When the artist Mel Bochner described the reductive geometric forms on view in
the "Primary Structures" exhibition in 1966, a show that announced the arrival of
minimalism on the New York art scene, he claimed: "there is nothing behind these
surfaces, no inside, no secret, no hidden motive."1 Yet after a careful examination of
minimal art, and the ways in which it challenged a modernist trajectory set into place in
the postwar period, I am arguing Bochner couldn't have been more wrong. With
minimalism as its primary focus, my thesis considers how the political turmoil of the late
1960s- manifest in widespread social upheaval, the polemics of a contested war, and
questions regarding the nature of the modern subject- disrupted the perceived self-referentiality
of abstract art, particularly that adhering to a tradition of Greenbergian
modernism. That is, when complicated by contemporaneous social relations and artistic
debates, the formal language of minimalism, with its simple forms, precise lines, and
industrial manufacture, becomes full of potential meaning, leaving the minimal box less
hollow than Bochner would have us believe.
To get at some of the complexities of the minimal project, both mainstream
artists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, and those more marginally related to the
movement, like Barnett Newman, Jo Baer, and Eva Hesse, are considered. Setting the
work of these artists into tension with one another and with the critical writings of
Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, the unique strategies used to mediate between
individual artistic interests and larger social tensions are brought into focus. One primary area in which this was accomplished was in relation to the issue of viewership. Whether
rethinking Morris' notion of "experience," Newman's conceptualization of
"participation," or Baer's prioritization of "perception," these distinct modes of
engagement signal what was at the time a shifting understanding of how politics is
formulated in relation to the body of the viewer and how the art object is implicated in
this process. Considering how this broke with previous formalist models, what these
chapters show in different ways and from varying perspectives is that the authority of
modernism was fracturing in the late 1960s, and that minimal art was central to this
