modernist 24

1.2. The Theatre of Cage and Rauschenberg 31

1.3. The End of Modernist Painting 40

2. Movement through Painting 47

2.1. Problems in Painting 48

2.2. Judd’s Early Paintings 52

2.3. The question of Pollock 56

2.4. Painting and Bodies 60

3. Modern Dance and Minimalist Interventions 66

3.1. Modernism and the Dancing Body 67

3.2. Cunningham’s Dance in Space and Time 74

3.3. Movement and Nature 80

3.4. Early Objects, Early Dance 84

3.5. Movement towards the Postmodern 93

4. Objects and Sculpture 104

4.1. Painting to Objects 105

4.2. Judd at the Green Gallery 111

4.3. Sculpture in Grey, Dance in White 121

4.4. Critical receptions at the Green 128

5. Formalist Concerns: Gestalts and Seriality 134

5.1. Primary Structures 136

5.2. Form and Order 144

6. Formalist Concerns: Red and Grey 157

6.1. Colour 158

6.2. Materials and Methods of Facture 170

7. The Canon and Critical Afterthoughts 180

7.1. Canon and Contest 181

7.2. Rupture and Conceptual Fragments 192

7.3. Politics and Practice 200

ii. Conclusion 212

iii. Bibliography 225

iv. Appendix of Illustrations

1

Introduction

Donald Judd and Robert Morris occupy decisive roles in the contemporary contest

of modern art’s canon played out in New York during the 1960s. The object-based

works of these artists announce the art historical movement of minimalism and

their critical literature fashions its aesthetic rationale. Minimalism’s discursive

challenge of the canon sees the rejection of the most defining conditions of

modernist art. Modernist critics, most notably Clement Greenberg, Harold

Rosenberg, and Michael Fried, prosecute Judd’s and Morris’s minimalist practices

for transgressing artistic modernism. In turn, Judd’s and Morris’s practices

compete and conflict against each other within this febrile atmosphere. This thesis

interrogates Judd’s and Morris’s differing intercessions into the narrative of

modernist art and examines the sites of dissonance between them. Modernist and

dismissive accounts of minimalism often missed the dissonances operating

between Judd’s and Morris’s practices. As such, their competition and their

diverging aesthetic strategies were not always scrutinised adequately within

modernist discourse. Greenberg’s ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967) and Michael

Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) are key texts which obviate Judd’s and Morris’s

conceptual disunity. Judd, below, delivered the following riposte in response to

Fried’s approximation of he and Morris in Fried’s essay:

Fried’s article ‘Art and Objecthood’ in the 1967 summer issue of Artforum was

stupid. He cross-referenced Bob Morris, Tony Smith and myself and argued against

the mess. Smith’s statements and his work are contradictory to my own. Bob

Morris’s Dada interests are very alien to me and there’s a lot in his dogmatic

articles that I don’t like.

[…]

Fried is not careful and informed. His pedantic pseudo-philosophical analysis is the

equivalent of Art News’s purple poetic prose of the late fifties.

2

That prose was only emotional recreation and Fried’s thinking is just formal

analysis and both methods used exclusively are shit.1

As Judd makes clear above, critics like Fried, who were more intent on the deletion

rather than consideration of minimalism, often missed the conflicting aspects

within Judd’s and Morris’s aesthetics. This thesis studies the formalist and

philosophical frameworks governing Judd’s and Morris’s respective art practices

and contends the dissonances at play between them are rooted in their individual

trajectories towards minimalism’s object. For Judd, this is through painting and art

criticism, and for Morris, through painting and dance. It is the differing formal

problems the artists engage in these earlier art practices that result in the

oppositional theories they articulate for minimalism in the mid-1960s.

To support this argument this thesis conducts respective analyses on Judd’s and

Morris’s artworks and writings from c.1955–1970. Within this chronology, Judd’s

and Morris’s corresponding aesthetics are contextualised through biography and

situated at the site of modernist art’s discursive rupture. The artistic works of Judd

and Morris are further interrogated against the prevailing critical theories of the

period, especially those of Greenberg, Fried, Rosenberg, and Rosalind Krauss. The

theatrical practices of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham

are examined in their challenge of the dominant theories of artistic modernism in

the 1950s; this thesis asserts that the collective and individual works of these three

artists anticipate and resonate with minimalism in the 1960s. Similarly, the

conceptual tributaries that deflect from minimalism in the late 1960s are

questioned for their resonance with Judd or Morris’ principal minimalist concerns.

It is at this historical juncture, at the end of the 1960s, when minimalism impacts

upon the canon of modern art that Morris’s practices diverge through

1 Donald Judd, ‘Complaints: part 1’, Studio International, (April 1969), in: Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975: gallery reviews, book reviews, articles, letters to the editor,

reports, statements, complaints (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design), 198.

3

postminimalism and process art. This divergence signals the endpoint of the

interrogative scope of this thesis.

Judd

Judd’s conceptual and formal progression from painting to what he terms ‘specific

objects’ is central to this thesis. This move is driven by Judd’s philosophical

concern with empiricism and sees his rejection of many of the aesthetic traditions

of modernism that branch from rationalist thought. By tracking Judd’s move from

painting to objects chronologically, his paintings are seen increasingly more and

more object-like across time. Judd first abandons representational painting to

work with simple geometric and abstracted forms, then mixes sand into the paint

to build a rougher, more pronounced and tactile ground. In later stages of his

painting, Judd inserts distinctive three-dimensional objects into the canvas. From

here, lastly, Judd breaks from painting’s inherent two-dimensionality to create

three-dimensional objects that jut from the wall or stand-alone on the floor.

Scholarship on Judd’s paintings from his early period is relatively limited. Judd did

not significantly exhibit any work after his 1957 exhibition of paintings at Panoras

Gallery until 1963 at the Green Gallery when his move to objects was all but

complete. The years between these two exhibitions are instructive to Judd’s

transition from painting to objects and are populated with artworks that speak to

this move. Yet without critical exposure at the time, there is scarce

contemporaneous literature on Judd’s paintings from this period.

There are two valuable pieces of scholarship which have been beneficial in the

analysis of the early Judd works undertaken in this thesis. Firstly, the 1975

catalogue raisonné on Judd, compiled by Brydon Smith with Roberta Smith’s

accompanying essay on the artist. This monograph is a vital documentary resource

4

for addressing Judd’s works produced between 1960 and 1974.2 The

documentation of works within this monograph enables analysis of the earliest

objects and object-like paintings from Judd’s oeuvre that are otherwise unavailing.

Roberta Smith’s essay on the artist exists as the first comprehensive biographical

account on Judd, making it requisite reading for researchers of the artist. This

publication was produced in conjunction with Judd’s retrospective held at the

National Gallery of Canada in 1975. The omission of Judd’s paintings produced

prior to 1960 in the catalogue is, however, notable. In Judd’s early paintings from

the 1950s, the problematic and painterly concerns of realism, figuration, and

illusionism are evident. Judd’s 1950s paintings do not sit well with his unbending

call for specific objects in the 1960s and they were not considered for inclusion in

this 1975 exhibition.

Judd’s earliest paintings were availed for critical analysis much more recently,

specifically in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in 2002. Thomas Kellein’s

scholarship on Judd in relation to this exhibition presents a more complete survey

of the artist’s painting practice.3 Kellein covers Judd’s artistic output over the time

period 1955-1968, which incorporates Judd’s earliest paintings from his formative

phase through to the specific objects of his principal minimalist period.4 Kellein’s

study problematizes the view that Judd’s objects materialised self-assured in the

early 1960s after a preliminary series of object-like paintings. This view is

promulgated through most of the earlier, contemporary literature on Judd. What

Kellein’s research demonstrates is that Judd’s painting practice extended for

almost ten years before the first of his objects appeared. As such, the paintings

2 Brydon Smith, Donald Judd: a catalogue of the exhibition at the National Gallery of

Canada, Ottawa, 24 May-6 July 1975: catalogue raisonné of paintings, objects, and wood-

blocks, 1960-1974 (Ottawa: The Gallery for the Corporation of the National Museums of Canada, 1975). 3 Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd, 1955-1968 (New York: D.A.P., 2002). A catalogue of the exhibition ‘Donald Judd. The Early Work, 1955-1968’ from 5 May to 21 July 2002 in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and from 31 January 2002 to 27 April 2003 in the Menil Collection, Houston. 4 Like the 1975 catalogue raisonné, Kellein’s study was produced to coincide with a 2002 exhibition at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, which showed Judd’s earliest paintings mostly for the first time. Although this exhibition occurred sometime after Judd’s death in 1994, Kellein states that the idea was hatched in discussions with the artist around 1992. Suggestibly, Judd’s own position on his objects’ relationship to painting softened with time.

5

Judd produced in this formative period are important to understanding how he

arrived at minimalism. The formal problems Judd uncovers in two-dimensional

painting led him to gradually reject the medium’s painterly conventions. This

aligns the early part of Judd’s program with Greenberg’s reductionist modernism,

though Judd pushed this self-analytical testing of medium to the point of its

rupture.

Judd’s realisation of actual space and his engagement with physical forms are

made manifest through his rejection of painting. The conditions of modernist

painting are set out by Greenberg in his essay of the same name – ‘Modernist

Painting’ (1965), which was republished from a lecture he gave five years prior.5

This thesis scrutinises the Judd and Greenberg dialectic and tracks this critical

dialogue through the conceptual and formal developments seen in Judd’s own

work. Viewed through his artworks, Judd’s repudiation of two-dimensional

painting and his move to three-dimension objects bears a certain fatal logic

towards Greenberg’s teleological narrative of modernism. This thesis gives

considerable attention to Greenberg’s modernist theory as it is realised through

the critic’s key essays, especially Greenberg’s writings on the primary painters of

the New York School. Seen through the context of Greenbergian modernism, Judd

pursues Greenberg’s criticism to its theoretical limits, subverts it, to then dismiss it

in the mid-1960s. Hal Foster below suggests that Judd’s intervention into

modernist art was not only a perverse agitation of Greenbergian theory, but was

logically indebted to it as well:

Yet this extreme defiance developed as excessive devotion. For example, the

reservation voiced by Greenberg about some cubistic painting – that its content is

too governed by its edge (‘American-Type Painting’) – is elaborated by Judd into a

brief against all modernist painting: its flat, rectangular format ‘determines and

limits the arrangement of whatever is on and inside it’. Here, as Judd extends

5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), Forum Lectures (Voice of America, Washington); revised and reprinted in: Art and Literature (Paris, Spring 1965) and Gregory Battcock (ed.), The New Art: a critical anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 67-77. The reprinted version in Battcock is referenced henceforth.

6

Greenberg, he breaks with him, for what Greenberg regards as a definitional

essence of painting Judd takes as a conventional limit – literally a frame to exceed.6

As Foster points out, Judd’s specific objects have their conceptual genesis in

Greenberg’s modernist painting. Yet, Judd’s specific objects necessarily reject the

conditions of two-dimensional painting to subversively occupy sculpture’s third

dimension. In ‘Specific Objects’ (1965), Judd declares painting and sculpture

finished; condemned by their inherent limitations, he asserts his new art exists as

neither. Driven by a strong empiricist bent, Judd purged what he saw as painting’s

redundancies and conceits: realism – the representational depiction of objects, the

illusionistic treatment of space, and anthropomorphic or rationalist composition.

Judd countered these falsities by creating real objects in real space. Surmising this

position, Judd confirmed: ‘Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific

than paint on a flat surface.’7

Judd’s 1964 radio interview with Bruce Glaser, in which Frank Stella and Dan

Flavin also took part, remains one of the prescient documents of the new art.8 In

the interview, Judd dismisses the aesthetic traditions of European modernism as

outmoded and in disagreement with the new American art. Judd and Stella set out

divisions between old and new, between Europe and America, and propose a new

art form that is non-compositional and not governed by rationalist philosophy.

This interview is critical to understanding Judd’s philosophical argument which

underpins the new art he theorises in his key essays and reviews. Within the

heated contest of ideas enthusing the New York art world, some critics were

6 Hal Foster, ‘The Crux of Minimalism’ (1986), in: Foster, Return of the Real: the avant-

garde at the end of the century (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 44. 7 Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965; in: Judd, Complete Writings, 184. 8 This program was one of a series hosted by Glaser and was titled, ‘New Nihilism or New Art’ and broadcast on New York’s WBAI-FM in February 1964. The radio interview featured Dan Flavin, though Judd and Stella contributed to most of the discussion with Glaser, and Flavin subsequently asked his comments to be withheld from the final transcript. The discussion was transcribed and edited by Lucy R. Lippard, and published in the September 1966 edition of ARTnews, appearing under the title ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’. It was reprinted in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 148-64. The reprinted version in Battcock is referenced henceforth.

7

sympathetic to the new art Judd agitated for, others were not as forgiving. In his

writings, Judd brazenly advocated for the new art while he took aim with his

customary blunt, dry, and often stinging rebukes, against artists and critics

perceived by him as ‘old hat’.9 In addressing Judd’s work through this primary

critical foment, his aesthetic program is historically situated – quite causatively –

at the fracture of modernist art. This thesis evaluates Judd’s words and objects in

their disruptive impact against modernist discourse and measures their weight

upon late artistic modernism.

Morris

Pursuing Morris’s trajectory through the different fields of painting, dance, and

sculpture forms the other critical focus of this thesis. Like Judd, Morris starts out in

painting, yet distinct from Judd, Morris’s engages the body and its movement.

Morris’s focuses on the physiological act of painting, whereas Judd’s focus is

squared on the formal physicality of the painting. This early distinction between

the two is vital and points to fundamental distinctions between Judd’s and Morris’s

principle minimalist practices. Morris’s interest in the body’s movement in the act

of painting was ultimately frustrated as he was unable to reconcile this activity

with the end image. Morris exhibited paintings in the late 1950s in two exhibitions

before he gave up on the practice altogether. There is little documentation or

information on these earliest paintings outside a favourable exhibition review and

a 1968 interview in which he lists his influences in these works as Jackson Pollock

and Clyfford Still. In this interview, Morris claims his inability to reconcile process

and image led him to the field of dance where the body’s movement constitutes

both the process and the artwork.10

9 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 151. 10 Robert Morris interview by Paul Cummings (1968). Transcript of oral history interview with Robert Morris conducted on 10 March 1968 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-morris-13065

8

This thesis contends that Morris’s dance practice opens-up to the conceptual crux

of his minimalist sculpture. Most of the monographic literature on Morris

approaches his involvement with dance from an art historical perspective, viewing

his choreographic work as adjunctive. This art historical literature considers little

of Morris’s important intercession into modern dance as part of the Judson Dance

Theater. There is scant illumination upon the formal concerns that Morris

interrogates in dance that inform his wider minimalist practice. This thesis

evaluates Morris’s choreographic work as part of the Judson group’s broader

dissolution of modern dance and performance. To achieve this, this thesis

establishes an historical interchange between the early modernism of Martha

Graham and Doris Humphrey, which Morris and his collaborators sought to

subvert and with the interrogative practices of Merce Cunningham and Ann

Halprin, who in many ways anticipate Morris and his contemporaries.

Dance historian Sally Banes’s scholarship on the Judson Dance Theater stands

alone as the most authoritative account on this collaboration of dancers, musicians,

and visual artists who performed at the Judson Memorial Church from the early

1960s.11 Banes follows the Judson group’s unravelling of modernism in dance and

argues that the group’s experimental practices instigated postmodern dance.

Banes’s documentation of the Judson concerts is an invaluable resource for study

in this field given the ephemeral nature of dance and performance, the scarcity of

visual documentation, and the little critical attention the group received at the

time. The dance critic Jill Johnston is the notable exception here; she was the

group’s initial critical champion. The research on the Judson Dance Theater

presented in this thesis is indebted to Banes’s scholarship for providing

documentary access to choreographic works otherwise inaccessible. Significantly,

it is the exuberant, unencumbered spirit and communal ethos of the group which

shines through Banes’s studies on the Judson Dance Theater. In the context of this

11 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1987 [1977]). Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993). Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde

performance and the effervescent body (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993).

9

thesis, Banes’s mapping of the personal trajectories and synergies among the

group have been particularly beneficial. These creative tangents bring forth

Morris’s influences from within and without this milieu for examination. The

personal and professional relationships Morris shared with Simone Forti and

Yvonne Rainer were the site of the major conceptual, formal, and indeed personal

problems Morris wrestled with through dance and sculpture. Reading much of the

literature on Morris through the prism of art history provides little insight into

these important relationships.

Maurice Berger’s scholarship on Morris is telling in how Morris’s relationships to

Forti and Rainer are generally treated in art historical narratives.12 Although

Berger does give analytic attention to Morris’s choreographic works, it tends

towards expressions of Morris’s individual achievement or genius. This is

somewhat understandable given Berger’s scholarship is solely focused on Morris.

Yet, the portrayal of Morris as a politicised, radical, individual, and even heroic

figure of the New Left, veils the fact that Morris was part of a much wider

collaborative group when working on these performance pieces. Further, Morris

was not always a principal member in the Judson group’s performances. Berger’s

scholarship neglects to mention that Morris was often cast as a performer, not

creator, in works choreographed by Forti, Rainer, or others. And it fails to point out

that many of the seminal concepts attributed to Morris were either common or not

so seminal. Anna C. Chave’s enquiry into the use of biography by Morris and his

overly sympathetic critics, casts doubt over the origin of concepts and works often

linked to Morris. Although Chave does not direct this criticism at Berger – instead

thanking him in the credits of her essay – it is useful, nonetheless, to focus Chave’s

analysis on Berger’s writing on Morris. Here Chave writes:

A certain overweighing of Morris’s role as progenitor or ‘intellectual superman’

has served to occlude or subsume the initiatives of other generative and engaging

12 Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Maurice Berger, ‘Wayward Landscapes’ in: Robert Morris: the mind/

body problem: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January – April 1994 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994).

10

figures of this era with differing reference points, emphases, and values ... the

lionising of Morris by Krauss and others has not only functioned indirectly to slight

other individuals whose achievements and scope of influence might render them

equally or more deserving of such attention, it has also traduced much that was

most radical – because at least incipiently communitarian – about the creative

ferment at this historical juncture in the United States.13

Chave’s feminist critique on Morris’s earlier practices and their less than critical

assumption in the writing of minimalism’s history reveals the complexity in

engaging the personal biography of Morris in discussion of his work. The artist

frequently mediates or presents biographic elements through his works which are

often at variance to others’ historical accounts. The writings of Rainer and Forti

have been valuable in disentangling Morris’s practices from his labyrinthine

biography. Although Forti’s and Rainer’s accounts cannot be taken as truer, they do

appear less affected than the deliberate mythologising and revisionism which is

present in Morris’s later writing and that of his allied monographers.

While this thesis interrogates Morris’s performance practices, it also looks at the

broader dissolution of modernism in dance. As such, it attends to other figures

within the milieu that influenced Morris or who he shared influences with. This

includes Forti, Rainer, Steve Paxton, and earlier luminaries Robert Rauschenberg,

John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. By viewing Morris’s choreographic practice

through dance history, his approach to minimalism is inherently different to that of

Judd’s. If Judd is seen to threaten modernist art from within, does Morris challenge

it from outside? Ultimately, by realising minimalist theory co-extensively in dance

and sculpture and with his conceptual crossover between these fields, Morris’s

perception of the object can only be distinct from Judd’s.

13 Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and Biography’, The Art Bulletin, 82.1 (March 2000), 154. Chave indicates the phrase ‘intellectual superman’ was used by Morris about himself.

11

Dissonance

Reading Judd’s definitive essay, ‘Specific Objects’ in contrast to Morris’s own

defining articles, ‘Notes on Sculpture, parts I & II’, the conflict between the two

viewpoints is made abundantly clear.14 Much of Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’

essays (parts I-IV), read as a negation of Judd’s aesthetic program. In establishing

the points of dissonance between Judd and Morris, this thesis engages their

opposing theories as they are set out in these essays and then realised in their

respective artworks. Of the more recent literature, James Meyer’s extensive study

on minimalism successfully periodises the artworks and critical writings of Judd

and Morris. Although Meyer’s holistic account extends to cover all the key

minimalists, his concise framing of Judd and Morris’s opposition resonates with

the investigative framework of this thesis. Meyer presents minimalism as a

contested discourse with its central theories and practices forged in a constant

state of challenge and rebuttal. Below, Meyer outlines the highly oppositional

nature of minimalism:

… if we construe minimalism as a discourse, we do well to understand this in

relation to its historical setting, the network of galleries and magazines that

supported these [minimalist] practices ... specific exhibitions inspired certain

replies, which inspired further accounts; a term introduced casually in a review

might eventually designate a broader trend. Theory influenced practice and vice

versa.15

Meyer’s discursive understanding of minimalism finds its defining theories were

constructed through antagonistic viewpoints. This critical perspective is expanded

14 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, Artforum, 4.6 (February 1966), 42-44. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, Artforum, 5.2 (October 1966), 20-23. Both parts are reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 222-235. The reprinted versions in Battcock are referenced henceforth. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part III: Notes and Non-Sequiturs, Artforum, 5.10 (Summer 1967), 24-29. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part IV: Beyond Objects, Artforum, 7.8 (April 1969), 50-54. 15 James Meyer, Minimalism: art and polemics in the sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 7.

12

upon and pursued in this thesis. To address Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ it is necessary

to engage with Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’. Consideration of Morris’s notion

of phenomenological formalism, as he defines it in ‘Notes on Sculpture, parts I & II’,

can only be fully realised in contradistinction to Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’. Fried’s

‘Art and Objecthood’ is a clear response to Greenberg’s, Judd’s, and Morris’s essays.

Finally, Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture, parts III & IV’ serve to unravel the minimalist

object. This dislocating digression is picked up and mapped out by Krauss in her

influential essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979).

The aim of this thesis is not to conduct a broad history of minimalism, as Meyer has

achieved, but rather to explicate the dissonances between the programs of Judd

and Morris in consideration of their earlier artistic practices. This dissertation

agrees with Meyer’s observation that Morris’s sculptural theory is staked out as a

rejection of Judd’s, however, this thesis goes further to contend that Morris’s

involvement with dance and performance is instructive to his sculptural theory

too. As Meyer’s framing of the artists confirms, the opposition between Judd and

Morris is seen elementarily in the terminology they use to describe their practices.

Where Judd declares painting and sculpture dead, with his specific objects existing

as an art form beyond these terms, Morris argues his own work is concerned with

traditional sculptural values. The use of colour then becomes a critical point of

contention, with Judd declaring: ‘Color is never unimportant, as it usually is in

sculpture.’16 Morris radically inverts this logic and emphasises that:

[The] qualities of scale, proportion, shape, mass, are physical. Each of these

qualities is made visible by the adjustment of an obdurate, literal mass. Color does

not have this characteristic. It is additive. Obviously, things exist as colored. The

objection is raised against the use of color that emphasises the optical and in so

doing subverts the physical. The more neutral hues, which do not call attention to

themselves, allow for the maximum focus on the physical decisions that inform

sculptural work.17

16 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 183. 17 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, 225.

13

According to Morris, colour was not one of the essential properties of sculpture.

The pale grey palette Morris worked with in the 1960s attests to this stance. In his

essays of the period, Morris slates Judd’s use of colour suggesting his brightly

coloured objects are not far removed from painting. Conversely, Judd pointed out

that ‘Morris’s pieces are minimal visually’, his sculpture existed in ‘the most

minimal way’, and that ‘there isn’t, after all, much to look at.’18 Minimalism during

this period was a contested term. Judd resisted the use of minimalist or minimal in

relation to his own work throughout and thereafter, claiming instead that he was

an empiricist. For Judd, minimalism was construed as negative against his own

work, though he had used it in his evaluation of Morris’s work. The fact

minimalism was eventually settled upon and applied to Judd’s work as well, was a

source of considerable annoyance to the artist as his complaint below suggests:

In the last three years or so I’ve thought that Clement Greenberg and his followers

have been trying to form a similar closed situation [to Abstract Expressionism].

I’ve expected a lot of stupid things to reoccur – movements, labels – but I didn’t

think there would be another attempt to impose a universal style. It’s naive and it’s

directly opposed to the nature of contemporary art, including that of the artists

they support. Their opinions are the same as those of the critics and followers of

the late fifties: there is only one way of working – one kind of form, one medium,

everything else is irrelevant and trivial; history is on our side; preserve the true

art; preserve the true criticism.19

Although it appears insincere to Judd to claim his work under the umbrella of

minimalism, as this thesis does, minimalism as a historical label which designates

an aesthetic style and discursive practice, has long since been adopted. Herein,

when the practices of Judd, Morris, or their contemporaries Frank Stella, Dan

Flavin, Carl Andre, or Sol LeWitt are labelled minimalist, it is in exploitation of the

18 Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, Arts Magazine (February 1965), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 165. Donald Judd, ‘Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, Arts Magazine (March 1964), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 118. 19 Judd, ‘Complaints: part I’, 197.

14

term in this broadest and most general sense. This thesis does not seek to unpack

minimalism as an art historical label or challenge its broader acceptance by the

canon. Judd’s and Morris’s work is not considered contemporary today; the

disputes over labelling artists and their artworks, which are typically hottest at

their most immediate, have been decided. This thesis does however scrutinise

when and where minimalism is used and contested as a visual description

comparative to Judd’s and Morris’s works. The question of what is visually minimal

goes to one of the core antagonisms between Judd and Morris. It points to

oppositional tension between the haptic and the optic which both artists heatedly

claimed distinguished their own work from the other.

In addition to explicating the dissonances between Judd and Morris, this thesis

examines how and where their respective practices engage and disengage

modernist art. The dissimilarity between the cumulative works of Judd and Morris,

and those of other contemporary groupings of artists, can be stressed through

analysing the formal properties of space, colour, scale, volume, mode of facture,

and choice of materials. From this, Judd’s and Morris’s formal concerns reveal

interrogative attitudes towards Greenbergian formalism. Judd’s intense empiricist

treatment of colour, material, and form exaggerate Greenberg’s definition of the

modernist artist and compounds the critic’s notion of artisanal quality. While

Morris’s minimal treatment of the visual and emphasis on the phenomenal calls for

a different perceptual model for engaging his works. The theatrical aspects of

Morris’s minimalist practices further question the very nature of modern art.

Resonance

While this dissertation accentuates the differences between Judd’s and Morris’s

practices to stress their extrication within the canon, it must also acknowledge the

resonances between them. The initial perceptions of Judd and Morris go some way

to explaining their proximity within the narrative of modern art. At the time of

15

their emergence, establishment critics perceived Judd and Morris pursuing similar

anti-modernist programs, identifying commonage across their geometric, mainly

monochromatic, three-dimensional forms. Heightening this, Judd’s and Morris’s

artworks were regularly presented alongside each other in the same group shows,

particularly early on. Both artists were promoted by the same New York galleries;

first Green, then Castelli. Mel Bochner, a sympathetic critic, identified amongst the

watershed ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, that the

works of Judd and Morris, along with the other would be core minimalists, stood

out amongst the rest in the show. In his review Bochner cut to the chase:

The New Art of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Don Judd, Robert Morris, Robert

Smithson deals with the surface of matter and avoids its ‘heart’. It is unlifelike, not

spontaneous, exclusive. It does not move. This is not an ‘art-style’. It will not

’wither’ with the passing season and go away. It is not engineering. It is not

appliances. It is not faceless and impersonal. It will not become academic. It offers

no outline or formula. It denies everything it asserts. The implications are

astounding. Art no longer need pretend to be about Life. Inhibitions, dogmas and

anxieties of nineteenth-century romance disappear. Art is, after all, Nothing.20

Bochner’s review valorising the works of Judd, Morris, Flavin, Andre, LeWitt, and

Smithson reveals their new art defied the interpretative models of previous art.

Although Judd and Morris conceptually contrasted each other throughout the

1960s, they did share a common rejection of previous aesthetic convention. Their

capacity to articulate this in both artistic production and theoretical writing is

attributable to their formative art training and their interests in art history and

philosophy. In a strictly biographic sense, and without framing an historical

context here, Judd’s and Morris’s paths towards minimalism bear considerable

semblance. Art historian Phyllis Tuchman identifies numerous similarities across

Judd’s and Morris’s childhoods and early adulthoods and proposes that ‘their

parallel experiences … probably were as significant for twentieth century art as the

20 Mel Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, Arts Magazine, 40.8 (June 1966), 32-5, in: Bochner, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007 (Cambridge and London: October and The MIT Press, 2008), 8-11.

16

actual exchanges of Picasso and Braque or Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.’21

Both Judd and Morris were born and raised in the American mid-West; Judd born

in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri and Morris, in 1931 in Kansas City, Kansas.

As children, both had shown interest in art in school and through extracurricular

art lessons, growing up in what Tuchman describes as ‘the hotbed of Regional Art

during its heyday.’22

Both Judd and Morris served in engineers’ units in Korea; Judd prior to the

outbreak of the war (1945-7) and Morris towards its end (1952). Returning from

Korea, Judd studied painting at the Art Students League in New York (1947-8;

1950-3) and philosophy at Columbia University (1949-53), with emphasis on

empiricism and pragmatism. He returned to Columbia in 1957, four years after

completing his Bachelor’s degree to undertake a Master’s degree in Art History

(1957-62). Judd’s interests here centred on the Renaissance and contemporary art.

Throughout this period (1953-67), Judd taught art at various institutions. In 1959,

Judd commenced writing art criticism and reviews for publications including Arts

News, Arts Magazine, and Art International.

Morris undertook tertiary studies at the University of Kansas City (1948-50) and

the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1951, Morris enrolled at the California School of

Fine Arts in San Francisco, before suspending his studies to serve with the Army

Corps of Engineers in Korea. Upon his return, between 1953 and 1955, Morris

studied at Reed College in Oregon, majoring in philosophy and psychology. After

moving back to San Francisco, Morris began his involvement with experimental

dance and performance. With his first wife Simone Forti, Morris moved to New

York around 1960 though they divorced soon after.23 In New York, Morris pursued

art history studies at Hunter College and submitted his Master’s thesis on

Constantin Brancusi in 1966.

21 Phyllis Tuchman, ‘Minimalism and Critical Response’, Artforum, 15.5 (May 1977), 29. 22 Tuchman, ‘Minimalism and Critical Response’, 29. 23 Judd also married a dancer, Julie Finch, in 1964 (divorcing in 1975).

17

Both Judd and Morris wrote extensively on art, their own and particularly, in the

case of Judd, the art of others. It is these writings that are given the most analytic

attention in this thesis. Judd’s definitive essay ‘Specific Objects’ was published in

1965, though he claims to have formulated its argument around 1963. From his

numerous exhibition reviews through to his longer essays on the primary painters

of the New York school, Judd fashions his view on how the new American art

differed from and surpassed European modernism. Here, Judd came to symbolise

both what is new and American, positioning himself not only as the logical heir to

Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, but as the voice

of this art thereby usurping Greenberg.

Morris first theorised his minimalist sculpture with ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part I’ in

the February issue of Artforum in 1966. Part II was published in the October issue

of the same year. Parts III and IV were published in 1967 and 1969 respectively,

while ‘Notes on Dance’ was published in 1965 and ‘Anti form’ in 1968.24 These

articles form the theoretical nexus of Morris’s minimalist, performance, and

postminimalist practices during the 1960s. As such, Morris offers an evolving

interpretation of minimalism. Over the course of his essays, Morris expands

minimalist thought to encompass various sculptural practices and situations, as

well as the engagement with unconventional, soft materials and external

environments. In both his writing on sculpture and dance, Morris’s conceptual

concern with body and object relationships is clearly evident.

Judd and Morris’s assumption of the positions of both artist and theorist, led

Harold Rosenberg to exclaim: ‘The inspiration of the Minimasters is art criticism;

many of these painters and sculptors began as writers on art.’25 Rosenberg, an

ardent critic of minimalism, writes here from a position of eroding authority.

Minimalism demanded new critical methodologies from those of earlier artistic

movements. The critics entrenched in previous convention, like Rosenberg, soon

24 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Dance’, The Tulane Drama Review, 10.2 (1965), 179-186. Robert Morris, ‘Anti-Form’, Artforum, 6 (April 1968), 33-35. 25 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Defining Art’, The New Yorker (25 February 1967); reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 304-5.

18

found their voices increasingly marginalised in the face of the new art. Gregory

Battcock, in the preface to his quintessential anthology of writings on minimal art,

noted this changing relationship between art and its criticism during this period:

In order to declare his intentions effectively, and to emphasise his achievements,

the new artist has moved into a much closer relationship with the art critic. Many

of the new artists are both writing and talking about their art in a highly articulate

and critical manner. At the same time, the appraisals of critics go beyond mere

judgment and evaluation; they provide a sympathetic contribution.26

That the artists themselves wrote liberally about their own art was not necessarily

a new development. Artists across the history of modern art have engaged with the

written word to substantiate meaning behind their artworks. In this sense, such

artist writings are somewhat reflective, often verging on and sometimes venturing

into the metaphysical as way of illumination. The generation previous to Judd and

Morris were no different in this regard; it is seen in the writings of Newman or

Rothko which deal with the sublime. This is not to say these earlier artists were

disingenuous when engaging with art writing, but rather, before Judd and Morris,

the artist’s text was held decidedly secondary to the primary practice of painting or

sculpting. These earlier texts served to reflect meaning upon the artworks – an

explanatory note or almost an afterthought. Judd and Morris differ from these

earlier artists in two main ways. Firstly, their writings serve as interpretive models

to their artworks. That is, they state to the audience the conceptual framework for

engaging the artwork. Their texts do not reflect, rather they instruct – sometimes

to the point of didacticism. As such, writing becomes an integral part of the overall

artistic practice, no longer held separate or distinct from the artwork and its

making. Judd’s objects and Morris’s sculptures, arguably, seem less resolute

without the contexts of ‘Specific Objects’ or ‘Notes on Sculpture’. Many of the

conceptual artists who followed Judd and Morris, dispensed with the art object

altogether leaving only its blueprint or text. That many of these artists saw Judd

26 Gregory Battcock, ‘Preface’, in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 26.

19

and Morris as their theoretical precursors, points to the centrality which Judd and

Morris afforded art writing in their practices.27

Secondly, the nature of art writing changed with Judd and Morris. References to

the spiritual, metaphysical, or transcendental qualities of the art object and art

making became decidedly unfashionable to Judd, Morris, and their contemporaries.

Instead, their writings situated meaning solely in the experiential, factual, and

tangible aspects of their artworks. In Judd’s case particularly, this manifested itself

as an extreme formalism extending into empiricism. Only what could be seen or

experienced as fact in the artwork was given countenance. Morris’s writings too

conveyed a rebellious matter-of-factness. He argued his sculptural objects existed

as the sum of interrelated formal properties – size, scale, mass, and shape. The

emphasis, as Morris’s essays makes clear, is on the spectator’s visual apperception

of these formal relationships. He termed this ‘phenomenological formalism.’28 The

key to decoding Judd’s and Morris’s minimalist works is set out in their respective

writings. Bochner would later reflect on this period of art writing and criticism

undertaken by these artists as revolutionary, irreversibly leading to a change in art

itself. For Bochner:

Judd opened-up art writing, showing that it didn’t deserve its bad name as a

literary form, and that it could establish grounds for a public discourse among

artists. His contemporaries like Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt, as well as

younger artists like Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and I, all joined the published

conversation … The inmates had realised that if they couldn’t quite take over the

asylum, they could at least talk to each other through the bars. Hijacking the

critical discourse proved extremely subversive, redefining all the issues (goodbye

27 Such artists include Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, or Vito Acconci who once declared minimalism ‘the father art’. (Acconci’s statement is from a 1997 interview with Frazer Ward, see: Alexander Keller & Frazer Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Grade Blockbuster’, Cinema Journal, 45.2 (Winter 2006), 5. 28 Robert Morris; Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris’, October, 70, The Duchamp Effect (Autumn 1994), 51. [Interview conducted 17 December 1985].

20

‘flatness, goodbye ‘framing edge’), and eventually leading to a sea change in the

nature of art.29

The stakes were high on all sides; for Judd and Morris the splintering of modernist

thought gave their competing aesthetic programmes historical consequence. They

served as models for the next generation of artists whose practices could no longer

be verbalised within a modernist syntax. Lucy Lippard confirms the influence of

the two: ‘Donald Judd was … a powerful figure, an obdurately blunt artist and

writer who was a model for many young artists. And Robert Morris, elusive and

virtually styleless, was the progenitor of many soon-to-be “seminal” concepts.’30

Notionally, Morris’s movement through postminimalism is beyond the

chronological scope of this thesis. Nonetheless, Morris’s early postminimalist

works demand deliberation when addressing minimalism’s canonisation. With the

elevation of minimalism into the canon of modern art occurring at the end of the

1960s, Morris’s postminimalist and process works, somewhat paradoxically,

subvert the very institution of modern art. This paradox is expanded upon in the

final chapter of this thesis which examines the elevation of minimalism into the

modern art canon. Here, Judd’s and Morris’s respective positions to the canon and

to modernism are addressed. Now, as a final intonation on the positioning of Judd

and Morris within the canon of modern art, Bochner’s observation below is telling:

For my generation, Judd posed the same problem as Picasso did for the Abstract

Expressionists; you either had to go over, under, around, or through him.

Conceptual, process, and earth art, each in their own way, constituted a rejection of

the specific object.31

Above, Bochner writes of the artists who came after Judd, though Morris was

obviously contemporaneous to Judd. Morris’s rejection of Judd’s specific object is

29 Mel Bochner, ‘Judd’s Writings’, Artforum (Summer 2005), reprinted in: Bochner, Solar

System & Rest Rooms, 198. 30 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: the dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 [1973]), viii. 31 Bochner, ‘Judd’s Writings’, p.198.

21

first discernible in his minimalist works in the mid-1960s. This negation becomes

unmistakable in Morris’s postminimalist and anti-form works of the late 1960s and

early 1970s, which read as attacks against the integrity of the art object. While

Morris’s minimalist works conflict so readily with Judd’s, their respective anti-

modernist programs created a fertile and emerging context for the postminimalist

and postmodernist practices that followed. Evidently, Morris’s work moved into

this context. A corollary of this enquiry, is that future research can adequately

define the conceptual resonances of Judd or Morris amongst the next generation of

New York artists who widened the fissures caused by their initial interrogations of

modernist art.

The dissolution of modernist art that is held common to Judd and Morris, sees their

pairing in art history. As such, the resonant and representative view of the artists

has more widely prevailed and the differences between their practices, has until

more recently, escaped thorough investigation. This thesis re-evaluates the

teaming of Judd and Morris by accentuating the dissonances at play between their

aesthetics. It finds these differences are ultimately rooted in their paths towards

minimalism and thus their minimalist practices are fundamentally dissonant. By

analysing their competing aesthetics through respective analyses and drawing out

this conflict, this dissertation offers to the existing scholarship on the artists a

more nuanced reading on how they defined themselves not only against

Greenbergian modernism, but against each other.

22

23

CHAPTER ONE

Modernist Painting and its Challenge

When the respective minimalist practices of Judd and Morris emerged in the early

1960s, they came into open conflict with the dictates of modernist art. The

modernist canon was largely policed through Greenberg’s formalist narrative and

practices that did not conform to the critic’s qualifications were excluded.

Greenberg had cemented his teleological view of artistic modernism through the

preceding decades and by the 1950s and the 1960s it was the established

paradigm in American art. The new art championed by Judd and Morris sought to

unravel this paradigm and soon after Greenberg’s critical model was resoundingly

rejected. Impelling the rejection of Greenberg’s narrative in the 1960s was the

collective and individual works of Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg in the

1950s. In 1953, Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company while

teaching at Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg served as the company’s artistic

director until 1964 and Cage continued as Cunningham’s long-time musical

collaborator and partner until the composer’s death in 1992.

Black Mountain College was a hotbed of new ideas in experimental aesthetics

through the 1940s and 1950s. Cage began performing and teaching there and

Rauschenberg started studying there, both in 1948.1 In 1951, while at Black

Mountain, Rauschenberg begun work on his White Paintings. It is after witnessing

Rauschenberg’s blank paintings that Cage produced his own silent arrangement

4’33”. The seemingly contentless works of Rauschenberg and Cage challenged the

inherent dichotomy of Greenbergian modernism – content and form. As such, the

White Paintings and 4’33” are influential precedents to minimalism. This chapter

defines Greenberg’s modernist paradigm and traces the emerging discordance

with it through the work of Cage and Rauschenberg. The paintings of Jasper Johns

1 Although Cage and Rauschenberg both first attended Black Mountain College in 1948, they did not formally meet until three years later at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.

24

and Frank Stella from the mid-1950s further agitate this discord. Cage,

Rauschenberg, Johns, and Stella resonate, in differing measures, with the

respective works of Judd and Morris in the 1960s. All four artists challenge

Greenberg’s modernist paradigm and within of the context this thesis they

anticipate the contest of the modernist canon played out in the critical

interventions of Judd and Morris.

Painting as Modernist

Greenberg was in many ways the chief arbiter of modernist art in America. He

greeted minimalism contemptuously as it coalesced as a visual presence in the

early 1960s. Within this new art, Greenberg rightly sensed a threat to modernist

art and criticism. Greenberg had established criteria to define artistic modernism

and policed the medium boundaries through a highly selective, formalist

methodology. Some tendencies within minimalism were categorically incongruent

to this privileged position of the art critic. Greenberg sought to exclude the

minimalists’ non-art from the canon, reactively publishing his dogmatic essay

‘Modernist Painting’ in 1965.2

Greenberg begins his narrative of modernist painting in the mid-nineteenth

century when a ‘more rational justification had begun to be demanded of every

formal social activity’.3 The arts, as one of these activities, had to justify their

continuation by offering an experience no other activity could, or face assimilation

into the realms of entertainment or therapy. To achieve this, each artistic discipline

had to eliminate allusions to the other arts and accentuate its own inherent

qualities. Painting had to distinguish itself from sculpture by removing sculptural

shade and modelling, from literature by removing reference to the literary, and

2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), The New Art:

a critical anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 67-77. 3 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 67.

25

then limit itself to qualities explicit to painting alone. In identifying ‘Kant as the

first real modernist’, Greenberg terms this move to medium purity as ‘self-

criticism’.4 Greenberg presents self-criticism as the very essence of modernism.

Self-criticism holds that the modernist practitioner uses the ‘characteristic

methods of the discipline to criticise the discipline itself.’5 The resolve of self-

criticism is to make explicit only what is ‘unique and irreducible’ to each art.6 This

is done through the testing of the medium’s conventions and rejecting all that are

found inessential. The result of self-criticism is medium purity. In ‘Towards a

Newer Laocoön’ (1940), Greenberg finds this move to medium purity complete:

… the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical

delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the

history of culture … Purity in art consists of acceptance, willing acceptance, of the

limitations of the medium of the specific art.7

In Greenbergian modernism, the artist tests the internal logic of their medium.

That is, the quintessential aspects which demarcates their art from other artistic

mediums. In painting, 'the flat surface, the shape of the support, and the properties

of the pigment' are the defining parameters.8 The modernist painter embraces

these limiting conditions in and as part of their work. Hence, in Greenberg’s

narrative: ‘[Édouard] Manet’s paintings become the first modernist ones by virtue

of the frankness which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted.’9

Greenberg determines that in tandem with the nineteenth-century’s increasing

rationality, artists progressively and consciously began testing the medium’s

explicit nature. Greenberg juxtaposes modernism as a reaction against

4 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 67. ‘Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left in all the more secure possession of what remained to it.’ 5 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 67. 6 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 68. 7 Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’, Partisan Review, (July-August 1940), in: Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-

1944, [(ed.) John O’Brian], (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 32. 8 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 69. 9 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 69.

26

Romanticism and what distinguishes the later condition is this greater concern

with technique or its ‘artisanal emphasis’.10 For Greenberg, it is this analytical and

technical approach to painting, beginning with Manet, that marks the 'hard-

headed, sober, “cold” side of Modernism’.11 The teleological nature of modernism

sees the technical advancements of earlier movements assumed by later

movements, pushing art forward through further technical innovation. To this end,

problem-solving is intrinsic to modernist art. The artist strives to overcome formal

problems proposed by earlier artists. Greenberg argues: for Pollock, this is Picasso;

for Picasso, this is Cezanne.

Modernist art is reductionist. Exploratory technique tests the medium’s

conventions and those found inessential are jettisoned. Gradually, over the course

of modernism painterly principles like correctness of proportion, the use of tone

and shade to model three-dimensional shapes, the use of light and dark to fashion

illusionistic space and depth, and linear perspective are proven dispensable. The

end result of this reductionism is a flattened and totally abstracted image. By

eliminating painting’s inessential elements the artist arrives at its ‘two constitutive

conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness.’12 Greenberg

claims that since the time of Manet, painters sought to flatten the picture plane

more and more to the point of its unity with the plane of its support: ‘The

uniformly smooth and transparent surface behind which the picture used to take

place has been made the actual locus of the picture instead of its window pane.’13

The medium of painting comprises these two irreducible constants – the image and

its support. It is the tension and disarticulation between these two fundamentals

and the pursuit to reconcile the two, which concerns the efforts of the modernist

painter.

10 Clement Greenberg, ‘Necessity of “Formalism”’, New Literary History, 3.1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn 1971), 173. 11 Clement Greenberg, ‘Necessity of “Formalism”’, 173. 12 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, Arts International, 6.8 (October 1962), revised and reprinted in: Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969), 369. The version reprinted in Geldzahler is referenced henceforth. 13 Greenberg, ‘Abstract Art’, The Nation (15 April 1944), reprinted in: Greenberg, Collected

Essays and Criticisms, vol. I, 200-1.

27

The New York School painters Greenberg champions see this resolution at its

nearest or most advanced. These painters are the logical apex to Greenberg’s

modernist succession. This positioning by Greenberg reinforces the geo-political

and economic ascendency of postwar America over Europe. Relatedly, Greenberg’s

aim was the insistence of New York’s centrality over Paris as the new home of

modern art and the avant-garde. Unapologetically, the critic envisages emergent

and radical painting techniques in mid-nineteenth century Paris as initiating the

relentless march towards flatness, abstraction, and onwards to Abstract

Expressionism. Yet puzzlingly, while developments in technique drive the advance

of Greenbergian modernism, its self-criticism begs ignorance towards cross-

medium innovations and the neglect of certain innovators. It is a too-clever turn

that reveals a judicious and shrewd narrative construction; a selection of artists

and stylistic innovations in nineteenth and twentieth century painting to predicate

the New York School in the mid-twentieth century.

A critical aspect of Greenberg’s theory is the notion of quality. While technique

assumes the mechanical or physical association of form, it is not designative of

quality. Content is the consequence of the artist’s conception and expression, and

this alone is ‘the only factor in the creation of a successful work.’14. Content and

form – the indelible dichotomy of Greenberg’s criticism – are coterminous though

forever remain distinct. ‘Quality, esthetic value originates in inspiration, vision,

“content”, not in “form”, Greenberg states and continues: ‘When a work of art or

literature succeeds, when it moves us enough, it does so ipso facto by the content

which it conveys; yet that “content” cannot be separated from its “form”’.15

From Greenberg’s perspective, it is not the skill and dexterity with which the

artwork is executed, but rather the artwork’s content which reveals its quality.

This becomes an important distinction with Abstract Expressionism. The total

14 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 369. 15 Greenberg, ‘Necessity of “Formalism”’, 174-5.

28

intellection of the image and the disparate, highly individualised styles of the

Abstract Expressionists makes the discernment of an overarching technical

approach difficult. More so than it had been in earlier movements like

Impressionism or Cubism. In eliminating one by one the painterly conventions

over the advance of a hundred years, all that is left by the time of Abstract

Expressionism is a barely or non-representational image. Or indeed, at its most

elemental, paint marks on canvas. Quality must then be found in something

intangible, as the tangible seemingly anyone can do. Greenberg’s writing on

Newman argues just this point. The critic postulates that even though ‘Newman’s

pictures look easy to copy… they are far from easy to conceive or invent’.16 For

Greenberg, Newman’s conception resides in the exact choice of colour and

proportion. It is Newman’s exactness in making these formal choices that point to

the artist’s inspiration and conception. This is evident in Greenberg’s declaration:

‘The onlooker who says his child could paint a Newman may be right, but Newman

would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do.’17

Newman’s aesthetic breakthrough came with Onement 1 (1948) [fig.1]. Formally, it

consists of two elements – a smooth Indian Red colour field of indeterminable

depth, bisected by a vertical strip or zip of light cadmium red. Together these

elements constitute a spatial order which Newman worked with predominantly

from here on. This is the first painting in which Newman articulates his conception

of the sublime experience. The zip expresses the finiteness of man against the

colour field that symbolises the infinite and unknown.18 The transcendental

significance of Newman’s zip paintings goes some way to confirming Greenberg’s

assertion that while they look technically simple, the concept governing them is

complex. Newman’s zip paintings are formally organised through an austere

pictorial device, yet they symbolise the artist’s abstraction of the sublime

relationship. Therefore, the content of Newman’s painting is exceedingly more

16 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 370. 17 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 370. 18 Paul Crowther, ‘Barnett Newman and the Sublime’, Oxford Art Journal, 7.2 (1984), 55-6. The ‘implied analogy’, Crowther suggests, is that just as Newman’s zip ‘achieves self-definition within the “whole space” by its accentuation of the colour field’, so too ‘humankind can only define and express its own finite rational nature in opposition to the infinite and unknown.’

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intricate than its form. It is this estimation by Greenberg that positions Newman at

the advance of a hundred years of modernist painting. Within Greenberg’s

reasoning then, the painting’s content extends from the artist’s conception and is

intangible. Form is tied to the artist’s technique and is mechanical. The artwork’s

content directs its form hence, conception is privileged over technique. The

hierarchic division between content and form replicates the Cartesian division

between mind and body. This division spurs Judd’s rejection of rationalist

philosophy and instructs his pursuit of a new art which collapses distinctions

between content and form, thought and feeling.

In the narrative of Greenbergian modernism, by the time of Newman many of

painting’s technical conventions had been abandoned. Conception alone remained

with the artist. It follows, if an artwork’s quality is determined through its content

vis-à-vis conception, then quality derives from the inherently individual and

subjective. In Newman’s Onement 1, it is the artist’s conception and individual

expression of the sublime relationship that points to the painting’s conceptive

quality.19 Greenberg confirms this: ‘Inspiration, conception, alone belongs

altogether to the individual; everything else can be acquired by anyone now.’20

This underscores the popularised reading of the Abstract Expressionists’

individualism, freedom, and originality. It also feeds into wider cultural tropes of

American exceptionalism. Greenberg’s championing of Abstract Expressionism

along these terms is indicative and sustaining of the confidence of American art

over European and the new found artistic centrality of New York.

The triumph of Greenbergian modernism extends from its easy readability – a self-

confirming and persuasive narrative grounded in Kantian aesthetics. Greenberg’s

19 Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime Is Now’, Tiger’s Eye, 1.6 (December 1948). Newman’s own words suggest as much; here declaring the power in his paintings and those of his New York School contemporaries, stems from the individual self-expression: Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.’ 20 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 369.

30

critical theory of modernism appeared more accessible and legitimate than other

methodologies in America during the 1940s, ‘50s and well into the ‘60s. Its

teleology was easily grasped; by arranging the successes of modernist art in linear

order, then expounding the analytical impulses behind these examples,

Greenberg’s theory of modernism was easy to get. Greenberg made modern art

explainable. Over the course of three decades, the accessibility of Greenbergian

modernism and its wide dissemination saw it entrenched as paradigm. Resultantly,

Greenberg came to be the undoubtable authority on art in America. By the late

1950s and in the 1960s, both these standings faced growing threats. When

Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ appeared in the mid-1960s it came as ‘a

defensive show of force’.21

Greenberg’s titular essay ‘Modernist Painting’ sought to reinforce the authority of

his paradigm. In doing so, it became a lightning rod for art’s new theorists to

counter and refute. Judd and Morris were in the forefront of this. Yet paradoxically

and somewhat paternalistically, Judd’s and Morris’s competing aesthetics must

interrogate to subvert Greenbergian formalism and break from modernist art.

Their differing strategies are the focus of later chapters in this thesis. Here, the

erosion of Greenberg’s authority began with Cage’s and Rauschenberg’s theatrical

practices in the 1950s. According to Greenberg, Cage’s and Rauschenberg’s works

extended the antagonisms of Marcel Duchamp against modernist art. By the time

of Judd and Morris in the 1960s, these antipathies had grown to rebellion. The

fracturing of modernist thought, stemming from this revolt, saw fierce competition

for the discursive space thereafter. A myriad of antithetical practices emerged,

21 Roxie Davis Mack, ‘Modernist art criticism: Hegemony and Decline’, The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52.3 (Summer 1994), 341-2: ‘[Greenberg’s] approach was being assimilated by a generation of younger critics, achieving widespread dissemination and with it something of the status of a critical paradigm. It attracted disciples for a number of reasons. It filled a theoretical vacuum and provided a learnable critical method that could be applied across cases. Its promise of cool cognitivity was alluring: by organising the productions of Modernist art into a developmental sequence and offering an explanation of the principles behind that development, it was able to supply a certain kind of understanding more powerful than any other model on offer … Greenberg’s essay gave Modernism in the visual arts the closest thing to a reasoned philosophical foundation it was ever to have and immediately made other styles of criticism look impressionistic, eclectic, and ad hoc. Apart from what seemed its considerable explanatory power, the fact that it was the ober dictum of the most powerful critic in the country gave it even greater impact.’

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unsustainable under modernist art’s theoretical conditions, though all loosely

sharing a repudiation of them. Did Greenberg’s fears come to fruition with the

arrival of postmodernism in the late 1960s – a general lowering of standards and

lessening of quality?

The Theatre of Cage and Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) [fig.2], problematize Greenberg’s critical

paradigm by bringing into question Greenberg’s notion of quality and confuting

content and form distinctions. Looking at Rauschenberg’s paintings, which consist

of a series of canvases painted white with house paint and a paint roller, it is

evident why Greenberg objected to these. Following Greenberg’s hypothesis, what

is to be read from Rauschenberg’s White Paintings? What is their content and what

is their form? Where is the question of technique? And, what is the artist’s

inspiration? Rauschenberg’s white monochromes are often referenced with the

composer John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), a musical piece consisting of three movements

of complete silence. Arguably then, the meaning behind Rauschenberg’s paintings

is better found in the words of Cage rather than those of Greenberg. Cage writes of

Rauschenberg’s paintings:

Everything is so much the same, one becomes acutely aware of the differences, and

quickly. And where, as here the intention is unchanging, it is clear that the

differences are unintentional, as unintended as they were in the white paintings

where nothing was done … the reflective surfaces changing by means of what is

happening; lights going on and off … The white paintings were airports for the

lights, shadows, and particles.22

22 John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, in: Cage, Silence: lectures and

writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 102.

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If Cage’s interpretation of the White Paintings is taken to be the more perceptive to

Rauschenberg’s thinking, then can they be considered proto-minimalist?23 From a

Greenbergian perspective, the form in these paintings, or Rauschenberg’s

technique, suggests the effacement of the artist’s hand, its artisanal aspect. The

application of white house paint with a paint roller gives the paintings a highly-

smoothed surface, almost industrial-like finish, making the craftsmanship of the

artist negligible. The paintings’ content, like their form, aspires to an apparent

nothingness. Though Cage suggests the paintings act as reflective surfaces for

lights, does this still make them contentless? Or do the reflections of the lights

become the content? More recently Rauschenberg called the paintings clocks,

offering: ‘if one was sensitive enough … you could read it, that you would know

how many people were in the room, what time it was, and what the weather was

like outside.’24 These seemingly contentless paintings call attention to the

perceptual relations between the spectator, the paintings, and the space containing

them – factors external to the artwork itself. This situation then evokes Fried’s

notion of theatre: ‘For theater has an audience – it exists for one.’25

Inspired by Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Cage’s composed 4’33”. Like the

paintings, Cage’s 4’33” is seemingly devoid of content, yet its silence focuses the

audience’s concentration to the indiscriminate sounds in the hall; a person

coughing, the creaks of the wooden floor, or the wind blowing through the trees.26

Cage would later opine about his silent masterpiece: ‘Life goes on very well

23 Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, 108: ‘(The white paintings caught whatever fell on them; why did I not look at them with my magnifying glass? Only because I didn’t yet have one? Do you agree with the statement: After all, nature is better than art?) Where does beauty begin and where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins. In this way we get our navigation done for us. If you hear that Rauschenberg has painted a new painting, the wisest thing to do is drop everything and manage one way or another to see it. That’s how to learn the way to use your eyes, sunup the next day.’ 24 Robert Rauschenberg, video interview by David A. Ross, Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999 (Unpublished transcript at SFMOMA Research Library and Archives [6537]), R:18. 25 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal

Art: a critical anthology, 140. The version reprinted in Battcock (1968) is referenced hereafter. 26 4’33” was first performed by the pianist David Tudor at Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York on 29 August 1952.

33

without me, and that will explain to you my silent piece, 4’33”.’27 What

Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Cage’s 4’33” do is shift the critical focus from

the creative subject, artist or performer, to the audience and their experience of

the theatrical situation. Despairingly, Fried points out Cage and Rauschenberg as

evidence of the boundaries of the arts being transgressed. He sees in Cage the

synthesis of music and theatre and in Rauschenberg, painting and theatre. Fried

pursues the reductive reasoning of Greenberg with vigour in ‘Art and Objecthood’

(1967) and finds a variety of emergent practices occupying the spaces between the

arts. Fried writes:

Art denigrates as it approaches the condition of theater. Theater is the common

denominator that binds a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities to one

another, and that distinguishes those activities from the radically different

enterprises of the modernist arts. Here as elsewhere the question of value or level

is central. For example, a failure to register the enormous difference in quality

between, say, the music of Carter and that of Cage or between the paintings of

Louis and those of Rauschenberg means that the real distinctions – between music

and theater in the first instance and between painting and theater in the second –

are displaced by the illusion that the barriers between the arts are in the process of

crumbling (Cage and Rauschenberg being seen, correctly, as similar) and that the

arts themselves are at last sliding towards some kind of final, implosive, hugely

desirable synthesis.28

Fried’s charge of theatre against Rauschenberg and Cage in a literal sense argues

that the mixing of disciplines dilutes medium purity. From this critical stance, the

collaborations and cross-disciplinary practices between the composer Cage, the

painters Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and the choreographer Merce

Cunningham, blur disciplinary boundaries. The combines of Johns and

Rauschenberg, mixtures of painting and sculpture, also blend mediums in this

literal sense. Leo Steinberg argues the restrictive aspect of modernist self-criticism,

27 John Cage, ‘[Letter to Paul Henry Lang]’ (1956), in: Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) John Cage:

An Anthology (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 118. 28 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 141-2.

34

which Fried and Greenberg advocate and which informs the need for medium

sanctity, is a strategic omission of many inter-disciplinary practices that can be

themselves characteristic of the modern. In excluding boundary-transgressing

elements of modern art an ‘impulse to self-preservation’ is revealed, where any

practice not conforming to the certain nature of its medium is read as a threat to

modernist art.29 Steinberg makes the salient points that: ‘Despite the continual

emergence in our culture of cross-border disciplines (ecology, cybernetics, psycho-

linguistics, biochemical engineering, etc.), the self-definition of advanced painting

is still said to require retreat.’30 Following Steinberg, it can be asked is one to omit

from the canon the collaborations between Matisse and Picasso with Diaghilev? Or

the explorations into film and photography by key twentieth century painters or

sculptors and the evident cross-pollination between these disciplines? If the

rigidity of the disciplinary boundaries is upheld, according to Greenberg’s and

Fried’s criteria, many collaborative and avant-garde practices are held against

modernism for their boundary-transgressions.31

Fried’s charge of theatre against Rauschenberg’s White Paintings is also tied to the

Greenbergian anaphora of quality. From Fried’s perspective, the White Paintings

have their antecedence in the Duchampian readymade. Duchamp’s readymades,

mass-produced functional objects which Duchamp labelled as art, upset the artistic

notion that an artwork is the result of the artist’s physical and metal toil.

Rauschenberg effectively erases the hand of the artist in the White Paintings. This

29 Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ (1968, 1972), in: Other Criteria: Confrontations with

twentieth-century art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 68. See also: Mack, ‘Art Criticism: Hegemony and Decline’, 342. 30 Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’, 68. 31 Mack, ‘Art Criticism: Hegemony and Decline’, 342-3. Mack suggests Fried’s and Greenberg’s arguments for modernist art are retrograde in their sanctioning of perceived transgressions. She writes: ‘It is not clear what undesirable consequences result when such transgressions occur, nor is it clear what is considered a transgression … It is strange in retrospect how quite intelligent critics could have believed, for example, that when painting portrays three dimensions, it is aspiring to the condition of sculpture, or if it depicts narrative, it has sullied itself with the ‘literary’. Painted three-dimensionality uses none of the means of sculpture; it alludes to but does not reproduce its effects. The same is true for painted ‘narrative’ and the actual literary variety. These elements, in painting, are not direct borrowings, but analogues of one medium within another. But for Greenberg, it is not enough that painting be, de facto, color on flat ground. It must also … intend, express, foreground what is characteristic of the medium; it must acknowledge rather than conceal the medium’s materiality and resistance.’

35

upsets interpretation of White Paintings from a modernist critic’s perspective as

the creative subject and their conception and technique cannot be readily

identified with the works. This is like Duchamp’s readymades that show little or no

sign of the artist’s making (only choosing). As the artist’s creative subject is

negligible or indeterminable in the work, the critic can only engage an authorless

object. The objecthood of the White Paintings prevents the critic from penetrating

the work to form a critical consonance with the creative subject. While Cage

proposes Rauschenberg’s paintings are reflective surfaces for lights, from Fried’s

perspective the paintings reliance on external effect suggests theatre and the need

for an audience. This is what relates Rauschenberg’s paintings to theatre

metaphorically in Fried’s critique.

The example of Duchamp is highly contrary to modernist art. Greenberg regularly

presents Duchamp as the forebear of the anti-modernist assaults against the canon

in the 1950s and 1960s. That Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg were

close to Duchamp aesthetically and in the case of Cage personally, further explains

the consternation they elicited from Greenberg.32 Their interest in the everyday,

mundane, and found objects, could only be read as anathema to the modernist arts.

What becomes apparent is only select art practices conform to Greenberg’s

demands and are admitted into the canon. In this sense, Greenberg’s criticism

becomes almost self-consciousness, evolving with the art it defines and continually

reasserting its authority through excluding practices outside its self-defined

parameters. Modernist criticism assumes a privileged position for the critic who

becomes the arbiter of what is fit for the canon and what is not. Greenberg’s

definitions and parameters however, are found to be ultimately arbitrary.33

32 Cage and Duchamp regularly played chess together when both were living in New York. See: John Cage interview by Paul Cummings (1974). Transcript of oral history interview with John Cage conducted on 2 May 1974 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-john-cage-12442 33 See: Toby Mussman, ‘A Comment on Literalness: Should the picture plane be abolished’, Arts Magazine (February 1968), 14: ‘‘When you make a line dividing one area from another (painting from sculpture, for example), how do you go about making that line? It seems clear enough to me that any line drawn has to be an arbitrary one.’

36

Although the fixing of these boundaries between the arts may be considered, they

are nonetheless informed by the critic’s partialities.

Thierry de Duve argues that much of the belated censure of Greenberg’s modernist

criticism stems from a misinterpretation of the relationship between formalism

and modernism.34 De Duve contends many opponents are quick to call attention to

the theoretic rigidity of ‘Modernist Painting’ and thereby fail to appreciate the

declarative summarisation of modernism and formalism that the critic presents.

De Duve points out the development of Greenberg’s modernist theory begins with

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) and is tested, refined, and advanced across the

entirety of his insurmountable body of work. ‘Modernist Painting’ serves as an

exclamation mark to Greenberg’s whole theory of art and modernism. Many of

Greenberg’s critics in their reproach, de Duve finds, neglect the qualifications of

modernism that Greenberg sets out in his previous essays. The most critical of

these oversights is its relationship with formalism. De Duve sees Greenberg’s

modernist theory presenting a slow process of elimination to arrive at modernist

innovation:

Certainly Greenberg would agree that … all modern art isn’t modernist. To be

modernist is to be a work that takes its own conditions of possibility for its subject

matter, that tests a certain number of the conventions of the practice it belongs to

by modifying them, by jettisoning or destroying them, and in so doing, rendering

the conventions or conditions thus tested explicit, revealing them as nothing but

conventions, which is to say as a social pact relative to a given culture or a given

moment of history. At the end of this process there will be isolated – stripped bare

– the ‘essential conventions’, otherwise called the necessary and sufficient,

universal conditions of the given practice, visible or legible in the work itself.35

34 Thierry de Duve, ‘Debate with Clement Greenberg’, in: Thierry de Duve, Clement

Greenberg Between the lines: including a debate with Clement Greenberg, [trans. Brian Holmes], (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 35 Thierry de Duve and Rosalind Krauss, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’, October, 70, The Duchamp Effect (Autumn 1994), 62.

37

In recognising Greenberg’s discrimination between modernist and modern art, de

Duve reaffirms Greenberg’s definition of modernist art as a medium specific

practice where the analytical testing of the medium’s conditions is evident in the

work itself. De Duve states: ‘When Greenberg says “painting”, one must never

forget that he means “the best painting”. And when he says “modernism”, he means

“the best of modern art”.36 Yet, Greenberg also conflates formalism, the

methodology he championed, with modernism. The effect being, works of art

where quality cannot be read from a formalist perspective are perceived as

deficient. Following on from de Duve then, Greenberg’s narrative is inherently

selective because it is concerned with forming and policing the modernist canon. In

this regard, it is highly paradigmatic. Reiterating the necessity of his narrative in

1971, Greenberg’s attempt here reads as a last grasp for relevancy:

But so far every attack on the ‘formalist’ aspect of Modernist painting and

sculpture has worked out as an attack on Modernism itself because every such

attack developed into an attack at the same time on superior artistic standards.

The recent past of Modernist art demonstrates this ever so clearly. Duchamp’s and

Dada’s was the first outright assault on ‘formalism’, that came from within the

avant-garde, or what was nominally the avant-garde, and it stated itself

immediately in a lowering of aspirations. The evidence is there in the only place

where artistic evidence can be there: in the actual productions of Duchamp and

most of the Dadaists. The same evidence continues to be there in the neo-Dadaism

of the last ten years, in its works, in the inferior quality of these works. From which

it has to be concluded that if Modernism remains a necessary condition of the best

art of our time, as it has been for the best art of the hundred years previous, then

‘formalism’, apparently, remains a necessary condition too, which is the sole and

sufficient justification of either Modernism or ‘formalism’.37

It is clear for Greenberg and Fried that the practices of Cage and Rauschenberg,

although modern, cannot be considered modernist. They are an attack on

formalism, just as Duchamp’s Dadaist practices before them. If Greenberg’s theory

36 De Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the lines, 52. 37 Clement Greenberg, ‘Necessity of Formalism’, 173-4.

38

can be reduced to such: that a modernist work takes the testing of the conditions of

its medium as its purpose and then disregards the inessential conventions to be

left with only the essential; then what of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings or Cage’s

4”33’? If read from a formalist perspective, these works show that what is essential

is nothing. Profoundly, Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Cage’s 4”33’ suggest

that everything inessential, or that nothingness, is essential.

Cage referred to Rauschenberg’s work as ‘a poetry of infinite possibilities’.38

Rauschenberg’s appeal in using found and everyday objects, such as stuffed goats

and tyres in his combines, confound distinctions between high and low art, and art

and life. By turning the detritus of the urban environment into art, Rauschenberg

questions what defines art and highlights its rarefied distinction from everyday

life. Cage’s intimation of Rauschenberg’s work being open to ‘infinite possibilities’,

indicates here a continuum between art and life in Rauschenberg’s work, not a

division. Cage mediates the notion of art’s divorce from life within his own work

too. It is a driving awareness in Cage’s aesthetic from the early 1940s, inspired by

his reading of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s essays on Indian aesthetics and other

traditional Asian cultural forms.39 Coomaraswamy contextualises the separation of

art from life in the modern West against the unity of life and art in Eastern

traditions. Coomaraswamy finds the post-Renaissance embellishment of artists’

individuality, led to art’s estrangement from everyday experience in the Western

modern era.40 Cage seeks to redress this alienation in his own work by not

privileging the human being as the centre of things:

38 Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, 103. 39 David W. Patterson ‘The Picture That Is Not in the Colours: Cage, Coomaraswamy, and the Impact of India’, in: David W. Patterson (ed.), John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and

Intention, 1933-1950, Routledge, New York, 2002, 177-216. Patterson writes about the influence of Eastern philosophies on Cage’s developing aesthetic perspective and finds that Cage’s first serious engagement with these philosophies came through the writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy in the early 1940s. 40 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art: Theories of art in

Indian, Chinese, and European medieval art; iconography, ideal representation, perspective

and space relations (New York: Dover Publications, 1934). Over the course of these essays, Coomaraswamy examines the relationship between art and life. He argues in the cultures of Asia and those of medieval Europe, art remains (and remained) indistinct from life, while in the post-Renaissance West the relationship between art and life became dislocated.

39

For ‘art’ and ‘music’, when anthropocentric (involved in self-expression), seem

trivial and lacking in urgency to me. We live in a world where there are things as

well as people. Trees, stones, water, everything is expressive. I see this situation in

which I impermanently live as a complex interpenetration of centers moving out in

all directions without impasses. This is in accord with the contemporary

awareness of the operations of nature. I attempt to let sounds be themselves in a

space of time.41

Cage reinterprets the non-emotive and non-expressive aspects of various Eastern

cultural forms in his performance practices from the mid-1940s. His engagement

with Zen Buddhism is well known. Contrastingly, this development in Cage’s

practice is occurring against the ascendency of Abstract Expressionism and the

popular reading of the movement which extolled individuality and self-

expression.42 Cage’s interest in Indian aesthetics encompassed his study of the

doctrine of rasa and Cage used the rasa as the subject for his 1946-48 work,

Sonatas and Interludes.43 Considered one of the composer’s principal works, it is

arguably the most exacting of Cage’s prepared-piano compositions.44 Cage’s score

for Sonatas and Interludes is decidedly mathematical, consisting of sixteen sonatas

and four interludes arranged in a palindrome. This structure restricts the

imposition of compositional choice by the creative subject. Further, using a

41 Cage, ‘[Letter to Paul Henry Lang]’, 117. 42 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Theory of Art in Asia’, in: The Transformation of Nature

in Art, 15.Contrast can be seen between the emphasis on self-expression and individuality in Abstract Expressionism against the cultural forms that inspired Cage: ‘… Indian treatises constantly emphasise that the actor should not be carried away by the emotions he represents, but should rather be the ever-conscious master of the puppet show performed by his own body on the stage. The exhibition of his own emotions would not be art.’ 43 John Cage, ‘More on Paik’, in: Cage, John Cage: Writer (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 155: ‘In the course of my studies of Indian philosophy, I had become aware of the nine permanent emotions of aesthetic tradition. The rasas. The four black, sorrow, fear, anger, disgust; the four white, the heroic, the wondrous, mirth and the erotic; finally, the one without colour, in the centre, towards which any work of art should conduce, tranquillity.’ 44 Cage’s prepared piano pieces involved placing bolts, screws, and pieces of rubber between the piano’s strings. The result was that certain keys took on percussive qualities; others’ tuning was effected, whilst the use of the soft pedal gave two completely different sounds.

40

prepared piano elicits indeterminate sounds and noises in the performance, even

when the instrument is played in a conventional manner. Non-composition,

chance, and indeterminacy as means for structuring a work, and non-expressive

and non-emotive ways for communicating it, were central to Cage’s aesthetic.

These Cagean strategies foreground many of the formal concerns of minimalism.

Cage’s sentiment voiced here: ‘My feelings belong, as it were, to me, and I should

not impose them on others’, presages the minimalist attitudes seen in sculpture,

dance, and music in the 1960s.45

The End of Modernist Painting

In ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ Greenberg builds a critique of minimalism, presents a

rebuttal to Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’, and highlights the irreconcilability of

Rauschenberg and modernist art. In contrast to Rauschenberg’s poetry of infinite

possibilities and blurring of distinctions between art and life, the critic asserts:

‘Given that the initial look of non-art was no longer available to painting, since

even an unpainted canvas now stated itself as a picture, the borderline between art

and non-art had to be sought in the three-dimensional, where sculpture was, and

where everything material that was not art also was.’46 Here, Greenberg stakes out

the non-art status of Judd’s three-dimensional objects, whilst also inferring their

precedence in Rauschenberg and Johns’ combines. This area between art and non-

art, which Greenberg refers to, evokes Rauschenberg’s desire to ‘act in the gap

between the two’. Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59) [fig.3], a combine

consisting of painted found and everyday objects, including a stuffed Angora goat,

45 Cage interviewed by Joseph H. Mazo, ‘John Cage Quietly Speaks His Piece’, Bergen

Sunday Record (13 March 1983), excerpted in: Cage & Kostelanetz, ‘The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview’, Kenyon Review, 9.4 (Autumn, 1987), 107. 46 Clement Greenberg, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967), in: American Sculpture of the

Sixties [exh. cat.], Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967; reprinted in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 180-6. The reprinted version in Battcock (1968) is referenced hereafter.

41

springs to mind here. For Greenberg, Monogram assuredly exists where the three-

dimensional material ‘that was not art also was’.

Greenberg contends, in relation to Johns and Rauschenberg ‘assemblages’, they

‘did a lot of flirting with the third dimension’ though could not escape ‘a stubbornly

pictorial context.’47 This criticism is more relatable to their combines which occupy

the wall space where they still retain the perpendicular aspect of conventional

painting. Such an example is found in Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

[fig.4]; a circular target of concentric blue and yellow bands on a red field with a

row of painted plaster casts of different body parts set in compartments above.

The bulls-eye target necessitates a perpendicular orientation as well as suggesting

flatness, while the casts are obviously three-dimensional. Greenberg argues

examples like these aspire to be both painting and sculpture, failing in their

purpose as art by not maintaining the purity of one medium or another. The

plaster casts, including those of genitalia mostly came from Johns’s own studio.

They are the type of casts painters use to practice rendering three-dimensional

body shapes in two-dimensions. In Target with Plaster Casts, Johns seems to tease

Greenberg’s stringent division of painting and sculpture by placing a row of

sculptural elements above a flattened painted image.

Similarly, Greenberg charges the ‘Shape-Canvas School’, which he mainly equates

with Stella, and proposes: ‘[They] used the third dimension mainly in order to hold

on to light-and-dark or “profiled” drawing’.48 It is here that Greenberg’s criticism

becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. To imply shaped-canvas paintings like

Stella’s are a kind of sculptural drawing and that this drawing determines the

shape of that canvas, rests on Greenberg’s reductive premise of painting consisting

of two irreducible elements – the support and the image it contains. For Greenberg,

the production of this image extends from drawing; an analytical process which

suggests the final image has been built up over time, the result of many tentative

47 Greenberg, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’, 182. 48 Greenberg, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’, 182.

42

lines and variations reflecting the inner workings of the artist.49 Greenberg reads

Stella’s work in the same terms he applies to Cezanne, who ‘sacrificed

verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit drawing and design more explicitly to

the rectangular shape of the canvas’.50 While Stella dismisses any notion that his

paintings begin from drawing:

Well, you have a brush and you’ve got paint on the brush, and you ask yourself

why you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing, what inflection you’re actually going

to make with the brush and with the paint that’s on the end of the brush. It’s like

handwriting. And I found out that I just didn’t have anything to say in those

terms.51

Stella’s insight above reveals that his painting is better understood in terms of

immediacy or perceived as if they are painted in one shot. Drawing is problematic

for Stella as it records a path of the artist working out the image in and over time –

something he ‘wasn’t going to do’.52 Without evidence of drawing in Stella’s work,

his paintings confound the artistic disarticulation of an image worked up in

relation to its support. Indeed, Stella’s rejoinder: ‘I tried to keep the paint as good

as it was in the can’, implies the urge to paint the painting in one shot.53 In Stella’s

painting the two aspects of image and support are unified. The work is seen as a

singular whole, or rather the question of this division in the first place has been

dismissed. They exist as a painted form and not as an image and its support. If

modernist painting in its progression since Manet demanded the continual

flattening of the picture plane, then are not Stella’s shaped canvases the logical

conclusion to this progress? If Stella’s paintings are read from a Greenbergian

perspective then they are declaratively the result of the steadfast advance towards

flatness. Nonetheless, Greenberg dismissed Stella’s paintings as mere ideation.

Notwithstanding, when the two-dimensional plane cannot be flattened further, the

49 Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is the perversion of this process. 50 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 68-70. 51 Stella; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical

anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 156-7. 52 Stella; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 157. 53 Stella; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 157.

43

illusionistic space suffocated and so the now completely abstracted image resides

on the plane of its support, this is the full extent of modernist painting’s

rationalisation. From here, there is little place for painting to progress except out

into the third dimension, the domain of sculpture. And, it is Judd who makes this

last step.

A comparison of colour field painting from the early 1960s on flat rectangular

canvases with the shaped, deep canvases of Stella from the same period,

demonstrates the expiration of two-dimensionality and prevailing of three-

dimensionality. In his installation of works at Castelli Gallery in New York, 1964,

Stella rejected the conventional perpendicular, rectangular orientations of the

canvas [fig.5].54 His radically shaped, deep-recessed, and expansive paintings

broke the rectangle and pushed their monochromatic and irregularly shaped forms

further from the wall into the gallery space, the space of the viewer. Works like the

large hexagonal Charlotte Toyaker (1963), seemed to draw breath as they escaped

the static format of two-dimensional painting and its illusionistic space. They did

not gain total independence from the wall, though they seemed to aspire to an

objecthood that could not be similarly remarked upon in Kenneth Noland’s

chevron paintings of the same period like Shoot (1964) or Morning Span (1964)

[fig.6]. Seen in contrast, Noland’s works appear overly dependent on the wall for

their flatness and perpendicular orientation.55

54 ‘Frank Stella’, Castelli Gallery, New York, 4 January – 6 February, 1964. 55 Judd, although he recognised Noland as ‘one of the best painters’, felt these paintings were part of Noland’s attempt to overcome the residuum of compositional painting. Judd observed of Noland’s breakthrough circle paintings of 1958 and 1959 that these were slightly hierarchical in their composition. Judd wrote: ‘You can argue that the area within the centred circles is more important than the area beyond the outer one and that this is a remnant of the form of the pictured object, of hierarchical structure.’ And so, by 1963 and 1964, Judd found: ‘The desire to use the whole area is reasonable generally and reasonable considering Noland’s earlier work, but also he may be influenced by the development of paintings that aren’t rectangular and by the development of three-dimensional work, which especially asserts wholeness.’ Seen here Judd is emphasising wholeness in relation most likely to Stella’s and his own work. For Judd, Noland occupies uncertain ground between Pollock and Newman on one side and between himself and Stella on the other. See: Donald Judd, ‘New York Letter’, Art

International, (April 1965), in: Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design), 172. Stella however, saw closer affinity between his work and Noland’s: ‘I think I have been very influenced by Ken in a number of ways, most of it I would say indirect. But I would say the most direct thing

44

While Fried would argue Noland and Stella together, Noland’s severely flattened

bands of colour do not suggest the occupancy of real space that Stella’s paintings

do.56 Noland’s chevron and circle paintings remained strictly two-dimensional, flat,

and consistent with the disarticulation of a painted image with its corresponding

rectangular support. Greenberg disagreed with Fried on Stella as well, suggesting

his ‘bas relief constructions’ were more concerned with ideation than painting; a

suggestion that arguably reflects anxieties that Stella’s works perform

Greenbergian theory and precipitate its demise.57 To Judd, Stella’s shaped canvases

opened to a new theoretical context for his three-dimensional objects. Yet, Judd’s

and Stella’s respective formal concerns were not entirely coterminous. While Judd

sought a new form beyond modernist painting and sculpture, Stella remained

engaged with the analytical interrogation of modernist painting, albeit

emphasising its terminus for Judd. Indeed, Judd and Stella straddle either side of

the divide between painting and objects. While Stella may push painting to its

precipice, Judd aims to pull painting from the wall, situate it on the floor, and

realise it in three dimensions. This distinction is evident through Judd’s

observations on Stella’s paintings, referring to them as ‘slabs’, as objects, if like he,

Stella too seeks to end painting. Judd reads Stella’s paintings as follows:

Frank Stella says that he is doing paintings, and his work could be considered as

painting. Most of the works, though, suggests slabs, since they project more than

usual, and since some are notched and some are shaped like letters. Some new

ones, painted purple, are triangles and hexagons with the centres open. The

notches in the aluminium paintings determine the patterns of the stripes within.

would be about a kind of feeling for scale potentials and also very influenced by his concern probably more than mine of direction both in terms of scale and direction and also in terms a little bit of a kind of breadth, I mean I’m attracted by his looseness as opposed to what I would call my own tightness.’ See: Transcript of interview of Frank Stella by Sidney Tillum for the Archives of American Art, (1969), 15. 56 See: Michael Fried, ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings’, Artforum, 5.3 (November 1966), 18-27. See also: Fried, catalogue essay for Three American Painters:

Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1965; reprinted in: Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: essays and reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 213-265 57 De Duve, ‘Debate with Clement Greenberg’, in: Between the Lines, 134.

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The projection, the absence of spatial effects and the close relation between the

periphery and the stripes make the paintings seem like objects, and that does a lot

to cause their amplified intensity.58

Yet for all their object-likeness, Stella’s shaped canvases still, for him at least, deal

with the analytical traditions of modernist painting. Stella firmly argues his

practice within the context of abstraction and as a rejection of representational

and figurative painting. Stella stipulates this in a 1969 interview, ‘in order to locate

myself as a person and, let’s say, essentially … as an artist, I had to get from Monet

to de Kooning in the simplest possible terms.’59 At the extremity of modernist

painting’s theoretical limits, after Abstract Expressionism, Stella’s paintings exist

as completely compressed picture planes with no illusionistic space and all traces

of representation and figuration eliminated. Slab-like as they are, Stella’s shaped

canvases are the end game to modernist painting’s unrelenting quest for flatness

and abstraction.

58 Donald Judd, ‘Local History’, Arts Yearbook 7 (1964), in: Complete Writings, 153. 59 Frank Stella interview by Sidney Tillum (1969). Transcript of oral history interview with Frank Stella conducted in 1969 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 12.

46

47

CHAPTER TWO

Movement through Painting

As with many American artists of their generation, the early tracts of Judd’s and

Morris’s aesthetics were cast against the ascendency of Abstract Expressionism.

The primary painters of the New York School appeared to the new artists

conceptually impassable in painting. This chapter analyses Judd’s and Morris’s

early painting from the mid-1950s, exploring what led them to abandon the

medium in the early 1960s; Judd for objects, Morris for dance and sculpture. For

Greenberg, The New York School represented the high point of modernist painting.

Abstract Expressionism was the culmination of a one-hundred-year advance of

artistic modernism. The stressing of pictorial flatness and total abstraction of the

image, which drove Greenberg’s linear narrative of modernism, had reached their

closest resolution with the New York School. The conceptual passages which Judd

and Morris navigated from painting to minimalism, were impelled by the initial

formal problems they grappled with in painting. These problems were established

through their respective dialectics with Abstract Expressionism, especially through

the figure of Pollock. Judd’s and Morris’s responses to the challenges of late

modernist painting, frame their divergent minimalist practices in the 1960s.

As the previous chapter established, a challenge to modernist discourse coalesced

through the 1950s. The painting practices of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Stella,

tested the limitations of Greenberg’s formalist dictates. The philosophical

mediations of Cage were prescient throughout the wane of artistic modernism and

conceptually resonant with the thinking of younger artists. Cunningham’s

innovations opened an emerging context for the postmodernist enquiries of dance

in the 1960s. Judd’s and Morris’s formative aesthetic explorations occur in context

of modernist painting’s rising exhaustion and the increasing literalist and

theatrical currents in American art as expressed by these artists.

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Problems in Painting

Judd’s conceptual passage from painting to objects is defined by the artist’s

interrogation of formalism and subsequent break with painting’s fundamental

condition – its two-dimensionality. Judd exhibited paintings in three shows at the

Panoras Gallery in New York in the mid-50s: a group show in 1955, another in

1956 with the artist Nathan Raisen, and a solo show in 1957. Judd did not exhibit

his artworks within a gallery context like this again until 1963 when he appeared

in two group shows at the Green Gallery – New Work: Part I and New Work: Part III.

Judd followed these group shows with his watershed solo show at Green Gallery in

late 1963, which emphatically announced the arrival of his specific objects. In

between the Panoras shows and the Green Gallery shows, Judd’s main visibility

was as an art critic. He taught art and studied art history, and less visibly, he

continued to work through important formal problems in painting. Many of the

paintings Judd produced during this period were not shown until much later and

some were not seen until after his death in 1994. These paintings are instructive to

the emerging aesthetic concerns that inform Judd’s specific object. In these

paintings, Judd negotiates non-compositional means for structuring a work, the

rejection of illusionistic space and representational objects, and the materiality of

colour and form.

Morris’s exhibited paintings at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco in 1957 and

again at the same gallery in 1958. His paintings in these exhibitions bore the visual

influence of Pollock and Still.1 Large scale, forcibly painted, and abstract, Morris’s

driving concern in these works is the interrogation of the painting process – the

interaction between the artist’s body, paint, and canvas. These early paintings not

only reveal Morris’s interest in process, but relatedly corporeality, movement, and

1 Robert Morris interview by Paul Cummings (1968). Transcript of oral history interview with Robert Morris conducted on 10 March 1968 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-morris-13065

49

perception. The conceptual contrast in Judd’s and Morris’s later work is

foreground in the early paintings of the artists. Judd’s focus is centred on the

formal elements within painting – composition, the depiction of space, the

representation of objects. Morris’s concerns lie with aspects without the picture

frame – the movement of the body, the elapse of time, and the physical act of

applying paint to canvas. This earliest distinction anticipates the fiercest exchanges

between the two around minimalism in the mid-1960s.

The philosophical influences from their corresponding years of study concentrate

Judd’s and Morris’s initial concerns in painting. Judd studied painting at the Art

Students League from 1949–1953 and philosophy at Columbia University during

this same period. Yet for Judd, his ‘philosophical allegiance’ to empiricism, which

he was studying at Columbia, conflicted with the imitative realism being

promulgated by the League.2 Judd’s interest in the eighteenth-century philosopher

and essayist David Hume led to his conviction that knowledge was only credible if

gained through concrete experience. Eventually, Judd concluded that painting

premised on a naturalistic treatment of figures and objects within an illusionistic

space was intrinsically false.

From 1953-1955, Morris studied psychology and philosophy at Reed College in

Portland, Oregon. He described this as an intense and competitive environment,

while intellectual and progressive.3 The combined interests in psychology and

philosophy are telling, given the strong phenomenological emphasis and interest in

Gestalt psychology that emerges with Morris’s minimalist works. Early on, Morris

explores the effect of shifting perspectives in painting. This is noted in a review of

Morris’s second Dilexi show by Eleanor C. Munro:

At the Dilexi, a small, comparatively new gallery dedicated to bringing an infusion

of New York vitality into this city, Robert Morris showed large energetic

2 Barbara Haskell, Donald Judd (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988), 18. 3 Morris; Cummings, no pagination.

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abstractions. These big paintings, in dark colors, are built up in short, thick strokes

with a wide brush, while drier frayed strokes interweave across the surface. The

surface thus presents endless variations, through many layers, perspectives and

depths. While there was some attempt to pull the works together with strong

white or dark themes coursing through, they are generally open, flat, composed

according to the shifting, Oriental perspective. Thus, the energy is equalised across

the surface, not gathered into focuses of intensity.4

Munro’s use of the term ‘Oriental perspective’ is used to describe Morris’s all-over

paintings; it was a popular refrain of mid-twentieth century critics and not

necessarily means for suggesting visual cues or references to Asian cultures.5

Instead, the reviewer is establishing that Morris’s paintings operate on multiple

perspectives and this implies that they were produced from shifting vantage

points. Morris, in similarity to Pollock, worked on his paintings from the floor, noting: ‘If I put it

on the floor, not seeing it in that completely frontal way, allowed me to have that

particular kind of critical focus of seeing all the relationships.’6 Here, Morris

distinguishes the perceptual contingencies between a painting produced on the

floor and one in a perpendicular position – in other words, an easel picture. His

thoughts on painting in this manner echo Pollock’s, who had previously stated: ‘On

the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way

4 Eleanor C. Munro, ‘Art News from San Francisco’, ARTnews, 58 (February 1960), 46. 5 Many traditional Asian art forms utilise axonometric perspective, Japanese wood block prints are one, in which there is no vanishing point and hence they are not governed by an optical illusion. Pictorial elements, like floorboards for example, remain geometrically constant, they run parallel to each other and do not converge to a single point as they would in post-Renaissance Western painting. Other Asian art forms use atmospheric perspective whereby distant objects in the picture are painted a duller or softer tone in contrast to the sharper and brighter foreground objects. In classical Chinese scroll paintings far-off mountains are often painted in a hazy blue or grey to signify their geographic distance to the forward figures or objects. Within Chinese scrolls space and time are often synchronous and the scroll explains a story rather than depicts a scene. For example, a pictorial element such as a boat can be shown throughout the scroll at different points in time (in relation to the story), appearing on one bank of a river, in the middle of the river, then on the other riverbank. Because of this there is no fixed point or dominant element to fixate upon in the scroll, rather the focal point is moving hence the perspective is ‘shifting’. The reviewer theorises Morris’s paintings as operating on ‘Oriental perspective’ because it aspires to this all-over state, there is no vanishing point, no single point of focus: ‘the energy is equalised across the surface, not gathered into focuses of intensity.’ 6 Morris; Cummings, np.

51

I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.’7 Like

Pollock, Morris found painting on the floor opened up new ways of seeing the

painting’s pictorial relationships. The studied and focused perspective of easel

pictures gave way to the multiple and shifting sensation of the all-over painting.

Given the significance of perception in Morris’s work, the writings of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty help illuminate its role within Morris’s early painting. In The Prose of the

World, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between what he terms ‘spontaneous vision’ and ‘perspective’.

Morris was clearly cognisant of this distinction when he started painting on the floor: ‘It was a

different way of seeing, of looking at something … it was a freer way of looking at

something.’8 And similarly here Merleau-Ponty’s description reveals:

In spontaneous vision, things rivalled one another for my look and, being anchored

in one of them, I felt the solicitation of the other which made them coexist with the

first. Thus, at every moment I was swimming in the world of things and overrun by

a horizon of things to see which could not possibly be seen simultaneously with

what I was seeing but by this very fact were simultaneous with it.9

Merleau-Ponty’s description of spontaneous vision evokes the experience of the

sprawling all-over paintings of the Abstract Expressionists. The all-over painting

has no fixed point of perspective, rather activity is registered equivalently across

the whole of the canvas. Morris consciously engages the perceptual contrast

between the all-over and easel painting. ‘These were completely abstracted

images’, he notes, ‘the influences that are most heavy in them are those of Clyfford

7 Jackson Pollock, ‘My Painting’, Possibilities,1 (Winter 1947-48),78-83. 8 Morris; Cummings, np. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (1969), [trans. John O’Neill], (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 52-3. Merleau-Ponty contrasts spontaneous vision (as excerpted above), with perspective which he describes here: ‘But in perspective I construct a representation in which each thing ceases to demand the whole visual field for itself, makes concessions to the others, and agrees to occupy no more space on the paper than the others leave it. In the first case, my glance, running freely over depth, height, and width, was not subordinated to any point of view, because it adopted and rejected each one in turn. In perspective, I renounce that ambiguity and agree to let only that figure in my drawing which could be seen from a certain reference point by an immobile eye fixed on a certain ‘vanishing point’ of a certain ‘vanishing line’, chosen once and for all.’

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Still and Pollock too. Very much an all-over kind of thing.’10 In his strive for the all-

over painting, Morris approximates the painting styles of Still and Pollock which

opens to investigations of process and corporeality [fig.7 & fig.8].

Judd’s Early Paintings

From the mid-1950s, tensions between the real and realism, and abstraction and

representation become evident in Judd’s paintings. His earliest known documented

paintings, which he produced while attending the Art Students League, include a

female nude figure seated within a red room (c.1950) [fig.9] and an interior view

from within a studio looking to and out a large window (c.1952) [fig.10]. In the

window painting, it is worth noting how sharply Judd defines the vertical and

horizontal lines. This gives the painting a pronounced geometric focus. Yet, the

geometry is clearly balanced and compositional. In Judd’s paintings dated from

1955, figuration recedes and a more abstract vernacular emerges. The forms are,

or still hold semblance to representational objects. The use of colour is somewhat

muted and middling. One feature in these paintings which persists is a horizontal

band that extends across the picture plane. It is a distinct feature that is worked up

to dominate the generally treated forms and areas of the paintings [figs.11 & 12].

This band gives these paintings a strong horizontal orientation. When

contextualised against Judd’s rectilinear objects, it is arguable that this pronounced

geometry stayed with the artist. Thomas Kellein describes this horizontal band as a

bridge motif; ‘bridges in the sense of picture-filling transitions.’11 Kellein indicates

that the motif possibly grew out of studies Judd made of Houston Street and FDR

Drive near East River in Manhattan.12 Kellein’s suggestion that these works extend

from Judd’s studies of Manhattan’s urban landscape are further credited by

remarks by Judd who later revealed in an interview with Roberta Smith:

10 Morris; Cummings, np. 11 Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd, 1955-1968, (New York: D.A.P., 2002), 22. 12 Kellein, Donald Judd, 22. Kellein states this information was passed on to him by Maureen Jerome. Reference is to the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive.

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‘Landscape and figures got in the way of doing what I wanted in the drawings and

paintings.’13

In the show with Raisen in 1956, Judd is seen abstracting the urban environment

more and more. The reviewer for ARTnews discerned that Judd was ‘struggling

with’ key formal problems:

He is a romantic of the machine and for him a tree is a kind of machine to be

reduced from an indecisive shape to a form as clearly defined as plumbing. Except

perhaps for Welfare Island, none of his paintings are thoroughly worked out. He

seems to be struggling with problems. The interest in his paintings lies in the

problems’ nature.14

The formal problems that the reviewer identifies appear at least twofold. Firstly,

representational elements in the paintings conflict with Judd’s empirical desire to

emphasise the actual experience of objects. It stands that a painted representation

of an object is not the same as the real thing. Secondly, the composition of these

pictures is conventional. The recurrent horizontal axis is an anchor point to

balance the paintings’ parts. This is not unusual in modern painting, but with Judd

this studied compositional effect is inherently problematic. In Judd’s subsequent

paintings, he goes to lengths to make his works appear uncomposed. This tendency

becomes obsessive in Judd’s objects, where mathematic or geometric progressions

are used exclusively to impose a non-compositional order upon the work.

13 Roberta Smith, ‘Donald Judd’, in: Brydon Smith, Donald Judd: a catalogue of the

exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 24 May-6 July 1975: catalogue

raisonné of paintings, objects, and wood-blocks, 1960-1974 (Ottawa: The Gallery for the Corporation of the National Museums of Canada, 1975), 6. Quote from an unpublished interview between Roberta Smith and Judd, 6 January 1969. 14 Lawrence Campbell, ‘Reviews and Previews: Judd and Raisen’, ARTnews, 55 (September 1956), 17. Review of Don Judd and Nathan Raisen, Panoras Gallery, New York, 4-15 September 1956.

54

In Welfare Island (1956) [fig.13], which the reviewer deemed the most successful

of the paintings, the bridge motif is abstracted and fractured. This treatment of the

compositional device signals the start of Judd’s break from conventional

composition. The painting appears a conglomeration of thick and thin, curved and

straight lines. The horizontality of the image is still resolute, though Judd’s intent

to branch out of his previous pictorial arrangement is evident. In the next group of

paintings after Welfare Island, dating around 1957, Judd moves closer to the all-

over picture [figs.14 & 15]. These paintings consist of flat, slow, slightly-geometric

shapes set upon light gradient fields. The forms have a primordial look to them and

do not correspond with real objects outside the picture or regular geometry. As

Roberta Smith suggests: ‘The irregular shapes themselves are difficult to describe

and look as if Judd took great care to make them that way.’15 Here, Judd is seeking

forms that are specific to the picture and are not predetermined by geometric or

compositional rules.

After his 1957 solo show at the Panoras Gallery, Judd moves through a brief

agitated period in 1958 and 1959 [fig.16]. The broad and flat shapes of before are

now distorted and appear more organic and violent, swirling and overlapping. The

thick, aggressive brushwork gives these pictures a sense of movement. The use of

colour is bolder and moving towards being specific and declarative. Pictorial space

in these paintings is significantly flattened with the juxtaposing forms pushing

toward the canvas surface. Smith writes that this is the ‘closest he [Judd] ever gets

to either Cubism or anything expressionistic’ and as such they are an important

formal step.16 These are the first of Judd’s paintings to approach the condition of

the all-over. Further, these paintings highlight the key problems confronting Judd:

The move to abstraction in rejection of representational forms, the denial of

illusionistic or pictorial space, the polarisation of specific and bold colours, and the

all-over effect sought in defiance of conventional composition. These swirling

paintings speak to the forcefulness of Pollock, but the forms, though more

abstracted, lack Pollock’s formlessness. Judd moves towards total abstraction, yet

is unwilling to abandon structure and embrace chance like the Abstract

15 Roberta Smith, ‘Donald Judd’, 8. 16 Roberta Smith, ‘Donald Judd’,15.

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Expressionist. There is still a slight, studied order and a painterly feeling in these

works. It is as far as Judd goes in this direction, as if realising his insincerity with

the expressionist mode. Later he expands on the problem of Expressionism in his

essay on Pollock:

The term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ was a big mistake. For one thing, it implied that

Pollock and de Kooning were alike and that both were Expressionists. Pollock’s

paintings are much more remarkable than that. De Kooning’s paintings are

substantially the same as those of the various Expressionist painters from Soutine

back to Van Gogh and back through the recurrent use of expressive brushwork.

That portrays immediate emotions. It doesn’t involve immediate sensations.17

After his experimentation with expressive painting, Judd resolved a Cartesian

division between evoking emotive qualities (mind) and exciting immediate

sensations (body). As his excerpt above indicates, this distinction separates

paintings in the Expressionist and European traditions to paintings like Pollock’s.

Resultantly, Judd’s next works after his expressive phase are pared back visually,

with singular forms and monochromatic backgrounds. In these paintings, Judd

rejects expressive and painterly qualities. Judd’s line paintings dating from 1960

and 1961 are a contrast in economy to his previous painting [figs.17 & 18]. These

works consist of one or two simplified pictorial elements. On a mostly

monochromatic field, the canvas is delineated by snaking or curved lines of lighter

colour. The ground is roughened by the mixing of sand with the acrylic paint.

Visually, the quietness of these paintings moves Judd closer to aesthetic

relatedness with Newman [fig.19]. The distinction between line and field in these

works recalls Newman’s zip paintings, but unlike Newman there is no deference to

17 Donald Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, Arts Magazine (April 1967), in: Judd, Complete Writings

1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design), 195. Judd continues: ‘That kind of expression of emotions occurs through a sequence of observing, feeling and recording. It’s one of the main aspects of European or Western art. It’s one kind of art, not all art. It’s bad that it involves reactions to things to such an extent. Its premise that those reactions say something about the nature of the things you observed is false. Obviously, what you feel and what things are aren’t the same. Anyway, Pollock’s paintings don’t involve the immediate emotions of traditional art and don’t involve the way these are generalised.’

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a sublime experience in these Judd paintings. The lines appear too studied to

reflect the bold, Romantic expression of Newman’s zips. Judd’s line paintings seem

more solely concerned with the organisation of pictorial space.

In Judd’s last group of paintings in his trajectory to objects, dating from late 1961

and 1962, the artist arrives at concluding divergences between illusionistic space

and physical space, and between representational and real elements. Judd

experiments with acrylics to give further particularity to the surface ground. The

faster drying times of Liquitex may say something about Judd’s desire to have the

work done in one shot; in contrast to the slower drying times of oil paints which

require the building-up of layers and adjustments to an image over time. The field,

now strictly monochromic and in bold, distinct, and primary colours, further has

sand and wax mixed into it to give it more physicality. The snaking, hand-drawn

lines from the previous paintings are replaced with a curved or double curved line

declaratively stamped into the field [fig.20]. There is an industrial feel to these

works. The bold, stencil-looking lines assert physical space and presence, more so

than the composition of pictorial space. Yet ultimately for Judd, painting still holds

to it the intrinsic problem that he cannot reconcile. When broken down, a painting

still consists of its two fundamentals – the rectangle and the image contained

within it.18

The Question of Pollock

In Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay on Pollock, written two years after the painter’s

death, Kaprow laments: ‘He created some magnificent paintings. But he also

18 Donald Judd; John Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, Artforum, 9.10 (June 1971), 41: ‘…one also had the problem that there were at least two things in the painting: the rectangle itself and the thing (image) in the rectangle, which is true even in Newman. You couldn’t get around that. The only paintings that didn’t have that kind of problem were Yves Klein’s – the blue paintings. But for some reason I just didn’t want to do monochrome paintings.’

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destroyed painting.’19 Kaprow, a contemporary of Judd and Morris, outlines four

aspects of Pollock’s painting that for him had a terminal effect on the medium.

These aspects are: the physicality of Pollock’s painting, formlessness or all-over

effect, scale, and the flattening of pictorial space [fig.21]. Kaprow reasons, that in

modernist painting since Impressionism the painter’s hand upon the canvas and

the resultant marks of the brush took on increasing importance. As these marks

became less representational, they became more self-sustaining and self-

sufficient.20 These markings made explicit an order devised by the artist –

composition; colours and shapes balanced against each other in considered

relation to the whole canvas. Thereby, the artist concerns themselves with

arranging part-to-part and part-to-whole relationships.21 Pollock in working with

large canvases placed on the floor so he could be in the painting, inspired a more

embodied perspective of the whole and its relatable parts. Morris similarly had

this revelation when working from the floor.

Pollock upset conventional understandings of form. There is no beginning, middle,

and end with Pollock’s paintings, but rather a continuum of activity simultaneously

branching out in all directions. This includes beyond the rectangular field.

Inasmuch, Pollock’s paintings are formless – the viewer does not enter or exit the

paintings at any one place, but as Kaprow explains: ‘Anywhere is everywhere, we

dip in and out when and where we can’.22 Pollock’s mural-scale paintings confront

and draw the viewer into them, similar in ways to large-scale Renaissance

paintings. The effect of trompe l’oeil in Renaissance paintings invites the viewer

into an idealised representation of a familiar world. Pollock’s mural paintings offer

a chaotic, dazzling web of colour best understood through Merleau-Ponty’s

spontaneous vision: ‘the experience of a world of teeming, exclusive things which

could be embraced only by means of a temporal cycle in which each gain is

simultaneously a loss.’23 Here, Pollock’s paintings operate like optic, polyphonic

19 Allan Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’ (1958), in: Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2. 20 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 2-3. 21 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 3. 22 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 5. 23 Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 53.

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environments. A gallery space hung entirely with Pollock paintings multiplies this

environmental effect.24

This leads to Kaprow’s fourth and final aspect, space. For Kaprow, Pollock’s

paintings are the fatal result of the picture plane’s flattening over the course of

modernism. The pictures of Pollock’s paintings moved so far out that they existed

outside the plane. The canvas no longer confines the picture, rather the picture is

upon it. Pollock’s paint marks push out into the space of the viewer. This extra-

spatial effect creates the sensation of being surrounded by drips and splashes as

Pollock was when he made them. Kaprow argues, this fundamentally alters the

relationship with the viewer, who is now cast as a participant in the spectacle.25

This fourth aspect, as read by Kaprow, resonated with the younger artists of the

late 1950s and early 1960s. The opening-out of Pollock’s painting to activate the

gallery space, conceptually opened to Happenings of which Kaprow was a central

figure. While this can be read as a conceptual stratagem on behalf of Kaprow, it no

less points to the emergent art practices that were increasingly theatrical,

sculptural, environmental, or performative. Many of these new divergent practices

saw Pollock as their theoretical departure point from the medium of painting.

The end of painting is the legacy of Pollock for a myriad of artists in the 1960s

including Kaprow, Judd, and Morris. Pollock compelled artists to engage the formal

problems presented by his painting outside the medium of painting.26 For Kaprow,

this was Happenings, with Judd specific objects, and Morris – dance and sculpture.

The terminal condition Pollock visited upon painting left the younger artists with

only two choices. One was to continue painting in a derivative and imitative style

of Pollock and the other was to abandon painting altogether. For Judd, Pollock

24 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 6. 25 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 6. 26 See also: Branden W. Joseph, ‘Negative Capabilities: Claes Oldenburg and Jackson Pollock’ Artforum International, 51.8 (April 2013): 231-237,239,282-283. Joseph articulates the formal relationship between Pollock’s painting and the work of Oldenburg – a contemporary to Kaprow who was likewise working with the form of the Happening. Though Joseph emphasises the dissimilarities between Oldenburg’s and Kaprow’s practices, the essay illustrates how Pollock’s work and legacy was negotiated by artists outside of conventional painting.

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pointed the way to an object-centric, non-compositional art form. In his

consideration of Pollock’s paintings, Judd found the power of the works resided in

the parts and elements being discreet and held in oppositional tension. Judd here

explains this in a manner which leaves little doubt to where the formal

theorisation of his objects aligns:

Pollock used paint and canvas in a new way… It’s a different idea of generality, of

how a painting is unified. It’s a different idea of the disparity between parts or

aspects and it’s a different idea of sensation … The elements and aspects of

Pollock’s paintings are polarized rather than amalgamated. The work doesn’t have

the moderated a priori generality usual in painting. Everything is fairly

independent and specific.27

Above, the importance of Pollock upon Judd’s development of his specific objects is

clearly seen. The premise of Judd’s objects is that their parts are discreet, they are

not ordered in a hierarchy, and the use colours and materials is considered

specific. This too can be interpreted as Judd creating an aesthetic lineage from his

own work back to Pollock’s. But again, it is the questions posed by Pollock’s

painting that necessitate answers outside the medium for the next generation of

artists. In his essay on Pollock, Judd defines generality and particularity within

painting to argue that Pollock departs from this convention. For Judd, the

prioritisation of certain colour and forms within a painting equates to hierarchical

composition. Herein, the central elements of the painting are accorded a more

detailed treatment, while the less important parts – usually towards the edges of

the rectangular canvas – are rendered in a generalised manner. This characteristic

is evident in Judd’s mid-1950s paintings, where the horizontal band dominates

other elements within the compositions. This focal, bridge-like form is afforded

more detail than the parts towards the edges of the picture, which in turn are

gradated to draw the eye back to the central point. In his estimation of Pollock,

Judd explains that the elements in Pollock’s paintings are not amalgamated to this

effect, but rather they are specific and polarised. Even the elements at the end of

27 Donald Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 195.

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Pollock’s canvases are seen to state their independence from the parts in the

centre. This for Judd, is the all-over effect of Pollock’s paintings.

Painting and Bodies

Morris’s conceptual engagement with Pollock was concerned with the physical act

of painting. The examination of physical process established aesthetic concerns

that Morris pursued through dance and sculpture. Below, Morris expands on the

importance of Pollock’s physical approach to painting:

Until Pollock, art making oriented toward two-dimensional surfaces had been a

fairly limited act so far as the body was concerned. At most it involved the hand,

wrist and arm. Pollock’s work directly involved the use of the entire body. Coupled

to this was his direct investigation of the properties of the materials in terms of

how paint behaves under the conditions of gravity.28

Seen above, Morris’s revelation from Pollock’s painting is the role that the artist’s

body plays in the realisation of the artwork. Morris suggests Pollock revolutionises

painting by using his entire body – as opposed to that of the just his hand, wrist,

and arm. In this context, Hans Namuth’s film and photographs of Pollock drip

painting illustrate most precisely how these paintings were born out of a physical

process that was measurable in real time [fig.22]. Pollock’s drip painting technique,

as recorded in Namuth’s photographs, shows the painter’s body moving in, out,

and across the breadth of the canvas attacking it from different perspectives and at

different moments in time.29 The viewer similarly engages the painting from

28 Robert Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, Artforum, 9 (April 1970), 63. ‘ 29 See: Matthew Baigell, ‘American Painting: On Space and Time in the Early 1960s’, Art

Journal, 28.4 (Summer 1969), 368-9: ‘In his [Pollock’s] work, one can observe the artist’s manual operations – the putting down of one color and the response with another, the tangled webs of one group of lines developing from the splatters of another. One certainly

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differing perspectives and temporal points, or as Kaprow noted: ‘we dip in and out

when and where we can’.30 In his exploration of Pollock’s work, Morris examined

this effect by building a scaffold over the canvas to access the painting from

different points.31 For Morris, these early all-over paintings and the use of the

scaffold, opened new ways of seeing the relationships between the different parts

and the whole of the picture.

Morris also notes that the scaffold restricted his movement: ‘The first paintings

had a lot of action in them. And they became less and less active.’32 With this

restriction of movement, Morris shifts from the kinaesthetic style of Pollock to a

more deliberative and less gestural approach familiar with Still.33 Here, Morris

interrogates painting in purely physical terms. In restricting his own physical

movement, Morris reduces the gestural quality of his paintings. Gesture in painting

symbolically analogises the artist’s brushwork with their internal state. The

gestural quality of Abstract Expressionist painting was popularised by Harold

Rosenberg’s theory of ‘action painting’.34 Rosenberg viewed the paintings of the

does not feel any logical progression of time in a linear sense. Rather one finds intensifications of particular moments and kaleidoscopic views that move off in many directions at once. Pollock worked from four sides of a canvas so that he could literally be in the painting. If his body was not actually borne along in a stream of time, it would appear that his soul was. Each entry to the canvas marked a new beginning, a new vantage point, that nevertheless had to coincide with earlier beginnings. Every splash was part of a continuing present that immediately engaged itself with a past.’ 30 Kaprow, ‘Jackson Pollock’, 5. 31 Morris; Cummings, np. 32 Morris; Cummings, np. 33 Michael Auping, ‘Clyfford Still and New York: The Buffalo Project’, in: Thomas Kellein (ed.), Clyfford Still: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992), 40-1. Auping writes: ‘What at first appears instantaneous in Still’s work, however, turns out upon closer inspection to be the result of considerable forethought and workmanship. In fact, Still’s method of working was a far cry from the splattered portraits that photographers offer us of de Kooning and Pollock. According to the artist’s widow, ‘Still seldom got paint on himself, and in fact was very careful. He used to laugh with Rothko about how he [Rothko] could get so much paint on his clothes.’ 34 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, ARTnews (December 1952); reprinted in: Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962 [1959]), 25: ‘At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.’

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Abstract Expressionists as gestural, performative acts. Rosenberg’s notion held

that the paint marks on the canvas acted as signifiers to the artist’s interior:

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The

painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life – whether

‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire

duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the

same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.35

With the free-flowing paint of Robert Motherwell or de Kooning, Rosenberg’s

reading held currency. With other painters of the New York School it was not as

convincing. Still and Newman, for example, do not pertain to their painting the

free-flowing styles that Rosenberg’s essay evokes. Rather their pictures appear as

the result of a more intellective process, where the image is conceived and the

application of paint, in its varying consistencies, depths, and directions is vital to

the realisation of the original concept. Notions of accident and chance, which

prevail in Pollock’s drip paintings, seem less prevalent in the work of Newman or

Still.

Rosenberg’s action painting came into opposition with Greenberg’s formalist

estimation of Abstract Expressionism. The two critics were the defining authorities

on the movement through the 1950s, with its key painters split in identifying with

one theory over the other. Rosenberg emphasised action, locating importance in

the expressive activity of the artist. Greenberg directed his critical gaze toward the

resultant artwork stressing flatness and abstraction in his formalist analysis. It is

against this theoretical disjunct between Greenberg and Rosenberg that Morris’s

early painting can be read. Morris, in breaking down the painting of Pollock to

examine the physical process behind it, speaks to the formalist analysis of

Greenberg. Conversely, Morris’s interest in physicality and performance resonates

with Rosenberg’s school of thought. Tellingly for Morris, the use of gesture

35 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 27-8.

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becomes a physiological indicator to the artist’s corporeality. This contrasts with a

psychological designator, that for Rosenberg points to the artist’s personality. With

Morris there is an objective, almost detached, concern with the body’s movements.

Again, concerning Pollock, Morris writes:

Of any artist working in two dimensions it could be said that he, more than any

others, acknowledged the conditions of both accident and necessity open to that

interaction of body and materials as they exist in a three-dimensional world. And

all this and more is visible in the work.36

Through the literal analysis of painting’s physical process, Morris questions the

Romantic figure of the artist. With the Abstract Expressionists, this mythologised

figure had been central in the writing of critics like Rosenberg and Greenberg.

Whether the artists themselves ascribed to these views, of which some did, is not

the issue, it is the construct itself that Morris seeks to agitate. Maurice Berger, in

pointing to Morris’s ‘disenchantment with the static, precious art object’, claims

that through Pollock, Morris began to question ‘the role of the artist in the

production of art.’37 Morris’s dance Site (1964), is a leading example where this

enquiry is played out. This performance piece is examined in greater detail in

Chapter Four of this thesis. Ultimately here for Morris, the investigation of process

and gesture in the late 1950s in painting, led to an irreconcilable dislocation. There

existed a split between the artist’s movement – their process – and the image

which resulted from that movement.38 This led Morris from painting to dance,

‘where process is something that is what it is; it takes place in time.’39 In dance,

36 Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making’, 63. 37 Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 23. 38 Morris; Cummings, np: ‘…there was a crisis developing in the painting because I couldn’t satisfactorily bring the two things together. It seemed to be a complete split. On the one hand, there was this process that I was very interested in, not in any kind of, you might say, inspired way, I mean it was a working process which did not in any way equate with the image. And I found in the theater a situation where that dichotomy was not the case.’ 39 Morris; Cummings, np. During this period Morris and Forti also rented out a studio in San Francisco and along with other visual artists, musicians, dancers, and filmmakers began experimenting with sound, objects, body movements, materials, and light projections. Morris explained to Cummings: ‘I guess you’d call it mixed media. I mean

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Morris resolved the division between process and the resultant artwork. In the

context of a time-based and three-dimensional medium, the body, which is only

suggestible metaphysically or metaphorically in painting, is literally availed in

dance. With dance, the body’s movement is the work. Critically, Morris’s

exploration of Pollock’s corporeality and process led him to work predominantly

within three-dimensional space hereafter.

there were musicians, who would come, play the drums, and there was a pianist … There were all kind of things to make noise with; we brought all kinds of props, like enormous amounts of fabrics and boxes and lights. There was some movement, dancers did certain kinds of movement that were more or less – not dance movement, but just moving around the room, moving these props.’

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CHAPTER THREE

Modern Dance and Minimalist Interventions

Morris continued his aesthetic investigations through the field of dance after

discovering an irreconcilable split in painting between process and the end work.

In dance, Morris again engages with process as part of the visual realisation of the

work. Concurrent to his performance explorations, Morris begins working with

objects. In his choreographic work and object production, two competing aesthetic

tendencies emerge. On one hand, Morris engages the Duchampian assault on art

through small-scale, self-reflexive objects and Fluxus-type performances. On the

other hand, Morris begins a more severe, formalist and theatrical interrogation of

bodies, objects, time, and space. Morris’s key choreographic works, which focus

this interrogation, open to the conceptual crux of his minimalist theory.

Morris’s involvement in dance can be traced back to Ann Halprin’s movement

improvisation workshops in late 1950s California. The workshops attracted an

array of visual artists, dancers, and musicians. This confluence of dance, music, and

visual art flowered in New York in the 1960s, where several performers including

Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, and Morris

continued these investigations as the Judson Dance Theatre. Morris choreographed

five works with the Judson group and appeared in several more choreographed by

other members. The young Judson dancers celebrated everyday bodies performing

pedestrian movements, challenging the technical emphasis of modern dance.

This chapter defines modern dance through the respective choreographic theories

of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Focus then shifts to Merce Cunningham,

whose uncompromising technique, and his rejection of narrative and expressive

performance, created an emergent context for the Judson Dance Theater. Many of

the performance strategies of the Judson group were informed by Halprin’s

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workshops which are herein analysed. Following on, this chapter examines

Morris’s choreographic works and his important partnerships with Simone Forti

and Rainer. Morris’s interrogation of bodies and objects in the time and space of

dance is considered against the formal concerns he works with in sculpture. From

this, a broader, non-medium specific understanding of Morris’s minimalist theory

emerges.

Modernism and the Dancing Body

Modern dance announced itself in the United States around 1930.1 As an inchoate

art form, it provided stark contrast to the studied reservedness, balance, and

proportion of the classical form of ballet.2 As modern dance was not bound –

indeed it sought to break from – the strictures of classicism, it exploited a more

direct correspondence with the modern consciousness. Modern dance was

innovative and contemporaneous, while ballet held to tradition. The

professionalism that Humphrey and Graham brought to dance pushed the

analytical development of teachable styles as with ballet. An integral part of the

dancer’s training under Graham or Humphrey was the refinement of the

individual. As an expressive art form, modern dance valued technique, yet it prized

above this originality and individuality.

1 Julia L. Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to

Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1. Mary Wigman, a German choreographer and dancer, was a central figure in the development of modern dance in Germany. It is generally accepted that the German experience of modernism in the performing arts was antecedent to that of the American. Yet, the influence of Wigman, who toured the United States in the early 1930s, was largely written out of modern dance’s canonical history by American-centric critics who sought to essentialise the Americaness of the new form. See: Susan A. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism

and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkely: University of California Press, 1993), 261. 2 For a detailed exposition on how the modernists reacted against the classism of ballet, see: Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Crisis in the Dance’, The North American Review, 243.1 (Spring 1937), 80-103.

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In the aftermath of the First World War, many avant-gardists rationalised the

cataclysm as a stage of vital rebirth. For Graham, expressing her anxieties of chaos

and regeneration in relation to dance: ‘This period following the war demanded

forms vital enough for the reborn man to inhabit’.3 Graham believed that society’s

‘revitalised consciousness’ needed ‘an entirely contemporary set of technics’.4

Humphrey similarly felt the compositional theory of modern dance emerged from

the schism of the First World War. ‘Everything was re-evaluated’, she opined, ‘in

light of the violence and terrible disruption’.5

Humphrey counselled that this new dance should draw upon the modern city for

inspiration.6 To this, the archetypal modern city – New York – where Humphrey

lived and worked, influenced her thoughts on dance and the modern

consciousness. Humphrey proposed that the stark and severe architecture of the

city presented the requisite lines and structures to the modern dancer: ‘The right

angle is possibly the prime symbol of our age, eloquent of conflict. Its parent, the

straight line’, she claimed, ‘is thought to be best and smartest when it is shiny and

naked, pointed slightly like the end of a weapon.’7 Humphrey’s vivid account gives

insight into how she expressed the intensity of experience felt with urban, modern

life through dance. Seeking parallels with the sleek, sharp, and angular forms of the

city, the modern dancer’s movement was acute with energy and struck strong,

hard-angled lines. The technical aspect of modern dance was exacting and

vigorous. Both Graham’s and Humphrey’s writings on dance inspire this sense of

the modern.

3 Martha Graham, ‘Graham 1937’, in: Brown (ed.), The Vision of Modern Dance (Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1998), 51. 4 Graham’s writing here is in retrospect and about the period after the First World War during the 1920s. 5 Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, (Princeton: Dance Horizons, [1959], 1987), 18. 6 Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, 29: ‘From the point of view of visual influences, it seems to me that architecture, especially for those who live in the city, speaks to us and for us with the most insistent cry.’ 7 Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, 29-30.

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As leading choreographers of American modern dance, both Graham and

Humphrey drew from continental ideas in painting, sculpture, architecture, and

literature. They endowed dance with an unprecedented intellectual rigour,

fervently pushing its elevation as a modern art form and furnishing it with a body

of teachable theory that was previously lacking. Graham was drawn to the

abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and her thoughts on dance echo Kandinsky’s on

painting. Graham recounts her experience when she saw a Kandinsky painting for

the first time: ‘I saw across the room a beautiful painting, what was then called

abstract art, a startling new idea … It was by Wassily Kandinsky and had a streak of

red going from one end to the other. I said, ‘I will do that someday. I will make a

dance like that.’8

For Kandinsky, harmonious composition in a painting had the power to uplift the

soul of the viewer. Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory extends from theosophy and the

belief that mental thoughts transmit electric vibrations and are communicable

through colour. If the colours in the painting are balanced correctly, then the

painting will illicit harmonious thoughts and feelings in the viewer. Kandinsky felt

it incumbent upon the artist to cultivate a harmonious soul, which transpired in

the painting as balanced and agreeable composition.9 ‘The resonance is then the

soul of the form which can only become alive through the resonance and which

works from within to without’, Kandinsky articulated about this harmonious

relationship: ‘The form is the outer expression of the inner content.’10

8 Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 98. Graham witnessed Kandinsky’s painting on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. The dance Graham’s choreographed in response to the painting was Diversion of Angels (1948). Although Graham did not name Kandinsky’s painting in her recollection, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an ‘Exhibition of Paintings from the Collection of the Late Arthur Jerome Eddy’ in 1922; a collection containing several Kandinsky paintings. The most probable painting from this exhibition which matches Graham’s description of red streak on blue, is Kandinsky’s Painting with Troika (1911). 9 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 37. 10 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Problem of Form’ (1912), in: Hershel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories

of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 155.

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Graham shares with Kandinsky’s compositional theory this notion of the artist’s

inner essence being externalised through the artwork – moving from the inside

out. In Graham’s dance, the inside is both a physical idea – as in the centre of the

body – as well as incorporeal – the emotional centre.11 The movement of the limbs

is physical, yet their stylised and composed form signifies the emotive content of

the dance. To this effect, dance historian Julia L. Foulkes intones: ‘Graham’s

landmark solo Lamentation (1930)[fig.23], was not a depiction of a woman in

sorrow – it was grief itself.’12 To heighten emotional connect with her audience,

Graham dramatized the cadence between rest and action.13 This tension gave

dramatic and psychological structure to the performance and came to be known

with Graham as contraction and release.14 The emphasis on crises and climax in

Graham’s dance is what Cunningham and then later the Judson choreographers

reacted strongly against.15 Cunningham went as far to declare:

11 Graham, Blood Memory, 6: ‘To understand dance for what it is, it is necessary we know from whence it comes and where it goes. It comes from the depths of man’s inner nature, the unconscious, where memory dwells. As such it inhabits the dancer. It goes into the experience of man, the spectator, awakening similar memories.’ 12 Foulkes, Modern Bodies,132. 13 Graham, Blood Memory, 8: ‘That tension, that intensification of a body in its stillness and in its movement’. 14 Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988), 166. Deborah Jowitt explains how contraction and release extends from Graham’s focus on breathing to inform her whole performance technique. ‘As Graham developed her technique, a contraction might hit the dancer sideways, make her twist, spiral, or be spun to the floor. It might attack percussively, then deepen slowly, resonating throughout her body. But always, no matter how drastic the fall, there is a release, a rise, an advance, an inhalation. The dancer waits – poised, charged – for the next crisis.’ 15 Yvonne Rainer’s minimalist dance construction Trio A subverts Graham’s notion of contraction and release and its inferred crisis and climax. Rainer’s dance consists of non-hierarchical and pedestrian movements performed in a continuous, almost repetitive manner thereby eliminating the Grahamnesque tension between movement and stillness which engenders the expressive and emotive qualities of her dance. Rainer, in her accompanying essay to Trio A, explains: ‘Much of the western dancing we are familiar with can be characterised by a particular distribution of energy: maximal output or ‘attack’ at the beginning of a phrase, recovery at the end, with energy often arrested somewhere in the middle. This means that one part of the phrase – usually the part that is most still – becomes the focus of attention, registering like a photograph or suspended moment of climax. In the Graham-oriented modern dance these climaxes can come one on the heels of the other.’ See: Rainer, ‘The Mind is a Muscle: A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, in: Rainer, Work 1961-1973 (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 65.

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Now I can’t see that crisis any longer means a climax, unless we are willing to grant

that every breath of wind has a climax (which I am), but then that obliterates

climax, being a surfeit of such. And since our lives, both by nature and by the

newspapers are so full of crisis that one is no longer aware of it, then it is clear that

life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and is separate from

each and every other, viz: continuity of the newspaper headlines. Climax is for

those who are swept away by New Year’s Eve.16

Graham’s dances are redolent with crisis and climax and structured on emotional

tempi. Her leading characters often evolve across emotional states, from envy to

anger to sorrow to triumph.17 As a representational art form, the subject matter of

Graham’s dances is conveyed through the narrative, costume, music, design, and

décor. These theatrical conventions give the audience the signifying framework in

which to make sense of the world of that dance, whether it is set against historic,

mythical, or contemporary backgrounds. Yet it is the expressive quality of

Graham’s movement style that connects the spectator to the emotional root of the

dance. Graham construes modern life as full of crises and climaxes, and her

choreography plays to the excitations and anxieties of her audience.

Graham’s contraction and release style is characterised by movement emanating

from the lower abdomen and pelvis – an area associated with primal instinct and

sexual desire. Tensely and against seeming resistance, the movement waves

through and twists the upper torso – the part of the body associated with the

symbolic heart and feelings. The head, the centre of intellect and rationality, is

flung back or cast askew. The arms and fingers outstretched. The asymmetry of the

right and left sides of the body, representing activity and sensitivity respectively, is

heightened to create dramatic and psychological contrast.18 In exploring the

connection between the corporeal and abstract in Graham’s style, Susan Leigh

16 Merce Cunningham, ‘Space, Time and Dance’, in: Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Merce

Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time: Essays 1944-1992 (Pennington: A Capella Books, 1998), 38-49. 17 Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American

Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 94. 18 Foster, Reading Dancing, 79.

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Foster finds: ‘This tense texture, pervading most of Graham’s choreography,

documents both the traumas of her characters’ situations and their resistance to

acknowledging and expressing these situations … The powerful message from the

unconscious makes it way only with great difficulty through the emotional and

intellectual centres of the person an into the world.’19 Graham’s style, as Foster

suggests, is grounded in the toil between libidinal impulses and rationality’s

restraint, and is physically expressed through the dancer’s bridled energies,

dramatic tensions and releases.

Humphrey’s dance style, in distinction, is characterised by its sweeping falls and

ascendant recoveries. In Humphrey’s style the dancing body skirts along the edge

of the fall, quivering between stability and imbalance. Only when the dancer

succumbs to the pull of earthly gravity, can the body then spring forth with

renewed vitality towards the next apogee.20 Foster explains that, Humphrey

‘portrays the human body in a cyclic but lyric tension between heaven and earth’.21

Indeed, Humphrey theorised her dance in terms of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and

Dionysian duality.22 Nietzsche reasoned that Greek tragedy played on the

opposition between order and rationality on one hand – Apollo, and intoxication

and disorder on the other – Dionysus. Consequently, in Greek tragedy Nietzsche

holds these conflicting forces in ‘equal measure’, resulting in a work of art that

appeals to both the higher nature and earthly pleasures of the viewer.23 Humphrey

likens this duality as the physical states of symmetry and asymmetry or balance

19 Foster, Reading Dancing, 81. 20 Jowitt, Time and The Dancing Image, 165: ‘Humphrey’s drama of motion lay in the struggle to resist the pull of gravity, in the ecstasy or the tragedy of complying, in the suspended moment before equilibrium was regained.’ Jowitt reveals the tension in Humphrey’s work as ‘the desire for stability and calm on the one hand and, on the other, the passions that throw you off-balance, the call to danger.’ 21 Foster, Reading Dancing, 87. 22 Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, 56. Humphrey relates this Nietzschean duality in her choreography to symmetry and asymmetry. She frames the dancer’s poise in either a state of symmetry or asymmetry. Extending from this, the dancer’s line is then seen as successional or oppositional. ‘If symmetry should be used sparingly in choreography because of its calming effect’, states Humphrey, ‘then asymmetry, which stimulates the senses, is the area to court and understand for dancing.’ 23 See: Friedrich Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, (1872) [The birth of tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith], Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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and imbalance.24 The fall and recovery serve as the liminal transition between

these states in her dance.

Deborah Jowitt claims the female modern dancer was similarly considered in

diametric terms: ‘All could display an artless sensuality, and, compared to ballet

dancers, they looked compulsive, capable of unexpected vagaries.’25 The individual

styles of Graham and Humphrey placed extreme demands on the dancer’s body

with constant fluctuation between activity and passivity, rigidity and laxity.

Dancers under the instruction of Graham or Humphrey were expected to prove a

committed adherence to technique. Yet more so, modern dance demanded an

intimate refinement within to inspire the dance’s emotional message.26 This

hierarchic separation between the mechanical – technique, and the conceptual –

inspiration, replicates the Cartesian division of body and mind that permeates

modern thought in the arts.

The young choreographers of the 1960s subverted or rejected most defining

conditions of modern dance. The use of untrained dancers, together with the

common, everyday movements that constituted typical Judson choreography,

subverted the stylised techniques of Graham, Humphrey, and their

contemporaries. This is evinced by Forti’s infamous denouncement: ‘I started

going to classes at the Martha Graham School, but I could not hold my stomach in. I

would not hold my stomach in’.27 The literal content of the Judson performances

24 Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, 56: ‘[Nietzsche] saw clearly that the Greek ideal of moderation and balance in all things was Apollonian, but that they wisely provided an escape from this monotony in their Dionysian rites. There lived within the Apollonian man a Dionysus, an unquenchable desire for excitement in breaking all the rules and indulging in the passion for unevenness – and freedom from rational balance.’ 25 Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, 157. 26 Graham, Blood Memory, 4. Graham here presents these terms as the fundaments of the modern dancer’s training: ‘It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. First comes the study and practice of the craft which is the school where you are working in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honoured, and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise, eloquent, truthful … Then comes the cultivation of the being from which whatever you have to say comes.’ 27 Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 34.

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was rejection of the symbolic narratives associated with modern dance. Rainer’s,

We Shall Run (1963) [fig.24], featured performers simply running around the

performance space, while Paxton’s Smiling (1969) had two performers smiling at

each other for five minutes. The content for the Judson performances was exactly

what their titled implied. Much of the Judson group’s antithetic attacks on modern

dance and their outright abandonment of its expressionist aims, was informed by

Cunningham’s earlier interrogations. Cunningham himself had been a soloist in

Graham’s company and trained classically at the School of American Ballet under

George Balanchine. Cunningham’s radical innovations exposed the limitations of

the expressive mode and hastened its exhaustion.

Cunningham’s Dance in Space and Time

Cunningham began dancing with Graham’s company in 1939. He had met Cage in

1938 while studying at the Cornish School in Seattle, thus commencing a

professional and personal partnership that would span until Cage’s death in 1992.

Starting as a twenty- year old under Graham, Cunningham performed with the

company for six years before branching out on his own. Cunningham’s first solo

concert in 1944 signalled the revolutionary intervention into modern performance

that became synonymous with his pairing with Cage. Cunningham’s choreography

showed little or no adherence to Cage’s music, which was often unmelodic and

constituted from non-musical sounds. Cunningham rejected narrative, emotive

structure, mythical themes, and dramatis personae that had constituted modern

dance. Conversely, Graham structured her dances with diminuendos and

crescendos, crises and climaxes, and contractions and releases; this gave her

dances linearity and emotive tempi. Cunningham spurned this compositional

model: ‘I never could stand the modern dance idea of structure in terms of theme

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and variations. That sort of A-B-A business based on emotional or psychological

meanings just seemed ridiculous to me.’28

Without contraction and release based movement, and with no emotive climaxes

or lulls, Cunningham’s dance took on an almost continuous, flowing quality.

Constance Smith, a notable dance critic in New York during the 1940s, when

reviewing Cunningham’s Root of an Unfocus (1944) [fig.25], wrote: ‘His cycle,

which should have contained both activity and inactivity, had a quality of quivering

tension throughout, and his pauses and suspensions were always so burdened

with impending pressures that in recall he seems not to have rested at all.’29 Within

Cunningham’s dance, crisis and climax gives way to sustained exertion and

physicality.30 In abandoning the dramatic structures of modern dance and

disassociating dance from music and décor, Cunningham focused solely on the

body’s movement. In Root of Unfocus Cunningham applied Cage’s notion of

rhythmic structure to organise the piece.31 With this, he divided his dance into

phrases based on temporal measures – Cage did likewise with his musical score.32

The result was that the music and choreography expanded independently only

28 Cunningham quoted in: Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the

Avant-Garde [expanded edition], (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976 [1968]), 244. 29 Constance Smith, ‘Dance Letter: Reviewed Work(s)’, The Kenyon Review, 8.4 (Autumn 1946), 691. Root of Unfocus featured on a concert programme of six solos by Cunningham and three musical pieces by Cage, performed at Studio Theatre, New York City, 5 April 1944. 30 Cunningham; Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, 244-5. Cunningham found that most of the audience, who were accustomed to the expressive conventions of Graham and Humphrey, sought to read an emotive quality into Root of an Unfocus. Cunningham lay waste to this belief, that his work was expressive in the conventional sense, stating: ‘A lot of modern-dance people in the audience liked one of my dances on that program – the one called Root of an Unfocus – because it seemed to them to be tied to an emotional meaning.’ 31 Merce Cunningham, ‘A Collaborative Process between Music and Dance (1982)’, in: Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Merce Cunningam: Dancing in Space and Time (Pennington: a Capella books),139. Cunningham explains: ‘… in Root of an Unfocus (1944), the original phase was structure 8-10-6 beats. The dance was in three parts, the first section being 8x8, the second 10x10, the third 6x6. The tempo for each section varied as did the time lengths (one and one-half minutes; two and one-half minutes; one minute). 32 Cage used a prepared piano for this concert which consisted of placing bolts, screws, and pieces of rubber and plastic between the piano’s strings. The result was that certain keys took on percussive qualities; others’ tuning was effected, whilst the use of the soft pedal gave certain keys two completely different sounds.

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approaching unison at the points where the phrases met.33 The disassociation

between choreography and score is the defining revelation of Cage and

Cunningham’s collaborations. Dance and music conceived independently; separate

occurrences coexisting in the same space and time of the performance. ‘The result

is the dance is free to act as it chooses,’ claimed Cunningham, ‘as is the music.’34

From dividing dance from music, Cunningham articulated the body’s movement

with more technical concern than the earlier moderns. He placed a heightened

emphasis on technique, isolating parts of the body and scrutinising their

movement. Cunningham consciously stripped back and tested the raw conventions

of the dance medium. This marks Cunningham as a formalist and high-modernist.

At this juncture, it is necessary to define the modern dance of Graham and

Humphrey from the modernist practice of Cunningham. The respective styles of

Graham and Humphrey are unquestionably modern, both in their expressionist

intents and the symbolic relationships they forge with the modern consciousness.

Dissimilarly, Cunningham’s practice is marked by its examination of the irreducible

elements of dance – the body and its movement. Cunningham’s interrogation of the

dance medium aligns his practice with analytical modernism. Here, Cunningham’s

practice is like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism in invoking Greenberg’s

modernist dialectic of self-criticism. Writing on Cunningham’s alignment with

analytical modernism, Sally Banes and Noël Carroll conclude:

Thus, throughout his compositions, Cunningham, in the spirit of high modernism,

unfailingly acknowledges his medium. It is pure dance and not something else: not

a representation of romance, an expression of primal instincts, or a journey of self-

discovery, but rather a sequence of steps, evolving their own intrinsic cadence, a

cadence with a temporal pulse tangibly different from any other sort of movement.

33 Cunningham, ‘A Collaborative Process between Music and Dance’, 138-9. Cunningham here details this radical collaborative approach: ‘The use of a time structure allowed us to work separately, Cage not having to be with the dance except at structural points, and I was free to make the phrases and movements within the phrases vary their speeds and accents without reference to a musical beat, again only using the structural points as identification between us.’ 34 Mere Cunningham, ‘Space, Time, and Dance (1952), in: Kostelanetz (ed.), Merce

Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time, 39.

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That is, by using movement that is unequivocably dancerly to the naked eye,

Cunningham intends to show us the quiddity of pure dance.35

Seen here, Cunningham’s dance reveals through itself the strictures and

conventions of the medium as he breaks them down. This self-critical tendency in

Cunningham’s practice – his examination of the conditions of dance in his dance –

separates him from the modern dancers that went before. When Cunningham left

Graham’s company, modern dance was waning in both innovation and appeal – it

had long lost its avant-gardist claims.36 Where the early moderns had rejected the

classicism of ballet, Cunningham returned to reinvigorate a moribund mode. In the

early 1940s, Cunningham began working with George Balanchine’s School of

American Ballet. Cunningham found with Balanchine, ballet going through its own

process of self-criticism and renewal.37 Balanchine had distilled ballet to its basic

‘movement patterns or conventions’.38 Discarding story, narrative, drama, and

elaborate costumes and scenery, Balanchine’s interventions revealed the

fundamental, technical concerns of ballet. Cunningham’s analytical questioning of

modern dance is conducted in similar vein to that of Balanchine’s and oversees the

jettisoning of unnecessary conventions. From this, Cunningham reduced dance to

its two constants – the body and its movement – and placed a modernist, hard-

headed emphasis on technique. Cunningham’s separation of dance from music

speaks to his indefatigable focus on bodies in motion in time and space; his

35 Sally Banes & Noël Carroll, ‘Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance’ (2006), Dance Chronicle, 29:1; 57-8. 36 Constance Smith, ‘Dance Letter: Reviewed Work(s)’, 689: Smith noted about the 1944, ’45 and ‘46 dance seasons in New York: ‘The revolutionary dynamic that led Miss Graham and the others away from ballet faded some time ago … and the dancers they indoctrinate, instead of seeming purposeful once they get off on their own, usually look derivative, grounded, or merely outdated. Sybil Shearer and Merce Cunningham are about the only ones trained in this pious, ingrown atmosphere who are really managing surviving all its hazards, and the concerts they are presenting separately during these inartistic seasons seem wonderfully intense, personal, audacious and important.’ 37 For comprehensive analysis on the formal relationship between Cunningham and Balanchine, see: Banes & Carroll, ‘Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance’, 49-60. 38 Banes & Carroll, ‘Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance’, 55.

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dancers frequently rehearsed in silence.39 Forti, who attended Cunningham’s

school, recalled being unnerved by this intense technicality of the lessons:

An important element of the movement seemed to be the arbitrary isolation of the

different parts of the body. I recall a statement I made in exasperation one day in

the studio. I said that Merce Cunningham was a master of adult, isolated

articulation. And that the thing I had to offer was still very close to the holistic and

generalised response of infants.40

Forti’s remark about the ‘arbitrary isolation’ of body parts relates with

Cunningham’s statement: ‘You do not separate the human being from the actions

he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break

these actions up in different ways’.41 Cunningham’s technique called for the

different parts of the body to move in opposition or out of synchronisation.42 To

this, Emily Macel Theys’s adds: ‘In a Cunningham class, your upper body and lower

39 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, 245. See also: Moira Hodgson, Quintet: five

American dance companies (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1976), 84: ‘The laughter, chatter and waiting that characterise rehearsals in most dance companies are absent here. There are no tapes to be fumbled with or pianist to give the cue. The only sound is the thud and squeak of the dancers’ feet on the highly polished maple floor. Merce Cunningham, in a gray tracksuit, sits very straight on the chair he has drawn up to face the dancers. Occasionally he stands and clicks his fingers or slaps his thigh in rhythm. He carries a towel, a stopwatch and a notebook. The dancers, young, grave, and elegant, four men and six women, work quickly and intently. With no stepping stones provided for them by music, they have to count it all in their heads. The dance, with several sections, must finish at a specific time. At the end of the sequence Merce looks at his stopwatch and says, ‘You’re thirty seconds over.’ The dancers look at each other and scratch their heads.’ 40 Forti, Handbook in Motion, 34. 41 Merce Cunningham, ‘You have to love dancing to stick with it’ (1998), in: Brown (ed.), The Vision of Modern Dance, 91. 42 In Cunningham’s technique, the spine is central and the legs and arms work in either opposition or unison to this centre point. The base of the spine acts as a spring, which can either coil or twist or send parts of the body or its whole surging into space. The legs which drive the vital movement across space often appear under different instruction than the rest of the body. Cunningham’s choreography necessitates the dancers cover large areas of space. He regularly sought to perform in gymnasiums, large halls, and later museums, escaping the spatial restrictions of the traditional proscenium stage. For Cunningham and his dancers to cover these expanses efficiently, the legs had to move with incredible dexterity and generate extraordinary power, just as with ballet. See: Copeland, ‘Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception’, 319; Cunningham, ‘Space, Time, and Dance’, 37-8; Robert Swinston quoted in Macel Theys, ‘Modern Masters’, Dance Spirit, 15.4 (April 2011), 69.

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body will often be doing totally different things.’43 Or, as Robert Copeland puts it:

‘Not only is everybody a soloist in Cunningham’s choreography, every section of

every body can become a soloist as well’.44

Rainer’s Trio A (1965-66) [fig.26], a focal work in articulating minimalism in dance,

expanded Cunningham’s arbitrary isolation to the structure of the dance itself. In

Trio A, Rainer conceives the performer’s body as an object and performs a series of

individual movements each separate and distinct from the others. ‘No one of the

individual movements’ she claimed, ‘was made by varying a quality of one with any

other.’45 The movements are not set in a hierarchy. There is no crescendo or

climax. Instead the series progresses by one distinct movement following another.

The effect is a series of disconnected movements undertaken by isolated parts of

the body. By focusing on basic, discrete movements and repeating these in a

mechanical, non-expressive manner, Rainer’s performance is serial and minimalist.

Here, Rainer’s choreography resonates more with Judd’s specific objects where

discrete units are repeated over and over to create a highly-depersonalised effect,

than it does with Morris’s phenomenological framing of bodies and objects. In Trio

A presents the body and its movement as object-like, inexpressive, and impersonal.

In earlier modern dance, the dancing body wrought and amplified the emotive

turmoil and exaltations of the modern condition. This aspect is one of the core

elements rejected by the Judson dancers: ‘I find all so-called “Modern Dance”

impossible to watch’, protested Morris, ‘that is all dance which exhibits

“expression” I find repellent.’ 46

Cunningham’s resonance with the younger generation of dancers is seen through

non-expressive modes of performance, anti-compositional strategies, and the

disassociation of dance, music, and décor. These concepts, which Cunningham

43 Emily Macel Theys, ‘Modern Masters’, 69. 44 Roger Copeland, ‘Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception’ (1979), in: Copeland and Marshall Cohen (eds.), What is Dance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 319. 45 Rainer, ‘The Mind is a Muscle’, 67-68. 46 Robert Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio: The Mirror to the Labyrinth (1998-1999-2000), (Lyon: Musee d’Art contemporain, 2000), 183.

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performed in the mid-1940s, empowered many of the antithetic questionings of

the Judson Dance Theater. There were aspects of Cunningham’s dance which the

younger performers of the Judson group challenged; the unnerving technicality of

Cunningham’s technique being the main. Mostly, there was practical and

conceptual interchange between Cunningham’s dance company and the Judson

group. Many of the younger dancers trained at Cunningham’s school and Steve

Paxton and Judith Dunn danced with his company. The figure of Rauschenberg was

a constant in both groups and undoubtedly a conduit of ideas.47

Movement and Nature

Morris was introduced to dance by Forti, who was a student of Ann Halprin.

Halprin formed her Dancers’ Workshop in 1955 in San Francisco; Forti, recently

married to Morris, joined in 1956. Although Morris never performed with

Halprin’s group, he attended her workshops which attracted visual artists, dancers,

musicians, and poets.48 The location of Halprin’s studio in the mountainous

countryside outside San Francisco spoke to her dance philosophy. Conducting

workshops surrounded by nature, Halprin encouraged students to explore the

relationship between humanity and the natural world.49 ‘You become vitally

47 In 1953, whilst at Black Mountain College with Cage, Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It was at the college that they met Rauschenberg, who joined as the company’s first artistic advisor until 1964 – Jasper Johns continued in this role from 1967. The collaborations which arose out of Cunningham’s choreography, Cage’s music, and Rauschenberg’s visual designs irrevocably disrupted the accord these three elements conventionally shared in modern and classical dance. Dance, music, and décor were conceptualised independently from the other and could be translated by the audience in isolation and in concert. Rauschenberg prepared the visual design in independence from the music and choreography. As was his practice, Rauschenberg’s routinely incorporated objects he found on the streets into his designs. This practice introduced another element of chance into the overall performance. 48 Other performers and artists associated with Halprin’s workshops around this time included – Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, La Monte Young, Ruth Emerson, Terry Riley, A.A. Leath, and John Graham. Many of these attendees were instrumental in the development of postmodern dance and minimalist performance in New York in the 1960s. Morris, Rainer, Brown, and Emerson were directly involved with the Judson Dance Theater. 49 Forti, Handbook in Motion, 31. Forti remembered in one workshop students were asked to observe the nature around them and articulate what they had viewed into movement.

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concerned with the materials, the sensual materials of our lives,’ Halprin reflected,

‘and with the almost primitive naiveness [sic] of being an extension of your

environment.’50 For Halprin, the relatedness between the body and nature, calls

upon a premodern view of the world. Halprin described this connection with

nature through movement a ‘non-intellectual’ way of working.51 Certainly, this

represents a non-rationalist or pre-Cartesian understanding, as there is a desire to

revert to an indivisible unity between humanity and the environment, and

between mind and body.52

Halprin’s premodern understanding of dance was aimed at moving beyond the

dance clichés and conventional techniques of modern dance. Halprin sought more

basic human responses and she considered improvisation as the means for

breaking down the stylised movement of modern dancers: ‘I was trying to get at

subconscious areas’, Halprin explained, ‘so things would happen in an

unpredictable way’.53 While Halprin aimed to break through the artifice of modern

dance with non-intellectual movement, this movement still required structure to

Morris participated in this exercise and Forti recalled that Morris had observed a rock. Over the course of three minutes, Morris compressed his body more and more until, according to Forti, ‘just the point under his centre of gravity remained on the ground.’ Forti’s recollection of Morris performing this exercise goes to the central tenet of Halprin’s dance philosophy; a primitive understanding of the body’s relationship to nature as it is articulated through movement. 50 Ann Halprin interviewed by Vera Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, in: Jean Morrison Brown (ed.), The Vision of Modern Dance (Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1979), 133. 51 Halprin; Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, 133. 52 Meredith Morse, Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), 15-35. In her extensive study on Forti, Morse traces the choreographic lineage of Forti’s dance interrogations in the 1960s back through the mentorship of Halprin in the late 1950s. Halprin in turn was influenced by the teachings of dance pedagogue Margaret D’Houbler from the 1910s and 1920s. H’Doubler approached dance using scientific and anatomical methods and dismissed the stylistic and expressive early-modern dance of Isadora Duncan. Informed by contemporary social reform and evolutionary theories, H’Doubler’s notion of kinaesthetic awareness was rooted in anatomical self-exploration and physical education. She gave her students movement exercises and instructed them to observe the bodily changes. H’Doubler’s objective focus on real and natural movement inspired Halprin’s practice which similarly sought to circumvent the stylised artifices of modern dance and arrive at an unadulterated view of the body’s movement. Morse illustrates that these concerns were carried forward in Forti’s practice in the 1960s. 53 Ann Halprin interviewed by Yvonne Rainer in: ‘Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin’, The Tulane Drama Review, 10.2 (Winter 1965), 143.

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be considered performance.54 She remarked in an interview with Rainer: ‘Doing a

task created an attitude that would bring the movement quality into another kind

of reality … [and] was devoid of a certain kind of introspection.’55 Here, Halprin

refers to ‘introspection’ as the emotive connect between the inner state of the

dancer and outward expression of that state through their movement. This notion

of introspection did not form part of Halprin’s dance philosophy or approach to

choreography.

Halprin devised game-like situations, improvisational problems, or had students

perform mundane tasks to give their movements the necessary performance

structure.56 In one example Forti recalls, Halprin asked her students to walk

around in a circle as a group. Individually, the students were instructed not to

instigate any changes to the speed or direction of the group. After an hour, the

group had gradually sped up to the point of running and after running for a while,

slowed to a walk again. Forti recalls that this process of speeding up and slowing

down continued for some time thereafter, until the group finally came to a stop

and fell to the ground.57 This walking/running exercise exemplifies the use of

game and task-based operations to elicit a performance quality out of a non-

intellectual movement. Operations like these preclude subjective compositional

54 Morris; Cummings, np. As Morris noted: ‘the kind of thing that Ann Halprin was doing at the time … was oriented towards a performance or toward a very, very structured kind of solution to some problem.’ 55 Halprin; Rainer, ‘Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin’, 147: ‘I wanted to explore in a particular way breaking down any preconceived notions I had about what dance was, or what movement was, or what composition was. I began setting up situations where we could rely only on our improvisation skills. Everything was done, for quite a few years, with improvisation. The purpose of the improvisation was not self-expression. I was trying to get at subconscious areas, so things would happen in an unpredictable way. I was trying to eliminate stereotypical ways of reacting. Improvisation was used to release things that were blocked off because we were traditional modern dancers.’ 56 Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006), 193. Rainer here describes a performance piece that she constructed in one of Halprin’s workshops. Both Rainer and La Monte Young would individually pursue avant-garde experimentations in New York in the early 1960s: ‘For one week, composer La Monte Young conducted explorations of John Cage’s scores and vocal and non-vocal sound production. I made a score for three performers titled “Sonata for Screen Door, Flashlight, and Dancer”. The squeaky screen door to the indoor studio beside the deck was the source of the sound. Someone else created a melange of sound while sawing through a milk carton.’ 57 Forti, Handbook in Motion, 29.

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choices of the choreographer and expressive gestures of the dancer. Rainer used a

similar exercise to Halprin’s – a group of people running in a circle together – as

the basis for her dance We Shall Run performed at the Judson Dance Theater in

1963.

Halprin’s practice celebrated real bodies performing real, everyday movements.

Her workshops were open to performers not formally trained in dance. Halprin’s

stated indifference to the technical lexis of modern dance: ‘I am disinterested in

movement so highly stylised that we must say this is a Dancer.’58 Halprin sought to

breakdown the artifices of the modern dancer and speak to the performer’s

movement alone: ‘Anybody’s a dancer to me at any time’, she stated, ‘when I am

involved in communicating with that person through his movement.’59 Halprin

encouraged her students to incorporate everyday objects, use non-musical sounds,

or perform repetitious and non-dance movements in their performances.60 This

was wilful erosion of the traditional boundary between performer and audience.61

Further, it augured collapse of the terms art and life.62 Many of these performance

explorations were continued with the Judson Dance Theater. Where Halprin used

these methods to arrive at a premodern or primitive understanding of the body

and its movement, the Judson Dance Theater incorporated these elements into

their performance as a conscious subversion and critique of modern dance. The

58 Halprin; Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, 128. 59 Halprin; Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, 128. 60 Forti, Handbook in Motion, 31-2. Here Forti explains a movement of Trisha Brown using an everyday object: ‘Another memory I have of those days is of a movement Trisha Brown did. She was holding a broom in her hand. She thrust it out straight ahead, without letting go of the handle. And she thrust it out with such force that the momentum carried her whole body through the air. I still have the image of that broom and Trisha right out in space, travelling in a straight line about three feet off the ground.’ 61 Halprin; Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, 129: ‘I want the audience to be able to identify and realise that this is a person more than he is a dancer, a person who identifies with very real things.’ 62 Halprin; Maletic, ‘The Process Is the Purpose’, 129-30: ‘We don’t even accept the theater as a conventional place where the audience is here and you’re there, but it is a place, and whatever you do in that place is valid because it’s the place. You don’t have to be on the stage separating here from there. This desire to merge a very life-like situation into the concept of the dance is very true also in my training. Everything we do in dance somehow or other usually relates to who you are as a person, and this affects how you see things and feel things and relate to people. Again, it’s this non-separation of life and art, so that somehow or other it becomes a heightening process.’

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ideas that emerged in the relative philosophic and geographic isolation of Halprin’s

workshops in California, gained a certain criticality when articulated by the Judson

group in New York in the early 1960s.

Early Objects, Early Dance

Morris and Forti moved to New York around 1960.63 By this stage Morris had all

but given up on painting.64 He began studies in art history at Hunter College with

designs of becoming an art historian, whilst Forti attended Robert Dunn’s dance-

composition classes at Cunningham’s studio.65 Dunn’s students started developing

performances out of the class activities and began showing these at various

Happenings and events around Lower Manhattan. One such piece composed by

Forti was See-Saw (1960), performed at the Reuben Gallery.66 The piece involved a

male and female performer, Morris and Rainer. A long wooden plank balanced

upon a saw horse, with elastic bands fastening the plank to the walls. A toy rubber

cow under the see-saw mooed every time it was tipped. Morris and Rainer

performed several combinations of movements, each affecting the balance of the

see-saw while trying to maintain equilibrium. In one section of the performance,

Rainer started screeching while she rode the see-saw and Morris began reading an

article from ARTnews in a monotone voice. Throughout the performance, Forti

turned the lights on and off and sung. The piece lasted twenty minutes.

63 The date of their arrival in New York is given differently by Forti and Morris. In Handbook in Motion, Forti lists it as Spring 1959. In his interview with Cummings, Morris says, ‘I moved to New York at the beginning of 1960 I guess it was, 1961. There was a time of travelling back and forth. There was a kind of inactivity there at one point.’ 64 Forti, Handbook in Motion, 34: ‘Bob had stopped painting. He was actively trying to do nothing, but actually he was reading voraciously.’ 65 Morris; Cummings, np. 66 Forti at this stage was working with children at a nursery in New York and through this became interested in children’s games and the way they act and move whilst playing. Forti subsequently explored the actions and activities of children in her performance works during this period. In See-Saw, Forti structured a performance around a children’s game-like situation upon a see-saw object, forming what she termed a dance construction.

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Morris has stated that Forti’s choreographic explorations resonated with his own

work greatly at this time.67 An important Forti piece that impacted on Morris was

Slant Board (1961), performed at her Five Dance Constructions & Some Other

Things held at Yoko Ono’s loft in Lower Manhattan.68 In this work, Forti

constructed a forty-five-degree inclined plywood ramp fitted with knotted ropes.

Performers had to pull themselves up or across the ramp and were required to

stay upon the board for ten minutes. For Morris, Slant Board was revelatory: ‘Here

focused clearly for the first time were two distinct means by which new actions

could be implemented: rules or tasks and devices (she termed them constructions)

or objects.’69 Morris increasingly explored this formalised relationship between

tasks and objects in performance and it is most visible in his dance Arizona (1963)

which is explored later in this chapter.

The installation of Forti’s dances throughout the space of Ono’s loft and the

movement of visitors through that space meant, according to Virginia Spivey, that

Forti ‘effectively blurred distinctions between real and performative space.’70

Spivey pictures a conceptual relationship between Forti’s Five Dance Constructions

& Some Other Things and Morris’s plywood show at the Green Gallery in 1964. The

activity of the spectator moving through Ono’s loft encountering simple rope and

plywood forms, was not dissimilar to what visitors encountered moving among

Morris large plywood objects at the Green Gallery.71

67 Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio, 198. 68 Other works performed in Forti’s concert included Huddle, Platforms, Hangers, Accompaniment for La Monte’s “2 sounds” and La Monte’s “2 sounds”, and the previously performed See-Saw. All the performances, except Huddle – which comprised a rolling scrum of dancers, featured rope or plywood board device. Visitors to Ono’s loft that evening moved through the space from performance site to site, with the dances performed sequentially. All the dances were structured by a set of predetermined tasks that the performers had to complete to finish the dance. 69 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Dance’, The Tulane Drama Review, 10.2 (Winter 1965), 179. 70 Virginia B. Spivey, ‘The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti’, Women’s Art Journal, 30.1 (Summer/Spring 2001), 14. 71 Spivey, ‘The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti’, 16.

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Morris has made efforts to disentangle his dance from his sculptural practices, yet

it is undoubtable that the theatrical relationships of bodies and objects resonates

across the two fields of practice. While it is unfair to both Morris or Forti to suggest

that either one was the originator of the pared-back, plywood minimalist aesthetic

and conceptual engagement with bodies and objects in performative space, the

most accepted canonical view is that it emerged with Morris.72 More realistically,

as a partnership, Forti and Morris worked through similar formal problems in

performance and developed a common visual vocabulary.73 Certainly, in this more

recent recount, Morris credits the importance of Forti’s innovations:

In dismantling and dispensing with the presuppositions of expressive movement –

based on carrying out tasks, negotiating objects, and following instructions or

rules, while using fatigue and endurance as limits – Forti’s Dance Constructions

revolutionized contemporary dance and embraced Agency Reduction as a strategy

that could be shared across various media.74

Forti’s Dance Constructions were a break through point for the artists and dancers

that became associated with the Judson Dance Theatre and minimalism. And,

Forti’s importance at this juncture – or critical lacuna in the art historical record

thereof – is source of much recent scholarly and curatorial re-evaluation.75 Forti

and Morris divorced in 1961 with Forti soon after marrying Robert Whitman, who

72 Yvonne Rainer, ‘On Simone Forti’ (2014), in: Sabine Breitwiesser (ed.), Simone Forti:

Thinking with the Body (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2014), 72: Rainer here interprets Forti’s critical oversight during this period: ‘Simone’s ‘Five Dance Constructions’ confirmed for many people her stature as a formidable artist on par with her better-known contemporaries. Of course, as far as the art world was concerned, she was still the ‘dancing girl’ with noting to sell, and as a consequence was relegated to the dance ghetto, with its attendant economic constraints.’ 73 Spivey, ‘The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti’, 15. 74 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Simone Forti’ (2014), in: Breitwiesser (ed.), 47. Morris here uses the term ‘Agency Reduction’ as reference to the automation of ‘decision making’ in art that is evidenced in Duchampian and Cagean aesthetic practices. 75 Steve Paxton, ‘The Emergence of Simone Forti’ (2014), in: Breitwiesser (ed.), 61:[In relation to ‘Five Dance Constructions’] ‘All I know is that this small, radical groups of works by Forti was like a pebble tossed into a large, still, and complacent pond. The ripples radiated. Most notably, Forti’s event happened prior to the first performance at the Judson Memorial Church by the choreographers from Robert Dunn’s composition class, and they took courage from it.’

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had organised the Happening at the Rueben Gallery where See-Saw was

performed.76 Morris and Rainer later became romantically involved. During this

period, just after his arrival in New York and the deterioration of his marriage to

Forti, Morris turned his focus to the minimalist object. One of Morris’s first

significant sculptural-type works Passageway (1961) was produced for a Fluxus

event again held at Ono’s loft [figs.27 & 28].77 The piece consisted of two, long

curving and narrowing walls of plywood that visitors could barely make their way

through. In this early work, concepts emerge that point to Morris’s later minimalist

sculpture. There is a concern with the human body, how it relates in scale to the

object and to the space which contains both. How the viewer’s perceptual field is

clouded by the imposition of the large blank-surfaced walls that converge to a dead

end. Clearly, the relationship between bodies and object, both psychological and

physical, is Morris’s main interest. The work is theatrical, functioning on the

situation evoked when a viewer encounters the work.78

A second early work further serves as a precursor to Morris’s minimalist sculpture

– Column (1961) [fig.29]. This piece was part of a presentation at the Living

Theater performed in 1962. For the performance, Morris stood the rectangular

grey plywood column on its end in the centre of the stage. The curtains parted to

76 Morse, 51-53. Morse explains how Whitman and the ‘more established artists of the downtown art scene’ involved in the early Happenings including Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, influenced Forti’s early works from 1960-61. This is an observation shared by Paxton who notes: ‘I believe she took courage from the artists who produced Happenings, rather than the example of the choreographers who had dance companies.’ See also: Paxton (2014), in: Breitwiesser (ed.), 60. 77 Robert Morris; Simon Grant, ‘Interview: Robert Morris’, TATE etc., 14 (Autumn 2008), [Online and no pagination], accessed on: 12 July 2010. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/interviewmorris.htm In the interview, Morris describes his piece Passageway and reveals how his interest in psychology and philosophy were mediated through the work: Reading Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Tractatus that ‘I am my world. (The microcosm),’ my heart skips a beat. I make a 50-foot long plywood Passageway, which narrows as it curves. Two arcs of a circle converging. I wedge my body between the narrowing walls, which curve ahead and out of sight. I am suspended, embraced and held by my world. I listen to the faint sound of the hidden mechanical heartbeat I have installed over the ceiling of Passageway. 78 Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 197. Rainer’s recollection of the piece is as follows: ‘The final evening at Yoko’s loft was announced as ‘an event’ by Robert Morris. George Sugarman and I traipsed downtown and up the five flights expecting some kind of performance, only to be met, on opening the door, by a three-foot wide curving corridor with seven-foot high ceiling that ended in a pointed cul-de-sac. I was so outraged that I wrote on the wall “Fuck you too, Bob Morris.”

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reveal the column with no one or nothing else on stage. After three and a half

minutes the column was made to topple onto its side, where it remained for

another three and a half minutes, then the curtains closed.79

Morris exhibited Column at the ‘New Works I’ exhibition at the Green Gallery in

January 1963. He continued the use of the column form in various configurations

throughout his minimalist period. Sidney Tillim, reviewing New Works I’, said of

Morris’s Column, ‘it protested the ineluctable modality of an aesthetic that had

79 Differing accounts of the origin of Column have been presented at times by Morris and others. Rainer has stated that Morris had intended to stand inside the column and make it topple himself, though had injured himself in rehearsal. Morris, on the other hand, has suggested a much more majestic origin. See: Robert Morris, ‘Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories Or…’, Art in America, 77.11 (November 1989), 144. Morris would later state that the genesis for this piece was to be found in his childhood experiences at the Nelson-Atkins Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. Morris claims: ‘I remember most drawing from the Egyptian objects … In 1961 I made my first works that would later come to be called Minimal sculpture. Those gray columns and slabs I copied directly from the photographs of the ruins of the King Zoser complex at Saqqara Egypt’. See also: Rainer, Feelings are Fact, 235-6. Rainer later made known that Morris actually found the column piece at the theatre: ‘Bob found it [the column] in the wings and painted it gray, then in rehearsal made it fall over while standing inside it. He cut his lip on that occasion and in the actual performance attached a string to the column, which he pulled from offstage to effect the toppling. And: Chave, ‘Minimalism and Biography’, The Art Bulletin, 82.1 (March 2000), 149-163; 156. Chave cites Morris influence for Column coming from an earlier Forti performance work Platforms (1961). However, Rainer asserts the actual physical object came from her performance The Bells (1961) and was constructed by George Sugarman (See: Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 235). Nevertheless, as Chave points out, Column ‘plainly owed less to Egyptian artefacts glimpsed in photographs during boyhood’. It is certain that Morris’s later re-interpretation of Column speaks more to an art historical game than it does to the influences of Forti or Rainer. Morris presents a reading of his art historical subject as the genius male artist, complete with the almost Vasari-like, childhood epiphany of the encounter with the ancient Egyptian forms. As an art historical subject, Morris appears to arrive at critical junctures in his practice without conference with the strong, female artistic voices that were actually present. He distances his minimalist sculpture from dance and aligns it with a perceivably more academic tradition; the gendered connotations of this are apparent; art history or archaeology conjures the collegiate image of middle-age and male professors, dance does not. Hence at the time, though now assuredly contentious, it was considered more serious and thereby more important. In retrospection, Morris seeks to theoretically posit works like Column within an authoritative historical continuum, rather than the fleeting and ephemeral essence of contemporary dance and performance. Column or Morris’s recount of its genesis, underscores the machinations which permeate his work and illustrates how he entwines selective versions of his biography with the narration of his art historical subject.

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stripped it bare.’80 Here we see, with this very early piece by Morris, the critical

vernacular around minimalism taking shape – an aesthetic stripped bare. Though

from Tillim, this is not a negatively-framed observation and indeed Tillim, who

wrote for Artforum, was one of the early art writers to anticipate the consequence

of Morris and Judd. Having started its life as a theatre prop, Column is inherently

performative and ephemeral.81 This ephemerality is an important distinction when

contrasting the works of Morris against Judd’s from this period. Judd’s objects

espoused a classical perpetuity; they were built to last in terms of both their

material construct and his supporting theory of specific objects. Morris’s plywood

works were usually constructed to exist for the duration of an exhibition and did

not last long after, often being destroyed. In a 1985 interview with Benjamin

Buchloh, Morris revealed his use of plywood was economical, temporal, replicable,

and as a slight to the precious art object: ‘I liked the idea of the thing being

completely reconstitutable at any moment and place, and the lack of precious

materials.’82

Morris displayed another work in ‘New Works I’ that was more Duchampian or

Cagean than minimalist. Card File (1963) consisted of a file card holder mounted

on a wood panel and affixed to the wall [fig.30]. Each card had written on it a word

explaining each different stage that went into its construction. Card File recalls

Morris’s interest in process which had first appeared in his explorations of

Pollock.83 These early works highlight the competing aesthetic motivations in this

period of Morris’s practice. In Passageway and Column, Morris articulates a visually

stark, theatrical, large-scale, object-based aesthetic that later was interpreted as

80 Sidney Tillim, ‘New York Exhibitions: Month in Review’, Arts Magazine, (March, 1963), 62. 81 Rainer, Feelings are Fact, 235-6: ‘The transformation of his ‘primary structure’ – from décor to inert protagonist – might add another angle to the roiling debates that would foment around the work of Morris and Don Judd for the next few years. But this early performance of his confirms a basic difference between them: The human body was always implicit in Morris’s sculpture in the 1960s.’ 82 Robert Morris; Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Three conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris’, October, 70 The Duchamp Effect (Autumn 1994), 50. 83 Robert Morris, ‘Letters to John Cage’, October, 81 (Summer 1997), 78-9. In a letter to Cage, Morris asks him as the viewer to make additions to the piece, ‘the nature of the work is such that all additions are welcome but I want to know the time that such and such an addition is conceived since this is important information that must be entered into the cards of the CARD FILE.’ (Letter dated, 12 January 1963).

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minimalism. On the other hand, there is a Duchampian subversion of the art object,

as in Card File, where linguistic games and visual puns are used to subvert the

conventions of art making.84

Also in this Duchampian vein is Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961)

[fig.31]. The piece, a small wooden box with a tape recording of the sounds of its

construction playing inside. The literal emphasis of the title throws back the

question to the viewer – what defines art? Is it the process that goes into making

the object or is it the resultant object itself? Morris exhibited this piece in his one

man show at the Green Gallery in October and November of 1963 [fig.32]. He

encouraged Cage to see his show.85 Both Card File and Box with the Sound of Its

Own Making, with their self-reflexive titles and performative aspects, would have

appealed to Cage’s sense of theatre.86 In both these works, process and the

resulting art object which had troubled Morris in painting exist together and

approach reconciliation.87 In this exhibition, Morris showed a mixture of both

larger minimalist and smaller-scale Duchampian objects.88 Here, the tension

84 Morris quoted in: Berger, Labyrinths, 31. [Taken from an unpublished interview with Jack Burnham in 1975]. Morris asked Cage to come to his studio and view his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Morris recalls of the meeting with Cage, ‘I turned it on … and he wouldn’t listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.’ 85 Morris; Buchloh, ‘Three conversations in 1985’, 51. Morris asked Cage to give his thoughts on this showing as well. In an interview with Buchloh Morris revealed Cage’s response as: ‘I knew John Cage; he was one of the first people I knew when I came to New York. So when I was showing my first slab in the Green Gallery, I asked John to be sure to go see this work. Later I heard that he told somebody: ‘I went to see Bob Morris’s sculpture, but I didn’t see any sculpture; I only saw this slab, this pipe form.’ I don’t know if he was being completely ironic or not, but I always enjoyed that comment.’ 86 There is performative aspect in Card File and Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, which suggests they do not begin their function as art objects until they are encountered by a viewer – until there is an audience. 87 Morris interviewed by Cummings: ‘I recorded the sound of making this box and put a speaker in it so that it plays for three hours the sounds of its being constructed. And it wasn’t conscious with me but I think this was again … I mean this completely split the process and the object. And yet put them both back together again. So in some way I think this was a work that allowed me then to go ahead. I mean really resolved that conflict that had happened in painting.’ 88 In the early 1960s Duchamp was receiving a renewed interest by the younger generation of American artists. A major retrospective exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in autumn 1963, and a limited series of Duchamp’s readymades, made by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan under Duchamp’s supervision in 1964, toured to New York. The term neo-Dada was derisory in the Greenbergian context. It was applied to several

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between his competing aesthetic concerns is played out. The Duchampian pieces

engage the viewer in a roguish intellectual game whilst the minimalist slab and

column excites a more physical, phenomenological experience. In a letter to Cage,

Morris suggested he was keener to explore the larger objects than pursuing the

smaller Duchampian works.89

Another neo-Dadaist work in this phase of Morris’s artistic production is the dance

War (1963), performed at the Judson Dance Theater’s A Concert for Dance #4 on 30

January 1963 [figs.33 & 34]. Morris created and performed War with the painter,

Robert Huot. The pair dressed as medieval knights with armour constructed from

objects found on the street. Morris carried a shield with a picture of Dwight D.

Eisenhower upon it. With the lights dimmed, La Monte Young slowly chimed a

gong and when the lights eventually raised, Morris and Huot charged at each other

yelling and flailing away with wooden swords which splintered and shattered.

After duelling violently for some time, the pair released doves and the lights went

off.90 The crowd reaction to this performance was positive and enthusiastic. Jill

Johnston, who was firming as the chief advocate for the Judson Dance Theater,

nominated War as one of the attractions of the night. War’s thematic content

suggests the piece was an exploration of violence, aggression, and spectacle,

though the treatment of these themes cannot be considered overly discursive or

analytical. Visual effect seemed to be the main concern of Morris and Huot, at least

this is how Paxton interpreted it:

It was a very successful piece in terms of audience reaction. I thought it was a piece

of shit. Where was the concept? What was this political cartooning that was going

instances of the new art that seem to take their cue from Duchamp, this includes Morris, Johns, Rauschenberg, but also Pop and Fluxus. 89 Morris, ‘Letters to John Cage’, 77. However, the response coming from the gallerist, with whom Cage had made an introduction on Morris’s behalf, indicated that the smaller pieces were more popular and hence more likely to sell: ‘I appreciated very much your efforts on my behalf in having Mrs Castelli come over to see my things. However, she expressed an interest at that time of mainly in the smaller objects since they would be more likely to sell. Even though I do not have plans for smaller objects.’ (Letter dated, 12 April 1962). 90 Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 101.

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on? … There was an anti-war movement then, certainly an anti-nuclear movement,

but this didn’t seem about that, this was just preposterous.91

Morris omits War from future discussions of his choreographic work, but it is fair

to say, War is limited in its attempt to critique the absurdity and spectacle of war.92

War is an over-the-top visual spectacle with dramatic action, costumes, and blithe

treatment of a significant issue.93 With this, War aligns firmly with Morris’s neo-

Dada tendencies. Morris’s performances hereafter assert a more thorough

interrogation of ideas on objects, space, time, and the moving body. Morris’s

exclusion of War from his account of his choreographic work, reflects his desire to

depart from the Duchampian tradition that had been influencing the more visible

part of his art making to this point. Rainer gives credence to this notion. In October

1964, when Rainer and Morris toured Europe (Rainer touring with Cunningham’s

company, though performed with Morris at separate events), Morris was invited to

exhibit his sculptural works at a gallery in Dusseldorf. For the exhibition, Rainer

recalled that Morris mainly presented smaller sculpt-metal reliefs and his self-

reflexive constructions – among them I Box (a small cabinet that contained a

photograph of Morris naked and smiling inside) and Box with the Sound of Its Own

Making. Yet, Rainer remembers that Morris was no longer interested in these

91 Steve Paxton in interview with Sally Banes (11 April 1980), as cited in: Banes, Democracy’s Body, 101. 92 Morris does not mention War in his ‘Notes on Dance’ essay. 93 Morris; Cummings [np]. An anecdote Morris shared with Cummings about his time serving with the military in Korea suggests that the artist had first-hand experience of the absurdity and spectacle of war. Morris recounts the story of serving with an Engineers battalion who had been tasked with drilling a mile-long tunnel into the side of a mountain to then fill with dynamite and blow it up. Morris recalls: ‘But before they blew it up, they built a grandstand in front of this hole at some distance. And all of the brass of all of the Engineering Battalions came to this event. And programs were printed up. And I remember the cook going up with a whole truckload of cake and coffee … And they blew this thing up. It was a fantastic event.’ Like the insane situation of blowing up of a mountain for a grandstand full of the Top Brass, is War meant to be anything more than an absurd display of militaristic violence and power? Morris advised Cage of the piece saying, ‘I think of this dance as a kind of moralistic act, a useful substitute, a necessary replacement for an activity not easily discarded.’ If war or violence is ‘not easily discarded’, then Morris and Huot fight a war with weapons and armour made from the easily discarded, the detritus they found on the street. War, like Morris’s experience with the exploding mountain in Korea, was absurd, violent, and an ultimately futile exercise. Morris’s battalion then spent the rest of the time he was in Korea grinding the remains of the mountain into gravel, a task Morris suggests was set to keep them busy: ‘It was one of those typical insane situations’.

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works: ‘Somehow he felt deeply humiliated by his ‘lapse’ in career acumen by

having exhibited the more personal neo-Dada objects, which were already being

perceived as not cutting edge.’94

After this exhibition in Dusseldorf, Morris produced less neo-Dada pieces and

sought to articulate minimalism through his choreographic works and large-scale

objects. Morris’s move to minimalism is set against the rising exhaustion of neo-

Dada; Johns and Rauschenberg had produced the first of these works in the 1950s

and Duchamp’s Dada works appeared some thirty to forty years previous.95 As

well, there was the increasing pervasiveness of Pop, which also had claims to the

Dadaist lineage as did Fluxus.96 In Morris’s next dance and sculpture pieces there is

a decidedly minimalist feel and appearance. A more rigorous, formalism appears in

these works that is not as apparent in War, Card File, or Box with the Sound of Its

Own Making. Morris performed these key works with the Judson Dance Theater,

which as a site of minimalist practice, proved just as vital – though less visible in

the discourse – as the Green Gallery.

Movement towards the Postmodern

The most synergetic period of the Judson Dance Theater runs from 1962 to 1964,

during which time they performed sixteen concerts.97 A Concert for Dance #1 took

94 Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 254-5. 95 John Cage interview by Paul Cummings (1974). Transcript of oral history interview with John Cage conducted on 2 May 1974 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-john-cage-12442 Cage, circa 1963, recalled: ‘It dawned on me that Marcel had done this 50 years, 40 years before. I saw him in Venice at Peggy Guggenheim’s and I said, “Oh, Marcel, you did that long before I did.” And then he smiled and said, “I must have been 50 years ahead of my time”.’ [No pagination]. 96 Morris; Buchloh, ‘Three conversations in 1985’, 52-3. Morris later distanced himself from Fluxus, though he had performed at Fluxus events and War could be read as a Fluxus-type performance; maybe another reason why he omits this from his dance history. 97 Banes, Democracy’s Body, xiv-xv.

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place on 6 July 1962 [fig.35]. The concert evolved out of Robert Dunn’s dance

composition classes and student-run workshops held in the church’s gymnasium.98

The creative buzz enthusing Greenwich Village created an open flow and exchange

of ideas between dance, music, poetry, and the visual arts; the concerts were the

embodiment of this eclectic, vibrant, and experimental spirit. Under the

ministership of Howard Moody (1956-1992), the church itself was a vital site for

fostering avant-garde experimentation within Greenwich Village [figs.36 &

37].99As early as 1959, the Judson’s art gallery was showing works by Pop artists

Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg. The church’s gallery

staged some of the first ever Happenings. The Judson Poets’ Theater was

established in 1961 and produced a regular program of plays and musicals with

untrained players drawn from the surrounding community. The use of the church’s

space by the Judson Poets’ Theater inspired students from Dunn’s dance-

composition classes to hold workshops and later stage dance concerts in the

church.100

98 A shaping influence on the Judson Dance Theater was the dance composition classes taught by Robert Dunn and held at Cunningham’s studio between 1960 and 1962. Dunn had studied music composition under Cage and brought many Cagean ideas to the class. He encouraged students to devise scores or game-plans to generate performance. For Dunn, the use of these plans or scores undermined the reliance on artifice and premeditated movement. Many of the future Judson Dance Theater members, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Alex Hay, Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, David Gordon, Ruth Emerson, and Judith Dunn, attended Dunn’s classes and it was Robert Dunn who organised the first dance concert at the Judson Memorial Church for his students. 99 Howard Moody, A Voice in the Village: A Journey of a Pastor and a People (New York: Howard Moody, 2009), 22-24. Located in Washington Square, the church was built in 1890 with the aim to serve the growing community of Italian migrants through health and nutrition, recreation, as well as worship and religious instruction. By the 1950s and 1960s, owing to the changing demographic of the area, which was due to the spread of the surrounding New York University and with it, the influx of intellectuals, students, and artists seeking cheaper rents, the church established itself as advocate for causes deemed undeserving by the mainstream churches. These causes included then and have continued to be – campaigning for civil rights, advocating compassion for drug addicts and prostitutes, providing consultation for women seeking abortion and abortion law reform, gay and lesbian rights, and medical advocacy for AIDS patients. 100 Rainer, Work 1961-73, 8. Rainer notes of their decision to use the church: ‘…the church seemed a positive alternative to the once-a-year hire-a-hall mode of operating that had plagued the struggling modern dancer before, Here we could present things more frequently, more informally, and more cheaply, and – most of important of all – more cooperatively.’

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The democratic nature of the Judson Dance Theater departed from the hierarchic

order of the modern dance studio. With no lead choreographer, principle dancers,

or soloists, the air of the group was egalitarian. Decisions were arrived at through

consensus; a definitive departure from the Graham and Humphrey schools and

even Cunningham’s. There were stronger personalities within the group like

Rainer and Paxton, and Dunn then later Rauschenberg acted as elder spokesmen

for the group, but openness to all ideas formed the group’s ethos. This free and

experimental atmosphere enabled the young choreographers to challenge

conventional assumptions of what dance was, where dance could take place, and

who could dance. Sally Banes in her authoritative scholarship on the Judson Dance

Theater suggests that between 1960 and 1968, postmodern dance developed out

of the explorations of the young Judson group and their milieu. Banes identifies

three areas that unravelled modernism in dance: ‘references to history; new uses

of time, space, and the body; [and] problems defining dance.’101

The first aspect Banes raises – references to history, concerns the Judson

choreographers ‘acknowledging the heritage [they]…set out to repudiate.’102 The

Judson dancers’ pedestrian movements were a conscious subversion of the highly-

stylised gestures of modern dance. Banes notes, works in this vein establish an

‘ironic’ dialogue with other dance traditions to accentuate their separation from

them.103 Secondly, the Judson group opened-up new understandings of the moving

body in time and space. Rainer’s expression of her body as an object, ‘so that it

could be handled like an object, picked up and carried, and so that objects and

bodies could be interchangeable’, speaks to Banes’s postmodernist condition, but

further to Rainer’s minimalist concern of objecthood.104 And thirdly, the use of

tasks, game-like situations, and chance operations were a rejection of the

101 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, xvii. 102 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, xvii. 103 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, xvii. 104 Rainer, quoted in: RoseLee Goldberg, ‘Space as Praxis’, Studio International, 190 (1975), 131. [Taken from an interview with Rainer in Avalanche (Summer 1972)].

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compositional rules of modern dance. Resultantly, these new choreographic

strategies confounded conventional definitions of dance.105

There are intersections between Banes’s three areas of postmodernist enquiry and

they rarely operate exclusively in any choreographic work. These areas of concern

are seen in Morris’s performances either solely or in combination. History (of

painting), is interrogated in Site (1964); relationships between space, time, and

body are articulated in Arizona (1963); while the definition of dance is challenged

in Check (1964).106 It is, however, the body’s movement in space and time and the

engagement with objects that is the prevailing idea communicated in these three

Morris dances. Significantly, for this dissertation this reveals more of a minimalist

rather than a postmodernist tendency with regards to Morris. Minimalism in dance

was championed by the primary agitators of the Judson group in Paxton and

Rainer.107 Minimalist strategies like non-expressivity and non-composition

105 Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets for 10 people and 12 mattresses (1965), illustrates both the use of chance and tasks. Rainer began with the premise of 10 people and 12 mattresses and drew up a large grid which consisted of 31 different activities, such as no.1 ‘Rope movement’, no. 18 ‘Human flies on mattress pile’, or no. 23 ‘crawl thru below top mattress’ [sic]. The order the performers worked through these activities was determined by chance and each activity took a different measure of time to complete. The effect was multiple activities occurring across the performance time and space, thereby upsetting the narrational or dramatic structure of modern dance and performance. 106 In August 1964 Morris and Rainer performed Morris’s Check at a concert at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In the 700-seat space, Morris rearranged the chairs at random during an interval. When the audience returned, they were confronted by a chaotic arrangement of chairs not knowing whether to sit or stand. Prior to the performance, Morris’s had instructed forty locals to wander through the sea of chairs and interact with the wider audience after the interval. At a given signal, they would form into groups and perform ‘simple, simultaneous actions. At another signal, they again dispersed throughout the room to resume wandering and talking. For Morris, the effect was that actions would materialise at a place and time from within the mass of people and chairs, then dematerialise back into this mass. This blurred the demarcation between spectator and performer. 107 Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 241. Rainer described Paxton’s work as ‘the most severe and rigorous of all the work that appeared in and around the Judson’ and ‘could most accurately be termed minimalist’. Paxton’s English (1963), is a group performance for eleven dancers in which the performers wore pale makeup to erase their distinguishing facial features. Paxton mapped out group configurations based on formations he saw in sports photographs. Following the paths Paxton devised, the dancers moved to different parts of the performance space to carry out pedestrian movements and mime everyday activities like washing up. The use of sports photographs to structure the dancer’s positioning for the performance, extended from the use of chance operations by Cunningham. Paxton was a dancer of Cunningham’s company and so arguably, had more grasp on the performance ideas of Cage and Cunningham to work with and against. The

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subverted the expressionist and individualist claims of modern dance.108 The

Judson Dance Theater rejected notions of spectacle and drama, adherence to

musical scores or narrative structure, elaborate costumes and sets, and

mythological or psychological themes. Rainer’s ‘NO’ Manifesto is the exclamation

point to this program:

No to spectacle, no to virtuosity, no to transformations and magic and make-

believe, no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image, no to the heroic, no

to the anti-heroic, no to trash imagery, no to involvement of performer or

spectator, no to style, no to camp, no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the

performer, no to eccentricity, no to moving or being moved.109

Many of these conventions that Rainer denounces were initially tested by

Cunningham and Halprin. Yet, in this experimental air of the Judson Dance Theater

there is a critical disengagement from tradition to create something entirely new

and regenerative. Paxton and Rainer, as the two main agitational forces within the

Judson group, were pursuing unadorned, pared back minimalist dance aesthetics

that departed from traditional notions of dance reliant on spectacle, drama, and

artifice. According to Rainer, critics found Paxton’s work more than often, the most

difficult to get or critically penetrate.110

Morris created some of his most conceptually important works during this period.

Arizona, an austere solo performance in four sections from A Concert for Dance #6,

articulated minimalist theory in the medium of dance [fig.38]. In the first section,

use of the photographs by Paxton precluded compositional choices. By blanking out of the performers’ faces, Paxton sought to negate the emotive syntax traditionally conveyed through the dancers’ facial expressions. 108 Not all the dance of the Judson engaged with minimalism – Carolee Schneemann or Trisha Browns’ works cannot be described as minimalist. Thus minimalist dance can be argued postmodernist, though not all postmodern dances are minimalist 109 Yvonne Rainer, ‘Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called “Parts of Some Sextets.” Performed at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965’, The Tulane Drama

Review, 10.2 (Winter 1965), 178. 110 Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 241

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Morris stood in the middle of the darkened stage and slowly turned his upper torso

from front to left over the elapse of five minutes. As Morris performed this

movement, a recording of his voice issuing instructions for sorting cows played.111

When Morris completed the movement, he left the stage and the lights dimmed.

Morris’s intent was to draw attention to the banal though pragmatic aspects of

labour. Morris’s own non-productive and non-strenuous movement stood in

contrast to that of a cattle hand or rancher.112 The second part of Arizona entailed

the artist walking out on stage and adjusting a T-form – a construction of a lamp

stand with two sticks attached to its top by a swivel joint. Morris adjusted the

object, then moved away from it and repeated this process several times before

leaving the stage and the lights again dimmed. The third section of Arizona

involved Morris throwing a javelin at a target. In the fourth section Morris swung a

small light attached to a cord over his head. As he was doing this the lights dimmed

and the only thing which remained visible to the audience was the moving point of

light.

For Arizona, Morris set up a temporal and spatial ratio between his actions and the

objects – the T-form, the javelin, and the swinging light. This idea of using such a

ratio to structure the performance came to Morris after viewing A Concert for

Dance #5, which had been held at a roller skating rink in Washington D.C. as part of

a Pop Art Festival. The highlight of the evening was Rauschenberg’s performance

Pelican, in which he and the Swedish sculptor P.O. Ultvedt glided and swooped

around the rink wearing white costumes with large sails attached to their backs

like parachutes. Rauschenberg’s Pelican impressed upon Morris the principle of

111 Robert Morris, ‘Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides Or…’, 147-8. Morris delineates productive from non-productive forms of labour and again questions the process of making art. The piece carries biographic intimations as well. Morris’s father was in the livestock business and the younger Morris would accompany his father to the stockyards of Kansas. See also: Morris; Cummings [np]. Morris, when he was fourteen or fifteen, rode a cattle train to Los Angeles and passed through the desert states of Arizona and New Mexico, and remembers being ‘very impressed with the West’ due to its large, open expanses. The dance’s title may be reference to this given its spatial concerns, but again, engaging Morris’s biography and character for meaning in his work is fraught due to the artist’s performative self-mythologising. 112 Berger, Labyrinths, 88.

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bodies in motion in time and space.113 The use of the skating rink for the concert

had been pushed by Rauschenberg, who was involved in Cunningham’s

productions where this premise for dance emerged.114 Cunningham had sought to

perform in larger venues like gymnasiums and halls to accentuate the notion of

bodies in movement in expanded space.

In the last three sections of Arizona, Morris incorporated objects into the

performance. Morris’s reasoning was to focus the body to a specific, task-oriented

movement which elicited a methodical, work-like process. Morris below discusses

how objects in this dance were used to address formal considerations of space and

time:

By the uses of objects which could be manipulated I found a situation which did

not dominate my actions nor subvert my performance. In fact, the decision to

employ objects came out of considerations of specific problems involving space

and time. For me, the focus of a set of specific problems involving time, space,

alternate forms of a unit, etc., provided the necessary structure.115

Morris here sets out a theory of dance which resonates with his minimalist

sculpture. In sculpture, Morris’s concern is with controlling the perceptual field of

the viewer. This is the spatial context of body and object, and the duration of this

encounter is measurable by time. The kinaesthetic quality of dance and the static

nature of sculpture present different formal problems and the time and space in

which these activities exist is different, yet the interest in the theatrical

113 Morris, ‘Notes on Dance’, 183-4: ‘The extreme slow-motion element in Arizona came from experiencing the dancer’s movements being soaked up, dissipated, in a concert given in an enormous skating rink in Washington D.C. It was apparent that only the smallest movements kept their weight or mass in such a large, nonrectangular space. A consideration in Arizona was to make movements which would keep their focus in any space – a case of spatial opposition rather than cooperation or exploration.’ 114 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, 230: ‘Rauschenberg would like to see modern dancers move toward a more spontaneous, unplanned sort of choreography, letting the specific environment they find themselves in dictate what they do at each performance.’ 115 Morris, ‘Notes on Dance’, 180.

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relationship between body and object remains constant in both fields.116 In dance,

the body of the dancer explicitly interacts with objects in the performance time

and space. In sculpture, it is the body of the viewer that is implicitly related to

objects within the gallery space.

Morris’s final and most complex choreographic work, Waterman Switch (1965),

was performed with Rainer and Lucinda Childs [figs.39 & 40]. The piece generated

controversy after a reporter for the New York Times ran the headline: ‘Nudes

Dance in the Sanctuary of the Church’. Though the dance had been debuted earlier

in a concert arranged by Jill Johnston in Buffalo, NY, the nudity of Morris and

Rainer within a church, raised the ire of the American Baptist Convention which

issued threats of ‘disfellowshipping’ the Judson congregation.117 As such, the

performance proved an almost fatal one for the group.118 The performance began

with fake rocks being rolled across the stage to the recorded sounds of real rocks

rolling downhill. Childs, who was dressed in a man’s suit and hat, then lay down

wooden tracks across the stage. The lights then went out. When they came back on,

one of Verdi’s arias played and Morris and Rainer stood on the tracks nude,

covered in baby oil and in face-to-face embrace. As a recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s

opera Simone Boccanegra (1857) played, Morris and Rainer moved along the track

pressed together, while Childs walked beside them unrolling a ball of twine. The

aria ended and the lights went off. In the next section, Childs stood in the centre of

the stage holding a long pole with the naked Morris at the other end running in

circles around Childs. Whilst this action was occurring Morris’s tape recorded

116 Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio, 217. Morris claims the relationship of body to objects in his dance is explicit, whilst in his sculpture it remains implicit. 117 Moody, A Voice in the Village, 179. 118 Waterman Switch was a fateful performance for the Judson group. Through the controversy, the church was forced to defend its involvement with the group and their concerts. They Judson ministry successfully argued for the right of artistic expression free of censorship and reaffirmed the Judson’s commitment to the arts and to the Greenwich Village community. For the dancers, the performance marked a symbolic end for the first generation of the Judson Dance Theater. By this stage many members had branched out into different directions and ventures; the workshops and concerts having served their purpose, the initial synergy lost. Divisions and rivalries started to appear in the once democratic group. A faction emerged from within the group that were being favoured by critics and invited to perform in paid engagements. See: Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 13. This favoured group included Morris, Rainer, Paxton, Childs, Trisha Brown, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, and David Gordon, and Rauschenberg who was already an art celebrity.

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voice spoke of rearranging the stage. The lights went out to again signal the end of

the section. When they came back on the three performers were standing on real

rocks holding a thick rope as Morris’s prerecorded voice read a passage from

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The final section again saw Morris and Rainer

traverse the tracks to Verdi. Morris then poured a vial of mercury down Rainer’s

back and the lights went out.119

The title for Waterman Switch, according to a biographical aside of Morris, came

from his experiences working as a land surveyor in the ‘50s – Waterman Switch

was the name of a road in Northern California Morris found on an old survey

map.120 Again, as in Arizona, the biographical is at play in Waterman Switch.121 This

differs from other members of the Judson group who strove for a completely

inexpressive and depersonalised aesthetic. Morris’s use of his biography in his

choreographic work, or presented versions of it, suggests he was not as committed

to purging the personal as Rainer or Paxton. The use of biography in his

choreography has its precedence in some of Morris’s earlier, small-scale objects

like I Box (1962) or Self-Portrait (1963). In these works, Morris records, in some

way, a trace of his actual self which reveals in the meaning of the work. In I Box it is

a naked photograph of himself. Or in Self-Portrait, it is an electroencephalogram of

his brain waves. Other sculpt-metal works were casts of Morris’s footprints or

impressions made by his hands. These objects record the artist’s corporeality as an

embodied experience. His dance suggests the performer’s body is constituted by

119 After the Buffalo performance, Rainer mentions that the vial of mercury poured down her back made her violently ill. It is unlikely that the mercury was used in the Judson performance. See: Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 265. 120 Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio, 177. 121 Morris’s performance piece 21.3 (1964) also has a biographic element. 21.3 was first performed at the Surplus Dance Theater in February and March 1964. In 21.3, Morris turned his critical focus to art history; the title was taken from the number of an art class at Hunter College where Morris taught and studied art history. For the performance, Morris dressed as an art history professor in tweed coat and dark rimmed glasses, stood from a lectern reciting passages of Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology. In subversion of Panofsky’s text, Morris’s had prerecorded the lecture and played this back on a tape that was out of sync with his live spoken words. This confounded the audience’s capacity to deduce meaning from the scrambled, overlapping words. Morris even paused to pour himself and drink a glass of water, only for the audience to hear the recorded version of this action moments later.

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personal memories and past experiences and is not considered as a factual object

detached from subjectivity or personality.122

After Waterman Switch, although he and Rainer undertook another European tour

later in 1965, Morris ceased his choreographic work. Morris suggested that, ‘after a

while it got to be a bore’.123 Rainer, however, would later state the reason was

more personal and share: ‘Either Bob had to get out of my field or I had to get out

of his life.’124 Either way, after Morris’s Green Gallery minimalist show his art star

rose and the large-scale plywood pieces became his focus. Morris had become

involved in dance to overcome a conceptual blockage in painting. Dance enabled

him to address the formal issues that confounded him in painting in real time and

space, namely the disarticulation between process and image, then, Morris

redirected his artistic practice to the field of three-dimensional objects. With his

smaller scale objects, the body is evidenced through indexical signs like handprints

or sounds it made in its interaction with the object. In dance, by the very nature of

the medium, the body is explicit. In his larger scale minimalist sculpture the

body/object relationship is implicit.

122 Morris would much later revise: ‘Although I had sympathy with Duchamp’s notion of a self that is never centred, I wanted to manifest a particular kind of presence in my performances. I wasn’t interested in showing the perfect, narcissistic body doing effortless work and masking every psychological nuance. Modern dance bothered me a lot. I was trying other ways to establish a persona. To some degree I even drew on the events of my past to shape this persona. While many of the Judson performers were involved in the blank-faced, neutral movements, I was self-consciously trying to create a persona – to frame it, to name it, to acknowledge that this character is a person and the audience must deal with that person.’ See: Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio, 223. 123 Morris; Cummings, np. 124 Rainer, Feelings are Facts, 265.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Objects and Sculpture

In December 1963, Judd marked his conceptual break from two-dimensional

painting and his entry into the three-dimensional field of objects with his one man

show at the Green Gallery. Featuring a mixture of wall reliefs and stand-alone

objects, the artist-critic boldly proposed a new aesthetic vernacular that spoke to

neither modernist painting or sculpture. On show, was Judd’s emergent theory of

the specific object. Historically, this watershed exhibition by Judd opened to the

challenge of modernist art and to the discursive dissonance of minimalism. This

chapter begins with examination of Judd’s move from his late painting to his first

objects displayed at the Green Gallery. During most of this period, Judd’s main

visibility is as an art critic and writer, and much of his theorisation behind his

arrival at objects is found in his critical considerations. Judd’s radio interview with

Stella by Bruce Glaser is a prescient document of the new art in which the young

artists define their programs in rejection of European modernism. Judd’s late

paintings speak to this continental split as he discards what he perceives to be the

medium’s European conventions – spatial illusionism, realism, and rationalist

composition.

The chapter then returns focus to Morris, analysing his perceptual interplay

between bodies and objects in his defining plywood show at the Green Gallery.

Morris’s second one man show at the Green in December 1964, stated the arrival

of his minimalist sculpture through his suite of large, grey polyhedrons.1 Sparse in

their distinction to Judd’s, the sculptural forms of Morris’s minimalist show

articulated his notion of phenomenological formalism. Morris’s sculptural

propositions were an unravelling of artistic modernism, challenging

understandings of the art object and subjective experience of it. In the previous

1 Morris had debuted a year earlier at the Green where he displayed a mix of smaller neo-Dada and minimal objects – this show was considered in the previous chapter.

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chapter, Morris’s dance interrogations of object and body relationships were

contextualised against his move toward the minimalist object. There is

chronological overlap between Morris’s dance and sculpture practices in this

period. A focus of this chapter is to analyse the conceptual interchange between

these two fields of Morris’s practice. This reveals Morris’s formalist exploration of

bodies and objects in time and space as a cross-disciplinary concern.

Painting to Objects

From late 1961 and across 1962, Judd incorporated found objects in his paintings.

In a work of 1961, Judd placed an aluminium baking pan within the painting to

create a recessed physical space [fig.41]. In another painting from 1961, Judd

inserted a sheet of wire enforced glass to produce tactile disjuncture between the

picture’s material parts [fig.42]. These works demonstrated to Judd, firstly, real

space as an organisational element in contrast to pictorial or illusionistic space;

and secondly, the resoluteness of real objects as opposed to painted

representations of objects. These two works exist as real objects and their

supports as opposed to images contained within the plane of their support. This

critical development proved terminal to Judd’s painting practice. As Judd placed

more found and manufactured objects into his works, it became apparent that the

format of two-dimensional painting was inherently limiting. In a larger work of

1961, Judd attached two curved galvanised iron pieces to the top and bottom of a

cadmium red-painted board. The iron ends of this piece project outward from the

picture into the space of the viewer. Thomas Kellein writes of this work: ‘Art was

no longer painting and sculpture, but texture, structure and material, weight and

volume on a wall’.2 It is difficult to reconcile this work by Judd within the medium

of painting. Yet somewhat problematically for the artist, whether this work

declares itself a sculpture or a relief, it is still constricted by the frontality and two-

dimensionality of painting.

2 Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd, 1955-1968, (New York: D.A.P., 2002), 36.

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In this phase of Judd’s artistic production, his increasing focus is to emphasise the

unorthodox materiality of his works. A piece produced in 1962 – a red wooden

rectangle, bisected top to bottom on its vertical axis by a black asphalt pipe –

declared its physicality through the assertion of its material components [fig.43].

The piece struggled to exist by its sheer weight and volume on the wall. When

asked by an interviewer what compelled him to move the piece off the wall and

onto the floor, Judd revealed:

First, I did the pipe relief and kept it on the floor. It was a big thing when sitting on

the floor. I left it on the floor, and that didn’t seem to bother it much. It was meant

to go on the wall, but it looked all right on the floor. And then the whole situation

of the wall was tiresome.3

This pipe piece, initially conceived as a relief and so retained the vestige aspects of

two-dimensionality, was a significant precursor for Judd’s specific object. Its

material components are unconventional in comparison to paint on canvas or

traditional sculpting materials. The work’s rectangularity, frontality, and need for a

support plane extends from painting, though its three-dimensional bulk precludes

it being hung on the wall. This piece exists uncomfortably between relief and

stand-alone object – an unsuccessful amalgam – yet important nonetheless, as it

opened-up for Judd a new field of possibility. ‘I didn’t want it to sit back against the

wall’, Judd remarked, ‘a piece that was completely three-dimensional was a big

event for me.’4 In a faculty show at Brooklyn Museum in November 1962, where he

was working as an art instructor, Judd displayed his first truly three-dimensional

object that was conceived and constructed as such. Comprising of a curved

Masonite board with three horizontal timber slats spaced and fixed at its front, the

piece was standalone without the need of physical support. This was Judd’s first

work to convey complete and real three-dimensionality. An asphalt pipe

connecting the Masonite backing to the centre wooden slat, both bisected and

3 Donald Judd; John Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, Artforum, 9.10 (June 1971), 41. 4 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 41.

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articulated the internal space of this sculptural piece. The materials used in the

work were unambiguous – Masonite board, asphalt pipe, and three planks of

timber.

The use of found objects in these works by Judd during this period points to a

wider aesthetic tendency of his generation of artists scouring the streets for

detritus to include in their artworks. Rauschenberg’s assemblages were the

precedence and by the early 1960s the practice was common. The use of found

objects helped Judd circumvent one of the most troubling formal aspects of

artmaking he had grappled with to this date – composition. A revelatory work Judd

produced in 1962, illustrates how the inclusion of a discarded pipe in the work

resolved the problem of conventional composition for the artist [fig.44]. This work,

simply comprised of two upright planks positioned at right angles with a bent pipe

extending out from the centre of one plank and connecting to the centre of the

other. The pipe is asymmetrical, not regularly shaped, and it determines the

structural organisation of the artwork. ‘The asymmetrical disposition is

determined by the pipe, which I found that way, so that the pipe is a given thing’,

Judd notes. He continues: ‘Otherwise, it would get into composing, and it doesn’t

really look that way.’5 The asymmetry of the work creates a questioning sense of

whether its placement is intentional or not in terms of artistic composition. Judd

incorporates the pipe into this work in a way that appears declarative, almost

inevitable, supposing industrial facture and not the result of a drawn-out,

compositional process. The materials Judd used in the construction of the work

were found essentially as is and determine the articulation of the end object. The

use of found objects then, obviates the subjective compositional choices of the

artist and suggests a new take on chance operations. The previous generation had

applied methods and devices to make chance central in the realisation of their

work. Pollock’s drip technique, Cage’s prepared piano, or Cunningham’s flipping of

a coin exemplify the use of chance as a non-compositional strategy. As Judd notes:

5 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 41 & 43.

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Pollock and those people represent actual chance; by now it’s better to make that a

foregone conclusion – you don’t have to mimic chance. You use a simple form that

doesn’t look like either order or disorder. We recognise that the world is ninety

percent chance and accident.6

Judd’s point is that similar outcomes to chance operations can be found with

simpler generic forms like boxes or machine-produced objects. Judd reasons that

these simpler forms suggest an impersonality – they are not so ordered as to

reveal an anthropocentric or rationalist order. This contrasts with more complex

compositional devices where, ‘order becomes more important than anything else’.7

Thus, Judd finds indeterminacy through the quotidian.

This use of simple, machine-produced forms and found objects, speaks to the post-

industrial, urban environment in which Judd and his contemporaries worked. The

cityscape of early 1960s New York was being rationalised and transformed. In

lower Manhattan, where Judd and most the younger artists lived, large swathes of

buildings and city blocks were rezoned, razed, and redeveloped. The old industrial

workshops and warehouses gave way to new office blocks and high rises.8 Joshua

Shannon insightfully correlates the transformation of lower Manhattan with Judd’s

shift from painting to found object reliefs. As the staid geometry of Judd’s two-

dimensional painting recedes, the semi-industrial appearance of his reliefs

materialises. Shannon here writes about the visual relationship between this

changing urban environment and Judd’s aesthetic development:

As the city was systemising unruly parts of lower Manhattan, Judd himself was

deploying a language of stripes and grids, gingerly half-organising the rough

surfaces of his works. In his paintings of 1961 and 1962, the artist constantly

rearticulated this tense dialectic between random surface particularities and

6 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical

anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 156. 7 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 156. 8 Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: culture, real estate, and resistance in New

York City, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000: 153-57.

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abstract linear order. As he began to work in sculptural reliefs, Judd bought these

tensions to bear on the forms of the city, focusing on the fading materiality of the

urban environment, the ungainliness of iron, asphalt, and discarded two-by-fours.9

Shannon reads Judd’s work in the early 1960s in consonance with the dramatic

physical changes of the city around him. This reading opens to further insights as

Judd’s career progresses. Judd’s use of discarded pipes and bits of timber mark his

work in the early 1960s, while the stacks, rows, and wall progressions of finely

manufactured and lustrous materials typify Judd’s high-minimalism from the late

1960s. This visual parallel identified by Shannon, is discussed further in Chapter

Six of this thesis which engages Judd’s use of industrial materials and

manufacturing processes.

Judd was not the only young artist to incorporate found and pre-manufactured

objects into his work. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama created sensorial objects

and obsessive environments from discarded and unconventional items found in

the street. Kusama had moved to New York in 1957 and with little English or

money, sought to sell her paintings to whomever she could meet. Judd was the first

person to buy one of Kusama’s painting and Judd, who was more prominently an

art critic at this stage, became an early champion of her work.10 Judd and Kusama

were at one stage lovers and it begs for curious rumination upon the creative

synergy that may have arisen from this pairing. For arguably, more than any two

visual artists of this period, repetition as a conceptual strategy is synonymous with

their individual practices. This is not to suggest that repetition was used by these

artists with same intent or for similarly desired outcomes. Notably however, some

of Kusama’s key works of this period clearly resonated with Judd.

9 Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York and the rise of the postmodern

city, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009: 164-5. 10 Yayoi Kusama interview by Midori Matsui (1998). ‘In Conversation with Yayoi Kusama’, Index, [Online and no pagination], accessed: 8 November 2016. Available from: http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/yayoi_kusama.shtml

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Kusama’s ‘Sex Obsession’ pieces, common objects that the artist covered in white

phalluses, bore the direct involvement of Judd. In Kusama’s Aggregation: One

Thousand Boats Show (1963), the centrepiece boat was found and retrieved from

the junk heap with the help of Judd. While for Accumulation No.2 (1963), a large

sofa also covered in white phalluses, Kusama enlisted Judd with the monotonous

and repetitive task of stuffing hundreds of the phalluses.11 These two works, along

with a third chair covered in phalluses, were displayed as a suite in Kusama’s

breakthrough ‘Driving Images Show’ at Castellane Gallery in April 1964. Judd

reviewed the show and wrote as follows:

The three masses of white protuberances are more alike than their underlying

forms are alike. Kusama varies the protuberances, but they are seen collectively, as

she intends, before they are seen individually. The collective impression is the

more important anyway; the point is obsessive repetition.12

While it is outside the scope of this thesis to delve into repetition as a strategy in

Kusama’s work, it is certain that her practice found resonance with Judd’s.13

Around this period of 1962-64, Kusama’s studio was directly below that of Judd’s

in the same building in lower Manhattan. It was fortuitously through Kusama that

11 Judith E. Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 246-7. 12 Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Driving Images Show’ at Castellane Gallery, 21 April – 9 May 1964, review by Judd: ‘In the Galleries’, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 134. 13 Judd use of repetition is analysed in the following chapter of this thesis. It is not possible within the scope of this thesis to fully expand upon Kusama’s use of repetition in its distinction from Judd’s, though in the limited space of this footnote, it is arguable that Kusama’s use of repetition is internalised and reflexive, while Judd’s use of repetition is highly depersonalised and external. In closing his review of Kusama’s show, Judd wrote: ‘In most art the chief interests of the artist have been subordinate – those things he thinks about most, the strongest and clearest attitudes, the psychological preoccupations. Kusama is dealing directly with her interests, developing them, making a clear and obvious form’. (Judd, ‘In the Galleries’, Complete Writings, 135). This aligns somewhat with Kusama’s reasons behind her making of the works she termed ‘Sex Obsessions’: ‘My family was really conservative, really uptight. I was really afraid of sex. It was a big taboo. I liberated myself from the fear by creating these works. Their creation had the purpose of healing myself.’ (Kusama, ‘In conversation with Midori Matsui’, Index, 1998), [online]. More broadly. Kusama’s use of repetition is understood in terms of compulsion and self-obliteration.

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Judd’s work was seen by Richard Bellamy, the director of the Green Gallery.

Bellamy had come to visit Kusama at her studio in the Spring of 1962, who in turn

took Bellamy upstairs to show him Judd’s work. Upon seeing Judd’s work, Bellamy

was instantly enthusiastic and invited Judd to show his work at the Green; first in

two group shows in early 1963, followed by a solo show in December 1963.14 It is

in these shows that Judd’s move to objects is formally realised.

Judd at the Green Gallery

The Green Gallery opened on Fifty-Seventh Street in 1960 and ran to 1965. Run by

Richard Bellamy and financed by Robert Scull, the dynamic gallery was a focal

point for the emergent avant-garde. Most of the young artists who historically

became associated with Pop or minimalism and indeed well-known artists who did

not, tasted their first critical and commercial recognition at the Green. Bellamy,

was a visible figure within the new avant-garde and had previously run the Hansa

Gallery, one of the artist-run cooperative galleries on Tenth Street. Of the same age

as Judd, Morris, and their contemporaries, Bellamy was well-known in the circles

of artists, poets, dancers, and musicians gravitating around Greenwich Village in

the early 1960s.15 When Bellamy opened the Green Gallery in midtown in 1960,

Judd was a regular visitor in his capacity as art critic. Bellamy was an admirer of

Judd’s reviews and they shared a mutual rapport.16 From this, Bellamy was the

first gallerist to showcase Judd’s three-dimensional work. Later, Bellamy

introduced Judd to Julie Finch, a dancer who Judd married and fathered two

children with and named after their contemporaries, Flavin and Rainer Judd.17

14 Stein, Eye of the Sixties, 261-62. 15 For detailed account of this synergetic milieu, see: Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963:

Avant-garde performance and the effervescent body (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993). 16 Stein, Eye of the Sixties, 261. 17 Stein, Eye of the Sixties, 235.

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The first group show that Judd participated in at the Green Gallery, ‘New Work:

Part I’, also featured Morris, Kusama, and Dan Flavin.18 Judd exhibited three works

in this show. The first piece comprised a large horizontally-spanning red board

with a triangular metal ‘beak’ protruding from a slit in the middle of the board

[fig.45]. Judd had mixed sand and wax in with the light cadmium red paint to give

the wood board a roughed-up surface. A reviewer of the show noted it was ‘the

most sensible and rigorous item in the exhibition.’19 The second piece Judd

exhibited was the large red plywood wall relief with curved galvanised iron top

and bottom as described in the previous section of this chapter. Likewise, the third

piece, the asymmetrical pipe piece as described above [see: fig.44].

In the second group show held in May, titled ‘New Work: Part III’, Judd exhibited a

large free-standing, open, three-dimensional piece [fig.46]. The work, comprising

of two vertical bookended boards holding seven horizontally arranged beams in

place between them in an ascending diagonal configuration, resemble stadium

bleachers. The centre beam is made from aluminium and painted purple, the rest

of the object is made from wood and painted cadmium red.20 An earlier Judd

painting from 1961 anticipates these three-dimensional bleachers. In the painting,

six stencilled horizontal black bars are arranged one after the other from the top of

the canvas to its bottom [fig.47]. A blue circle is positioned in the centre of the red

field bisecting the six bars, so that three are positioned above and below the circle.

‘The Bleachers’ articulate this in three-dimensions.21 The central blue circle in the

painting corresponds with the purple aluminium bar in the later object. The

painting’s six black bands are repeated by the six red wooden beams. The

18 ‘New Work: Part I’, Green Gallery, 8 January – 2 February 1963. Milet Andrejevic, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Larry Poons, Lucas Samaras, George Segal. 19 Sidney Tillim, ‘New York Exhibitions: Month in Review’, Arts Magazine (March 1963), 62. 20 ‘New Work: Part III’, Green Gallery, May – 15 June 1963. Robert Morris, Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Darby Bannard, Ellsworth Kelly. * Note: There was no ‘Part II’ of the ‘New Work’ shows. Confusingly, there was another ‘Part III’ held in 1964. See: ‘New Work: Part III’, Green Gallery, 8 April – 2 May 1964. Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Larry Poons, Richard Smith, Neil Williams, George Segal. 21 Judd never tilted his works and the unofficial nickname, ‘The Bleachers’, was given by Bellamy, much to Judd’s chagrin. Bellamy wrote the unofficial names on the back of curatorial photographs. See: Stein, Eye of the Sixties, 260.

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painting’s red field is replicated by the two red boards supporting the beams in the

object. Judd’s ‘Bleachers’ demonstrate his origination of a three-dimensional object

out of painting. The horizontal axis, predominant in Judd’s painting, and to a lesser

degree the vertical axis, is appended here in this sculptural piece by a third axis

signalling real spatial depth. Where in painting the organisation of space is

restricted to the pictorial plane, in the ‘Bleachers’ Judd organises real space. This

large work volumetrically holds space. Yet its open-endedness means the space is

not enclosed only divided. It was an indicative work for Judd who revealed, ‘it’s the

first big piece. It’s also the first, free, open, dimensional sculpture.’22

Judd exhibited eight pieces in his one-man Green Gallery show that started in

December and ran until January.23 These included three wall reliefs and five stand-

alone objects. The pieces in the exhibition were untitled, like all Judd’s works had

been since his early paintings. Judd maintained this practice of not naming his

works to obviate subjective or personal meaning being conferred upon the work

by the artist or discerned by the viewer. Cadmium red dominated the colour

scheme for Judd’s one-man Green Gallery show and the colour became

synonymous with Judd’s work in the early 1960s. Judd’s use of colour here nears

Newman’s palette in the older painter’s breakthrough works of the late 1940s and

early 1950s, and further points to the aesthetic closeness between the two artists.

Colour also became another major point of dissonance between Judd and Morris.

The brightness of Judd’s red objects contrasted starkly against Morris’s grey

plywood forms of the same period.

Some of the floor pieces Judd exhibited are the most recognisable pieces of this

time and indeed his oeuvre. These include two strikingly coloured cadmium red

cubes, built to the same proportions with recessed channels on their upper

22 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 43. 23 ‘Don Judd’, Green Gallery, 17 December 1963 – 11 January 1964. See also: James Meyer, Minimalism: art and polemics in the sixties (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), 56. Meyer identifies that an additional relief was displayed in the side room of the gallery, making a total of nine works. The eight mentioned here, were displayed in the front room of the gallery.

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surfaces [figs.48 & 49]. The channels are cut approximately one third in from their

edge. One cube’s channel contains an iron pipe, while the other cube’s semi-

circular channel is slatted. The slats of the second cube are distanced by

progressively thinner spaces. Critically, Judd decided the distancing of the slats not

by a conventional composition, but a devised geometric sequence. There are four

segments of the largest spacing, followed by three segments of lesser-distanced

spacing, then four-five-six-seven segments of descending spatial distance. In

figuring where to place the channel on the two pieces, Judd sought to make them

asymmetrical: ‘In the red box I did a great deal of juggling to make it un-composed’,

Judd informs, ‘it couldn’t appear to occur at some definite, measured spot.’24

These three-dimensional pieces speak to the aesthetic influence of Newman upon

Judd. The deep red surfaces of Judd’s objects, broken by the slatted channel or

pipe, recall the dividing zip upon the colour fields of Newman’s paintings. Like

Newman’s zips, the channels in Judd’s boxes are declarative and discrete. Judd

remarked of Newman’s painting: ‘Everything is specifically where it is.’25 Judd’s

channels, like his reading of Newman’s zips, declare with conceptual exactness

upon cadmium red coloured fields. For Judd, both Newman’s zip paintings and his

own three-dimensional objects appeal to the notion of seeing the work done in one

shot; they are not the result of relational, drawn-out composition. The notion of

non-compositional art works was not new to Judd or his generation of artists. As

noted in this thesis previously, non-compositionality was read in Newman’s work

and it certainly applied to Pollock’s. Non-compositional order was undeniably

elemental to Judd’s work. As his objects became more refined, the non-

compositional strategies Judd employed became increasingly sophisticated. Judd

further argued against conventional composition in philosophical and geopolitical

terms, which reverberated across the 1960s.

24 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 43. 25 Donald Judd, ‘Barnett Newman’, Studio International (February 1970); in: Complete

Writings, 202. Judd indicates the article was written in November 1964.

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In 1964, Stella and Judd appeared in an infamous radio discussion with the critic

Bruce Glaser. In the interview, Judd and Stella outlined the philosophical context

for the new art they were pursuing. The young artists argued a clean break from

the traditions of European art.26 To Judd and Stella, their experience of the world

was vastly different to that of pre-war Europe and the abstract geometric painters

who they were often compared with. Judd dismissed many of the beliefs and truths

which had philosophically sustained European art to be ‘old hat’.27 When asked by

Glaser why he sought to rid his work of compositional effects, Judd responded:

‘Well, those effects tend to carry with them all the structures, values, feelings of the

whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’28 When

pressed to expand upon this response by Glaser, Judd elaborated: ‘The qualities of

European art so far, they’re innumerable and complex, but the main way of saying

it is they’re linked up with a philosophy – rationalism, rationalistic philosophy.’29

For Judd, this rationalistic model as a basis for art was not conducive to the

experiences of the artists of his generation. Rationalism, for Judd, expressed ‘a

certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of

finding out what the world’s like.’30 Judd’s generation were witness to the

cataclysmic events of the Second World War, several – including Judd – served in

the Korean conflict. The 1960s were marked by rapid cultural and political change

and turmoil, through Civil and Women’s’ Rights movements, defining political

assassinations, anti-war and counter-culture movements and another epochal

conflict unfolding in Vietnam. Against this socio-historical context, Judd’s remarks

26 In a later interview in 1969, Stella retreats from his anti-modernist sentiments seen in the interview with Glaser. Repositioning himself within the tradition of modernist painting, Stella asserts: ‘I never protested the past. That’s not what I am about. I mean the burden of modernism is, it seems to me – at least the way I feel it – is that the past is not something that you have to refute. The past is something you really have to acknowledge. I mean what modernism is all about is acknowledging the best work of the past and what the implications are of really good painting and therefore forcing yourself to act in face of the quality or the quality as you perceive it of that painting in the immediate past.’ See: Frank Stella interview by Sidney Tillim (1969). Transcript of oral history interview with Frank Stella conducted in 1969 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2. 27 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 151. 28 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 150. 29 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 151. 30 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 151.

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are consistent with the contemporary questioning of many of modernism’s models

of knowledge and grand narratives. Judd’s interrogation of modernist art carried

with it the voice of paradigmatic and generational rupture.

The division between old European and new American art that Judd and Stella

announce, reflects the confidence in their generation creating art anew. The new

art was championed by them as a reawakening of the artist’s relationship to

contemporary experience. Most generations of artists across the modernist

narrative have held to this relationship. What situates these younger American

artists at the end of this narrative is their wholesale rejection of much of what had

defined and sustained modernism in the arts before them. The rejection of

rationalism as a basis for the art experience is critical to Judd’s theorisation of his

specific objects. It is Descartes’s mind/body problem, embryonic to modern

thought, that Judd finds erroneous and seeks to overcome. This division has its

origins in Descartes’s Meditations (1641) where the philosopher methodically

distinguishes between thoughts originating in the mind from the sensory

perceptions received through the body.31 Descartes believed that the mind, distinct

from the body and its senses, could reason the essential nature of material things.

This internalised vision was perceived to be harmonious with a higher or divine

intelligence, while the corporeal body as the realm of sensory perceptions could

not be trusted as its senses where held to be corruptible. Thus, as it extends from

Descartes, thought is privileged over feeling – Cogito ergo sum.

31 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: with selections from the Objections and

Replies (1641), [ed. and trans. John Cottingham], (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1986]), 21-2. Here, Descartes distinction between mind and body, and the perception of a piece of wax through mental reflection: ‘We say that we see the wax itself, if it is there before us, not that we judge it to be there from its colour or shape; and this might lead me to conclude without more ado that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone. But then if I happen to look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax, Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so, something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in my mind’.

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Descartes writings touched little on the arts, though Judd argues European artistic

modernism is fundamentally built upon a rationalist seventeenth-century view of

the world. Judd asserts the division of mind and body is simulated in the modernist

dichotomy of content and form.32 In rejecting Cartesian rationalism, Judd turned to

empiricism as an experiential basis for his art where only observable and real

qualities in the work are given countenance.33 Judd’s art seeks to bring together

thought and feeling or collapse this division, so that the viewers’ experience of the

work is both cognitively and sensibly immediate. The aim is to preclude the need

for rational analysis of the artwork, which preferences content (thought) over

form (feeling).34 This tendency can be seen in the early Judd objects which have

been discussed above. In the two cube pieces that Judd exhibited at his solo show

at the Green, the viewer can apprehend the make-up of these works quite readily.

Both pieces are wooden red boxes of the same dimensions, with one containing an

iron pipe in its recessed channel and the other with a slatted grove. The

freestanding nature of these works and the simple, material forms Judd uses,

means the viewer perceives their mass, materiality, and structure with immediacy;

they are seen in one shot. This is not to suggest that these works are intellectually

32 Donald Judd, ‘Art and Architecture’ (1983), Complete Writings 1975-1986, 30: ‘I’ve always disliked the division between content and form, and have never known what to answer when asked: ‘But what is the content?’, ‘What does it mean?’ Recently it occurred to me that this unreal and uninformative division is just part of the larger division between thought and feeling.’ 33 Judd, ‘Walter Murch’, Arts Magazine (February 1963), in: Complete Writings 1959-1975, 72: In a review of the contemporary painter Walter Murch’s exhibition which featured paintings of ‘three stacked bricks … machine parts, rocks, spheres and cylinders’, Judd brutally compared Murch to the 18th century still life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Judd lectured: ‘In regard to painting objects in a naturalistic, unified space, it is necessary to believe that the objects are so important that the composition of and the colour must not violate their integrity, that the formal elements must accord with the objects. The only thing that can justify all this trouble is the thing that did: objects have essences. The world has a spiritual order and identity, part and whole. But: ‘We have therefore no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we either talk or reason concerning it.’ This is from A

Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1738, by David Hume. It is very elementary philosophy that objects do not have essences.’ 34 Richard Shiff, ‘Donald Judd: Fast Thinking’, in: Donald Judd: Late Work (New York: Pace Wildenstein, 2000), 6-7: Expanding on Judd’s distrust of the thought/feeling divide and Judd’s desire to create works that collapse the division, Shiff writes, ‘feeling is thinking of a certain sort – thinking that’s too fast to be “thought”, or rational analysis. “Insight” and “intuition” are other words for fast thinking: an immediate apprehension of an object or a situation by either the mind or the senses. With such immediacy, the distinction between the mind and sense, thought and feeling breaks down.’

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‘lean’ as one reviewer did.35 Rather, Judd is premising an immediate experience of

the artworks over a deductive reading of them that extends from the division of

thought from feeling.36

For Judd, it is the simple forms with little or no internal parts which enable fastest

apprehension of the artwork. Central to Judd’s thesis of the non-rationalist art is

the concept of wholeness. This is what Judd esteemed in Newman’s paintings:

‘They are whole and aren’t part of another whole.’37 Conversely, works of art with

many parts and complex relationships between those parts demand rational

analysis. In these works, the viewer must evaluate the formal relationships

between the parts to arrive at comprehension of the work’s meaning.38 Judd sees

this relational composition inherent within European modernism and emphasises

35 G R Swenson, ‘Reviews and Previews: New Names this Month’, ARTnews, 62 (February 1964), 20: ‘Simple, wooden, box-like constructions are painted flat-red orange; but these works are neither lean nor intellectual enough to look as demandingly simple as they should.’ 36 Donald Judd, Yale Lecture, September 1983, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 7/8 (Spring – Autumn 1984), 50: ‘I’ve always considered the distinction between thought and feeling as, at the least, exaggerated; this is a small description that has been raised to a central fact of human nature. All experience, large and small, involves feeling; all thought involves feeling. All feeling is based on experience, which involves thought. Emotion or feeling is simply a quick summation of experience, some of which is thought, necessarily quick so that we can act quickly. It is not irrational, virtually the opposite. Thought is not strict, isolated, and only logical, but is continually using its backlog of experience, which is called feeling. Otherwise we could never get from A to Z, barely to C, since B would have to be always rechecked. It’s a short life and a little speed is necessary. If the nature of art is the same as our nature, and if there is no division between thought and feeling, art is cognitive just as our experience is. And art is no more inferior than is our experience as a whole.’ 37 Judd, ‘Barnett Newman’, 202. 38 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing: Three Letters to Beginners, 1857 (New York: Maynard, Merril, & Co., 1893), 241: ‘In a great picture; every line and colour is so arranged as to advantage the rest. None are inessential, however slight; and none are independent, however forcible. It is not enough that they truly represent natural objects; but they must fit into certain places, and gather into certain harmonious groups’. Ruskin’s notion of composition exemplifies what Judd found implausible in the European tradition. In referencing Ruskin in this thesis, it is not to dismiss the nineteenth-century aesthetician’s theories of composition, which should be understood in the social and historical context of Victorian England, but rather to illustrate relational composition as Judd applies it to European art. In Ruskin’s concept of composition, the composed artwork is hierarchical and harmonious; it reaffirms the order of the Divine. The depicted objects and figures are the physical embodiment of a metaphysical or Platonic form. In contrast, see Judd’s review of Walter Murch in fn.33 above.

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wholeness as an American quality. Here, Stella further ties relational composition

to European modern art:

The other thing that the European geometric painters really strive for is what I call

relational painting. The basis of their whole idea is balance. You do something in

one corner and you balance it with something in the other corner.39

Judd and Stella frame non-compositional aspects of the new art as positively

American. Their sentiments are resonant with the larger postwar cultural shift

marking New York’s centrality in the international art world, with Judd declaring:

‘There’s an enormous break between [European] work and other present work in

the U.S., despite similarity in patterns or anything.’40 In the interview, the young

American artists argue composition and non-composition as European and

American respectively. From this, Howard Singerman asks: are we to understand

‘the contrast between democratic order and hierarchical passion’ as ‘the difference

between Stella and Mondrian’ or ‘as Stella and Judd did, as the difference between

American and European’?41

The geo-political distinction between hierarchic Old World Europe and democratic

New World America has obvious historical and political connotations. As James

Meyer observes with Judd, ‘wholeness, and Americaness were indissociable

terms.’42 It is not surprising, given the paternalistic nature of Greenberg’s

modernism to the younger artists, that this geo-political framing of composition

and non-composition is anticipated in Greenberg’s ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’

(1948). Herein, Greenberg associates Pollock with the ‘all-over, decentralised,

39 Stella; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 149. 40 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, 149. 41 Howard Singerman, ‘Noncompositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970’, Oxford Art Journal, 26.1 (2003), 135. See also: E.C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948-

1968 [exh. cat.], (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 9. 42 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 88.

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polyphonic picture’.43 For Greenberg, as the title suggests, the new all-over

tendency constituted a crisis, though it was a crisis visited upon the European

tradition. ‘I am not thinking of Mondrian in particular at this moment’, the critic

wrote, but rather it was Pollock’s all-over paintings that were the cause of crisis.44

For Greenberg, the Abstract Expressionists, especially Pollock, were destroying the

easel picture inasmuch because:

The ‘all-over’ may answer the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been,

literally, exhausted and invalidated; that no area or order of experience is

intrinsically superior, on any final scale of values, to any other area or order of

experience.45

Above, Greenberg points to the exhaustion of relational or hierarchical

composition with the slight allusion to European pictorial modernism. The

quintessential all-over paintings of Pollock held for Greenberg qualities of

wholeness, unity, and repetition. These aspects came to be similarly noted by Judd:

‘It’s a different idea of generality, of how a painting is unified. It’s a different idea of

the disparity between parts or aspects and it’s a different idea of sensation.’46

While there is theoretic resonance between Greenberg and Judd at points like here,

the discursive dialogue between them in general is contested on shifting

paradigmatic and generational terms. Greenberg’s location of this all-over

development in Pollock and in American high-modernist painting focuses Judd’s

theorisation of his specific object. Greenberg believed that in Pollock’s paintings

the pictorial dissolved into ‘sheer texture’, ‘sheer sensation’, and ‘sheer monotony’

– an ‘accumulation of repetitions’ with no beginning or end.47 These were not

43 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ (1948), in: Greenberg, Art & Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 155. 44 Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’, 155. 45 Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’, 157. 46 Donald Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, Arts Magazine (April 1967), in: Complete Writings 1959-

1975, 195. 47 Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’, 157: ‘The very notion of uniformity is anti-aesthetic. Yet many “all-over” pictures seem to succeed precisely by virtue of their uniformity, their sheer monotony. The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in our contemporary sensibility… It may express a monist

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pictures in the conventional sense and Greenberg’s language here pushes them

towards a certain objecthood and unity where rationalist division between thought

and feeling is lost. But, this is as far as Greenberg pushes in this direction. By 1965,

when he released ‘Modernist Painting’ as rear-guard action against the new art,

content and form were reasserted as the explicit binary in formalist art.

The formal and theoretical relationship Judd constructs with Pollock and Newman

shares this generational aspect. Judd positioned his specific objects as the

resolution to the problems advanced by the New York School’s primary painters. In

Judd’s theorisation of his specific objects these painters point for him the end of

painting and he seeks resolution in the three-dimensional space beyond painting.

The generational contest, between Greenberg and Judd and between Judd and

Abstract Expressionism, frames Judd’s formal move from painting to objects.

Sculpture in Grey, Dance in White

Morris’s one man show at the Green Gallery in December 1964 marked the artist’s

definitive shift to his large-scale, minimalist vocabulary.48 Although Morris had

shown three larger scale works at his debut show at the Green a year previous,

they were mixed among a selection of his smaller scale neo-Dadaist works; a

conflict of not only size and scale, but of tone and presence. The December 1964

show was the first time Morris had an entire gallery space dedicated to his

minimalist sculpture [fig.50]. Featuring seven large plywood shapes painted a

ghostly grey, the pieces were strategically arranged around the room. The

accumulative effect was the concealment or revelation of space to the viewer as

they moved through the gallery. The exhibition featured several forms that re-

materialised in various configurations throughout Morris’s minimalist period. The

naturalism for which there are neither first or last things, and which recognises as the only ultimate distinction between the immediate and the un-immediate.’ 48 ‘Robert Morris: Sculpture’, Green Gallery, 16 December 1964 – 9 January 1965.

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Cloud, which hung from the gallery ceiling, was a re-augmentation of the slab that

had earlier intrigued Cage at Morris’s first show at the Green; where then, it had

sat on the floor [fig.51]. The large inverted L-shape that buttressed the wall in this

second show, was a form that Morris would return to, often placing it with other ‘L’

shapes in different arrangements. A column was also present in this show; laid

down in the centre of the exhibition space, it almost extended the length of the

room. The upper, longitudinal plane of the resting column had one square edge

while the other was rounded.

Reviewing the show, Ted Berrigan wrote: ‘Robert Morris is interested in the Other’.

It is a curious observation by Berrigan that calls for unpacking.49 According to

Berrigan, Morris’s concern with the Other arises from the disarticulation between

the rounded and square edges of the laid down column. This for Berigan, made the

work ‘both suggestive and paradoxical’.50 If the column were to have two straight,

square edges it would be an ordinary rectilinear form, a true rectangular prism.

Yet, the rounded edge implies, however slightly, an artistic intent; it shifts the up-

ended column’s status from regular object to art object. As it exists, the laid down

Column is a simple though uncommon form. This paradox is what makes Column

art. Morris’s work inhabits the space between a barely art form and a slightly

irregular shape giving it, for Berrigan, the sense of otherness.

In an earlier group show in which Morris participated, ‘Black, White, and Gray’ at

the Wadsworth Athenaeum in January 1964, Morris exhibited the Column, the Slab,

the Portal – a large doorframe shape, and an upright, hollowed-out square referred

to as Doughnut [fig.52]. All the forms were painted grey and spoke to this uneasy

existence between being barely art and an ordinary object. Referring to this

exhibition in an article he wrote on Morris, David Antin noted that Morris’s work

was involved with absence – ‘the absent reference, the absent context’51. For Antin,

the ghostliness of Morris’s work was found in its abounding absence. The doorway,

49 Ted Berrigan, ‘Reviews and Previews’, ARTnews, 63 (February 1965), 13. 50 Berrigan, ‘Reviews and Previews’, 13. 51 David Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, ARTnews, 65 (April 1966), 57.

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the doughnut, and the wheel are all fashioned out of what is not there’, remarked

Antin. ‘This bringing together of what is absent with what is present,’ Antin

continues, ‘to a great extent characterises the earlier work.’52

Morris’s early minimalist works, as seen at the Wadsworth Athenaeum and at the

Green Gallery, evoke emptiness and loneliness. They quaver in an almost

indeterminate state between materiality and hollowness, absence and presence,

art and non-art. They deal with the revelation and concealment of space. In a much

more recent interview, Morris intimated at the alienation which encouraged these

forms: ‘Only the inanimate object is alive for me in these years, and making objects

becomes my bulwark against the threat of the other, and every other is regarded as

threatening, especially those who would try to get close to me.’53 From Morris’s

self-assessment here, it appears that for the artist too these early objects carried a

certain pathology; a deviation from normalness and a mediation on loneliness and

emptiness. The common observations of Morris personally during this period,

from those within his circle, point to a strangely isolated, slightly depressed, and

detached figure.54 It is conjecturable that part of this air of detachment was

cultivated by Morris. In his earlier neo-Dadaist works, it is apparent that the artist

put forward an artistic ego, engaging in a roguish intellectual game through self-

referential works like I-box and Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.55 This

playful version of the artist’s subjecthood soon gives way to the more sombre,

severe, and gloomy grey presence.56

Morris’s minimalist slabs and columns represent a withdrawal or

depersonalisation – they are as much defined by the artist’s absent subjecthood, in

52 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 57. 53 Robert Morris; Simon Grant, ‘Interview: Robert Morris’, TATE etc., 14 (Autumn 2008), [Online and no pagination], accessed on: 12 July 2010. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/interviewmorris.htm 54 Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006), 185. 55 Stein, Eye of the Sixties, 37. 56 Robert Morris in interview with W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Golden Memories’, Artforum, 32:8 (April 1994), 133: ‘How should I remember to/for you a sense of how the world felt, how nailing together a slab of gray plywood resonated to impulses compounded of desperation, humor, speculation, anger, indifference, malice, doubt?’

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comparison to the early neo-Dada works, as they are by their material presence.

Reviewing Morris’s work in the ‘Black, White, and Gray’ show, Judd observed, ‘it is

art, which is supposed to exist most clearly and importantly, but it barely exists.’57

Picking up on the influence of Cagean silence in these works, Judd found that in

their slight existence as art, ‘in the most minimal way’, Morris’s sculpture

questioned the specialness of the art object and its context:

It doesn’t appear to be art. Its only claim to be is that it is being exhibited. It is

shown as art and becomes the equal of things that are obviously art. The

importance of art is extended to everything, most of which is slight, ordinary and

unconsidered. You are forced to consider the ordinary things and to question

whatever was thought important in art.58

Following Judd, Morris’s grey forms are barely definable as art objects, yet they are

also unidentifiable as ordinary, everyday objects. In Morris’s minimal grey forms,

Judd reads the clouding of distinctions between art and life, and in so doing, they

call to question the special nature of art. In his minimalist Green Gallery show,

Morris’s grey forms seemingly meld with the things around them that are clearly

not art such as the walls and floor of the gallery space. Their uniform greyness

accentuates the effect; it cloaks the nature of their plywood materiality and masks

signs of their construction. There is no expressivity shown by the artist to inspire a

subject-oriented reading of the work. All that is left is space and its division.

Similarly, Antin found in Morris’s plywood show at the Green that: ‘In the most

profoundly sculptural sense these simple forms really determine the space into

which they are put.’59 For Antin, Morris’s minimalist sculptures at the Green were

placed in a manner within the room that directed the viewers’ sightlines and as

they moved through the room directed their movement. Perceptual and spatial

57 Donald Judd, ‘Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, Arts Magazine (March 1964), in: Complete Writings, 118. 58 Judd, ‘Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, 118. 59 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 56.

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concerns are the guiding ideas driving Morris’s early minimalism. In his show at

the Green, Morris’s grey forms cloud the perceptual field of the viewer. The

viewer’s response then becomes phenomenological as they are made physically

conscious to the disjunctive relationship between their body and the objects. As

the viewer’s gaze through and then move among the gallery, Morris’s objects block

off space or give access to it. Their encompassing greyness marks the forms

impassive, yet they are imposing.

Morris’s dance Site (1964) [fig.53], visually foregrounds his minimalist installation

at the Green Gallery.60 Site is all white with the show of sculpture predominantly

grey. The neutral colours of grey and white evoke silence, coolness, and

detachment. Plywood boards are used in both to reveal and conceal space. In the

Green Gallery show these boards are static, in Site they are dynamic. For Site,

Morris, dressed as a construction worker in white clothes and gloves, wore an

expressionless skin-tight face mask crafted by Jasper Johns. He began the

performance standing in front of a white box which emitted prerecorded

construction sounds. In the centre of the performance space a stack of large,

rectangular, plywood boards stood horizontally. Morris with slow, pallid, and

deliberate movements strode to the first board and picked it up to position it

vertically a few metres away. He then moved to the second board, grasped its

upper corner with his hands and buttressed its bottom with his foot to swing the

board swiftly upwards to reveal performance artist Carolee Schneemann.

Schneemann lay naked covered with white body paint reclined on a white sofa and

backed by white pillows in the manner of Eduard Manet’s Olympia (1863).

As Schneemann sat motionless and silent assuming the persona of Olympia, Morris

gracefully danced with a large wooden board across the performance space. He

balanced it on his back, manoeuvred it around his body, lifted it over his head, and

spun it on its point. Morris’s partner in this dance was an inanimate object, not

60 Morris first performed Site with Schneemann at Stage 73 with the Surplus Dance Theater in March 1964. In a later performance in Philadelphia, Morris performed with Olga Adorno Kluver in April 1964 and a few days later at the Judson Dance Theater’s A

Concert #16, Morris again presented the piece with Schneemann.

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Schneemann, who gazed coolly out to the audience as Manet’s depiction of

Victorine Meurent had scandalously done so one hundred years previous. Morris’s

duet with the board continued as sounds of drills and jackhammers rang out from

the small white box creating a dissonant visual and aural effect between the box,

the sounds, Morris and the board, and the unflinching Schneemann. After Morris’s

duet with the board finished, he repositioned it in front of – and to again conceal –

Schneemann. Visually, the movement of the plywood boards and the neutral tones

and colours of the performance, though dynamic, anticipates the Green Gallery

installation. With the boards Morris cuts across the performance space, blocking

out and sealing off space. In relation to his Green Gallery show, Antin noted of the

plywood forms: ‘they are cuts through space of such and such dimension,

proportion, solidity.’61 In Site Morris conceals and reveals space with the plywood

forms, in this case the space Schneemann occupies.

Through Site, Morris interrogated the process of art making by evoking ideologies

of industrial labour and production to question long-standing values and conceits

in art historical discourse. It is not without a degree of poeticism that Morris’s

critical focus in Site is trained on the beginning of the Greenbergian narrative.

Manet in his time had been the epitome of the Baudelarian dandy; a painter of

modern life inhabiting a rarefied aesthetic realm nominally outside the socio-

political class structure. In contrast Morris’s workmanlike construction of his

‘Olympia’ posited the artist back within this societal structure, demystifying and

even undressing the romanticised figure of the artist. This goes to the spirit of the

Judson Dance Theater which held anyone can be considered a dancer, implying art

making is not a specialised realm open to a select few.

Peter Bürger explores the socio-historic circumstances which gave rise to the idea

of art’s autonomy or rather ‘the detachment of art as a special sphere of human

activity from the nexus of the praxis of life.’62 This idea of the autonomy of art had

61 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 56. 62 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47-49.

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been entrenched by the time of Baudelaire and Manet and served as validation of

dandyism as Bürger suggests:

…the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society. It permits the description

of art’s detachment from the context of practical life as a historical development –

that among members of those classes which, at least at times, are free from the

pressures of the need for survival, a sensuousness could evolve that was not part

of any means-ends relationships.63

With his treatment of Manet’s Olympia, Morris collapses the disjuncture between

art and art making on the one hand and the everyday aspects of labour and

production on the other. Site’s scrutiny of aesthetic production highlighted the

inherent gendered positions of object and subject therein. In reframing Olympia,

Morris questioned the Romantic notion of the artist through his inexpressive

performance, however the masculine coded reality of this role was not likely an

overly conscious concern for him.64 In his plywood show at the Green, Morris’s

arrangement of the plywood forms called to question the rarefied status of the art

object. Morris’s ghostly grey forms barely existed as art; they did not draw to them

the discerning eye of the spectator as in the case of previous modernist sculpture.

Instead, Morris’s show at the Green forced the spectator into a phenomenological

encounter with his grey forms. As such, with Morris here, the meaning of sculpture

shifted from the internal and subjective to the external, spatial, and environmental.

63 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 46. 64 Schneemann’s positioning as the art object, called to question the absence of a similar female positioning or rather agency as a creative subject. The objectified position that Schneemann occupied for this performance would serve as a point of departure into her own feminist interrogations of art making and art history.

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Critical Receptions at the Green

The Green Gallery played a crucial role in the emergence of minimalism. Through

Dick Bellamy, the artists that formed the core of minimalism were first brought

together in the Green’s group shows; Stella, Judd, Morris, and Flavin with the latter

three all holding early solo shows there. The location of the gallery on Fifty-

Seventh Street exposed the younger artists to the uptown network of serious

critics and collectors, whereas previously, the circle of artists had gravitated

downtown and around Greenwich Village. The Green Gallery also played a role in

establishing numerous artists not associated with minimalism. Mark di Suvero and

Ronald Bladen featured prominently in early showings at the Green. Di Suvero and

Bladen became central figures in the Park Place group and were often seen in

contest with Judd and Morris. Kusama, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Larry

Poons, James Rosenquist, Lucas Samaras, and George Segal all featured at the

Green. Indeed, these artists were often shown in the same group shows alongside

the works of Morris, Judd, Stella, and Flavin.

This meeting and mixture of diverse visual styles and aesthetic tendencies in the

Green Gallery group shows illustrates the inexact practice of art historical

labelling. It is something that Judd forewarned against at the time: ‘The history of

art and art’s condition at any time are pretty messy. They should stay that way.’65

Here, Judd is acknowledging the often-inaccurate approximation of artists, schools,

styles, and movements that constitute the modernist canon. Yet, he is also pointing

to the disparity and diversity of the new art of which the young artists at the Green

were key protagonists. For Judd, the new artists shared more of a sensibility in

their rejection of previous art, than any emerging codified school or style.

Critically for Judd, the best works of the new art that he championed and which

were seen at the Green, were works that he described as attaining the ‘the

singleness of objects’. That is, these works had no correlative or reference in the

65 Donald Judd, ‘Local History’, Arts Yearbook 7 (1964), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 151.

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world outside of the exhibition. These works, made from common forms and

specific materials, become singular art objects.66 Judd explains this concept as:

The most unusual part of three-dimensional work is that which approaches ‘being

an object’. The singleness of objects is related to the singleness of the best

paintings of the early fifties. Like the paintings, such work is unusually distinct and

intense. Generally, it has fewer of the devices of earlier art and more of its own.67

For Judd, this singleness is best understood when the work exists as its own object

and not a sculptural or painted representation of an object. At the same time, to

make it art these objects necessitate aesthetic intent to distinguish them from

commonplace objects. This understanding is central in Judd’s concept of specific

objects and it is visualised in a telling piece Judd exhibited at his solo show at the

Green. The work is a large square-shaped slab with another triangular slap atop

[fig.54]. The triangular slab bisects the square slab diagonally. The whole piece is

set low, rising roughly knee-height at its highest point. It is painted cadmium red

except the hypotenuse of the triangle which is made from violet Plexiglass. This

piece sustains a visual tension between the purple reflective surface and the

matted red plywood structure. The sensible simplicity of that structure – a triangle

laid flat upon a square – almost undermines the work’s specificness as an art

object. A reviewer of Judd’s show, who was unimpressed with what was on offer,

picked up on this seeming contradiction:

Seen from different angles, it appears to change from more to less ‘absolutely

simple’ shape. It never seems to exist as pure fact (what is in complete simplicity)

nor as illusion (more or less what it is) – which is a logical if not visual paradox.68

66 Donald Judd, ‘Lee Bontecou’, Arts Magazine (April 1965), in: Complete Writings, 178. ‘Rather than inducing idealisation and generalisation and being allusive, it excludes. The work asserts its own existence, form and power. It becomes an object in its own right.’ 67 Judd, ‘Local History’, 152. 68 G R Swenson, ‘Reviews and Previews: New Names this Month’, ARTnews, 62 (February 1964), 20.

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The conceptual strength of Judd’s objects stems in part from the tensions he

articulates between the works’ formal properties. These formal tensions are often

the source of most intrigue amongst Judd’s critics and it is this aspect that Judd

increasingly refines across his oeuvre. As the above excerpt specifies, the critic of

Judd’s earliest object show at the Green finds a problematic tension between what

appears as fact and the illusive qualities in the work. The square slab with a

triangular slab atop is not an unusual shape or combination of shapes. Yet the

violent, transparent Plexiglass contrast against the rest of the object’s matte red

creates an interplay between colour and surface, interior and exterior, and this

makes the determination of a clear, singular object uncertain.

Judd’s strict and objective structuring of a work’s physical components, contrasts

against the sensuous properties of the materials and colours he worked with.

Judd’s interplay between structure and colour is expanded upon in more detail in

chapter six, particularly in relation to Rosalind Krauss’s observations, and

specifically in contradiction to Morris’s use of colour. From Judd’s and Morris’s

solo shows at the Green considered in this chapter, it is maintained that while

Judd’s cadmium red objects call for a more visual and optic interpretation, Morris’s

large grey forms tend towards a more perceptual and haptic comprehension. A

commonage arising from Judd’s and Morris’s Green Gallery showings however, is

in the abstraction of ordinary and recognisable shapes; a cube, rectangular prism,

pipe, or triangle. The three-dimensional, geometric abstraction that the artists

engage with here, however, springs forth from differing aesthetic trajectories. With

Judd, the move into three-dimensional space is the artist’s end game to two-

dimensional painting. Insightfully, Sidney Tillim, a colleague of Judd’s at Arts

Magazine, picked up on Judd’s origination of objects out of painting in his Green

Gallery show and noted, ‘the work’s claim upon space is real, an abstract object

that verges on sculpture while retaining its pictorial axis.’69

69 Sidney Tillim, ‘Month in Review’, 62.

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Tillim’s comment reveals the crucial dynamic at play in Judd’s work, that is, the

objects’ occupancy of the field between painting and sculpture. This observation

was commensurate with Judd’s thinking at the time. Judd admitted in response to

his first free-standing objects that, ‘to have something set out in the middle of the

room … suddenly seemed to have an enormous number of possibilities’, he adds, ‘I

certainly didn’t think I was making sculpture’70 [fig.55]. Judd’s insistence that the

objects of the new art existed neither as painting or sculpture is the premise of his

‘Specific Objects’. In defiance, Morris categorised his large plywood forms within

the medium of sculpture and this too forms the central thrust of his ‘Notes on

Sculpture’ essays. In the strictest understanding of sculptural form, in Morris’s

plywood show at the Green his grey forms shape the space around them and sculpt

the space of the gallery. Judd, in his review of Morris’s show similarly found:

Morris’s pieces are minimal visually, but they’re powerful spatially. It’s an unusual

asymmetry. The Cloud occupies the space above and below it, an enormous

column. The triangle fills a corner of the room, blocking it. The angle encloses the

space within it, next to the wall. The occupancy of space, the access to or denial of

it, is very specific.71

Judd’s labelling of Morris’s work here as ‘minimal’ points to the main dissonance

between the work of the two artists. Morris embraced the term minimalism when

used in this sense, that his work was less concerned with the optic – colour, than it

was with space – the haptic. Conversely, Morris makes this charge against Judd,

that his work is more concerned with colour rather than it is space. In their solo

shows at the Green that have been considered above, this argument reveals itself

in the distinction between Judd’s cadmium red objects that articulate formal

tensions residing in the works themselves and Morris’s flat grey plywood forms

disarticulating the space which surrounds them. Nonetheless, there were distinct

commonages to be found in the works of the two artists in their various showings

at the Green Gallery. Often shown next to each other in group shows, it was clear

70 Judd; Coplans, ‘Interview with Don Judd’, 43. 71 Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, Arts Magazine (February 1965), in: Complete

Writings, 165.

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that Judd and Morris were advancing a new art premised on the rejection of old

conceits and rationales. Coalescing from their exhibitions at the Green Gallery

came an art form based on geometric abstraction that was conceptually laden,

often physically understated, and premised on simple, basic order. It is now

historically accepted that minimalism, which was then a contested term, emerges

with Judd’s and Morris’s exhibitions at the Green.

The Green Gallery was integral in promoting the new art and its artists who

alongside Judd and Morris included Warhol, Kusama, Stella, Flavin, and Oldenburg

amongst others. Both Judd and Morris were personally close to Dick Bellamy and

when the Green closed in 1965, both artists signed on with Leo Castelli. Through

this transition, Judd and Morris both grew in critical recognition and acclaim. The

following chapter of this thesis addresses Judd’s and Morris’s practices when

minimalism reaches its critical peak in the mid-to-late 1960s. This next chapter

analyses the formal dissimilarities between Judd’s and Morris’s respective objects

and sculpture, relating these back to the artists’ key theoretical writings which

conceptually underpinned their three-dimensional works.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Formalist Concerns: Gestalts and Seriality

From an art historical perspective, the emergence of minimalism is traceable to

Judd’s and Morris’s solo shows and the various group exhibitions occurring at the

Green Gallery in the early 1960s. From these showings, a loosely-shared formal

vocabulary developed, conveying values like rectilinearity, non-expressivity, large-

scale, and unitary forms. After this emergent phase of minimalism, Judd’s and

Morris’s aesthetics mature, and minimalism approaches its critical zenith. The

central years of minimalism occur between 1965 and 1968. The contest of art

history in these central years is played out in text as well as the key artworks and

exhibitions.

The critical literature Judd and Morris produce during this period is vital to

understanding the formalist concerns with which their individual practices engage.

The formal dissimilarities between the pair are defined more pointedly in their

competing aesthetic theories. In 1965, Judd published ‘Specific Objects’ where he

sets out his designs for a new art form moving beyond the containers of modernist

painting and sculpture.1 In the same year, Greenberg revisits ‘Modernist Painting’

to declare anything outside these containers is indeed not modernist, but barely

considerable as art.2 Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture, parts I & II’ appeared in 1966.3

In the articles, Morris proposes a phenomenological understanding of minimalist

sculpture which invokes Gestalt psychology. Morris emphasises the embodied

experience of the spectator in their relation to the object as an essential aspect of

1 Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965; in: Judd, Complete Writings 1959-

1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design), 184. 2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), The New Art:

a critical anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 67-77. 3 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, Artforum, 4.6 (February 1966).), 42-44. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, Artforum, 5.2 (October 1966).), 20-23. Both parts are reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 222-235.

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his work. This leads to Fried’s charge of theatre against minimalist art. Morris’s

emphasis also underscores the difference in focus between his work and Judd’s:

Morris locates meaning necessarily outside the object with the viewing subject’s

relationship to it; whilst Judd emphasises the formal tensions operating upon the

object itself and the viewer’s experience is not entirely essential.

This chapter and the one proceeding scrutinise the formalist concerns behind

Judd’s specific objects and the minimalist sculpture of Morris. Judd’s and Morris’s

respective treatment of formal elements like size, scale, colour, material, facture,

and structural organisation, extend in their difference from their earlier aesthetic

explorations. Formal problems in painting, like tensions between illusionistic and

real space, form and content, are answered in Judd’s turn to his specific objects.

The formal lexis of Morris’s sculpture reveals his concern with situating objects

within a temporal and spatial or theatrical context, and the perceptual experience

of the viewer.

The appearance of Judd’s and Morris’s works alongside each other in major

exhibitions of this period meant their aesthetic conflict in formalist terms was not

often interrogated sufficiently.4 The ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition at the Jewish

Museum, New York in 1966, saw the appearance of Judd and Morris together,

along with the other emerging minimalists. This exhibition helped solidify

minimalism as a movement of the avant-garde while further signalling its break

4 ‘Shape and Structure: 1965’ at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery featured Stella, Judd, Morris, and Andre. The ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in 1966 showed works by Judd, Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, Andre, and Smithson. Running concurrently, ‘Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Structure’ was held at the Finch College Museum of Art and featured Judd, Flavin Le Witt, Morris, and Smithson. The Whitney’s ‘American Sculpture, Selection 1’ of 1966 had Judd and Morris and their ‘Annual’ of that year selected works by Judd, Morris, as well as Smithson. ‘10’ at the New York Dwan gallery found Judd, Morris, Andre, Smithson, Flavin, and LeWitt. And Judd’s and Morris’s first showings at the Castelli occurred in 1966 and 1967 respectively. There were numerous other exhibitions, both major and minor, throughout this feverish period in and out of New York that contributed to the codification of minimalism. The period leads to two major exhibitions, which largely canonised minimalism as an art historical movement, held aptly at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968’ curated by E.C. Goossen at MoMA in 1968 and ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970’ at the Met, curated by Henry Geldzahler in 1969.

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from modernist art. This departure distinguished minimalism from other

contemporary modes of sculpture and object making.

Primary Structures

Rosalind Krauss argues that the end of modernist sculpture is signalled with

minimalism, with sculpture reaching a state of ‘pure negativity: the combination of

exclusions.’5 Krauss finds that, ‘one found in the early sixties that sculpture had

entered a categorical no-mans-land: it was what was on or in front of a building

that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the

landscape.’6 Krauss uses Morris to exemplify this; with his 1964 Green Gallery

exhibition featuring the suite of large scale, grey painted polyhedrons, and an

outdoor installation of his Mirrored Boxes in 1965. For Morris’s Green show,

Krauss suggests the plywood forms identification as sculpture becomes the ‘simple

determination that it is what is in the room that is not really the room.’7 Whilst for

the outdoor mirrored boxes they are ‘distinct from the setting only because,

though visually continuous with grass and trees, they are not in fact part of the

landscape.’8 With these Morris works, sculpture enters its full condition of

negation – it is defined by what it is not (not-architecture and not-landscape).

5 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8 (Spring 1979); reprinted in: Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 36. The reprinted version in Foster (1983) is referenced hereafter. Krauss uses a mathematical structure, a Klein Group, conceived by the 19th century mathematician Felix Klein and which can be used to map operations within the human sciences. It relies on establishing a ‘quaternary field’ of binaries, in which Krauss places oppositional terms such as architecture/not-architecture, landscape/not-landscape. See also: A J Greimas & Francois Rastier, ‘The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints’, Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), 86-105. Greimas & Rastier point out that these types of structures (known as a Klein group in mathematics, and similar model in psychology – the Piaget group) allow the logical mapping of ‘semic terms’. 6 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 36. 7 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 36. 8 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 36.

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Krauss expounds that traditionally in Western art, sculpture was bound to the logic

of the monument. Sculpture served a commemorative function, symbolising a

distinct meaning or event in a specific place. The pedestal served to ground the

representational sign – the sculpture – in its specific place. With the advent of

modernism, sculpture rejected this call to the monument. The pedestal was

subsumed into the structure and a sculpture no longer spoke of a historical

instance, nor marked a specific site. It became placeless, siteless, though self-

referential and autonomous. Modernist sculpture became the negative condition of

the monument. By the mid-twentieth century modernist sculpture was no longer

representational or symbolic, it was abstract and analytical. For Krauss, modernist

sculpture’s drive to self-autonomy hastened its exhaustion as it followed painting’s

restricting resolve to medium purity. Modernist sculpture’s negative condition and

inverse logic meant it was increasingly defined by what it was not, rather than its

positive content.9 This is the point minimalism emerges. Vitally for Krauss, while

this development proves terminal for modernist sculpture, it opens to an expanded

field of postmodernist practices.

The ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition at the Jewish Museum exemplified late

modernist sculpture’s negative condition and inverse logic. Significantly, seen in

the show was sculpture’s distinct departure from its earlier logic and conventions.

Instead of resting on pedestals the works sat on the floor or jutted from the wall in

confrontation with the viewer. The stated, stark, and bold colour of the new

sculpture was thrown up in dramatic relief historically against the muddled and

drab tones of previous sculpture. Earlier sculpture had taken its colour cues from

its materials, aspiring to a middling generality between colour and form. Although

the exhibition featured the work of young artists from the London and New York

schools, it was notable, if not definitive, in establishing minimalism as distinct

aesthetic style. Some critics, namely Mel Bochner, identified amongst the various

styles those of a core group who became regarded as minimalists: Andre, Flavin,

LeWitt, Judd, Morris, and Smithson. Their works articulated a rationale which

9 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 33-4.

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challenged modernist interpretation and as a grouping represented a conceptual

split from other contemporary groups and artists in the exhibition [fig.56].

For Bochner, these six artists represented a definitive break from both previous

and contemporaneous art styles. ‘What is ultimately most difficult for the art

viewer of good faith to accept’, remarked Bochner, ‘is the non-visuality, a concept

at odds with all previous ideas of the Art experience.’10 The six artists’ works were

inexpressive; the hand of the artist seemingly absent in their making. This aspect

made critical penetration difficult, given most modernist interpretative models

sought to engage the artist’s subjectivity through the art object. Bochner identifies

in the work of the six artists a disjuncture between new and old art: ‘Old Art

attempted to make the non-visible (energy, feelings) visual (marks). The New Art

is attempting to make the non-visual (mathematics) visible (concrete).’11 Here,

Bochner points to a new motivation operating upon the works of Judd, Morris,

Andre, Flavin, LeWitt, and Smithson. Whereas the old art recorded the subjective

expressions of the artist, the new art sought more impartial measures. Serial

progressions, non-gestural arrangement, and non-compositional order informed

the works of these six artists in ‘Primary Structures’.

For the show, Judd displayed two near-identical rows of galvanised iron cubes

connected in front by a horizontal aluminium rod [fig.57]. One row of cubes sat on

the floor whilst the other was set into the wall behind in relief. The rod which

connected the cubes on the wall was painted blue, whilst the rod for the floor piece

remained plain. The seeming equivalence of the rows, seen in their symmetrical

arrangement and uniform size, is upset by the blue coloured rod. Inert and

metallic, Judd’s evenly spaced cubes made a bold statement – inexpressive, yet

wholly declarative. In terms of structural organisation these are the first truly

10 Mel Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, Arts Magazine, 40.8 (June 1966), 32-5, in: Bochner, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007 (Cambridge and London: October and the MIT Press, 2008). 11 Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, 35.

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serial works of Judd’s. Hereafter, Judd increasingly uses seriality to preclude

personal and subjective compositional choices in his works.

Morris exhibited two large grey ‘L’ shapes which were positioned alongside Judd’s

works [fig.58]. The L-Beams were set in different arrangements – one sat upright in

a regular ‘L’ position while the other was inverted. Morris worked with these

forms regularly during this period altering the arrangement of the ‘L’ shapes in

various showings. This reveals Morris’s intent to create Gestalt effect through basic

unitary forms. The viewer recognises these shapes as ‘L’s, though their unusual

configuration, sometimes inverted, sometimes back-to-front, made the

straightforward cognition of them as ‘L’ shapes somewhat unsure or uncertain.

The arrangement of the simple forms becomes increasingly important to the

meaning of Morris’s work. As Morris notes: ‘placement becomes critical as it never

was before in establishing the particular quality of the work. A beam on its end is

not the same as a beam on its side.’12

Flavin’s corner monument 4 (1966) in gallery one – an unassuming arrangement of

red fluorescent tubes occupying the corner of the room, Andre’s Lever (1966), a

row of firebricks laid out on the floor of gallery two, Le Witt’s Untitled (1966), a

white, open cubic grid in gallery eight, and Smithson’s five cog-like metallic units –

Cryosphere (1966) – set into the wall of the museum’s vestibule, were also

dissimilar in tone and tenor to the works of the other artists in the exhibition.

Amongst each other they seemed to loosely share a rejection of many aesthetic

conventions that were identifiable, however slightly, in the works of other artists

in the show.13

12 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 235. 13 Milton Kramer, ‘”Primary Structures” – The New Anonymity’, The New York Times (1 May 1966), 147: ‘There are, to be sure, at least two discernible modes of feeling in these sculptures: on the one hand, a certain cheerfulness and gaiety, an extrovert affability; and, on the other, an intellectual solemnity that only grudgingly permits its innermost concerns to be tested in the realm of quotidian experience.’ See also: Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, 32: ‘This addition of dilutants [sic] and mannerists to this exhibition (in the name, no doubt, of a ‘good show’) does not dissolve the issues the best work raises. In this exhibition, sculptors such as the Park Place group, the Richard Feigen group and the Pace

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In ‘Primary Structures’ Judd announces seriality as a non-compositional means for

organising a work. Morris’s use of Gestalts as structural organisation signals his

concern with phenomenology. This distinction will be expanded upon in the next

section of this chapter, though it is worth noting here that shown alongside each

other, Judd’s and Morris’s works were seen more in conceptual unity than apart.

Gallery five which contained their works, also featured sculptures by Robert

Grosvenor and Ronald Bladen. The choice of artists in this gallery speaks to the art

historical contest of New York sculpture in the mid-1960s.

Bladen created monumental and dramatic sculptures like the three black, slanted

rhomboids shown in Gallery five. He was older than Judd, Morris and the other

minimalists, and though he was associated with the geometric object-type

sculpture of the 1960s, he eschewed the depersonalised tendencies of

minimalism.14 To the younger minimalists, Bladen’s sculptures sought to echo the

movement, lyricism, and sublime romanticism that concerned some Abstract

Expressionist painting.15 The Elements (1965), Bladen’s three rhomboids, were

dynamic; their slant implied a push or pull operating on the three obelisks –

movement which was not present in the inert works of Judd or Morris. Grosvenor’s

Transoxiana (1965) was a large inverted ‘V’ that thrust downward from the ceiling

of Gallery five, made an acute about-turn, and soared back up to the ceiling. More

broadly, Grosvenor’s monumental constructions suggested movement in space or

travel through space in a manner that implied the forms were following

Gallery group are seen to be manipulating streamline versions of outmoded forms. They may be dismissed in a discussion of New Art.’ 14 James Meyer, ‘Ronald Bladen’, Artforum International, 37:9 (May 1999), 174. 15 Meyer, ‘Ronald Bladen’, 174. See also: Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Ronald Bladen’, Arts Magazine (February 1963), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 75. In Judd’s review of Bladen’s solo exhibition at Green Gallery (Dec.1962-Jan.’63), Judd points out that the composition of Bladen’s wall relief is suggestive of Rothko, whilst the placement of a plank is like Kline’s brush strokes – ‘a form of abbreviated naturalism.’ At the time of his show at the Green, Bladen was moving from his abstract, painted wall reliefs to his free-standing geometric sculptures. Judd criticisms arise from the gestural movement and undercurrent of naturalism he identifies in Bladen’s works; a criticism he would continue to detail in relation to Bladen’s monumental sculptures and indeed the rest of the Park Place group. Judith E. Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 253.

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internalised motivations. The tensile aspect in the works of Grosvenor and Bladen

came from their suggested kinaesthesia, evident stasis, and monumental size.16

Bladen and Grosvenor were associated with the Park Place Gallery in Greenwich

Village, while Judd and Morris were more identified with the Green Gallery in

Midtown. The Park Place group included the sculptor Mark di Suvero, and the

painters Leo Valledor and Ed Ruda. The aesthetic concerns of the Park Place group

generally conflicted with those of Judd and Morris, who viewed them as rivals

within the contest of art history taking place.17 Bladen, Grosvenor, and di Suvero

implied movement in their sculpture, using large counterbalanced forms and the

gestural arrangement of its materials. For Judd, this revealed compositional affect

and in relation to di Suvero’s sculpture he remarked:

Di Suvero uses beams as if they were brush strokes, imitating movement, as

[Franz] Kline did. The material never has its own movement. A beam thrusts, a

piece of iron follows a gesture; together they form a naturalistic and

anthropomorphic image.18

16 The Park Place group explored space not only in a formal or sculptural sense, but also examined space through their engagement with the technical and philosophical possibilities opened-up by the Space Age. They read journals on science, technology, and mathematics and developed a visual vocabulary that made manifest these interests. They also held noise-making jams at Park Place, smoking pot and listening to free jazz. David Bourdon wrote of the group: ‘The Park Place artists take the Space Age for granted and try to get it across in their work.’ See: David Bourdon, ‘E=MC2 a Go-Go’, ARTnews, 64.9 (January 1966), 24. Whilst Smithson found: ‘The Park Place Group … exists in a space-time monastic order, where they research a cosmos modelled after Einstein.’ And he described their works with the evocative terminology: ‘Valledor’s “fourth dimensional” color vectors, Grosvenor’s hypervolumes in hyperspace, and di Suvero’s demolitions of space-time.’ See: Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, 30-1. 17 Judd, ‘Complaints: part I’, Studio International (April 1969), in: Complete Writings, 198: ‘I hated the Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, itself and its title – primary sounds Platonic. The show started out a year earlier with Flavin, Morris, myself, maybe Andre and Bell and maybe a couple of others. Forty odd artists, I think, were in the show and a lot of them, most of Park Place had become geometric that year.’ 18 Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965; in: Judd, Complete Writings, 183. *Note: Di Suvero did not exhibit in ‘Primary Structures’.

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In contradistinction, the works of Judd, Morris, Andre, Flavin, LeWitt, and Smithson

in ‘Primary Structures’ were vastly inexpressive and inherently non-gestural. Judd

was against movement and anything expressionistic: ‘I am interested in static

visual art and hate imitation of movement’, he declared.19 In contrast to Bladen’s

and Grosvenor’s dynamic works in gallery five, Judd’s and Morris’s works were still

and silent. Similarly, Judd’s two rows of boxes and Morris’s two ‘L’ beams were

sombre and contained in terms of tone and scale against Bladen’s and Grosvenor’s

expressive and monumental structures. The engagement with space in the

respective works of Judd and Morris was literal and immediate to the actual space

surrounding their objects. For Morris, the size and scale of the object was a vital

consideration for its spatial context – the gallery space – and its perceptual

engagement by the viewer:

Beyond a certain size the object can overwhelm and the gigantic scale becomes the

loaded term. This is a delicate situation. For the space of the room itself is a

structuring factor both in its cubic shape and in terms of the kinds of compression

different sized and proportioned rooms can effect upon the subject-object terms.20

Where Bladen’s and Grosvenor’s sculptures were structured on a monolithic and

heroic scale, Morris’s and Judd’s works were scaled more realistically in relation to

the human body. As Morris’s above text identifies, in his work the critical concern

is the relationship of the embodied viewer to the object and how this relationship

is contextualised within the space of the gallery. Brian O’Doherty argues that

exhibitions, curatorship, and gallery spaces were transformed during the 1950s

and ‘60s as the tendency towards large, blank white rooms became the norm.

O’Doherty finds that the new art developed in tandem with the transformation of

the gallery space. He suggests that Stella’s shaped canvases were fundamental as

they broke the rectangular parallelism between painting and its support.

19 Donald Judd; John Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, Artforum, 9.10 (June 1971), 49. In reference to: Don Judd, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 27 February – 14 April 1968. Judd made this comments in relation to a row of floor boxes he exhibited at the Whitney in 1968. 20 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 233.

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O’Doherty writes: ‘The breaking of the rectangle formally confirmed the wall’s

autonomy, altering for good the concept of the gallery space.’21

The gallery spaces at the Jewish Museum for ‘Primary Structures’ consisted of

large, blank, white rooms. The sculptures on display in ‘Primary Structures’

dominated the gallery creating a contextual relationship with the display space

that had rarely been explored prior. These sculptures no longer simply sat on

pedestals with a myriad of other similar works, passive and unassuming, to be

contemplated by the viewer. The new sculpture asserted its presence within the

space making the viewer aware of their own embodied experience in relation to

the object and to the gallery space. Again, Morris in text reasserts this premise:

The awareness of scale is a function of the comparison made between that

constant, one’s body size, and the object. Space between the subject and the object

is implied in such a comparison. In this sense space does not exist for intimate

objects. A larger object includes more of the space around itself than it does a

smaller one.22

Seen above, the articulation of size and scale in Morris’s sculpture is in blunt

consideration of the body/object relationship and how this is framed within the

gallery space. This necessarily opens to a new art experience for the visitor and

demands new interpretive methodologies of the critic. Critics who labelled the

works of Morris, Judd, and their counterparts non-art and reductionist, did so

because against previous aesthetic criteria it was deemed deficient in some way.

Conversely, Judd countered: ‘New work is just as complex and developed as old

work. Its color and structure and its quality aren’t more simple than before; the

work isn’t narrow or somehow meaningful only as form.’23 Meanwhile Bochner

21 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1976). 29. 22 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 231. 23Donald Judd, ‘Statement’, for: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, The Jewish Museum, New York, April – June 1966, in: Judd, Complete Writings

1959-1975, 190. Judd continues: ‘Prior work could be called reductive too; it would have

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argued that terms such as ‘form-content’, ‘classic’, ‘romantic’, ‘expressive’,

‘individual’, ‘composition’, ‘biomorphic’, ‘biographic’ – were outmoded in face of

the new art that Judd and Morris championed.24

If minimalism emerges at the point of modernist sculpture’s utmost negative state,

as Krauss contends, the works of Judd, Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, Andre, and Smithson

in ‘Primary Structures’ necessarily demanded new modes of critical interpretation.

The apparent rejection of subjective meanings and the gestural and emotive

aesthetics associated with Abstract Expressionism, presented a quandary for

critics. The prefabricated and seemingly authorless objects of the six artists

identified by Bochner, signalled a break from the rationale of modernist art. Yet,

what logic did the artists themselves offer in its place?

Form and Order

The use of simple geometric forms is central within minimalism. Judd’s use of

simple forms, primarily cubes and rectangular prisms, is to escape rational and

anthropomorphic order. ‘Take a simple form – say a box – and it does have an

order,’ he remarked to Glaser, ‘but it’s not so ordered that that’s the dominant

quality.’25 Judd then used serial progressions or mathematical sequences to

organise his works in a way which precluded compositional choices of the artist.

He argued: ‘You see, the thing about my work is that it is given. Just as you take a

stack or row of boxes, it’s a row. Everybody knows about rows, so it’s given in

advance.’26

less color, less scale and less clear form; compared to the new work it would even mean less, since then much of its own meaning would be irrelevant.’ 24 Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, 33. 25 Donald Judd; Bruce Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, in: Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: a critical anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 156. 26 Judd; Coplans, ‘Interview with Don Judd’, 47, 49.

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Morris’s use of simple unitary forms is to generate Gestalt effects: ‘In the simpler

regular polyhedrons, such as cubes and pyramids, one need not move around the

object for the sense of the whole, the Gestalt, to occur’, Morris explained.27 Gestalt

theory came to significance in the 1920s in the writings of Wolfgang Kohler and

Max Wertheimer, who were both members of the Berlin Circle (die Berliner

Gruppe). Kohler and Wertheimer advanced Gestalt theory to challenge

conventional scientific method. For them, the fundamental logic of European

science was to break down complex structures into their constituent parts, then

analyse these parts in isolation to discover their governing laws. Reconstituting

these parts would then give a better understanding of the nature of the whole.

Contrary to conventional scientific thought, Kohler and Wertheimer held to the

proposition that it is the whole that makes sense of the laws of its parts.

Wertheimer offered this rationale in 1925: ‘There are wholes, the behaviour of

which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-

processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.’28

Gestalt theory seeks to makes sense of these wholes. Following Wertheimer’s

description, the extension of Gestalt theory into the visual arts in postwar America

was expressed by artists and critics ‘seeking the essential whole image’.29 This

dominant propensity within late modernist American art, from Greenberg through

to Judd and Morris, holds that the more unified the work of art, the more the

entirety of the art object speaks over the disparity of its parts. Wholeness in an art

work tends towards greater Gestalt effect. This points partly to the esteem in

27 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, 226. 28 Max Wertheimer, ‘Gestalt Theory’ (1925), in: Willis Davis Ellis (ed.), A source book of

Gestalt psychology (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1938), 2. See also: Wolfgang Kohler, ‘Physical Gestalten’ (1920), in: Willis Davis Ellis (ed.), A source book of Gestalt

psychology, 20: ‘The facts of vision require that we treat them [stimuli] as properties of a single physical system in which the totality of stimulus conditions both individually and collectively is determined by the whole which they comprise.’ 29 See: Rudolph Arnheim, ‘Gestalt and Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism, 2.8 (Autumn 1943), 71-75; Cindy Nemser, ‘Art Criticism and Perceptual Research’, Art Journal, 29.3 (Spring 1970), 326. Nemser indicates that Rudolf Arnheim, who studied under Kohler and Wertheimer in Berlin before immigrating to the United States, was instrumental in relating perceptual research to the visual arts.

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which Pollock was held in by Judd and Morris. Pollock created whole art works,

seemingly overcoming painting’s inherent divisions between content and form,

image and support.

With Morris, the simple geometric form also lacked internality. Yet, where Judd’s

focus is seen directed more towards the object articulating formal tensions upon it,

Morris’s focus is necessarily without. Morris used basic three-dimensional

polyhedrons in puzzle like configurations to create Gestalt effects. This emphasis

on the viewer’s perceptual engagement with the work points to an externalised

meaning for Morris’s sculpture. Morris’s phenomenological formalism extends the

concerns of his sculpture to spatially and temporally contextualise the embodied

experience of the viewer. The implication of the viewer’s experience in the

meaning of the work, for Fried, points to the innate theatricality of Morris’s

sculpture. Fried argued: ‘The literalist preoccupation with time – more precisely,

with the duration of the experience – is, I suggest, paradigmatically theatrical, as

though theater confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the

endlessness not just of objecthood but of time’.30

Taking simple geometric forms as the basis for their work, often likened the

objects of the minimalists to mass-produced items. In the case of Andre’s use of

firebricks, this is entirely literal. The evocation of industrial mass production

undermines the artisanal quality of artistic practice. Yet more so, the use of basic

units of identical size and shape arranged in an objective order or serial

arrangement, denied any sense of the art object’s internality. In response to Judd’s

one man show at the Green Gallery considered in the previous chapter, Fried

admitted: ‘I find myself unable to discover a convincing internal rationale for the

particular decisions of style and structure Judd has made.’31 Yet this was exactly

Judd’s intent, to deny internality or interior meaning of his objects. It is this

negation of internalised significance which most confounds modernist criticism.

30 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal

Art: a critical anthology, 144. 31 Fried, ‘New York Letter: Judd’ (1964), in Fried: Art and Objecthood: essays and reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 312

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Krauss further explains: ‘In structural or abstract terms, compositional devices of

the minimalists deny the logical importance of the interior space of forms – an

interior space which much of previous twentieth-century sculpture had

celebrated.’32

Following on from Krauss, the art object’s interior abstractly holds a symbolic

relationship with the individual associated with it – either the artist or the

viewer.33 By voiding the object of interior meaning, minimalism troubles this

relationship. The subject is unable to form a critical consonance with the object.

Thus, Fried reacts negatively to Judd’s work through his inability to identify any

internal rationale.34 Donald Kuspit terms this critical relationship between the

critic and the artist qua the artwork as ‘theatrical mirror transference’. Kuspit

theorises that the critic makes internal the subjective position of the artist to

decipher meaning in the art object. Kuspit explains:

… the artist is unconsciously regarded by the critic as his twin, his double. The art

is encountered and analysed in the aura of this two-faceted narcissistic

32 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 251 & 253. 33 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 250: ‘The idea that they were not fabricated by the artist but were made instead for some other use within society at large – constructing buildings – gives to those elements [firebricks] a natural opacity. It will be difficult, that is, to read them illusionistically or to see them as alluding to an inner life of form (the way chiselled rock in a sculptural context might allude to inner biological forces). Instead the firebricks remain obdurately external, as objects of use rather than vehicles of expression. In this sense the readymade elements can convey, on a purely, abstract level, the idea of simple externality.’ 34 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 156. Ironically and perhaps wrongly, Fried described both Judd’s and Morris’s work (as well as Tony Smith’s) as being anthropomorphic. This was due, so Fried believed, to their works having an inner meaning or ‘life’: ‘It is, as numerous commentators have remarked approvingly, as though the work in question has an inner, even secret, life – an effect that is perhaps made most explicit in Morris’s Untitled (1965-66), a large ringlike form in two halves, with fluorescent light glowing from within at the narrow gap between the two. I am suggesting, then, that a kind of latent or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism, lies at the core of literalist theory and practice … The latency or hiddenness of the anthropomorphism has been such that the literalist themselves, as we have seen, have felt free to characterise modernist art they oppose, for example, the sculpture of David Smith and Anthony Caro, as anthropomorphic – a characterisation whose teeth, imaginary to begin with, have just been pulled.’ Krauss’s reading on minimalist sculpture, which argues the object’s externality, contradicts Fried’s anthropomorphic interpretation here. See fn.33.

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transference, out of which emerges a fantasy or transference representation of the

artist-self, which is internalised by the critic. But it is in fact the critic’s self ‘making

sense’ of the art, that is, giving it a self of which the particular works are regarded

as emanations.35

The use of simple three-dimensional forms without interiority negates this critical

act of ‘mirror transference’. Unable to penetrate the art object to arrive at its

essential meaning, reactionary critics like Greenberg or Fried dismiss minimalism

as non-art. In turn, Judd retorted: ‘Non-art’, ‘anti-art’, ‘non-art art’ and ‘anti-art art’

are useless. If someone says his work is art, it’s art.’36 Minimalism opened to new

art criticism, necessarily beyond Greenbergian formalism. For Judd, simple

geometric forms presented the most efficient means to exclude any sense of

anthropomorphic, hierarchical, or rationalist order. As he noted in relation to

Morris’s work: ‘Order, in the old sense, can’t be read into something that is just a

rectangle or a triangle.’37 Judd then used repetition to further eliminate

compositional order and artistry. ‘The order is not rationalistic and underlying’, he

wrote (in relation to Stella), ‘but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing

after another.’38 Repetition, ‘one thing after another’, expunges any question that

the forms are following the artist’s gesture or directed by some internal

motivation.

In Judd’s first solo show at Castelli Gallery, beginning in February 1966, the artist

featured works mainly organised by repetition and serial progressions [fig.59].

These included a wall-bound, long aluminium bar with purple subtended units, a

vertical stack of galvanised iron boxes set into the gallery wall at identical

intervals, a horizontal row of aluminium boxes with a blue bar (this had also

appeared in ‘Primary Structures’), a horizontal and wall-bound, stainless steel row

of cubes with amber plexiglass ends, and three low steel wedges, perforated and

35 Donald Kuspit, ‘The Subjective Aspect of Critical Evaluation’, in: The New Subjectivism:

Art in the 1980s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 555-6. 36 Judd, ‘Statement for: Primary Structures’, 190. 37 Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, Arts Magazine (February 1965), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 165. 38 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 184.

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placed alongside each other. Two unitary works were also displayed – a single,

large aluminium box which sat on the gallery floor and a galvanised iron box set

into the wall with green plexiglass at its top and bottom, casting green reflections

on the gallery wall above and below.

Judd’s vertical stack at Castelli contained seven identical, clearly segregated, and

evenly-spaced boxes. The play between negative and positive space in the work

gave off the spatial effect of a singular vertical column. Judd used this format

extensively hereafter, changing the number of units within the stack for different

displays. Judd experimented intensely with a multitude of colours and materials in

this stack format [figs.60, 61, & 62]. Within the various installations of Judd’s

stacked boxes no one of the units is held subordinate or dominant in relation to the

others; the independent units are perceived in unison. With these stacks, Judd

overcomes relational composition and hierarchical layering in a multi-part work of

discrete and identical units through serial organisation.

With his first Castelli show, several key terms from Judd’s aesthetic vocabulary are

pronounced within a serial system – independence of parts, specificity of

materials, polarity of colours, and formal unity or wholeness. The distinction of

this show resides in Judd’s articulation of these artistic terms, which he first

identifies in the work of Newman and Pollock, within a postindustrial syntax. Part

of Judd’s consequence to late modernism is that he impressed systemic thinking

upon art. That is, Judd evokes factorial production in the creation of late modernist

sculpture – a seeming antithesis or contradictory notion in the context of high art.

Bochner here expands on the concept of systemic thinking:

Systems are characterised by regularity, thoroughness, and repetition in execution.

They are methodical. It is their consistency and the continuity of application that

characterises them. Individual parts of a system are not in themselves important

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but are relevant only in how they are used in the enclosed logic of the whole

series.39

Following on from Bochner, seriality is not commensurate with modernist

aesthetics.40 The clinical precision and methodical repetition of Judd’s wall-

mounted boxes and floor-bound cubes seem a far remove from the visceral drip

paintings of Pollock. Visually, they are. Yet conceptually, within these serial works

Judd is seeking three-dimensional resolutions to aspects he valued in Pollock’s

painting. The play between negative and positive space, the independence of the

works’ parts within a unified whole, the polarisation of light and colour, and

importantly using repetition as non-compositional order.

One of the main criticisms levelled against Judd is that he outsourced the

production of his objects to metal workshops and factories. This was not

uncommon practice and was not exclusive to Judd or minimalism. It is arguable

that this criticism stems not from the use of industrial workshops in the realisation

of the art object, but instead the manufacturing thinking in the conception of it.41

As Krauss notes, Judd used seriality to ‘drive the possibility of significance out of

the act of placing or arranging forms.’42 It is the negation of this significance that

troubles modernist critics. In his critique of minimalism as theatre, Fried contends

that the minimalists are concerned with ‘endlessness’. Fried’s frustration is that

the experience of the object is necessarily temporal – it is measurable by time.

39 Mel Bochner, ‘Serial Art Systems: Solipsism’, Arts Magazine (Summer 1967), 40. 40 Bochner, ‘Serial Art Systems: Solipsism’, 40. 41 Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum (September 1968), 31. Jack Burnham suggests that the relation of art to industrial production reflected a boarder rationalisation of postwar American society. For Burnham, systemic thinking could be seen in most ‘matrixes of human activity’ where there was need to create stable relationships between ‘organic and non-organic systems’; from industrial complexes and transportation systems to farms and neighbourhoods. In the mid-1960s, minimalism introduced systemic thinking to art, nominally the most individualist and subjective human endeavour. Hence, the initial critical reception of minimalism was that it was cold and impersonal. 42 See: Krauss, Passages of Modern Sculpture, (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 245: ‘One found it in the early 1960s in the sculpture of Donald Judd, through wall-bound rows of boxes in which the sameness of the units and the regularity of the intervals between them seemed to drive the possibility of ‘significance’ out of the act of placing or arranging forms.’

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Compounding frustration for Fried is the fact that the temporal experience

confronting the spectator is endless – it goes on and on. In relation to Judd, Fried

charged:

In fact, it seems to be the experience that most deeply excites literalist sensibility,

and that literalist artists seek to objectify in their work – for example, by the

repetition of identical units (Judd’s ‘one thing after another’), which carries the

implication that the units in question could be multiplied ad infinitum.43

The implication that Judd’s rows and stacks of boxes could go on and on forever,

while not the actual case, goes to the core of the modernist distrust of minimalism.

As noted, Judd used repetition to negate the significance of arranging forms, to

inhibit personal compositional choices. Fried’s notion of endlessness, where Judd’s

rows and stacks continue on and on, suggests no personal agency is acting upon

them. The nightmarish revelation for Fried is that this calls to question

modernism’s anthropocentric view of the world – it upsets the natural order.44

Judd’s use of simple geometric units and serial progression to structurally organise

his works, purges the art object of interior meaning and compositional effects.

Instead, Judd stresses the formal tensions operating upon the work. These include

the play between positive and negative space, the synchronicity of discrete units

into a whole form, and the incongruity between the illusive properties of light and

colour against the tactile rigidity of the works’ materiality and structural

43 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 144. 44 Conversely, it can be argued that minimalism forces a universal understanding of life and existence in which humans are not the centre. The minimalist composer Steve Reich, likewise known for his use of repetition, writes of this understanding in relation to his own work: ‘Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward it.’ Reich’s point here is that an art work that eschews rationalist aesthetics and anthropomorphic order, requires its audience to look outside the work and themselves for meaning. See: Steve Reich, ‘Music as Gradual Process’, Writings on Music (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 34-36.

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organisation. The articulation of these tensions operating upon the self-contained

object goes to the conceptual strength of Judd’s artistic program.

Morris staged Gestalt theory in his sculptural installation at the Dwan Gallery Los

Angeles in March 1966 [fig.63].45 An untitled work featuring four grey fibreglass

irregular polyhedrons presented a simple visual puzzle to the viewer. Rising just

below waist height and fixed in a separated configuration, the inner facing planes

of the boxes ran perpendicular at right angles. The outer facing sides were slanted

[fig.64]. When the spectator encountered the polyhedrons in their separated

configuration, they almost immediately perceived them grouped together as a

whole – a truncated square-based pyramid. As Morris explains, the Gestalt occurs

when the viewer’s spatially visualises this unified whole: ‘One sees and

immediately believes that the pattern within one’s mind corresponds to the

existential fact of the object. Belief in this sense is both a kind of faith in spatial

extension and a visualisation of that extension.’46 Morris’s installation here evokes

the simple block and pattern puzzles used to teach young children arithmetic and

basic geometry.47 The tendency of the viewer is to visually arrange the

polyhedrons in their correct position. Unlike children’s puzzles however, this is an

urge that can never be satisfied. Morris directs the viewer towards the Gestalt

though never resolves it.

Another quizzical work in this exhibition was a large fibreglass ring cut in half

across its diameter [fig.65]. White light shone from the split in the ring from

fluorescent lights Morris installed inside the two segments. Here, the perceptual

urge is to visualise the complete ring, yet the emanating light vexes the viewer’s

45 Robert Morris, ‘Sculpture’, 15 March – April 1966, Dwan Gallery Los Angeles. 46 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, 226. 47 Max Wertheimer, ‘The Famous Story of Young Gauss’, in: Wertheimer, Productive

Thinking (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959 [1945]), 126-7. ‘If confronted by such patterns – say in blocks – there seems to be even in children a strong tendency in the sensible direction. They often get at it spontaneously, ‘improving’, ‘correcting’ the situation. No language is needed – they just put the objects together reasonably, fit them together. Often it is not even necessary to assign a task for a sensible response to appear: it grows out of the inner dynamics of the situation. Again we see the role of ‘disturbance’, ‘gap’, ‘fitting’, ‘being just needed’, ‘being required’, as parts in a consistent whole.’

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attempt to grasp the whole form. If there were shadows instead of light, would

perceiving the whole be easier?48 Again, instead of resolving the Gestalt, Morris

stresses separation between the whole and its parts. In staging Gestalt theory

through his large-form sculptural works, Morris theatricalises the viewer’s

perceptual relationship with the object(s). A reviewer of the show suggested the

apparent meaning of Morris’s sculptures rests in the fact they compelled the

viewer into a ‘kind of Gestalt showdown’.49 Morris’s basic unitary forms precluded

rational analysis. The forms’ externality and relationship within the gallery space

forced the viewer to analyse the visual field in which they were arranged. The

shifting, physical perspective of the viewer then becomes one of the formal terms

involved in the work. Here, Morris explains how the formalist considerations of his

work are not exclusive to the non-reducible object, but are extraneous to it: ‘While

the work must be autonomous in the sense of being a self-contained unit for the

formation of the Gestalt, the indivisible and undissolvable whole, the major

aesthetic terms are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object.’50

Whether conscious to the viewer or not, their shifting perspective, along with the

environmental exigencies of the gallery (space and light), become formal terms in

the enactment of Morris’s sculpture. Only one aspect of the work is immediate,

writes Morris: ‘the apprehension of the Gestalt. The experience of the work

necessarily exists in time.’51 It follows, that within this contrived situation the

temporally-measurable experience of the viewing subject functions in the

consequence of the work. This of course underscores Fried’s charge of theatre

against Morris. Morris’s sculpture, as with dramatic theatre, requires an audience

48 David Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, ARTnews, 65 (April 1966), 56. ‘… in the split ring at the Dwan, the use of light is even more emphatic [compared to Morris’s plywood show at the Green], since fluorescent lights are installed inside the ring segments and glow from the air gaps, which would normally be reservoirs of shadow. This is one of the major factors contributing to the strangeness of the piece, but this sort of equivocation has always been characteristic of Morris’s work.’ 49 Donald Factor, ‘Los Angeles, Dwan Gallery, Robert Morris’, Artforum (April 1966), 13. ‘The prime significance of these sculptures is the effect of forcing the viewer into a kind of Gestalt showdown. These non-reducible, closed forms sit uncomfortably in the gallery space, or, in Gestalt terms, the ‘visual field’, and permit of no direct analysis. Thus, they force the viewer into analysing the field itself and disrupting his organisational habits.’ 50 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 234. 51 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 234.

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to complete it. Fried argues further, that not only is the viewer’s experience of the

object measurable by time, but the temporal experience confronting them is

endless:

Similarly, Morris’s claim that in the best new work the beholder is made aware

that ‘he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from

various positions under varying conditions of light and spatial context’ amounts to

the claim that the beholder is made aware of the endlessness and inexhaustibility

if not of the object itself at any rate his experience of it.52

Fried reads endlessness in Morris’s minimalist objects as they never resolve upon

themselves, instead they engage the viewing subject in a Gestalt circularity. With

Judd, Fried saw endlessness in the suggestion of infinite repetition. Fried argues,

that unlike minimalism’s endlessness, modernist painting and sculpture pertain to

them the qualities of ‘presentness’ and ‘instantaneousness’. That is, modernist art

is held to be self-sufficient and self-fulfilling – ‘every moment the work itself is

wholly manifest.’53 As such, the viewer’s experience of modernist painting and

sculpture is not bound to a notion of duration as these works exist in a ‘continuous

and perpetual present’.54 What’s more, modernist paintings and sculptures do not

require an audience to complete their function as art objects.

In contrast, Morris’s sculptural object operates as but one formal term within a

theatrical or expanded situation. Control of the situation then becomes of primary

importance to Morris: ‘the concerns now are for more control of and/or

cooperation of the entire situation’, he writes: ‘Control is necessary if the variables

of object, light, space, body, are to function.’55 Further, Morris argues that it is his

emphasis on the expanded situation which distinguishes his work from Judd’s. In

pointed reference to Judd’s specific object, Morris pans: ‘The sensuous object,

52 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 144. 53 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 145. 54 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 146. 55 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 234.

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resplendent with compressed internal relations, has had to be rejected.’56 Morris’s

inference here is that Judd emphasises the formalist concerns operating upon the

object itself, where in contrast his work articulates extraneous formal

considerations. On the other hand, Judd faults the lack of visual interest in Morris’s

objects, implying that they barely exist as art: ‘They are next to nothing; you

wonder why anyone would build something only barely present. There isn’t

anything to look at.’57 To which Morris responds: ‘That many considerations must

be taken into account in order that the work keep its place as a term in the

expanded situation hardly indicates a lack of interest in the object itself.’58

These differing viewpoints concerning the object opens to the major source of

dissonance between Judd and Morris. In his ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essays, Morris

airs the notion that his work presents a haptic understanding of sculpture,

whereas Judd’s objects appeal to the optic and therein belie their origination from

painting. To this, the use and concern of colour as a formal consideration becomes

important in interrogating the haptic/optic discrimination between the two artists.

In the next chapter of this thesis, Judd’s and Morris’s formalist concerns of colour

and facture are analysed. While colour becomes the major point of contention

between the two artists, new age materials and the industrial manufacture of their

works is an initial point of resonance. The discord they strike through their

contracting of professional metal workshops is with competing contemporary

artists and historically against traditional notions of artistry and the handmade.

56 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 234. 57 Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, 165. 58 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, 234.

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CHAPTER SIX

Formalist Concerns: Red and Grey

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter further analyses the formalist

concerns of Judd and Morris. The sharpest discord between the artists is on the

grounds of colour. Judd viewed colour similarly to how he viewed materials and

other formal properties – it was treated as a structural element. In this regard,

Judd’s work extends from the earlier painters of the New York School in their

structural use of colour. In contrast, Morris rejects colour because of its optical

quality. Morris used a neutral palette to lessen visual appeal in his sculpture, but

sought to heighten its spatial claims. Morris’s plain grey forms had the further

effect of questioning visual definitions of art, which led to Judd’s labelling of

Morris’s work as minimal.

Where Judd and Morris share common concerns, is in the use of industrial

materials and contracting metal workshops to have their pieces constructed. In

their respective writings, Judd and Morris valorise the availability of new materials

and manufacturing processes to the contemporary artist. Their engagement with

these non-traditional materials and processes was exceedingly technical and led to

censure by critics and artists who valued the artisanal nature of art. For Morris, the

use of professional metal workers to execute his concepts ultimately proved

problematic. The removal of the artist from the production of the object, provoked

Morris’s divergence from minimalism and his subsequent experimentation with

soft materials in his postminimalist practice. Here, Morris unravels the minimalist

object’s stated materiality and reasserts the physical role of the artist in artmaking.

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Colour

Morris claimed colour as a major point of differentiation between his work and

Judd’s. He argued that colour detracted from the physical aspects of sculpture and

that it was primarily an optical concern. Where Judd states: ‘Color is never

unimportant, as it usually is in sculpture,’1 Morris argues just this, that colour is

unimportant to sculpture: ‘It is the essentially optical, immaterial, non-containable,

non-tactile nature of color that is inconsistent with the physical nature of

sculpture.’2 To which Judd countered: ‘I consider everything to be color, including

gray, so that business of gray not being a color that Morris talks about is

nonsense.’3

Judd’s use of colour extends from his earlier painting: ‘so obviously’, he notes, ‘I

wasn’t going to go and do uncolored three-dimensional things.’4 His palette in his

earlier objects centred around cadmium red. It was bold though spare with few

hues and in this sense reflected his aesthetic closeness to Newman. With Judd’s

first show at Castelli, which was considered in the previous chapter, his use of

colour gained complexity. The objects of Judd’s principal minimalist period

generally feature more than one colour, often achieved using coloured materials.

Intense experimentation with colour, materials, and structural organisation

became readily associated with Judd’s work from the mid-1960s. From his first

show at Castelli, Judd introduced the use of coloured materials, such as tinted

Plexiglass and anodised metals. Using coloured materials meant the juxtaposition

of materials created polarisation between colours. Judd’s structural organisation of

the works, whether unitary or serial, heightened tensions between colours and

between materials.

1 Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965, in: Donald Judd, Complete Writings

1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design), 183. 2 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part I’, Artforum, 4.6 (February 1966), in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 225. 3 Donald Judd; John Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, Artforum, 9.10 (June 1971), 45. 4 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 44.

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The use of coloured embedded materials marked a crucial step for Judd. He had

realised in his early plywood pieces, with the absorbent nature of the material and

the need for thick coats of paint, that the result was an indefinite volume and

surface. Judd found metals did not have to be painted and he used metals

extensively to ‘reduce the number of ambiguous elements in the pieces, to define

them more rigorously.’5 Further, the adonising process freed Judd from the

lingering problem of painted surfaces. The disunion between painted surface and

its supporting structure is one of the irresolvable problems which pushed Judd

from painting to objects: ‘one also had the problem that there were at least two

things in the painting’, he stated, ‘the rectangle itself and the thing (image) in the

rectangle’.6 Applying a painted surface to an object repeats this binary division, no

matter how slight. In using colour embedded materials, Judd collapses the

distinction between surface and structure. Colour becomes part of the structure

itself.

Light is used by Judd to sustain tension between the part and the whole. This is

seen in one work from Judd’s Castelli show in 1966; a horizontally, wall-bound row

of four stainless steel boxes with amber plexiglass at their lateral ends. From front-

on the metal boxes appear as discrete, silver units with slight amber colour seen at

their lateral edges. When seen directly side on, looking through the plexiglass

sheets, it appears the boxes are connected through a unifying beam of amber

colour. The viewer’s movement from front on to side on elicits contradictory visual

experiences. Krauss, in an article relating to Judd’s exhibition, suggests that this

optical interplay with the viewer points to the illusory quality of Judd’s work.7 The

piece that puzzled Krauss was an elongated, horizontal aluminium bar set high into

the wall [fig.66]. Ten small, violet aluminium units of differing sizes and spaced at

unequal intervals, subtended from the long uncoloured bar. Krauss notes that the

extreme length of the bar meant the work had to be viewed in perspective. Yet, at

the same time, Judd confounds this perspective view with the different sizing and

5 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 45-6. 6 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Don Judd’, 41. 7 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd’, Artforum, 4.9 (May 1966), 24-6.

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intervals of the violet units. The size and spacing of the units do not correlate with

the viewer’s understanding of geometric proportion in perspective.

Krauss establishes that the work ‘cannot be seen rationally’, as the a priori laws of

geometry conflict with the actual experience of the object.8 Drawing upon Merleau-

Ponty, Krauss finds Judd’s work can only be understood through ‘lived

perspective’.9 That is, the work only becomes sensible in the direct experience of

the viewer. Yet, Krauss goes further, interrogating Judd’s use of colour and

material, to argue Judd’s work presents a ‘lived illusion’.10 More recently, David

Raskin and Richard Shiff have both countered Krauss’s implication that Judd’s

objects are somehow insincere in rejecting pictorial illusionism while inviting

visual illusion. Raskin finds that Krauss’s view of Judd’s piece discussed above

extends from the belief ‘that our perception and conception of the world require[s]

a representational interface’. This belief extends from Cartesian thought to which

Raskin writes:

In presenting this idea – one she called ‘lived illusion’ to distinguish it from non-

modernist pictorial illusionism – she held that Judd’s art served as ‘an irritant’,

teaching viewers that the world is only a function of active cognition, since they

must move in order to make sense of his art. Krauss thought that meaning in Judd’s

work resides in evoking just this self-reflection, because it believed it was

interaction with objects in the world that enlivens them, that imbues them with

significance.11

Pursuing Raskin’s argument, the critical frustrations directed against Judd’s work

stems from a rationalist premise where the subject’s engagement with the object

8 Krauss, ‘Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd’, 26. 9 See: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (1969), [trans. John O’Neill], (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 52-3. Discussed previously in Chapter 3 of this thesis. 10 Krauss, ‘Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd’, 26. 11 David Raskin, ‘The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd’, Art Journal, 65.1 (Spring 2006), 7 & 9.

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gives the object consequence. Given Judd’s repeated rejection of Cartesian

philosophy, it is difficult to reconcile this understanding with his work. Indeed,

Judd seemingly presents an object disassociated from the subjective. The object is

and of itself. The formal tensions Judd brings to bear upon the object, do not

appear reliant upon the subjective experience of the viewer to make them

cognisable. Nonetheless, visual interest is heightened in Judd’s objects through

tensions created between the optical – but real – concerns of materials, colour,

light, and structural pulse. The visual illusions elicited through the stressing of

these tensions are real. The subject’s experience of these illusions is empirically

measurable. Shiff here outlines the difference between illusion and illusionism in

relation to Judd’s work:

Everyone see optical illusions in the same situations, under the same conditions.

Such illusions are not only objective but real – real illusions. They have little to do

with illusionism. What Judd said of the modern artist’s emphasis on colour – that it

produced ‘an immediate sensation, a phenomenon’, that it ‘destroyed the earlier

representational painting’ – applied also to optical illusion. The ‘illusions’ of

illusionism, to the contrary, were effects neither physiologically nor

phenomenologically inherent in the direct apprehension of an object. Illusion is the

way things are. Illusionism is the way things are not.12

As Shiff notes, the visual illusions that occur in Judd’s work are real and objective

and do not impress upon the viewer an image which defies empirical observation.

The tension between clarity and ambiguity does however, underscore much of

Judd’s work. Robert Pincus-Witten termed this ‘the device of

attraction/frustration’, where the viewer’s experience of the object is never fully

resolved.13 The culminating point between what is visually concrete and what is

12 Richard Shiff, ‘Donald Judd, Safe from Birds’, in: Nicholas Serota (ed.) Donald Judd (Tate Publishing: London), 42. 13 Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘Fining it Down: Don Judd at Castelli’, Artforum (June 1970), 49. ‘He engages the spectator without in fact permitting the participation to spend itself. Open ended boxes, for example, are placed too low to crawl through while polished surfaces and glossy plastic linings also thwart the sensate body appeals they are making.’ Considering Raskin’s observations in relation to Krauss (fn.11), Pincus-Witten similarly places the viewing subject at the centre of meaning with Judd’s objects.

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visual illusion is never quite revealed to the viewer or completed by their shifting

perspectives. In the sense, the experience of Judd’s objects undulates between the

haptic and the optic.

Morris persisted with his distinction from Judd using colour. He emphasised the

inherently optical nature of colour and reinforced the physical and tactile concerns

of his sculpture. In antagonism of Judd, Morris declared, ‘intense color, being a

specific element, detaches itself from the whole of the work to become one more

internal relationship. The same can be said of emphasis on specific, sensuous

material or impressively high finishes.’14 Here, Morris is defining and

substantiating his own definition of minimalist sculpture in contradiction to Judd’s

specific objects. Seen in this way, Morris’s theoretical positioning, as

communicated through his ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essays, is didactically oppositional

to Judd’s. In arguing on the grounds of colour, Morris delineates the optic from the

haptic. From the perspective of Morris’s argument, the chromatic appeals of Judd’s

sensuous objects disarm their physical claims to sculpture. In contrast, Morris used

almost exclusively a neutral palette of Merkin Pilgrim grey in his work.

For Morris, the colour grey obviates internal relationships in the work. Conversely,

he finds Judd’s use of vibrant colours increase the internal relationships in the

object. In lessening the visual appeal of his sculptural forms by using grey paint,

Morris encourages the viewer to shift their perceptual focus to external concerns.

As such, Morris’s sculpture is reduced to the simple determination whether it is

part of the architecture of the room or not. In Morris’s solo exhibition at the Dwan

Gallery Los Angeles, a reviewer noted just this:

One does not see these simple, neutral, grey polyhedrons in the conventional sense

of seeing sculpture. Rather, the pieces are sensed as spatial amalgams, objects that

disrupt or comment upon the space of the room. Interest in the shapes themselves

14 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part II’, Artforum, 5.2 (October 1966), in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 232.

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is quickly diminished, leaving an impression of scale as the dominant tension-

causing device.15

As the reviewer identifies, the visual appeal of Morris’s objects is limited. The

basic, grey-painted forms do not hold the attention of the viewer long and this is

Morris’s intent. Unlike Judd’s objects, which Morris criticises for their overly visual

appeal, Morris’s sculptural forms have minimal visual tensions operating upon

them. Morris’s concern is with manipulating the formal conditions necessarily

without. Morris works with the formal properties of size, mass, and scale,

moderating these relative to the gallery space in consideration of the viewer. The

diminishing visual appeal of Morris’s sculpture heightens their claims to real space.

Morris privileges the haptic over the optic. The grey paint further speaks to this; it

uniformly blankets the forms barely differentiating them from each other within

the gallery space. So, as David Antin writes: ‘Only the greyness of the paint seems

constant.’16

Antin, in comparing Morris’s Los Angeles Dwan show and his earlier plywood

show at the Green, likewise notes the spatial claims of Morris’s sculpture. Antin

observes that Morris’s effectiveness in doing this differs with the materials he

respectively used in the two shows. In Morris’s Dwan show, several of the pieces

were constructed from fibreglass with no visible joins or fissures in the material.

For Antin, the forms appeared as ‘sudden materialisations of some indefinable grey

substance’ to envelop space within.17 In Morris’s show at the Green, joins between

the plywood sheets were visible and disunion between the grey paint and plywood

surface was discernible. This for Antin, made the ‘large pieces look relatively

weightless, like continuous, enclosed surfaces rather than volumes.’18 The

positioning of the plywood forms and the bare differentiation in colour to each

other and to the gallery room left Antin to conclude: ‘At what point does grey

15 Donald Factor, ‘Los Angeles, Dwan Gallery, Robert Morris’, Artforum, 4.8 (April 1966), 13. 16 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, ARTnews, 65 (April 1966) 56. 17 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 56. 18 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 56.

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become white? The question is what are we looking at?19 Expanding on Antin’s

comments, the uncertainty Morris’s sculptural forms elicit resides in their bare

existence as art objects. Critics of Morris’s shows at the Green and at the Dwan

galleries read the works as phenomenological propositions. Morris’s plain and grey

polyhedrons were a seeming rejection of the notion of art being something to look

at. Morris’s sculptural works called attention to the formal conditions under which

they were arranged. Morris ascribes meaning in these works to the viewer’s

perceptual experience within a contrived theatrical situation.

Judd reviewed Morris’s plywood show at the Green Gallery and Morris’s work

shown in the ‘Black, White and Gray’ exhibition [see: fig.52].20 In these two

reviews, Judd labels Morris’s work as minimal, cool, and barely existing as art.

Morris does not reject Judd’s observations of his work in the two reviews, but

rather craftily subverts them in his attack against the optic nature of Judd’s objects

in his ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essays. Morris further disclaims Judd’s call to the

specific object by situating his own minimalist forms in historical continuum of

sculpture, not the category of new objects that Judd seeks beyond painting and

sculpture. Judd’s thoughts upon Morris’s sculpture, nonetheless, are clearly

prescient. In relation to Morris’s Green Gallery show Judd found:

Morris’s work nearly appears not to be art; perhaps he doesn’t want it to be

thought art at first, though of course it is finally. ‘Cool’ applies only to Morris. The

pieces are fairly ordinary geometric shapes and a very ordinary color, but they

have been built. They’ve been made on purpose, not found, to be minimal,

unimportant, relatively unordered objects.21

19 Antin, ‘Art & Information, 1 Grey Paint’, 56. 20 ‘Black, White and Gray’, Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut, 9 January – 9 February 1964. 21 Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, Arts Magazine (February 1965), in: Judd, Complete Writings, 165.

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Here, the reasoning behind Judd’s stern resistance to the term minimalism in

context of his own work becomes apparent. Judd initially uses the term against

Morris’s work that he sees existing minimally and barely as art. The ordinary

greyness of the forms further dispels any visual claims upon Morris sculpture.

Instead, greyness sustains Morris’s preferencing of a haptic experience over an

optic one. The experience of Morris’s sculpture is temporal and the materials and

construction of the forms tends to the ephemeral. In this way, Morris’s minimalist

sculpture is framed as conceptually oppositional to Judd’s specific object.

Rauschenberg’s White Paintings were also shown in ‘Black, White and Gray’. In his

review, Judd notes that Rauschenberg’s paintings along with Morris’s grey

sculptures are ‘the extreme of the most inclusive attitude of the show.’22 Judd’s

observation here is that both Rauschenberg’s paintings and Morris’s sculpture

question the visual nature of art, but in doing so, they point profoundly to the

equivalence of all things. That is, like everything else they exist – however

minimally:

Morris’s pieces exist after all, as meagre as they are. Things that exist exist, and

everything is on their side. They’re here, which is pretty puzzling. Nothing can be

said of things that don’t exist. Things exist in the same way if that is all that is

considered – which may be because we feel that or because that is what the word

means or both. Everything is equal, just existing, and the values and interests they

have are only adventitious.23

In comparison, Judd conceived his objects to be the equivalent of Pollock’s or

Newman’s in their claims as high art. Neo-Dadaist or theatrical propositions which

questioned the very endeavour of art is not reflected in Judd’s late modernist

program. Materially and conceptually, Judd’s objects stated permanence and

resolution. The artistic lineage Judd constructs for his work through the primary

painters of the New York School suggests he did not consider his work minimal in

the way he implied it to Morris. Colour was as important to Judd as it was to

22 Donald Judd, ‘Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, Arts Magazine (March 1964), in: Complete Writings, 118. 23 Judd, ‘Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, 118.

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Rothko. The visual strength of Judd’s objects lies in the specificity, polarity, and

boldness of colour. Judd’s triumph is in how he identifies these optical qualities in

the best of Abstract Expressionist painting and articulates them in three-

dimensional objects. To this, Judd’s intense and technical experimentation with

colour is indicative of a high-modernist sensibility. Conjecturally, the colours Judd

worked with, along with the materials and serial arrangements, do not pertain to

them characteristics of high art. This paradox reveals the anxiety that Judd bears

upon formalism and late modernism. Judd’s methodical and highly analytical

practice befits Greenberg’s description of the modernist artist. Judd’s aesthetic

program however, was directed at tearing down modernist art’s defining

conditions – medium purity, artisanal quality, and content and form – to position

the new art, his specific object, in its place.

Much more recently, Morris revived his objections to Judd’s use of colour and

materials, pointing to the optic and haptic distinction as the main difference

between their practices: ‘Judd’s work … in its emphasis on candy-box colored

surfaces and simple serial extensions, issues from an essentially optical position.

Haptic physicality and phenomenological penetrations of space were foreign to his

work.’24 This is not entirely unaffected, indeed there is a revisionist refrain to

Morris’s writing. Yet in the terms Morris establishes, he is one of the ‘more severe

practitioners’ of minimalism due to his engagement with space and conversely,

what he states, Judd’s objects ignoring this space: ‘Always beautiful but never

sublime, it fetishized the object and ignored the space.’25

Judd clearly held a formal concern with space however he was less interested in

the vocabulary of conventional sculpture: ‘I have always been interested in making

light pieces, I dislike sculptural bulk, weight, and massiveness’.26 It follows, that a

light object can hold as much space as a heavy object can. What Judd sought was

art objects that were visually sustaining and enduring like the Abstract

24 Robert Morris, ‘Size Matters’ (2000), in: Morris, Have I Reasons: work and writings, 1993-

2007, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 126. 25 Morris, ‘Size Matters’, 126. 26 Judd; Coplans, ‘An Interview with Donald Judd’, 45.

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Expressionist paintings with which his work resonated and colour was the main

means in which he achieved this. The primary formal distinction between Judd and

Morris then, is manifest in their respective use of colour. Morris’s minimal grey

palette was part rejection of the precious art object as he called into question the

very nature of art itself. His sculpture’s bare existence as art forced the viewer to

consider more broadly what was essential to art and what made art essential. In

this regard, Morris’s minimalism has its antecedence in Cage’s 4’33” and

Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. The materiality of Morris’s sculpture only

prevented it from existing as aesthetic proposition or idea.

More recently, David Batchelor has argued that much of the subsequent literature

on minimalism has repeated the negative terminology it encountered in the 1960s.

The result, according to Batchelor, is the clouding of Judd’s (and Flavin’s) bold use

of colour. The lessened appeal to the visual, which Judd initially attributed to

Morris’s sculpture, has prevailed and shaded Judd’s intense concern with colour. In

review of this discursive oversight Batchelor elaborates:

Judd’s colours have remained largely invisible for nearly four decades … You

would not know, for example, from reading Anna Chave’s account of Minimalism

and masculinity, that most works by Judd and Flavin are not only stunningly

colourful – a quality which is habitually associated with the feminine, the irrational

or the infantile rather than the masculine or authoritarian – but they are often

weird and weightless too.27

Batchelor explains that it is the ‘minimal’ reading of minimalism which became the

accepted version within the narrative of modern art. This may have been the cause

of unsympathetic critics at the time, whose negative reviews gained the most

currency. As such, the lesser or understated palettes like Morris’s became

emblematic within a discourse which held to visual descriptions such as austere,

27 David Batchelor, ‘Everything as Colour’ (2004), in: Nicholas Serota (ed.) Donald Judd (London: Tate Publishing 2004), 71. Batchelor is here referencing: Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, Arts Magazine (January 1990), 44-63.

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sombre, and spare. More so, it was likely the cause of theorists sympathetic to

Morris at the time. Annette Michelson, Barbara Rose, and Krauss were all early

critical champions of Morris. Michelson and Krauss together formed the influential

journal October (1976-present), which often held-up Morris as the exemplar of

poststructuralism in American art. It is not without a sense of irony then, that this

reading was partly perpetuated by Judd initially in relation to Morris – and that

Judd spent the best part of the next three decades trying to dissociate his art from

it.

Judd and Morris viewed colour as a site of difference between themselves, more so

than any other formal concern.28 For Morris, colour was secondary to shape, size,

scale, and mass. Grey precluded the spectator from discerning the internal

relationships in his sculptural forms plus diminished their visual appeal. This then

forced the spectator’s focus to the spatial field where his forms were barely

discernible from the architecture of the room, closing off and revealing pockets of

its space. In stark contrast, colour was critical to Judd’s aesthetic program, tying

him to the earlier New York school. ‘More than the so-called form, or the shapes’,

Judd later reflected, ‘color is the most powerful force.’ He continued: ‘In retrospect,

28 Jack Burnham submitted Morris’s use of grey to the Lüscher colour test. The test concludes certain aspects about a person’s psycho-physical state through their choice of colours. Selecting grey as the first choice in the test reveals: ‘The grey of the test is neither coloured, nor dark, nor light, and is entirely free from any stimulus or psychological tendency. It is neutral, neither subject nor object, neither inner nor outer, neither tension nor relaxation. Grey is not an occupied territory but a border’. This reading cannot be taken as an accurate measure of Morris’s psychological state, as the test was not conducted on Morris, but rather from Burnham’s selection of grey. Nonetheless, the description of character traits associated with grey in the test is intriguing when held in consideration of the writing around Morris’s work which views it as dispassionate and distant. See: Jack Burnham, ‘Robert Morris Retrospective in Detroit’, Artforum, 8.7 (March 1970), 67-75. Pursuing Burnham’s hypothetical exercise further and selecting red as the Judd’s presumed first colour choice for his early plywood pieces, reveals stark contrast to the grey chosen for Morris. Once again, this should not be read as a truthful evaluation of Judd’s personality traits, but as a hypothetical exercise the Lüscher test explains red as follows: ‘Red is the urge to achieve results, to win success … Red is impulse, the will-to-win, and all forms of vitality and power from sexual power to revolutionary transformation. It is impulse towards active doing, towards sport, struggle, competition, eroticism and enterprising productivity. Red is ‘impact of the will’ or ‘force of the will’.’ Here, the notion of ‘revolutionary transformation’ resonates with Judd’s call to the specific object. See: Max Lüscher, The Lüscher Colour Test (1969), [trans. and ed. Ian Scott], (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 52, 60-1.

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and only so, the expansion of color is logical until the 1960s, concluding with the

painting of Pollock, Newman, Still and Rothko.’29 Judd continues the innovation in

colour from these earlier painters in three-dimensions. In discrimination to

Morris’s grey forms that minimally existed as art, Judd found colour to be intrinsic

to art:

Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists. Its

existence as it is, is the main fact and not what it might mean, which may be

nothing. Or rather, color does not connect alone to any of the several states of the

mind. I mention the word ‘epistemology’ and stop. Color, like material, is what art

is made from.30

Where Judd views colour like material and associates it intrinsically with art,

Morris disassociates colour for its immateriality. Although colour is not tactile,

Judd’s use of colour embedded materials creates visual and physical juxtapositions

between colours and materials contained within the object. Further, these

materials influence the light and space surrounding the object. Conversely,

Morris’s use of greys and whites force attention towards the haptic claims of his

sculpture. A further effect of Morris’s minimal palette is it agitates art’s definition

as a visual experience. Colour opens to the aesthetic fissure between Judd’s and

Morris’s programs. Judd resists the term ‘minimal’ in relation to his own work as it

lessens its claims to equivalence with the work of Pollock, Newman, Still, and

Rothko. Morris ostensibly embraces the term as it fits his program of critiquing the

institution of art itself.

29 Donald Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’, Artforum, 32.10 (1994), reprinted in: Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, 152. 30 Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’, 158.

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Materials and Methods of Facture

The use of non-traditional media, industrial materials, and contracting metal

workshops to produce works became synonymous with the new art and especially

minimalism. These aspects, at least initially, are common points between Judd and

Morris. Where the difference is more pronounced is historically, between

generations of artists and periods of art making. Both Judd and Morris reasoned

the new materials and processes opened to more possibilities than oil paint on

canvas or sculpting conventional materials. Much of Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’

emphasises the use of advanced materials in the new art. Traditional materials are

seen to carry the nascent qualities of previous art.31 To Judd, the traditional media

and materials were limiting – whereas:

The use of three dimensions makes it possible to use all sorts of materials and

colors. Most of the work involves new materials, either recent inventions or things

not used before in art. Little was done until lately with the wide range of industrial

products. Almost nothing has been done with industrial techniques … Materials

vary greatly and are simply materials – Formica, aluminium, cold-rolled steel,

plexiglass, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. Also, they are

usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.32

Judd asserted the new materials were not art in the traditional sense: ‘Most of the

new materials are not as accessible as oil on canvas and are hard to relate to one

another. They obviously aren’t art.’33 Industrial materials were stronger and

bolder than conventional art materials and stated their actuality within the

artwork. Where conventional oil paint and canvas melded together to form an

31 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 183: ‘Oil and canvas are familiar and, like the rectangular plane, have a certain quality and have limits. The quality is especially identified with art … Wood and metal are the usual materials, either alone or together, and if together it is without much of a contrast. The middling contrast and the natural monochrome are general and help to unify the parts.’ 32 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 187. 33 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 187.

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artistic image, something more than the summation of their material properties,

steel and plexiglass declared their identities in the end object. ‘The materials are

specific’, Judd declared: ‘If they are used directly, they are more specific’.34 Judd’s

blunt and dryly descriptive language invokes more the terminology of industry and

manufacturing, than the ‘emotive and literary associations’ of previous art

criticism.35 Judd theorised the specific object with a syntax that signified a new

order of materials and process. The contracting of specialist metal workshops

catering purposely to artists, opened to a range of possibilities not afforded

previous generations of artists.36

In ‘Notes on Sculpture Part III’, Morris explores industrial manufacturing processes

available to the new artists. Like Judd, Morris expounds the historical division

between the new sculpture and the old. He further argues the new work has more

to do with industry than art in the conventional sense: ‘Its referential connections

are to manufactured objects and not to previous art.’37 Morris continues:

In grasping and using the nature of made things the new three-dimensional art has

broken the tedious ring of ‘artiness’ circumscribing each new phase of art since the

Renaissance. It is still art. Anything that is used as art must be defined as art. The

new work continues the conventions but refuses the heritage of still another art-

based order of making things. The intentions are different, the results are different,

so is the experience.38

34 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 187. 35 Jack Burnham, ‘System Esthetics’, Artforum, 7.1 (September 1968), 32: ‘Even before the emergence of the anti-formalist ‘specific object’ there appeared an oblique type of criticism, resisting emotive and literary associations. Pioneered between 1962 and 1965 in the writings of Donald Judd, it resembles what a computer programmer would call an entity’s ‘list structure’, or all the enumerated properties needed to physically rebuild an object.’ 36 Jonathan D. Lippincott, Large Scale: fabricating sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 12-13. 37 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part III: notes and non sequitors’, Artforum (June 1967), 26. 38 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part III’, 29.

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As Morris reveals, the new art broke from the ‘tedious’ artisanal nature of art, its

handmade aspect. The materials and processes which Morris promotes augur

dislocation with artistic tradition and convention. Notions of craftsmanship and

authenticity, at the heart of traditional artistic practice, are proven to be

dispensable. The hand of the artist is all but lost in the professionally fabricated

works of the new art. Yet, not everyone responded enthusiastically to the

minimalists’ use of industrial materials and metal workshops to execute their

concepts.39 It was a contentious issue that split traditionalists from the new art’s

protagonists. A symposium mediated by Barbara Rose coinciding with the ‘Primary

Structures’ exhibition, pitted Judd and Morris against Mark di Suvero, a rival from

the Park Place group who held to the notion an artwork’s quality derives from the

artist’s hand in its making. In pointed exchange directed at Judd, di Suvero flamed:

I think my friend Don Judd can’t qualify as an artist because he doesn’t do the

work. And there is more and more of this kind of thing, which to my mind is the

negation of the object by making an object. But this is not grappling with the

essential fact that a man has to make a thing in order to be an artist.40

Di Suvero’s critique epitomised the general distrust of minimalism from

conventionalists. The mediator, Barbara Rose, intervened and framed the issue:

‘Here is the crucial question: whether an abstract aesthetic conception which may

be manufactured or fabricated is as much art as the personal manipulation of

materials.’41 Comments like those of di Suvero’s fed into Greenberg’s and Fried’s

39 Harold Gregor, ‘Everyman's Infinite Art’, [exh. cat.], Chapman College, Orange, CA, 1966. Gregor, a professor in the art department of Chapman College in Orange, California, parodied the minimalists in his show ‘Everyman’s Infinite Art’, which was held at the College’s Purcell Gallery in December 1966. Gregor’s works included ‘A stack of twenty-four white Styrofoam cups, open end down’ and ‘Ten yard sticks lined end to end’. In the accompanying catalogue for the show he wrote: ‘No skill is required to make the works; anyone can repeat the arrangements’. And: ‘The presentation is practically devoid of content – any interpretation seems appropriate.’ 40 Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Kynaston McShine, Robert Morris, Barbara Rose, ‘The New Sculpture’, transcript of a symposium held in conjunction with ‘Primary Structures’, Jewish Museum, New York, 2 May 1966. Barbara Rose Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Excerpted here from James Meyer, Minimalism (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 220-221. 41 Rose, ‘The New Sculpture – Primary Structures Symposium’, 221.

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labelling of minimalism as non-art or anti-art. This condemnation stemmed from

the minimalist’s choice of materials and methods of facture, which trivialised the

notion of the hand-made artwork. With his curt answer, Morris sided with Judd

and defanged di Suvero’s attack:

I think that’s a ridiculous issue, and I don’t think whether you fabricate it yourself

or have somebody fabricate it for you has anything to do with making art. My

interest is in having the work as well executed as possible.42

For Judd and Morris, a well-executed artwork outweighed the conditions of its

facture. They contracted metal workshops to ensure the precise and detailed

execution of their concepts. This effectively removed the artist from the physical

production of the object, though it accentuated their role in the conception of it.

Debatably, this freeing of the artist from the purely mechanical, motivated the

conceptual expanse of minimalism. Conception and theorisation were central to

both Judd’s and Morris’s practices. Removed from mechanical process, the

concepts behind the respective works of Judd and Morris became increasingly

cerebral and realisable only through professional workshops.43 It is for this reason

that many of the conceptual artists that followed, point to Judd and Morris as

originators.

The materials and industrial processes favoured by Judd and Morris openly

correlated with the technologically and industrially advanced society in which they

42 Judd, ‘The New Sculpture – Primary Structures Symposium’, 221. 43 John Perreault, ‘Union-Made: Report on a Phenomenon’, Arts Magazine (March 1967), 29: ‘The materials involved (and the new industrial materials employed by the minimalists represent a great break though for sculpture, freeing it not only from the pedestal, the chisel and the casting procedure, but from the blow-torch as well) are completely subservient to the intent of the composition. The artist is once removed from the actual execution of the work, so that the automatism of the artist’s hand does not interfere with the rationalism of the readymade or manufactured units involved. The composition or anti-composition itself is often mathematically derived, modular, or based on permutations of geometric elements. There is, therefore, an automatism of geometry and necessary efficiency rather than of materials or prerational expression.’

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lived.44 This is not necessarily uncommon when one considers how modern art

developed in tandem with technological advancements and economic

transformations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where earlier

modernist practices reflected the socio-economic and technical advance of their

time, minimalism however, directly referenced it.45 ‘I’m impressed by a lot of

things I see in industry’, Morris explained, ‘the more you have things made, the

more you go into fabrication, the more feedback you get from the processes and

the materials and methods that you see in these factories.’46

More recently, Joshua Shannon has read Judd’s work as synonymous with the

postindustrial transformation and postmodernisation of New York City. ‘Donald

Judd appropriated the style of New York’s postmodernisation’, suggests Shannon,

‘hyperbolising its look of rectilinear systematicity.’47 Shannon argues that as New

York City lost the last of its blue collar industries in the 1950s, becoming more a

financial and corporate centre from the mid-1960s, this shift is analogised in Judd’s

practice. Shannon finds: ‘Representing itself with a metal box, New York capitalism

in this period turned definitively toward administration and away from the manual

44 Karl Beveridge and Ian Burn, ‘Don Judd’, The Fox, 2, 1975, 129-130. Judd points out that the new materials were ‘not as accessible as oil and canvas’. For artists without the standing or geographic convenience of Judd, the new materials and processes he details in ‘Specific Objects’ were completely inaccessible. Karl Beveridge and Ian Burns’ Marxist interrogation of Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ argues just this: ‘Doesn’t this suggest that the materials (and techniques) you use are “specific” to an advanced industrial society? Inasmuch as we know America is technologically the most advanced nation, wouldn’t that locate “specific” in what are generally held as American ways of doing things?’ 45 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part III’, 26. Morris here explains how the cube or rectangular block, the fundamental forms of minimalism, are standard elements in manufacturing and industry. This highlights the direct correlation between minimalism and the principle of mass-production: ‘The most obvious unit, if not the paradigm, of forming up to this point is the cube or rectangular block. This, together with the right-angle grid as a method of distribution and placement, offers a kind of ‘morpheme’ and ‘syntax’ which are central to the cultural premise of forming. There are many things which have come together to contribute to making rectangular objects and right-angle placement the most useful means of forming. The mechanics of production is one factor: from the manufacture of mud bricks to metallurgical processes involving continuous flow of raw material which gets segmented, stacked, and shipped. The further uses of these ‘pieces’ from continuous forms such as sheets to fabricate finished articles encourage maintenance of rectangularity to eliminate waste.’ 46 Robert Morris interview with David Sylvester (1967), in: David Sylvester, Interviews

with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 267-8. 47 Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York and the rise of the postmodern

city (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 165.

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manipulation of objects.’48 Judd’s earlier works had all been handmade, with

cheaper materials like plywood and galvanised iron, and often incorporated

objects found on the street. From the late 1960s, with the new materials and

methods of facture accessible to the artist, Judd’s objects become increasingly

sleeker and lustrous, brilliant though somewhat standardised. Judd’s rows and

stacks of boxes were readily reproducible with variations of colour and materials,

the physical work carried out by others.49

Yet, does not Judd’s and Morris’s engagement with highly technical problems

concerning materials and manufacturing processes, approach the markers of a

formalist sensibility? In ‘Necessity of Formalism’, Greenberg defends the modernist

artist with terms such as ‘hard-headed’, ‘sober’, ‘cold’, and ‘crucially a concern in

the first place with medium and exploratory technique’.50 Both Judd and Morris

experimented intensely with industrial materials and processes or techniques.

Judd further shone an intense focus upon colour.51 In reviewing the Judd

retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988, Lynne Cooke

observed that despite the artist’s protestations against modernist art and

formalism, in hindsight Judd’s work is ‘central to the late flowering of formalist

modernism.’52

48 Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects, 165. 49 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’, October, 54 (Autumn 1990), 3-17. Krauss teases out the contradiction in minimalism using the production technology of late consumer capitalism and its claims to high art in this essay. 50 Clement Greenberg, ‘Necessity of Formalism’, New Literary History, 3.1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn 1971), 172-173. 51 William C. Agee, ‘Unit, Series, Site: A Judd Lexicon’, Art in America, 63, (May – June 1975), 45. In relation to Judd’s series of frame-like boxes dating from 1966, Agee found that Judd’s use of colour was the result of intense experimentation and a workman-like approach: ‘These pieces (with exception of one stainless-steel version) were all surfaced with a baked-on-automobile paint (the ‘Lucite Regal Turquoise’ of Chevrolet’s 1958 Corvette). Judd had gathered literally hundreds of samples of automobile paints before settling on this color – another example of the painstaking testing and experimenting that lie behind any given work of his. This ‘turquoise’… is strong enough to ‘carry’ the pieces over the large areas they span without being excessively opulent or reflective. Such formal necessity underlies all his color choices.’ Does not Agee’s observation on Judd here invoke Greenberg’s description of the cold, hard-headed modernist? 52 ‘Donald Judd’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 20 October – 31 December 1988; travelled to Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, 12 February – 16 April 1989.

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The enduring consequence of Judd lies in the fatal tension his work creates

between the terms formalist and modernist. Like other aspects of his aesthetic,

Judd’s exploration of materials and facture is so literal and acute it destabilises

their original emphasis in Greenbergian modernism. With Judd’s intensity of form,

the artist’s hand as indicator of a creative subject is supplanted by an empirical and

automated process. Now: ‘Art could be mass-produced’, as Judd claimed.53

Though for Morris, this increasing emphasis on the object as the result of an

industrial process removed from the physical involvement of the artist eventually

became problematic.54 ‘In object-type art’, notes Morris, ‘process is not visible.’55

For Morris, the ‘well-built’ object revisited the troubling divide between artistic

process and the resultant art object. This problem had vexed Morris’s earlier

explorations in painting. With minimalism, the resoluteness and rectilinearity of

the well-built object, largely dictated the materials used and how they were

structured together.56 The investigation of process, a key aesthetic concern of

Morris, weakened with the well-built, especially given its manufacture was not

undertaken by the artist.

Morris expressed his increasing disillusion with the well-built object stating: ‘The

process of “making itself” has hardly been examined.’57 Beginning in 1967, Morris

started producing work with felt and other soft materials [figs.67, 68, & 69]. It is

Lynne Cooke, ‘Sculpture Shows, New York’, The Burlington Magazine, 131.1030 (January 1989), 65. 53 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 187. 54 Morris; Cummings [np]: ‘In a constructed work like a box that you make, a chair, or something, there’s a form that’s very prior to the construction of the thing. The ends and means are completely separate. You can see and you can depict it is what you’re doing. It’s not too different than painting in some way. You’re depicting a form that you have in your mind or that you’ve drawn. And I wanted to get away from that.’ 55 Robert Morris, ‘Anti Form’, Artforum (April 1968), 35. 56 Morris, ‘Anti Form’, 35: ‘The most obvious unit, if not the paradigm, of forming up to this point is the cube or rectangular block. This, together with the right angle grid as a method of distribution and placement, offers a kind of ‘morpheme’ and ‘syntax’ which are central to the cultural premise of forming.’ 57 Morris, ‘Anti Form’, 34.

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clear in these felt works Morris sought to reclaim the role of the artist’s physical

presence in the work. The artist’s ripping, hanging, folding, and dropping of the felt

was intrinsic to its visual understanding. Conversely, the strict geometry of

minimalism largely predetermined the execution and result of its object, Morris

found soft materials circumscribed this: ‘It is part of the work’s refusal to continue

estheticizing form by dealing with its prescribed end.’58 With these statements

Morris signals his break from minimalism.

In his soft-sculptural works, Morris explores the physical interaction of artist and

materials, and how this is articulated in the end object. He returns to his earlier

investigations of Pollock’s painting.59 ‘Of the Abstract Expressionists’, states

Morris, ‘only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the

end form of the work.’60 The role of the body in Morris’s minimalist sculpture, in

this case that of the viewer, is necessarily external to the object. In Morris’s anti-

form and postminimalist works, the referential body of the artist is reasserted in

the work. In focusing on the body’s activity in its relation to materials, emphasis is

shifted from the resultant object and its perception to encompass process as

well.61 Morris’s anti-form works question minimalism’s accent on the fabricated

end object through its dissolution.

58 Morris, ‘Anti Form’, 34. 59 Burnham, ‘Robert Morris Retrospective in Detroit’, 71. Burnham notes Morris’s return to Pollock in his review of Morris’s felt works finding: ‘The Detroit show contains a number of felt pieces, some very structured and some not. It is easy to understand why these works are especially popular with museums and collectors. The colors and consistencies of the felt and the thread-waste pieces are incredibly sensuous. In an era of mechanically organised field painting, Morris has managed to evoke a passing memory for Kokoschka, Soutine, and Pollock, a sense of painterliness that none of the other anti-form artists has matched.’ 60 Morris, ‘Anti Form’, 34. 61 Robert Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, Artforum, 9 (April 1970), 62: ‘The body’s activity as it engages in manipulating various materials according to different processes has open to it different possibilities for behaviour. What the hand and arm motion can do in relation to flat surfaces is different from what hand, arms, and body movement can do in relation to objects in three dimensions. Such differences of engagement (and their extensions with technological means) amount to different forms of behaviour. In this light, the artificiality of media-based distinctions falls away (painting, sculpture, dance, etc.). There are instead some activities that interact with surfaces, some with objects, some with objects in a temporal dimension, etc. To focus on the production end of art and to lift-up the entire continuum of

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The works which most illustratively announce Morris’s break from the minimalist

object are the artist’s scatter pieces [fig.70]. These works, dating from 1968 and

1969, consisted of various materials strewn out across the room – felt, copper,

aluminium, zinc, rubber, nickel, and stainless steel. This listing of industrial

materials and their scattering across the gallery space, suggests a breakdown of

the manufacturing process that would have turned these elements into a sensible

object.62 In his scatter works, Morris theatrically unravels the specific object – its

materials and unordered elements spread across the floor. Whereas Judd’s objects

revealed the materials of their construction only specifically in their realisation;

the process behind their construction was hidden – not only by their seamless

factory-made appearance, but by Judd’s theorisation of objects which precluded

internalised and subjective readings of them. With his scatter works, Morris resists

and confounds the realisation of the materials as a finished object. What is more,

the scattering of the materials explicitly points to the role of the creative subject –

as someone assuredly had to scatter the pieces. While Morris’s negation of Judd’s

specific objects defined his own minimalist sculpture, his scatter works perform

the dematerialisation of the minimalist, well-built, and specific object.

the process of making and find in it ‘forms’ may result in anthropological designations rather than art categories.’ 62 Burnham, ‘System Esthetics’, 32: ‘Morris was the first essayist to precisely describe the relation between sculptural style and the progressively more sophisticated use of industry by artists. He has lately focused upon material-forming techniques and the arrangement of these results so that they no longer form specific objects but remain uncomposed. In such handling of materials, the idea of process takes precedence over end results: ‘Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders of things is a positive assertion.’ Such loose assemblies of materials encompass concerns that resemble the cycles of industrial processing. Here the traditional priority of ends results of technique breaks down; in a systems context, both may share equal importance, remaining essential parts of the aesthetic.’

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Canon and Critical Afterthoughts

The institutional acceptance of minimalism at the end of the 1960s instigated the

discursive rupture of modernist art, criticism, and the canon. Minimalism not only

demanded new methodologies and theoretical frameworks of criticism, but it

inspired various divergent and fragmentary art practices which broadly shared a

rejection of modernism. This rupture of artistic modernism transpired against a

backdrop of widespread social unrest and pertinently to this chapter’s

investigation – a period of increased artists’ activism and artists’ disillusionment

with establishment authority. Judd, and particularly Morris, were visible agitators

within the tense atmosphere of post-1968 New York. Paradoxically then, at a time

when Judd and Morris were being elevated into the canon of modern art, their

personal politics and practices were oppositional to the grand narratives and

institutions of modernism. Further, Judd’s and Morris’s minimalist aesthetics were

instructive to younger artists whose practices were decidedly against modernism.

This chapter analyses the acceptance of Judd, Morris, and minimalism into the

canon through specific exhibitions held at modern art’s central institutions. In

these major exhibitions, the works of Judd and Morris were included alongside the

key figures of the New York School. In exhibiting Judd and Morris in this context,

minimalism was assumed as the successor to Abstract Expressionism.

Conjecturally, Judd’s and Morris’s highly-visible minimalist works and theories

were germinal to an expanding field of postminimalist, conceptual, process, body,

and land art. These practices confounded modernism’s narrative linearity, medium

sanctity, and its object’s integrity. In this chapter, these fragmentary practices are

considered against the minimalist legacies of Judd and Morris. Notably, however,

Morris’s own practices increasingly diverged from minimalism through an

expanding matrix of sculptural and performative activities. This makes Morris’s

shifting legacy comparatively harder to qualify than Judd’s, whose practice after

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minimalism was concentrated and direct. The final part of this chapter maps out

the mediation of art and politics in Judd’s and Morris’s work. The late 1960s is

marked as a period of intense social discord, with protests, strikes, riots, and a

politically energised New York art world. Judd and Morris were leading figures in

this fractious and often politically contradictory art world. This chapter examines

the political aspects in their corresponding practices within this era of protest.

Cannon and Contest

The inclusion of minimalism in the canon of modern art was galvanised through

two major exhibitions held aptly at the Museum of Modern Art and the

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968’ curated by E.C.

Goossen at MoMA in 1968, and ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970’

held at the Met and curated by Henry Geldzahler in 1969.1 If the ‘Primary

Structures’ exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966 announced minimalism, then

these two shows at the end of the decade confirmed minimalism as a modern art

movement. Similarly, Judd’s and Morris’s first major retrospectives at the end of

the decade – Judd at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968, and Morris at the

Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, 1969 – closed off the artists’ principal

minimalist periods. What is seen in Goossen’s and Geldzahler’s curating of these

shows, with minimalism positioned contiguous to Abstract Expressionism, is the

fracture of Greenberg’s modernist-formalist nexus. This institutional embrace of

minimalism ran counter to the dictates of Greenberg’s modernist paradigm. In

displaying the works of Judd, Morris, and other minimalists alongside works of

Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still, ideas emerging from Abstract Expressionism

are corresponded with concepts seen in minimalism. These resonances occurring

across late modern New York painting and sculpture, between seemingly disparate

artworks and artists, did not stem from formalist interpretation.

1 ‘The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968’ featured works by Judd, Morris, Smithson, LeWitt, Andre, and Smithson. ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970’ contained works by Judd, Morris, and Flavin.

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Judd’s works in ‘Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968’, included a vertical stack of eight

iron boxes from 1965 and a painted wood wall relief with curved iron top and

bottom, which had appeared at the Green Gallery in 1963. Morris included an

aluminium I-beam, c.1967-1968 and a low-set grey slab from 1962 [fig.71].

Goossen’s curatorial rationale for the show held that many American artists over

the considered timespan engaged the ‘stubbornly literal idea of the real’.2 For

Goossen, these select artists created works which dissolved experiential

distinctions between art and reality. The ‘real’ in Judd’s and Morris’s minimalist

works, which has been illustrated in previous chapters of this thesis, is found here

in their explicit materiality and their singleness as objects. Goossen below

expresses this premise behind the exhibition:

The ‘real’ of today as it is posited by this new art has nothing to do with metaphor,

symbolism, or any kind of metaphysics … Today’s ‘real’ on the contrary, makes no

direct appeal to the emotions, nor is it involved in uplift. Indeed, it seems to have

no desire at all to justify itself, but instead offers itself for whatever its uniqueness

is worth – in the form of the simple, irreducible, irrefutable object.3

Critically, Goossen identifies this turn to the real initiating with Abstract

Expressionism. Goossen asserts that in the mature work of Pollock, Newman,

Rothko, and Still, there emerges the desire to ‘find one’s real self on the canvas

through personal imagery and format.’4 These painters created works so singular

that their existed no representational tangent to the world outside that of the

painting. They rejected illusionistic space, Euclidean geometry, reference to

organic form, indeed any nascent qualities of realism, which as Goossen explains is

the ‘illusion of the fact rather than the fact itself.’5 Instead, the ambition of the

primary painters of the New York School was ‘to make something so original that

2 E.C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968, [exh. cat.], (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 7. 3 E. C. Goossen, The Art of the Real, 7. 4 E. C. Goossen, The Art of the Real, 7. 5 E. C. Goossen, The Art of the Real, 7.

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its reality could not be challenged.’6 This ambition was continued in the works of

Judd and Morris.

Within context of this exhibition, Goossen’s estimation of Judd and Morris cogently

positions minimalism as the logical succession to the advanced painting of Pollock,

Newman, Rothko, and Still. ‘The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968’ called re-

evaluation upon late modernist art history by proposing minimalism's succession

of Abstract Expressionism. Pointedly, Goossen’s correspondence of minimalism

with Abstract Expressionism intones a common literalist sensibility across the two

generations of New York painting and sculpture. This emphasis on the real points

to a new critical understanding of art and its context. It is an understanding that

eschews formalist criticism as it exceeds the pure analytical testing of mediums.

The new art spoke to a broader, deeper disconnect with previous models of

knowledge and meaning. Minimalism made this disconnect explicit. And, within

this heightening critical foment, modernist criticism waned.

With an ascendant New York School, modern art theorists assumed a privileged

position. The highly abstracted and individualist nature of Abstract Expressionism

was necessarily explained through the teleology of modernist painting. That is,

interpreting Abstract Expressionism obliged the privileged language of modernist

criticism so to explain it both as the outcome and acme of modern art.

Individualism was valorised, with the centrality of the subject – artist and critic –

extending from an earlier modern, anthropocentric view of the world. Minimalism

confounded the critical readings that extended from Abstract Expressionism by

stating a self-contained object, supressing claims to the subjective, and collapsing

distinction between art and life or reality. Hal Foster here explains the effect of

minimalism’s negation of the two dominant critical models of Abstract

Expressionism:

6 E. C. Goossen, The Art of the Real, 7.

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Minimalism … contradicts the two dominant models of the abstract expressionist,

the artist as existential creator (advanced by Harold Rosenberg) and the artist as

formal critic (advanced by Greenberg). In so doing it also challenges the two

central positions in modern aesthetics that these two models of the artist

represent, the first expressionist, the second formalist.7

Not only did minimalism reveal these two critical models – expressionist and

formalist – limited in light of its irreducible object, it demanded re-evaluation of

these models in relation to Abstract Expressionism as well. In earlier chapters of

this thesis, consideration of Morris’s engagement with Pollock and Abstract

Expressionism focused on the body and its movement – the real process of

painting. Judd’s interrogation of Abstract Expressionism was directed upon the

formal physicality of the object-painting – what was real and evident in the end

work. In ‘The Art of The Real’, Goossen situates minimalism as the successor to

Abstract Expressionism according to a shared literalist sensibility. This positioning

undermines both the expressionist and formalist critical models which had

previously prevailed in American art. As it is, minimalism precludes modernist

interpretation and renders it weak in the context of Abstract Expressionism by

inspiring new critical insights that align the two movements. Whereas previous

criticism had discussed Abstract Expressionism and minimalism as high-

modernism and non-art respectively, the new criticism perceived a continuum.

Geldzahler’s rationale for ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970’ speaks to

this new inclusivity and vexes the Greenbergian discriminations between high-art

and non-art. Geldzahler selected works for the show to illustrate ‘not a general

inventory’, but instead an ‘evaluation’ of the key problems and their resolutions

played out in the run of New York art over the previous three decades.8 The artists

represented in the show, as termed by Geldzahler, were ‘deflectors’.9 These

7 Hal Foster, ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, in: Return of the Real (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 40. 8 Henry Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970’, in: New York Painting

and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969), 25. 9 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 23.

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selected artists resolved problems posed by the work of earlier artists in ways

which deflected recent New York art from a more linear course.10 Within this high-

profile show, alongside the acclaimed painters of the New York School, were Pop

and minimalist artists nominally excluded from the Greenbergian cannon.

Geldzahler reasoned that by the time of the mid-1950s, younger artists were

forced to branch from conventional painting to respond to the problems of

Abstract Expressionism. For Geldzahler, Rauschenberg was decisive in this regard:

After two decades of tremendous energy and inventiveness in abstract painting,

the reintroduction of recognizable content (objects, landscape, and figure)

appeared at first retardataire and beside the point. The best and most mature

artists at the time had created personal and distinct abstract manners and images.

These men left little room for the younger artist … Robert Rauschenberg pointed a

way out of this dilemma by the mid-fifties by incorporating real objects in his

work.11

Within the exhibition’s narrative, Rauschenberg and then Johns, connect Abstract

Expressionist painting to Pop Art. As has been argued elsewhere in this thesis,

other elements from Rauschenberg’s aesthetic explorations open to minimalism.

The other strain of painting emerging from the late 1950s, Post-Painterly

Abstraction as phrased by Greenberg, was featured in the show through the work

of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Ellsworth Kelly. Greenberg omits Stella from

this grouping, though Fried championed Stella as vital to painting post-Abstract

Expressionism.12 Geldzahler positioned Stella extending from Post-Painterly

10 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 24: ‘The innovative artist in his grasp of a new possibility inevitably alters the problem and therefore deflects the tradition through his solution. The current exhibition was conceived as an accumulation of thirty years of solutions to constantly changing set of problems – problems and solutions that make up a vital tradition.’ 11 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 36. 12 See Fried’s exhibition and accompanying essay: ‘Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella’, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 21 April – 30 May 1965.

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Abstraction into minimalism, suggesting that Stella sought to eliminate ‘the

roughness of surface and eccentric evidences of personality’ that was associated

with expressionist-type painting.13 Geldzahler likened Stella to the minimalist

sculptors with their tendency towards ‘anonymity of craftsmanship, a clear

projection of simple formal relationships, and a suppression of signature.’14

Judd, Morris, and Flavin represented minimalism in ‘New York Painting and

Sculpture: 1940–1970’. Geldzahler only considered artists ‘whose distinctive styles

emerged and were viewed before 1965’. In making his selection for new and

contemporary artists in the show, Geldzahler looked to the city’s network of

private galleries and public museums. In his accompanying essay, Geldzahler

points to the importance of the Green Gallery which first revealed the three

minimalists to the New York artworld. While Geldzahler selected artists, who came

to critical attention before 1965, the selection of artworks produced by these

artists extended to 1969. As such, both Judd and Morris exhibited works from both

their early and principle minimalist periods and Morris exhibited one of his first

felt works, an untitled piece from 1968. Judd and Morris each included four works

in the show. Morris’s works also included a painted plywood triangle from his

seminal Green Gallery show in 1964, a steel mesh, low-rising cubic form dating

1966, and a set of nine translucent fibreglass blocks rising chest height from 1968.

Judd’s works included a low-set perforated steel wedge from 1965 and a wall-

bound row of stainless steel cubes with Plexiglass ends of 1969. A darkened gallery

room held Flavin’s light sculptures.

Geldzahler held Pop and minimalism as the two contemporary instances from New

York art. In distinguishing the two movements, beyond the obvious visual and

thematic differences, Geldzahler reasoned: ‘Minimal Sculpture is the most recent

movement in American art with a coherent body of work and a sizeable critical

literature.’15 While on the other hand, Pop Art ‘was an episode, an interesting one

13 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 37-8. Geldzahler also includes Burgoyne Filler and Ad Reinhardt in this discussion. 14 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 38. 15 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 38.

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that has left its mark on the decade, and will continue to affect the future, but not a

major modern movement which continues to spawn new artists.’16 In contrasting

minimalism and Pop, Geldzahler points to two distinguishing factors: minimalism’s

body of critical literature and its conceptual legacy to engage a next generation of

practitioners. To Geldzahler’s first point, the literature that grew from minimalism,

especially the critical writings of Judd and Morris, evinced the new centrality

afforded to artists’ writings and the highly contestable discourse of minimalism.17

Anticipating the fatal effect of minimalism upon traditional criticism, Harold

Rosenberg complained: ‘The ideal situation from the point of view of the new

critics would be for works of art to vanish completely and nothing to be left but the

critical interpretation.’18

For Judd and Morris, writing was crucial and contingent alongside the making of

objects. Arguably, this was a necessary strategy given the content-less aspect of

minimalism and the subsequent charges of non-art against it.19 While dissimilarity

has herein been argued between Judd’s and Morris’s practices, minimalism as

proscribed cumulatively to them, comprised an undeniable body of theory. While

often divergent, this vital body of theory was ultimately successful in the contest of

art history played out in the 1960s. This goes to Geldzahler’s second point. The

success of minimalism’s theory enabled a next generation of practitioners engaged

in conceptualism, land art, process art, and other fragmentary practices stemming

from minimalism’s interrogation of modernist art. These subsequent practices

16 Geldzahler, ‘New York Painting and Sculpture’, 37. 17 At the time of Geldzahler’s exhibition statement, Gregory Battcock’s anthology of writings on minimalism had just been published. This collection of writings gave minimalism its critical rationale and because of the breadth and immediacy of the writings, helped centralise text within minimalist practice. Undoubtedly Battcock’s anthology encompassed critical voices indisposed to the validation of minimalist art – Greenberg, Fried, and Rosenberg for obvious instance. What it did do is present minimalist as a disputatious, though essentially cogent, discourse. 18 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Virtuosos of Boredom’ (1966), in: Rosenberg, Discovering the

Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, & Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 121. 19 James Meyer, Minimalism: art and polemics in the sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 249. ‘Responding to the charge of the not-art-enough, Judd and Morris had supplied an extraordinary polemical support for their apparently content-less work: the blunt simplicity of their forms required copious justification. The triumph of the minimal movement in 1968 was a powerful testament to the success of their argumentation.’

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rejected aesthetic conventions, were decidedly unconcerned with the testing of

medium distinctions, and took for their driving concerns the questioning of

broader cultural values. The acceptance of minimalism into the canon proved fatal

to artistic modernism as it legitimised practices which rejected its definitions of

art, theory, and practice.

The figure of Judd loomed large for the younger artists working in the conceptual

aftermath of minimalism. Just as Judd and his contemporaries had to confront the

figure of Pollock, younger artists had to engage Judd. Mel Bochner later reflected

upon Judd, ‘you either had to go over, under, around, or through him.’20 Vito

Acconci described minimalism as the ‘father art’.21 While Joseph Kosuth went as

far to state: ‘Pollock and Judd are, I feel, the beginning and end of American

dominance in art’22 Judd’s work was selected to represent the United States in the

VIII São Paulo Biennale of 1965 alongside Newman and Stella. Judd was the

recipient of several grants and fellowships during the 1960s, including from the

John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and

the Swedish Institute. As mentioned, in 1968 The Whitney Museum of American

Art held the first retrospective of Judd’s work. Judd’s second major show was in

1970 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands and it the first

showing of one of the key minimalist protagonists in Europe. Asserting his status

within the New York art world, Judd purchased a five-story building at 101 Spring

Street in 1968 to serve as his studio and residence. In this first building that Judd

purchased, he developed his notion of permanent display. Judd believed that the

placement and the context in which an artwork was displayed became critical to its

very understanding. Alongside works of his own in Spring Street, Judd installed

works by Stella, Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Ad Reinhardt, and

20 Mel Bochner, ‘Judd’s Writings’, Artforum (2005); reprinted in: Bochner, Solar System &

Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007 (Cambridge and London: October and The MIT Press, 2008), 198. 21 Alexander Keller & Frazer Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Grade Blockbuster’, Cinema Journal, 45.2 (Winter 2006), 5. 22 Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, in: Art after Philosophy: collected writing, 1966-

1990, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 29.

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Larry Bell.23 Judd pursued and realised his conception of art and permanence in his

installations in Marfa, Texas from the mid-1970s.

Judd was the central voice of the new art. His extensive body of critical writings

argued parallels between earlier Abstract Expressionist painting with the diversity

of contemporary practices that sprung forth in the 1960s. Instead of disjuncture

between the earlier New York School and contemporary works, Judd argued a

continuum based on a shared language of non-compositionality, wholeness, the

rejection of realism and illusionism, and the singularity of the art object. ‘The Art of

the Real: USA 1948–1968’ and ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970’

affirmed the theoretical perspective argued by Judd. Yet somewhat problematically

for curators and critics seeking to historically situate Judd, Judd argued throughout

that the new art he championed was not contingent upon the notion of schools and

movements that had typified conventional modernism.24 In ‘Specific Objects’ Judd

explicitly rejects the progression of movements which define modernist art:

The new three-dimensional work doesn’t constitute a movement, school or style.

The common aspects are too general and too little in common to define a

movement. The differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are

selected from the work; they aren’t a movement’s first principles or delimiting

23 Judd often viewed his work resonating more with the sculptural practices of Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlin, and Lee Bontecou, than other minimalist artists. For a detailed elaboration of Judd’s critical resonance with Bontecou, Oldenburg, and Chamberlain see: David Raskin, Donald Judd, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), particularly the second chapter, ‘Credible Art’. 24 Donald Judd, ‘Complaints: part I’, Studio International (April 1969), in: Complete

Writings 1959-1975, 198: ‘Originally I agreed to write this to keep Studio International from calling me a minimalist. Very few artists receive attention without publicity as a new group. It’s another case of the simplicity of criticism and of the public. It seems as if magazines are unwilling to give a new artist space by himself … One person’s work isn’t considered sufficiently important historically to be discussed alone. But most of the so-called movements are only one person or maybe two remotely related. That’s obvious by the work, by the initial development, by the fact that in two or three years the followers follow elsewhere.’

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rules. Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and

sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that.25

While Judd’s aversion to being labelled minimalist has been elaborated upon in

earlier chapters of this thesis, here it is necessary to examine how Judd is situated

in the wider context of artistic modernism. Seen above, Judd closes off the

traditions of modernist painting and sculpture. He then announces a new three-

dimensional domain of objects that is neither painting or sculpture: ‘The use of

three dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything’.26 Greenberg

acknowledges this new three-dimensional field, but makes clear it is ‘where every

material that was not art also was’.27 Thierry de Duve has more recently examined

the competing dialectic between Judd’s and Greenberg’s validations for the new

and modernist art respectively. With Judd’s new category of art removed from the

aesthetic traditions of painting and sculpture, the judgments of quality pertaining

to those traditions are rendered obsolete. Here, de Duve elaborates on this

consequential shift away from aesthetic judgements set upon traditional criteria:

The formalist judgment that would call them art (as art) is lost in a limbo where

confrontation with the constraints of a specific tradition can be avoided and where

no aesthetic experience of significance can be had. The experience of such objects

is merely phenomenal, says Greenberg, and Judd agrees. What we have is generic

art with only logical, not aesthetic, ties to history.28

De Duve reasons that Judd’s new objects are more generic than they are specific,

precisely because they are not bound to the specific and historical conditions of

painting or sculpture. Nonetheless, in Judd’s rationale for the new art, the three-

25 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in: Judd, Complete Writings

1959-1975, 181. 26 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 181. 27 Clement Greenberg, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967), American Sculpture of the Sixties

[exh. cat.], Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967; reprinted in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 182. 28 Thierry de Duve, ‘The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas’, in: de Duve, Kant after

Duchamp (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 231-232.

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dimensional objects he champions are the logical outcome of the crisis visited

upon the two-dimensional medium of painting by Pollock, Rothko, Still, and

Newman. Yet, in creating a new category of art that is neither painting or sculpture,

can Judd’s specific objects be assessed as the aesthetic outcome to these traditions?

From a modernist critical perspective, they cannot, nor can they aspire to the

aesthetic quality of these traditions. Judd, however, disputes this position, posing:

‘A work only needs to be interesting.’29 This notion of interest then sets up a

beguiling contradistinction to Greenberg’s formalist evaluation of quality.30 And

this, as elaborated upon by Hal Foster below, creates an expansive sphere of

critical practice and enquiry:

Whereas quality is judged by reference to the standards not only of the old masters

but of the great moderns, interest is provoked through the testing of aesthetic

categories and the transgressing of set forms. In short, quality is a criterion of

normative criticism, an encomium bestowed upon aesthetic refinement; interest is

an avant-gardist term, often measured in terms of epistemological disruption. It

too can become normative, but it can also licence critical inquiry and aesthetic

play.31

It is questionable whether the conceptual, postminimalist, process, earthwork, and

performative practices which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s after

‘Specific Objects’ was what Judd had in mind in his essay. Just as Judd subverted

Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ by reading it so literally as to push two-

dimensional painting into three dimensions, Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ became a

29 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 184. 30 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 142. Fried picking up on this distinction argues: ‘For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest. Whereas within the modernist arts nothing short of conviction – specifically, the conviction that a particular painting or sculpture or poem or piece of music can or cannot support comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not in doubt – matters at all.’ Judd responded to Fried’s argument: “I was especially irked by Fried’s ignorant misinterpretation of my use of the word “interesting”. I obviously use it in a particular way but Fried reduces it to the cliché “merely interesting”. See: Judd, ‘Complaints: Part I’, in: Complete Writings 1959-1975, 198. 31 Foster, ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, 45-46.

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rallying call for subsequent and younger practitioners to challenge the art object

itself. If Judd terminally deflected the traditions of modernist painting and

sculpture by his turn to the specific object, then what was open to the artists that

succeeded him? By confounding modernist definitions of painting and sculpture,

Judd and more broadly minimalism, gave validation to a range of divergent

practices that threatened the integrity of the object.

Rupture and Conceptual Fragments

Younger artists like Bochner, Kosuth, Acconci, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman

responded to the conceptual and formal aspects of minimalism, though rejected its

emphasis on the articulated object. These aspects included: the use of repetition in

text-based or video art works, body as object and body and object relationships in

performance art, systemic thinking and grid structures in drawn conceptual and

object-based works – or the rejection of these in soft-material sculpture, the play

on perception and phenomenon in environmental and installation works, and

emphasising temporality and the artist’s corporeality in process art. In the new

field forged by these divergent practices, ideas and concepts were often prefaced

over the material presence of a work. This tendency was phrased by Lucy Lippard

as the ‘dematerialisation of the art object’.32 Across a period beginning in 1968 and

through to the mid-1970s, younger artists challenged the visual formats and

definitions of art. Kosuth questioned whether art need be physically manifest at

all.33 A conceptual work could and did take any form or format. It is here that

sculpture enters the expanded field, as outlined by Rosalind Krauss, where ‘the

organisation of work … is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium’

and as such, the artist can occupy different places within: sculptor, photographer,

performer, and so on.34

32 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: the dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973/1997). 33 Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, 37. 34 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8 (Spring 1979), 38.

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It is debatable whether Judd found these conceptual works interesting any more

than Greenberg deemed them to be of quality.35 Here again, Judd merges with

Greenberg: ‘One thing is I want to be able to see what I’ve done’, Judd made clear in

his discussion with Glaser, ‘art is something you look at.’36 To this end both Judd

and Greenberg are concerned with an articulated and autonomous art object. The

dematerialisation of the object voids the endeavour of art that is premised upon a

quantifiable, tangible, and commodifiable work of an artist. Greenberg’s objection

here reaffirms the nihilist threat conceptualism presents to the institution of art:

Let’s take conceptual art. I’m not going to show you a work of art, I am going to

give you a dictionary definition, blow it up, Photostat it – that’s what Kosuth does –

and put it on the wall, or put some loose-leaf notebooks on the table for you to go

through. There’s one idea operating there, it’s that we’re going to go so far out,

we’re going to show you that art doesn’t have to be seen. It’s idea that way, not

ideas but idea.37

Greenberg above is referring to Kosuth’s First Investigations (Art as Idea as Idea)

from 1966-68, in which the artist deployed a series of Photostats of dictionary

definitions. Kosuth’s use of language as his medium and his conceptual

provocation was part of a strategy to unravel the commodified and precious art

object. With Judd, who in practice and theory had foremost stressed the primacy

and integrity of the object, the object’s negation in conceptual practices seems

anathema. Ursula Meyer points out the challenge of the specific object by younger

artists inadvertently undermined Judd’s program: ‘All of a sudden prominent

Minimalists have become conservatives; entrepreneurs of the new establishment,

but establishment nonetheless.’38 Certainly, at this time Judd is questionably

35 Clement Greenberg; Thierry de Duve, ‘Debate with Clement Greenberg’, in: de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the lines: including a debate with Clement Greenberg, [trans. Brian Holmes], (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 134. 36 Judd; Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, in: Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical

anthology, 164. 37 Greenberg; de Duve, ‘Debate with Clement Greenberg’, 134. 38 Ursula Meyer, ‘De-Objectification of the Object’, Arts Magazine (Summer 1969), 21

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aligned with the establishment given his prominence, critical importance, and high

visibility within the collections and exhibitions of the central institutions of

modern art. Judd’s objects were the shiny example of the commodifiable art object;

stacks and rows of boxes repeated, replicated, modified, shipped, and installed in

galleries, museums, and private collections worldwide. Noting this, Meyer

continues: ‘The art of the object is a merchandisable commodity. An artist like Judd

refers to his time-consuming managerial tasks. The objectless artists are not

burdened with such problems.’39

Ursula Meyer’s observation above points to a final division between Judd and

Morris. Judd remained dedicated to the object, constantly refining, revising, and

reissuing his vertical stacks and horizontal rows, ceaselessly experimenting with

combinations of colours and materials within well-defined parameters and to

precise outcomes. Judd’s work as an artist evolved to be highly managerial,

efficient, and profitable. And as an artist, Judd was nominally removed from the

labour and production of the object itself. Morris’s practice became more

concerned with process, often as performance, and the theatrical manipulation of

unconventional materials in attack of the art object. Morris explained these

dematerialising practices in his final ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essay, ‘Beyond Objects’,

claiming: ‘Certain art is now using as its beginning and as its means, stuff,

substances in many states – from chunks, to particles, to slime, to whatever – and

pre-thought images are neither necessary nor possible. Alongside this approach is

chance, contingency, indeterminacy – in short, the entire area of process.’40

Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essays firstly establish his notion of the minimalist,

sculptural object – largely in contradistinction to Judd’s specific object – before

unravelling this through his turn to soft, unconventional materials and the physical

manipulation of them.41 In Morris’s retrospective held at the Corcoran Gallery of

39 Meyer, ‘De-Objectification of the Object’, 21. 40 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part IV – Beyond Objects’, Artforum (April 1969), 54. 41 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, part IV – Beyond Objects’, 53: ‘It is only with this type of recent work that heterogeneity of material has become a possibility again; now any substances or mixtures of substances and the forms or states these might take – rods,

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Art in Washington, 1969, which then travelled to the Detroit Institute of Art,

Morris’s interrogative trajectory through objects was on display. The retrospective

showcased Morris’s earliest and intimate neo-Dadaist objects, his large scale and

impersonal minimalist forms, to then arrive at his postminimalist soft sculpture

works. Writing of the show, Jack Burnham presented a poststructuralist

perspective of Morris’s work viewing his different practices as critical

interventions into the meta-structure of art itself. For Burnham, Morris’s work

consisted of different bracketed sub-sets of artistic enquiries. These differing sub-

sets were quantified as ‘environmental systems, fabricated objects, piles of

materials, paintings, sculptures, file cards, motion pictures, or any other entity.’42

From this, Burnham concluded: ‘Perception of art’s structure, as Levi-Strauss

implies, dissipates art’s societal function. Once the limits of a category are

understood, or bracketed, then all further activity is residual, merely existing for

collectors and museum directors.’43

As Morris’s enquiries moved further into the field beyond objects his work

significantly eschewed collectability and museum display. For the Detroit show,

Morris created a large outdoor installation comprised of discarded timbers,

concrete, and scrap metal that he had transposed on the museum’s lawn from a

nearby demolished overpass. The work was monumental and ungainly, and

required labourers to unload the materials on the museum grounds and remove

them at the end of Morris’s show.44 In this large theatrical work, Morris states

resistance to institutionalisation and commodification. Morris was now

increasingly perceiving his own artistic activities as critical interrogations into the

convention of art making as it is understood and equated with the production of

particles, dust, pulpy, wet, dry, etc., are potentially useable. Previously, it was one or two materials and a single or repetitive form to contain them. Any more and the work began to engage in part to part and part to whole relationships. Even so, Minimal art, with two or three substances, gets caught in plays of relationships between transparencies and solids, voids and shadows and the parts separate and the work ends in a kind of demure and unadmitted composition.’ 42 Jack Burnham, ‘Robert Morris Retrospective in Detroit’, Artforum, 8.7 (March 1970), 75 43 Burnham, ‘Robert Morris Retrospective in Detroit’, 75. 44 See: Burnham, ‘Robert Morris Retrospective in Detroit’. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers:

Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 108-9.

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objects. With anti-form materials, Morris returned his investigative focus onto

process, yet here, unlike his earlier explorations, process itself became the

requisite and valuable activity. ‘There are instead some activities that interact with

surfaces, some with objects, some with objects in a temporal dimension, etc.,’

Morris claimed, furthering: ‘To focus on the production end of art and to lift up the

entire continuum of the process of making and find in it ‘forms’ may result in

anthropological designations rather than art categories.’45 A show organised by

Morris in 1968 at the Castelli Warehouse featured works that existed as signs of a

prior physical activity rather than a predetermined, articulated form or object.

Morris did not feature his own work in the show, titled ‘9 at Leo Castelli’, but chose

works by Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra amongst

others. In his review of the Morris-curated show, Max Kozloff complained:

After all, we are not accustomed to stepping on sculpture, or avoid stepping on

sculpture which appears to be some kind of leaving. Nor do we expect it to seem

merely a sullying and spotting of the surfaces which enclose us. And this is not to

speak of the amorphousness of the substances that for the most part are scattered

or dropped about, and that betray little preconceived notion of orthodox form or

even pattern … surely it is its attack on the status of the object which provides the

show with its major premise and rationale.46

Kozloff’s observation above expresses the anxiety provoked by the

dematerialisation of the art object. The works in ‘9 at Leo Castelli’ presented more

as evidence of a performance or remnants of a sculptural activity, rather than

sculptural forms or objects. The works could not be touched or moved without

irreparably damaging or reconstituting them in some way. ‘The life and salience

they have as objects’, Kozloff lamented, ‘is, therefore, a pathetic transience.’47 The

work of Richard Serra speaks to the transience between the object and its

constituent materials qua process. Serra included one of his series of Splash (1968-

45 Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, 62. 46 Max Kozloff, ‘9 in a warehouse’, Artforum (February 1969), 38. 47 Max Kozloff, ‘9 in a warehouse’, 38.

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70) works in the show at the Castelli Warehouse. These works involve Serra

flinging molten lead against wall and floor surfaces with the subsequent hardened

lead then availed as the object to viewers. For Serra, the conceptual emphasis in

these works is on the act of splashing in a performative interrogation of process.

Serra’s Verblist (1967-68), a series of actions set out on paper, instructs the artist’s

manipulations of materials and environments in his postminimalist practice of the

late 1960s. The list contains such actions as ‘to roll’, ‘to fold’, ‘to scatter’, ‘to

disarrange’, ‘to spill’, and ‘to splash’. Verblist resonates with conceptual art in the

use of language to concretise artistic thinking and process, and it further tangents

with the dance explorations of Rainer and Forti in their use of literal, task-based

movements as source for performance. As such, Serra’s practice critically

intersects with performance, conceptualism, and sculpture.

In the Morris-curated show at the Castelli Warehouse, Serra also displayed one of

his Prop pieces. In these works, Serra balances lead plates and pipes upon each

other. The precarious positioning of the heavy lead forms excites an immediate

visual tension, but operating on a conceptual level Serra’s prop pieces disarticulate

the minimalist object and re-impose the hand of the artist. The indexical

interaction of the artist upon the lead pieces impressed upon Acconci, who noted:

‘because, obviously, if something is propped, someone propped it.’48 Serra’s One-

Ton Prop – House of Cards (1969) is the most distinguished of Serra’s prop works.

It consists of four 250kg lead plates propped against each other in the semblance

of a cube. With no physical means of interlocking the plates, gravity simultaneously

works to sustain and collapse the structure. For Krauss, Serra’s One-Ton Prop

presents the postminimalist cube as an unresolvable and inherently temporal

proposition: ‘Serra creates an image of the sculpture as something that is

constantly having to renew its structural integrity by keeping its balance.’ Krauss

continues: ‘In place of the cube as an ‘idea’ – determined a priori – he substitutes

48 Keller & Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Grade Blockbuster’, 5. Attributed to an unpublished interview with the artist at Acconci's studio, Brooklyn, New York, April 1997.

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the cube as an existent – creating itself in time, totally dependent upon the facts of

its surface in tension.’49

The works that Morris presented at ‘9 at Leo Castelli’ were a dissolve of

minimalism and signalled the unravelling of the art object. Taking the examples of

Serra above, these works were theatrical, ephemeral, and held the object

circumstantial to process. Process and the performance of it were stated foremost.

The striking conflict here between Morris’s and Judd’s diverging programs can be

seen in a comparison with Judd’s show at the Castelli Warehouse in 1970. The

show featured a re-visitation of Judd’s stacks and rows in new materials, colours,

and in different augmentations [fig.72]. Reviewing the show, Robert Pincus-Witten

offered these reissues were refinements – ‘a kind of self-testing’, he wrote, ‘in the

same way that a Brancusi polished brass is more refined than the same subject

carved in wood or stone.’50 This refinement in Judd’s mature work likens him to

the eminent modernists before him, illuminating new complexities and more

gradated resolutions to formal problems in their work. In this context and in its

contrast to Morris’s postminimalism, Judd’s work is held in defence of the art

object and paradoxically, artistic modernism.51 While Judd’s aesthetic program

hastened the rupture of modernist art, his work stressed the primacy of the art

object and mainly dealt with art’s formal concerns. Artists operating beyond this

49 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 269-70. See also: Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: art of circumstance (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 123. Baker makes a similar observation to Acconci and Krauss in relation to Serra’s work. He writes: ‘Serra’s sculpture is pivotal because it brings into focus the ‘human’ content of minimalism … In the way that it deflects our attention back upon ourselves, the inertia of minimal sculpture orients us to one of the great human mysteries: our ability to originate our own actions.’ 50 Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘Fining it Down: Don Judd at Castelli’, Artforum (June 1970), 47. 51 Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘Fining it Down: Don Judd at Castelli’, Artforum (June 1970), 47 & 49: ‘They [Judd and Andre] saw the period’s hardest problem most clearly – how to deal with, in fact, how to protect, the solidity, the tangibility of the ‘recognisable’ formal vocabulary of Cubism and Constructivism while reforming and renewing the spectator’s sense of relationship to this legacy… What Judd, and Andre too, block with their intransigent barricades, is the notion of that dreary Rauschenberg-Cage kid stuff should pass for high art. I think that ultimately Judd and Andre are going to fail in this ambition – if it is their ambition – but in their failure, should it come to this, they will have created the most important work of the late ‘60s.’

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point of rupture, as Krauss below explains, largely rejected the object and the

theoretic apparatus which sustained modernist art:

It seems fairly clear that this permission (or pressure) to think the expanded field

was felt by a number of artists at about the same time, roughly between the years

1968 and 1970. For, one after another Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael

Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman …

had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described

as modernist. In order to name this historical rupture and the structural

transformation of the cultural field that characterizes it, one must have recourse to

another term. The one already in use in other areas of criticism is postmodernism.

There seems no reason not to use it.52

The appeal here is to label Judd the last of the modernists and Morris the first of

the postmodernists within the canon of twentieth-century American art. This reads

implicitly in Krauss’s reading of minimalism and postminimalism. Krauss’s notion

of the expanded field brooks no place for Judd, although this field is somewhat

foreshadowed by his specific object or at the very least, the dematerialisation of it.

Krauss above points to a wider transformation occurring in the cultural sphere

that concurs with postmodernism. The period of 1968 and the immediate years

adjacent to it, is noted for profound cultural schism and disruption. In the context

of this thesis, this disruption can be localised to the protests and politics of the

New York art world. And herein, examining Judd’s and Morris’s individual

practices through the prism of politics and protest can offer a more nuanced

dissimilation between them than the labels of modernist and postmodernist offer.

52 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 41.

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Politics and Practice

1968 is universally and symbolically marked as a year of violence and protest. For

the United States, this year of acute social turmoil witnessed the severe escalation

of hostilities and atrocities in Vietnam with the Tet Offensive and its bloody

counterpoint in the My Lai massacre. An increased, mobilised, and agitated public

opposition against the war materialised at home. The assassinations of Martin

Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy left the nation bereft. Disillusionment and

disenfranchisement fuelled race and political riots, triggering violent police

suppression at flashpoints across the country. Student protests within the United

States and abroad voiced a revolution which was never realised and was too,

violently dealt with by police. The febrile and pervasive mood of 1968 was the

culmination of dawning dejection and rising anger at the disconnect between the

decade’s promise at its start and its reality at its end.53 A longer historical view of

the symbolic 1968, which begins in 1967 and runs through 1970, allows the

cultural undercurrents that informed the New York art world’s responses to

Vietnam, Civil Rights, and women’s rights to be gauged more sagaciously. Herein,

Judd and Morris, as highly-visible leaders not only of minimalism but more broadly

the new art of the 1960s, were scrutinised for their responses.

In her gender and political critique of minimalism, Anna C. Chave charges Judd,

Morris, along with Flavin, Serra, and other minimalists with producing art that

speaks more to the power of the military-industrial complex and corporate

America than it does against.54 Chave finds minimalist art’s valorisation of power

reinscribed the domineering discourses of American capitalism, militarism, and

imperialism. Incongruently, minimalism’s ascendency was occurring at a time

when widespread denunciation and protest of hegemonic power was coalescing.

Chave’s charge is two-fold, in that firstly the minimalists’ use of industrial

materials and manufacturing processes – and their resulting slick-surfaced,

53 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde performance and the effervescent body (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 4. 54 Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, Arts Magazine (January 1990), 44-63.

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precise, and geometrically uniform objects – affirm the visual language of the

modern technocracy. Secondly, Chave argues minimalism is inherently hostile

towards viewers with its ‘obdurate blankness’ and the ‘minimalist’s categorical

refusal of the humanist mission of art.’55

Referencing the writings of Judd and Morris, Chave draws out a rhetoric for

minimalism where materials are described as strong and aggressive, colour as bold

and powerful, and size and scale is termed in the impassive consideration of bodies

and objects. Chave’s analysis is persuasive, highlighting the construct of art

historical discourse on minimalism through language that affirms existing

dominant power structures. Yet, Chave’s reading is also blunt, staking cumulative

and historical claims that decontextualizes the writings of Judd and Morris from

their personal political beliefs and actions in the late 1960s. This is not to absolve

Judd and Morris from some of the criticisms Chave’s makes and they were

criticised for their perceived and privileged alignment with the establishment at

the time by critics like Cindy Nemser and Lucy Lippard.56 Rather, here, it is to tease

out the complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes of a fraught time in the New

York art world and to re-contextualise Judd’s and Morris’s political attitudes with

their practices.

In her analysis of the political debates within the New York art world in the late

1960s, Francis Franscina finds many of the period’s seeming contradictions arose

from the split of the political Left.57 The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s

was received and engaged with by the younger artists of that decade. The Old Left,

which had emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, was associated with older artists,

critics, and intellectuals like Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Kozloff. The Old Left was

sustained in the certainty of modernism’s institutions, structures, and grand

narratives and maintained belief in the radical activities of an avant-garde which

challenged convention and ultimately spurred progress from within. Generally, the

55 Chave, ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, 51&54. 56 Francis Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 140. 57 Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America, 109.

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Old Left viewed art and politics as two discrete realms of activity. The

achievements of high culture were necessarily inoculated from debasement by

capitalism’s kitsch, or the mass-spectacle of Fascism and Socialist Realism. It is the

dialectic which underscores Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939). The

younger artists aligned with the New Left sought to destroy artistic convention,

tradition, and ‘the established intellectual and institutional criteria’ for assessing

value and quality.58 Artists of the New Left found concern with inclusive political

discussions around race and gender, and argued the invisibility of these voices

within an exclusive modernism. The artistic agitation of the New Left was

expressed in practices of protest and dissent. Art and politics merged. Collective

practice became a political statement as seen in examples like the ‘Artists’ Tower

of Protest’ in Los Angeles, 1966, the New York Angry Arts Week in 1967, and the

formation of the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969.59

The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was formed in response to several concerns of

younger artists. These included the war in Vietnam, the rights of artists both in

museum exhibitions and in the resale of artworks, and the institutional

representation of women artists and artists of colour.60 Owing to these varied and

differing interests, the AWC unravelled in 1971 with numerous splinter groups

emerging in its place.61 One of these groups, the New York Art Strike against

Racism, War, and Repression, was co-chaired by Morris. The most visible actions

by the AWC was the first Art strike on 15 October 1969, in which the Whitney,

MoMA, the Jewish Museum and most of the city’s private galleries closed. The Met

postponed the opening of a large exhibition of American painting and sculpture,

though with the Guggenheim, it remained open. As a result, both museums were

picketed by the AWC. And secondly, the furore over sponsorship for the My Lai

protest poster (Q: AND BABIES? A: AND BABIES), that the AWC waged against the

58 Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America, 134. 59 Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 70. See also: Miguel de Baca & Makeda Best (eds.), Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), xiv. 60 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Artworkers’ Coalition: Not a History*’, Studio International, 180.927 (November 1970), 171-174. 61 Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America, 131.

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board of MoMA.62 In her account of the activities of the AWC, Lippard, whilst

acknowledging the disparate and competing interests of the coalition, singles out

Judd for criticism over his apparent silence on the organisation and activities of it.

A closer look at Judd’s personal political views reveal aspects that did not

necessarily align with the aims of the AWC. Even though Judd was a highly visible

attendee at early AWC meetings and a central figure within the New York artworld,

Lippard claims Judd remained silent on critical issues and indeed, was silently

disgusted with how the AWC operated.63

Unlike many of the young artists associated with the New Left, Judd’s art and

politics remained relatively discrete.64 This is not to say that Judd’s political views

were developed in strict separation from his art. Judd’s writing on his art suggests

a meditative sense of his individual politics, while his writing on politics is

resonant with his aesthetic practices. Yet Judd viewed art and politics as two

distinct fields of activity that demanded different focus and actions. Judd’s work

was not overtly political in statement or sentiment, as Lippard and more militant

agitators seemed to demand. And, it was not archly conservative or authoritarian

as Chave’s criticisms alludes to, but nor was it devoid of a political consciousness

or awareness. Rather, Judd held the view that art distinct from politics acted as a

site of resistance and that art overtly engaged in politics tended towards

propaganda.65 In response to a symposium question posed by Artforum’s editor

Philip Leider in 1970 on art’s relationship to politics, Judd wrote:

62 A detailed history of this incident is found in ch.4: ‘My Lai, Guernica, MoMA and the Art Left, New York 1969-70’ in: Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in

Sixties America. 63 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Artworkers’ Coalition: Not a History*’. The AWC was also involved in an unseemly quarrel with MoMA and the painters of the first New York School over an exhibition on Abstract Expressionism in which the AWC called on the older painters to withdraw their works and boycott MoMA. This drew the ire of several of these artists, especially Barnett Newman who Judd was particularly close too. See ch.3: ‘Angry Arts, the Art Workers Coalition and the Politics of “Otherness”’, in: Franscina, Art, Politics and

Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America. 64 For accounts of Judd’s involvement in political causes, see: David Raskin, ‘Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics’, Art History, 24.5 (November 2001), 682-706. And Franscina’s case study on Judd in: Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties

America, 137-142. 65 Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America, 139; Raskin, ‘Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics’, 683.

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My attitude of opposition and isolation, which has slowly changed in the last five

years or so, was in reaction to the events of the fifties: the continued state of war,

the destruction of the UN by the Americans and the Russians, the rigid useless

political parties, the general exploitation and both the Army and McCarthy… So, my

work didn’t have anything to do with the society, the institutions and grand

theories. It was one person’s work and interests; its main political conclusion,

negative but basic, was that it, myself, anyone shouldn’t serve any of these things,

that they should be considered very sceptically and practically.66

Certain beliefs of Judd’s politics are revealed in the above statement and these do

not easily reconcile with either the prerogatives of the Old or New Left. Judd was

wary of central government and institutional structures which propagated

hierarchies. Politically, in the 1960s and 1970s, Judd was active in localised

political groups including Citizens for Local Democracy and Artists Against the

Expressway (which had successfully opposed the construction of new expressway

through lower Manhattan where Judd lived). David Raskin suggests that this

political concern of localism and the rejection of centralism and hierarchy aligns

Judd with the tradition of anarchism, rather than contemporary Marxism to which

much of the New Left identified.67 In his aesthetic practices, this suspicion of

centralism is found in Judd’s rejection of hierarchical or rationalist composition.

Instead, Judd advances an art where the work’s elements are independent,

polarised, and non-relational. Judd was further a pacifist and involved with the

War Resisters League, joining in protest marches against the Vietnam War, and

donating art to the ‘Artists’ Tower of Protest’. Judd had earlier served with the

Army in Korea and held a pessimistic view of dominant political ideologies and the

Cold War. As an anarchist and pacifist, Judd believed that war impeded upon

individual liberty. Raskin proposes that in his art and politics Judd ‘promulgated a

radical individualism’ and in: ‘Subordinating political demand to aesthetic

66 Donald Judd, in: ‘The Artist and Politics’, Artforum, 9.1 (September 1970), 36. 67 Raskin, ‘Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics’, 687.

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principle, he restricted his works of art to conveying only a generalized

oppositional attitude, a practice built around an empirical core.’68

Raskin’s implication here is that Judd maintained separation between his art and

politics, and within the realm of his art, aesthetic concerns were foremost. More

indistinctly, Judd’s art expressed the artist’s individualist and anarchist politics.

This is seen through Judd’s objects’ conceptual and formal concerns of

independence, singleness, non-hierarchical order, and primacy of experience. Judd

was sceptical towards models of knowledge that were not based on an individual’s

quantifiable experience. This is evident in his identification with empiricism and

his frank rejection of Cartesian rationalism. An encounter with one of Judd’s

objects necessitates the rejection of all preconceived notions of what the object

should be and instead experiencing the object wholly and anew in the here and

now. Judd’s art holds no reference or tangible connection to the politics and ‘moral

values of actual life’ and stresses autonomy.69 This autonomous field and the

viewer’s experience of the object herein, acts as site of isolation from and

opposition against political populism, propaganda, and kitsch.70 In spaces where

Judd exerts near complete control over the display context of his objects, this sense

of isolation and opposition is heightened. This is most readily seen in Judd’s

permanent installation of his objects in sites in Marfa, Texas. In 1973, Judd began

purchasing buildings, including decommissioned military sheds, in the isolated

desert town to permanently install his objects and those of artists he collected.

Here we see Judd, who remained based in Marfa until his death in 1994, resolute in

his isolation and opposition to the centrality of the New York art world.

68 Raskin, ‘Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics’, 702. 69 Franscina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America, 139. 70 Raskin, ‘Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics’, 687. Raskin here suggests that: ‘By testing experiences against beliefs, Judd thought his art provided an avenue through inductive generalisation to liberty.’ That is, moving from specific observations of the object, the viewer through inductive reasoning at more general comprehension of its meaning. This contrasts with a deductive process that moves from the general to the specific and bears the traces of rationalist thinking.

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The relationship between Morris’s politics and practice was much more entwined

than that of Judd’s. Morris engaged with high-profile political actions and in his

practice, was polemically concerned with labour. Morris was not involved with the

AWC, but became a central figure of artist activist circles when he shut down his

1970 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. The U.S. government had been bombing

Cambodia and the day after Morris closed his exhibition, a meeting of artists

gathered to organise a political response to the bombings. From this meeting, The

New York Art Strike against Racism, War, and Repression was formed with Morris

elected as co-chair with Poppy Johnson. The strike was called for 22 May 1970 and

the group demanded that New York’s museums and galleries close for the day.

While some museums did close, The Metropolitan refused and was picketed by

hundreds of angry artists [fig.73]. The crowd was led by Morris who addressed

them from the steps of the museum.71

To understand how Morris became the voice and face of The New York Art Strike

against Racism, War, and Repression, it is necessary to explore the increasing

political nature of Morris’s practices through the 1960s. The Whitney show was

the culmination of Morris’s interrogations into art and labour and the notion of

artist as worker. The minimalists had valorised production with their factory-

produced objects crafted by blue-collar metalworkers. Now, in his turn from

minimalism to postminimalism, Morris not only sought to reclaim production and

process for the artist but occupy the role of worker too. This identification as

worker, rather than artist, was inherently political. Maurice Berger’s writings on

Morris examine the artist’s engagement with process and how this situates Morris

within the New Left’s desired political alignment with the working class.72 In the

late 1960s, the writings of Herbert Marcuse circulated through artist activist

circles and very likely had an impact upon Morris. In his widely-circulated essay,

Marcuse reasoned that scientific and technological advancement would herald a

‘new sensibility’ and ‘aesthetic ethos’, with a revolutionary art as praxis bringing

71 For detailed history of the strike, see: Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Robert Morris’s Art Strike’ in her book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. 72 See: Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, minimalism, and the 1960s, New York: Harper & Row, 1989. And: Maurice Berger, ‘Have mind, will travel’ (c.1994), in: The

Mind/Body Problem, [exh. cat.], New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994.

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about the structural change of society. 73 The artist, working in cooperation with

the working class, would be the necessary catalyst for the revolution.74

In Morris’s exhibition at the Whitney this concept of art as praxis and solidarity

with workers is played out. The show, initially planned as a retrospective, involved

the dispersal of raw and rough materials throughout the gallery space by Morris

and a gang of construction workers over a period of weeks. Concrete blocks and

lengths of steel and timber were manoeuvred throughout the space on tracks and

by a series of hoists and pulleys. The art in the show was the theatre of work and

the performance of the workers. Visitors looked on as Morris and his crew pushed,

pulled, dropped, scattered and rolled heavy industrial materials around the gallery.

The materials were left where they fell, Morris allowing chance and gravity to

determine the outcome of the work process. Then, before the show was scheduled

to close, Morris called a stop to the work – an art strike. In the catalogue

accompanying the show, which was curated by Marcia Tucker, it states:

The present exhibition, which consists of approximately a dozen works by Robert

Morris made especially for the occasion, bypasses the historicizing function of a

retrospective show. Morris has integrated space and sculpture in his own manner;

the installation and choice of works have been determined by the artist. By

dispensing with a formal opening and allowing the public access to the museum

floor during the installation of the exhibition, environment and work become

elements in a continuous process which is crucial to the body of Morris' work.

These pieces, therefore, will not have been seen prior to their installation.75

73 Herbert Marcuse, ‘An Essay on Liberation’ (1969), 22. 74 Herbert Marcuse, ‘An Essay on Liberation’ (1969), 40: ‘The radical transformation of a social system still depends on the class which constitutes the human base of the process of production. In the advanced capitalist countries, this is the industrial working class. The changes in the composition of this class, and the extent of its integration into the system alter, not the potential but the political role of labour. Revolutionary class “in-itself” but not “for-itself”, objectively but not subjectively, its radicalization will depend on catalysts outside its ranks.’ 75 Marcia Tucker, Robert Morris, New York: Praeger and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970, [in preface].

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In this show, Morris theatricalises work and presents himself as a construction

crew leader or foreman. As Julia Bryan-Wilson surmised in her thorough research

of this exhibition: ‘By circumventing the studio and fabricating the work wholly on

the floor of the museum, Morris figured the art itself as a specific kind of work,

performed at a specific kind of work site.’76 Does this though really figure Morris as

worker? Certainly, the show had its dangers like a construction site and Morris was

forced, much to his consternation, to alter some of the materials (concrete blocks

as opposed to granite); engineers feared the floor could not hold the weight.77

There is no doubt that Morris was physically involved in the construction process,

photographs show Morris alongside the workers heaving and hefting large blocks

and beams.78 Yet, the realities of work experienced by construction workers was

vastly different to that of Morris as an artist. The labourers’ work may be viewed

politically from the New Left perspective’s, though it is unlikely that the workers

themselves shared this outlook. Morris’s work was a conscious political statement

that the labourers, cognisant to it or not, were part of.

Bryan-Wilson points out that the New Left’s desired solidarity with the working

class was somewhat naïve and even misguided. Citing the hard-hat riots on 8 May

1970, in which construction workers in lower Manhattan came into violent

confrontation with students protesting the bombing of Cambodia, Bryan-Wilson

claims: ‘More than any other single event, the hard-hat riots served to redefine

publicly the position of the labourer as politically conservative.’79 As is the case

broadly, the working class were disproportionally conscripted into the armed

forces and generally held a pro-war sentiment. Obviously, this was in dire contrast

to the artist activists of the New Left and their anti-war protests. The hard-hat

riots, which occurred at the time of Morris’s show at the Whitney, brought this

contrast into sharp focus and this would have been a difficult realisation and

reconciliation for Morris. Indeed, Morris’s political interest in work and labour, as

76 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, 85. 77 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, 86. 78 As Julia Bryan-Wilson research points out there is little documentary evidence of this show, bar a few photographs of which are re-published in Art Workers: Radical Practice in

the Vietnam War Era. 79 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, 110.

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a critical inquiry of it, somewhat retreats after the Whitney show. Morris’s next

notable focus in his oeuvre is his Blind Time series (1973), where he created

drawings blindfolded with his hands dipped in oil and graphite. Here, Morris’s

focus is again with process, but the concerns are more formal – the physical

interaction between body, materials, and medium – than they are political.

The relationship between art and politics was broached differently by Judd and

Morris. Judd made distinction between his art practices and his political actions,

although his writings suggest that the two spheres influenced each other. In this

aspect, Judd aligns more with Greenberg or Rosenberg and of the intellectual

traditions of the Old Left in their belief that art and politics should remain discrete

concerns. Yet, Judd was indifferent to dominant political structures and ideologies.

He remained fiercely independent, leaning politically towards anarchism rather

than Marxism. On the other hand, Morris’s art practices became resoundingly

political through the 1960s. Morris was the embodiment of the artistic New Left

with his polemic interrogations of work, art, and labour championed by his critical

allies in Artforum and October. With Morris’s art and political concerns

intermeshed, when the energy of the protest era of the New Left dissipated,

Morris’s practice shifted into an exploration of diverse media that included

drawing, painting, performance, earth art, steam, and conceptual writings. While

aspects of Morris’s practice in the 1970s still engaged critically with political

concerns, including war and gender, these were mediated more through art than

political actions or protest. The engagement with broader cultural themes and the

move beyond formalist art, suggests Morris’s work also responded to the new

critical paradigm which Krauss described as the postmodernist, expanded field.

The contrast to Judd at this point is severe. Judd’s mature work approached a

certain linearity. Based in Marfa, Judd pursued his formal interrogation of the

specific object. The formal tensions in Judd’s work remained somewhat constant,

but were resolved with heightening aesthetic refinement and conceptual

complexity. Morris’s mature work unfolds like a matrix, with different points

therein constituting different media and thematic concerns.

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Examining the mature practices of Judd and Morris through the 1970s is beyond

the scope of this dissertation. Further, given the widening fissure of the practices

in the 1970s, such a comparative investigation would prove difficult to quantify or

sustain. Indeed, an examination of Morris’s practices during the 1970s would find

more fitting comparative analysis with the postminimalist, process, and

performance artists who have been considered in this chapter. These artists

include Serra, Beuys, Acconci, and Nauman. A similar examination of Judd’s

practices through the 1970s would offer interesting relative analyses with Andre,

Flavin, John Chamberlain, or Claes Oldenburg – artists who remained committed to

the object’s integrity.

Broadly, this thesis scrutinises the historical snapshot of minimalist sculpture in

the mid-1960s which presents a nearer aesthetic unity of Judd and Morris. As

detailed in this chapter, this seeming unity sees Judd and Morris situated together

within the major canon-affirming exhibitions at the end of the 1960s. The

acceptance of minimalism into the canon of modern art proved fatal to it, owing to

minimalism’s conceptual legitimisation of various practices which were hostile

towards artistic modernism. This historical rupture positions Judd and Morris at

the terminus of modern art. Though, as has been explored in this chapter, Morris’s

practice after this rupture moves through sculpture’s expanded field. The latter

parts of this chapter examined the political currents in Judd’s and Morris’s

aesthetic practices in the late 1960s. This time period is defined by intense societal

and political discordance, and both Judd and Morris were highly-visible within the

debates on art and politics coursing through the New York art world. The

relationship between art and politics was treated differently by both artists and

this difference helps inform the distance between them in the 1970s. Judd’s late

practice was defined by his opposition and isolation to dominant political and

institutional authority, while Morris’s practices in the 1970s were concerned with

the agitation and critical enquiry of them.

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Conclusion

This thesis has discriminated the aesthetics of Donald Judd and Robert Morris

within minimalism to renegotiate difference between their competing

interventions into modernist art and criticism. As minimalism emerged as a

discursive threat to modernist art in the early1960s, notable contemporary critics

missed the conceptual divergences between Judd’s and Morris’s three-dimensional

objects. In mapping both the dissonances and resonances across the artists’

minimalist works and theory, this thesis investigates the oppositional relationship

between them and against Clement Greenberg’s modernist paradigm. Principally,

this thesis has contended that the conceptual dissonance between the pair’s three-

dimensional objects originates in their differing paths towards minimalism. For

Judd, this was through painting and art criticism, while for Morris it was through

painting and dance.

Through chronology, this thesis interrogates the artists’ early aesthetic

explorations beginning in the mid-1950s paintings up until Judd’s and Morris’s

first minimalist shows in the early1960s. For Morris, this involved passage through

experimental dance and performance. This thesis then comparatively analyses

Judd’s and Morris’s respective three-dimensional works in the mid-1960s at the

height of minimalism’s contest of modernist discourse. This analysis examines the

treatment of formal concerns in the respective work of Judd and Morris, including

consideration of size, scale, shape, colour, materials, and modes of facture. The

final chapter of this thesis scrutinises the acceptance of Judd, Morris, and

minimalism into the canon of modern art at a time when modernist thought was

fracturing aesthetically and politically. A broader consequence of minimalism was

an emerging context for diverse postminimalist and postmodernist practices that

necessarily moved beyond modernism. This site of fracture and subsequent artists’

responses to it, is framed as an area for future enquiry extending from this

dissertation.

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Chapter One of this thesis, titled ‘Modernist Painting and its Challenge’, establishes

the critical paradigm of artistic modernism as it is informed by Greenberg’s

formalist narrative. Greenberg’s teleology of modernist painting begins with

Édouard Manet, then the advance of one hundred years of graduating flatness and

abstraction to culminate in the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Mark

Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still. This trajectory, while shaped by

broader historical circumstance, accorded centrality to the New York art world.

Herein, Greenberg’s critical authority was resolute and the critic policed the

modernist canon rigorously. Artists and practices that did not conform to the

strictures of discipline and medium were excluded for their perceived

transgressions. In painting, the artist’s driving concern was reduced to the

flattening and abstraction of the image in relation to the two-dimensionality of its

support. The primary painters of the New York School see this formal problem at

its nearest resolution, leaving little space for the subsequent generation of

American painters to navigate within. This is a crucial point in the context of both

Judd’s and Morris’s moves into three-dimensionality that instruct the early

chapters of this thesis.

While Greenberg’s critical formalism sustained the status of paradigm through the

1940s, ‘50s, and into the 1960s, a theatrical and Duchampian challenge emerged in

the 1950s to strike discord. The individual and collaborative works of John Cage,

Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg upset conformist notions of

medium purity and confused artistic distinctions of form and content.

Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) and Cage’s 4’33” (1952) focus Chapter

one’s aesthetic enquiry. These silent masterpieces served as stark counterpoints to

the crises and climax of Abstract Expressionism and were vital antecedents to

minimalism in the 1960s. The emerging and influential painters, Jasper Johns and

Frank Stella in the late1950s, are also given analytic attention in the first chapter.

For differing reasons, both Johns and Stella offer conceptual entry points into the

interrogative relationship between late modernist painting and minimalism.

Johns’s combines and assemblages (along with Rauschenberg’s), blended the

mediums of painting and sculpture. The use of found objects in these works

blurred distinctions between art and life. The Duchampian tendencies in the

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practices of Rauschenberg and Johns, resonated with Morris’s early three-

dimensional work. Stella’s shaped canvases were, in the context of this thesis and

in relation to Judd, the end game of modernist painting. At a time of the medium’s

exhaustion, Stella’s paintings pushed out from the gallery wall and broke the

rectilinear format of painting. Content and form were collapsed and became

coincident. To Judd, Stella’s paintings are the conclusion to Greenberg’s

unrelenting march towards flatness and abstraction. From here, the only place

painting could go was into three dimensions.

The early painting practices of Judd and Morris were examined in Chapter Two of

this thesis – ‘Movement through Painting’. The primary painters of the New York

School loomed large for Judd, Morris, and other younger contemporary artists. The

formal problems that the younger artists encountered, that were framed by the

innovations of the earlier painters, spurred the new artists’ movements into

different disciplines. This movement was most pronounced with Morris. Morris’s

driving concern in painting was the interrogation of physical process; he had been

inspired by the work of Pollock and Still. Impressed by Pollock’s physicality and his

sense of being in the painting, Morris started painting from the floor in search of

the all-over image. This move opened-up to Morris the perceptual distinctions

between a painting produced on the floor and one in a perpendicular position or

an easel picture. This concern with perception was developed and exploited by

Morris in his minimalist sculpture. Ultimately for Morris, he was unable to

reconcile the split between the physical process with the finished painting, and so

soon abandoned painting to work in dance and performance with his then partner,

Simone Forti.

Judd’s engagement with painting was defined by his working through formalist

and philosophical problems. Across his early paintings, Judd grappled with

tensions between realism and the real, relational composition and non-

anthropomorphic order, illusionistic space and spatial arrangement, and the

general and specific treatment of forms and colour. Judd’s interrogation of these

formal problems was contextualised by his questioning of and tensions between

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Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism. Seen with a certain linearity, Judd’s

painting from the mid-1950s through to the early 1960s, gradually became less

representational and expressive and more tactile and object-like. Judd’s final

paintings in this span, approached the eloquent sparsity and minimal palette of

Newman. Yet, unlike Newman’s abstract expression of the sublime, metaphysical

experience, Judd’s paintings appeared more concerned with spatial structure and

physical presence.

For Judd, Morris, and their contemporaries the question of Pollock was central to

their respective practices. To many, indeed most, Pollock had created paintings so

singular in their radical abstraction and so transcendent over earlier stylistic

conventions and analytical concerns, that their revelations proved insurmountable

to successive artists. Allan Kaprow noted that the legacy of Pollock was that he

forced younger artists to address the formal problems his art created through

different mediums. For Kaprow, this field was Happenings. For Judd, it was

pushing painting into the three-dimensional field of objects. While for Morris, his

interrogation of Pollock’s physical process led him to the field of dance. Morris

returned to Pollock in his exploration of soft materials in his postminimalist phase.

Chapter Three of this dissertation, ‘Modern Dance and Minimalist Interventions’,

addresses Morris engagement with dance and performance within the disciplinary

history of modern dance. American modern dance was established foremost

through the dance and choreographic theories of Martha Graham and Doris

Humphrey. As an expressive art form, modern dance viewed the dancer’s

movement as the outward, physical expression of an interior, emotive state. This

physical expression of the dancer’s internalisation of the dance’s emotive content,

compelled a sympathetic response of emotions within the viewer. Graham and

Humphreys’ theories on dance further stressed correspondence between the

dancing body and the modern consciousness. Humphrey counselled the archetypal

modern city of New York as a source of inspiration. Although their practices were

unrelated, Judd too took visual cue from the changing landscape of Manhattan in

the 1960s.

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Into the 1940s, modern dance was on the wane. A young Merce Cunningham, who

had danced in Graham’s company, sought to reinvigorate the mode by coolly

incorporating the technical lexis of ballet. Cunningham rejected the expressive

content of modern dance, employed chance as a choreographic strategy, and

through his collaborations with Cage and Rauschenberg, upset the conventional

relationships between dance, music, and visual décor. Cunningham brought to

dance an unprecedented, highly analytical, and high-modernist concern with

technique. He isolated the body’s parts and articulated their movement into a

performance structure that was focused on precision and constant movement.

Freed from the relational arrangements with music and visual décor,

Cunningham’s radical choreography stripped dance back to its irreducible

elements – the body and its movement. Cunningham’s revolutionary notion of

dance as movement in time and space, foreground many of the experimental

practices and minimalist interventions of the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s.

Morris began his performance explorations in the movement workshops of Ann

Halprin. Halprin encouraged her students to move beyond dance clichés and

expressive responses to explore the body and its movement freed from the rules of

modern dance. Halprin used games and tasked-based activities to generate

movement that was not expressive nor dramatic. Many of Halprin’s ideas on

pedestrian movement and non-compositional strategies were developed by some

of her students that formed the Judson Dance Theater. These students included

Morris, Yvonne Rainer, and Trisha Brown while other members of the group

included Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, and Carolee Schneemann. In the early to

mid-1960s, Morris collaborated with Forti and Rainer who were both vital to the

articulation of minimalism in dance and performance. During this period, Morris

created some of his most distinguishing choreographic works which he developed

coextensively with his early, large-scale minimalist sculpture. In his key works

performed with the Judson Dance Theater – Arizona (1963), Site (1964), and

Waterman Switch (1965) – Morris explored the interrelationships between objects,

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bodies, time, and space. The theatrical staging of these formal relationships was

focal to Morris’s conception of minimalism.

The fourth chapter of this thesis titled ‘Objects and Sculpture’, analyses Judd’s and

Morris’s initial minimalist periods which began with their solo shows at the Green

Gallery in 1963 and 1964 respectively. Within the narrative of modern art,

minimalism is announced with these two shows. Judd’s Green Gallery show was

instructive to his origination of three-dimensional specific objects out of painting.

In his last paintings prior to this show, Judd incorporated a series of found objects

into his canvases. The use of found objects proved fatal to his painting practice, as

these paintings became unsustainable within the two-dimensional medium – both

conceptually and physically. Judd’s first three-dimensional objects were, somewhat

incidentally, the result of paintings that failed to exist on the wall and had to stand

alone on the floor. Judd’s first show of objects at the Green, was revelatory in this

regard. Featuring a suite of objects painted bright Cadmium red and containing

metal pipes and other found materials, these early objects opened to Judd a new

art form that was neither painting or sculpture, but what he termed specific

objects. This chapter traced Judd’s theorisation of his specific objects through his

critical work, most principally his manifesto-like essay ‘Specific Objects’ (1965)

and in his radio interview accompanied by Stella with Bruce Glaser and published

as ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’ (1964).

Morris’s first minimalist show at the Green Gallery in 1964 consisted of a series of

large, grey polyhedrons strategically positioned throughout the gallery. Visually

spare, the large forms combined to sculpt the space of the room and contend the

perceptual field of the viewer. Reviewing Morris’s show, Judd noted that Morris’s

forms were minimal in their visual appeal. This term used intuitively by Judd set in

train the shibboleth of minimalism that came to encompass his work as well. In his

Green Gallery show, Morris presented sculpture as a haptic and phenomenological

proposition over a visual experience. He articulated his conception of minimalist

sculpture in his primary essays, ‘Notes on Sculpture, parts I & II’ (1966). Morris’s

essays defined his minimalism in antagonism to Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’. As this

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dissertation has stressed however, the fundamental dissonance between Judd and

Morris was discernible in these seminal Green Gallery shows. With his brightly

coloured specific objects, Judd resolved the formal problems from his painting, by

devising a non-compositional order and overcoming representation through a turn

to real objects. In this early showing of his minimalist sculpture, Morris’s

interrogation of objects and bodies in time and space was evident and paralleled a

similar focus in his dance.

Chapter Five, ‘Formalist Concerns: Gestalts and Seriality’ examines the formal

distinctions between Judd’s specific objects and Morris’s minimalist sculpture.

While expounding the dissonance between Judd’s and Morris’s work, this chapter

also considers them collectively in their separation from other contemporary

groupings of artists. The ‘Primary Structures’ show at the Jewish Museum in 1966,

was notable for marking out the key artists that defined minimalist sculpture. This

included Judd, Morris, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and the younger artist

Robert Smithson. Within this significant exhibition of large-scale sculpture, the

works of these six artists stood apart from the rest in the show. Their works

challenged conventional understandings of art and sculpture. There was little sign

of anthropomorphic or rationalist composition in these works. The simple cubes,

‘L’ shapes, fluorescent tubes or firebricks, were devoid of a conceptual interior –

the inner life of a work of art which imbues it with meaning from a critical

perspective. These objects stated externality. They were arranged by repetition or

in basic configurations to create Gestalt effects. The simple forms and their

uncomplicated order, negated the significance attached to artistry and

composition. Moreover, these aspects confounded modernist criticism.

The use of rectilinear shapes and basic polyhedrons was a common to Judd’s and

Morris’s practices, as it was with all the key minimalists. These simple forms

precluded a priori knowledge and spoke to an experience of art based on empirical

observation. The structural arrangement and placement of these forms within a

display space then became imperative. Morris articulated this aspect of his

minimalist sculpture as phenomenological formalism; he created puzzle-like

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configurations to produce Gestalt effects as experienced by the viewer. This

engagement of the viewer by way of their perceptual field was condemned by the

critic Michael Fried for being inherently theatrical. Fried’s charge of theatre

suggested that Morris’s sculpture demanded the participation of an audience, as

with dramatic theatre, for it to function as art. Fried further declared the

experience of Morris’s sculpture was temporal in nature and that this temporality

of experience was endless – it could go on and on. Fried directed the charge of

theatre against Judd as well. Fried claimed that the endlessness of experience in

Judd’s work was in its repetition, suggesting that Judd’s repetition could go on ad

infinitum, at least conceptually. Judd used repetition and mathematical sequences

in the structural organisation of his works to circumvent artistic compositional

choices. Judd and Morris left their works untitled as another inhibition to personal

meaning being conferred upon their works. This practice of not naming their

works, common between the artists, was indicative of their aims to break from

aesthetic tradition.

Following on, ‘Formalist Concerns: Red and Grey’ – the sixth chapter of this thesis,

continued the comparative formal analysis of the work of Judd and Morris. Colour

was the main site of theoretical contest between the artists. Judd’s principal

minimalist practice was defined by the intense experimentation of colour and this

was partly responsive to the innovations of Abstract Expressionism. Judd’s formal

concern with colour was heightened through his use of industrial materials that

were embedded with colour, such as anodised steel and tinted Plexiglass. These

materials enabled Judd to treat colour as a structural property. The juxtaposition

of materials gave Judd’s highly-coloured works the specificity and polarity he

esteemed in the work of the primary painters of the New York School.

Contrastingly, Morris declared colour as an extraneous concern to sculpture and

that it detracted from its tactile aspects. Morris’s neutral palette of greys and

whites lessened the visual appeal of his work as he emphasised it physical claims.

The attack on sculpture’s visual presentation was part of Morris’s questioning of

the nature of art. Morris used the distinction between the optic and haptic to create

division from Judd. This divide affirms an interrogative thrust of this thesis, that

Judd’s and Morris’s minimalist objects are conceptually dissonant because they

220

stem from dissimilar early practices. Judd’s movement towards the specific object

was through a formal interrogation of modernist painting, where he broke down

the discipline’s aesthetic conditions to arrive at objects. This formalist or rather

empirical interrogation of the two-dimensional medium was necessarily

concerned with optical experience. On the other hand, Morris’s earlier explorations

in painting were more centred on the artist’s physical movement. Morris pursued

his investigation of physical process in dance. Here, Morris developed his haptic

concern of bodies and objects which he coextensively developed in his large-scale

sculpture.

One of the main criticisms by adverse critics and the competing Park Place group

artists against the minimalists, was that the execution of their works was

performed by contracted metal workers. The use of industrial materials and

manufacturing processes opened a new horizon of possibilities to the minimalists

in the 1960s. Both Judd and Morris wrote in depth on using unconventional

materials and technical forming processes. Traditionalists claimed that because

they did not make the work with their own hands, the minimalists could not claim

the role of real artists. Arguably, in freeing the artists from the physical or

mechanical production of the work, minimalism was more cerebral and

conceptually-laden than other sculptural practices. For Judd, industrial processes

meant that his art could be mass-produced; his stacks and rows of cubes were

pressed out in countless variations of colours, materials, sizes, and units. Yet for

Morris, being removed from the production of the artwork eventually became

problematic, as it conflicted with his long-held concern with the artist’s physical

engagement. Morris returned to this concern in his performative interrogation of

soft materials, thereby marking his movement into postminimalism.

The final chapter of this thesis ‘The Canon and Critical Afterthoughts’, examines the

fatal elevation of minimalism into the canon of modern art. This elevation occurred

through major exhibitions at the end of 1960s. Here, Judd and Morris were

positioned alongside the pre-eminent Abstract Expressionist painters. Somewhat

paradoxically, Morris at this stage was moving through postminimalism and

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producing process works that were politically informed and challenged the

integrity of art’s object. Morris’s critiques on the institution of art and unravelling

of the minimalist object resonated with younger artists engaging in conceptual,

performance, and process art. This chapter considers the splintering of modern art

and identifies some of the conceptual tributaries flowing from this fractious period

as areas of future research. In contrast to Morris, Judd pursued a late modernist

interrogation of the specific object concentrating on conceptually expansive

resolutions to it and creating an environment of pure art in Marfa. To the younger

artists who followed, the question of Judd was pertinent, much like Pollock had

been to Judd’s generation.

Chapter Seven further analyses the mediation of art and politics in the work of

Judd and Morris at the end of the decade. Politically, Judd was sceptical towards

dominant political ideologies and models of knowledge. His political inclination

was towards pacifism and conscientious anarchism. Mediated through his work,

these political themes emerge generally as notions of opposition and isolation.

Judd’s move to Marfa and his creation of an environment of permanent art can be

read in this context. Throughout the 1960s, Morris performed Marxist

interrogations of art and labour that culminated in his major exhibition at the

Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. In this show, Morris led a construction

gang hauling, spilling, and tipping large concrete blocks and timbers across the

galleries. Morris then abruptly stopped work on his show calling a strike. He then

led an anti-war protest and sit-in by artists on the steps of the Metropolitan

Museum of Art. In this era of protest, Morris’s art and political practice were

enmeshed, unlike Judd who sought to keep his art and politics discrete.

The investigative scope of this thesis is limited to the historical period c.1955-

1970. Herein, the focus has been on the early aesthetic practices of Judd and

Morris through to the effective end of minimalism and their acceptance into the

canon. As such, the necessarily narrow focus of this thesis does not permit a more

lateral view of minimalism. A broader, but historically shorter view of minimalism

could consider in depth the practices of Flavin, Andre, or LeWitt. Having

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articulated difference between Judd and Morris, and determining their respective

conceptions of minimalism, further research branching from this dissertation can

seek out dissonances and resonances with these other key minimalists. Similarly,

this thesis’s historical scope limits the study of divergent practices which stemmed

from minimalism after 1970. In the last chapter of this thesis, it is noted that

pursuing Morris’s diverse concerns beyond this point necessitates comparative

analysis with artists who were engaged in similar practices and critical enquiries.

These artists include Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. On the other

hand, Judd’s single-minded pursuit of the specific object beyond 1970 could be

analysed in relation to John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and even aspects of

Andre’s practice. These artists were committed to the continuing integrity of the

art object.

What the potential expansion of this thesis proves is that the nearer aesthetic

alignment of Judd and Morris in the mid-1960s, belied their disparate trajectories

towards minimalism. Beyond minimalism and into the artists’ late and mature

periods, the disparity witnessed in their earlier trajectories re-emerges more

resolute and pronounced. After minimalism, Judd pursued his interrogation of the

specific object and his articulation of a permanent art environment in Marfa.

Morris’s corporeal concern with process and his concerns of theatre and

temporality extended across mediums, disciplines, and thematic interests during

the 1970s. The conceptual distance between Judd and Morris in the 1970s, that is

evident in their closer aesthetic associations with the artists mentioned above, can

therefore be traced back to their engagement with painting and criticism and

painting and dance respectively. Seemingly then, Judd’s and Morris’s practices are

only tangent for a brief period in minimalism in the mid-1960s. The dissonance

between Judd and Morris within minimalism has been the main explication of this

dissertation.

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225

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Stella, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1965; reprinted in: Michael Fried, Art and

Objecthood: essays and reviews, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Glaser, Bruce, et al. ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’, ARTnews (September 1966), reprinted in: Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: a critical anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Graham, Martha (1937). ‘Graham 1937’, in: Jean Brown (ed.), The Vision of Modern

Dance, Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1998.

Humphrey, Doris (1937). ‘What a Dancer Thinks About’, in: Jean Brown (ed.), The

Vision of Modern Dance, Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1998.

Kaprow, Allan (1958). ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, in: Kaprow, Essays on the

Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kaprow, Allan (1961). ‘Happenings in the New York Scene’, in: Kaprow, Essays on

the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Köhler, Wolfgang (1920). ‘Physical Gestalten’, in: Willis D. Ellis, ed. A source book of

Gestalt psychology, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1938.

Kuspit, Donald (1988). ‘The Subjective Aspect of Critical Evaluation’, in: Kuspit, The

New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Leepa, Allan (1966). ‘Anti-Art and Criticism’, in: Gregory Battcock, ed. The New Art, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973.

Maletic, Vera & Ann Halprin (1967-68). ‘The Process Is The Purpose’, in: Jean Brown (ed.), The Vision of Modern Dance, Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1998.

Michelson, Annette (1969). ‘Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression’, in: Robert Morris, [exh. cat.], Corcoran Gallery of Art; Detroit Institute of Art, 1969.

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Patterson, David W. (2002). ‘The Picture That Is Not in the Colours: Cage, Coomaraswamy, and the Impact of India’, in: Patterson, ed. John Cage: Music,

Philosophy, and Intention, 1933-1950, New York: Routledge, 2002.

Paxton, Steve (2014). ‘The Emergence of Simone Forti’, in: Breitwiesser, Sabine, ed. (2014). Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, Munich: Hirmer Verlag.

Rainer, Yvonne (2014). ‘On Simone Forti’, in: Breitwiesser, Sabine, ed. (2014). Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, Munich: Hirmer Verlag.

Rainer, Yvonne (1966). ‘The Mind is a Muscle: A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, in: Rainer, Work 1961-1973, Halifax: The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974.

Raskin, David (2004). ‘Judd’s Moral Art’, in: Nicholas Serota, ed. Donald Judd, London: Tate Publishing, 2004.

Rosenberg, Harold (1966). ‘Virtuosos of Boredom’, in: Rosenberg, Discovering the

Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, & Politics, Chicago: The University of Press, 1973.

Harold Rosenberg, ‘Defining Art’, The New Yorker (25 February 1967); reprinted in: Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: a critical anthology, 304-5.

Shiff, Richard ‘Fast Thinking’ (2000), in: Donald Judd: late work, [exh. cat.], New York: PaceWildenstein, 2000.

…… (2004) ‘Donald Judd, Safe from Birds’, in: Nicholas Serota, ed. Donald Judd, London: Tate Publishing, 2004.

…… (2011). ‘What Judd Knows’, in: Donald Judd, [exh. cat.], Göttingen: Steidl/David Zwirner, 2011.

254

Weiss, Jeffrey (2010). ‘Things Fall Apart’, in: Robert Morris, Untitled (Scatter Piece)

1968-69, New York: Leo Castelli, 2012.

Wertheimer, Max (1925). ‘Gestalt Theory’, in: Willis D. Ellis, ed. A source book of

Gestalt psychology, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1938.

…… (1945). ‘The Famous Story of Young Gauss’, in: Wertheimer, Productive

Thinking, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.

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Online articles, interviews, and transcripts

Donald Judd interview by Bruce Hooton (1965). Transcript of oral history interview with Donald Judd conducted on 3 February 1965 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-donald-judd-11621

Flavin Judd, ‘The Glasshouse Conversations, 18 July 2001’, [online]. Accessed 10 November 2011. Available from: http://glasshouseconversations.org/

Frank Stella interview by Sidney Tillum (1969). Transcript of oral history interview with Frank Stella conducted in 1969 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

John Cage interview by Paul Cummings (1974). Transcript of oral history interview with John Cage conducted on 2 May 1974 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-john-cage-12442

Robert Morris interview by Simon Grant (2008). [Online and no pagination], accessed: 12 July 2010. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/interviewmorris.htm

Robert Morris interview by Paul Cummings (1968). Transcript of oral history interview with Robert Morris conducted on 10 March 1968 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Online and no pagination], accessed: 5 March 2009. Available from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-morris-13065

Robert Rauschenberg video interview by David A. Ross, Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999 (Unpublished transcript at SFMOMA Research Library and Archives [6537]), R:18.

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Yayoi Kusama interview by Midori Matsui (1998). ‘In Conversation with Yayoi Kusama’, Index, [Online and no pagination], accessed: 8 November 2016. Available from: http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/yayoi_kusama.shtml

Writings of Clement Greenberg

From Art and Culture: Critical Essays:

‘Abstract, Representational, and so forth’ (1948, 1958): 133-138.

‘”American Type” Painting' (1955, 1958): 208-229.

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939): 3-21.

‘Cezanne’ (1951): 50-58.

‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ (1948): 154-157.

‘The New Sculpture’ (1949): 139-145.

From The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.1:

‘Abstract Art’, The Nation (15 April 1944): 200-201.

‘Review of the Whitney Annual and the Exhibition Romantic Painting in America’, The Nation (1 January 1944): 171-174.

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‘Study in Stieglitz: Review of The Emergence of an American Art by Jerome Mellquist’, The New Republic (15 June 1942): 106-108.

‘Towards a newer Laocoön’, Partisan Review, (July-August 1940): 23-38.

From The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.2:

‘Review of an Exhibition of Georgia O’Keefe’, The Nation (15 June 1946): 85-87.

‘Review of Exhibitions of Jean Debuffet and Jackson Pollock’, The Nation (1 February 1947): 122-125.

‘Review of an Exhibition of John Marin’, The Nation (25 December 1948): 268-270.

‘Review of the Whitney Annual’, The Nation (28 December 1946): 117-118.

‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, Horizon (October 1947): 160-170.

‘The Role of Nature in Modern Painting’, Partisan Review (January 1949): 271-275.

‘The Situation at the Moment’, Partisan Review (January 1948): 192-196.

Other writings:

‘After Abstract Expressionism’, Arts International, 6.8 (October 1962), revised and reprinted in: Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969): 360-371.

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‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), Forum Lectures (Voice of America, Washington); revised and reprinted in: Art and Literature (Paris, spring 1965) and Gregory Battcock (ed.), The New Art: a critical anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966): 67-77.

‘Necessity of “Formalism”’, New Literary History, 3.1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn 1971): 171-175.

‘Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967), in: American Sculpture of the Sixties [exh. cat.], Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967; reprinted in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: a critical anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968): 180-6.

Writings of Donald Judd

From Complete Writings 1959-1975:

‘Barnett Newman’, Studio International (February 1970): 200-202.

‘Claes Oldenburg’, exhibition catalogue for the Oldenburg exhibition, Moderna Museet, Stockholm: 191-193.

‘Complaints: part I’, Studio International (April 1969): 197-199.

‘In the Galleries – 79 Park Place’, Arts Magazine (February 1964): 112-113.

‘In the Galleries – Boxing Match’, Arts Magazine (May/June 1963): 90.

‘In the Galleries – Kenneth Noland’, Arts Magazine (May/June 1963): 92-93.

‘In the Galleries – Robert Morris’, Arts Magazine (February 1965): 165.

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‘In the Galleries – Robert Rauschenberg’, Arts Magazine (May/June 1963): 86-88.

‘In the Galleries – Ronald Bladen’, Arts Magazine (February 1963): 75.

‘In the Galleries – Yayoi Kusama’, Arts Magazine (September 1964): 134-135.

‘Jackson Pollock’, Arts Magazine (April 1967): 193-195.

‘John Chamberlain’, exhibition catalogue for ‘7 Sculptors’, ICA, Philadelphia, November 1965 – January 1966: 190.

‘Lee Bontecou’, Arts Magazine (April 1965): 178-180.

‘Letters’, Arts Magazine (April 1963): 81.

‘Local History’, Arts Yearbook 7, (1964): 148-156.

Nationwide Reports: Hartford – Black, White and Gray’, Arts Magazine (March 1964): 117-119.

‘New York Letter’ Art International (April 1965): 172-177.

‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965: 181-189.

‘Statement’, for: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, The Jewish Museum, New York, April – June 1966: 190.

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Other writings:

‘Portfolio: 4 Sculptors’, Perspecta, 11 (1967): 44-53.

‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’ (1993), in: Nicholas Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London: Tate Publishing, 2004: 144-161.

‘Yale Lecture, September 20, 1983’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 7/8 (Spring – Autumn 1984): 147-154.

Writings of Robert Morris

‘Aligned with Nazca’, Artforum, 14.2 (October 1975): 26-39.

‘Anti Form’, Artforum, 6.8 (April 1968): 33-35.

‘From a Chomskiam Couch: The Imperialistic Unconscious’, Critical Inquiry, 29.4 (Summer 2003): 578-694.

‘Letters to John Cage’, October, 81 (Summer 1997): 70-79.

‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation, October, 12 (Spring 1980): 87-102.

‘Notes on Dance’, The Tulane Drama Review, 10.2 (Winter 1965): 179-186.

‘Notes on Sculpture, Part I’, Artforum, 4.6 (February 1966): 42-44.

‘Notes on Sculpture, Part II’, Artforum, 5.2 (October 1966): 20-23.

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‘Notes on Sculpture, Part III: Notes and Nonsequitors’, Artforum, 10.10 (Summer 1967): 24-29.

‘Notes on Sculpture Part IV: Beyond Objects’, Artforum, 7.8 (April 1969): 50-54.

‘Notes on Simone Forti’ (2014), in: Breitwiesser, Sabine, ed. (2014). Simone Forti:

Thinking with the Body, Munich: Hirmer Verlag.

‘Portfolio: 4 Sculptors’, Perspecta, 11 (1967): 44-53.

‘Professional Rules’, Critical Inquiry, 23.2 (Winter 1997): 298-322.

‘Size Matters’, Critical Inquiry, 26.3 (Spring 2000): 474-487.

‘Solecisms of Sight: Specular Speculations’, October, 103 (Winter 2003): 31-41.

‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, Artforum, 5.5 (April 1970): 62-66.

‘The Idle Idol, or Why Abstract Art Ended up Looking Like a Chinese Room’, Critical

Inquiry, 34 (Spring 2008): 440-466.

‘The Labyrinth and the Urinal’, Critical Inquiry, 36 (Autumn 2009): 76-99.

‘Threading the Labyrinth’, October, 96 (Spring 2001): 61-70.

‘Three Fold ins in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories Or…’, Art in America (November 1989): 142-151.

‘Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism’, Critical Inquiry, 15.2 (Winter 1989): 337-347.

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Dissonance and Resonance: Theory and Theatre in the Art of

Donald Judd and Robert Morris

Appendix of Illustrations

Appendix has been removed due to copyright restrictions

Luke Diggins

June 2017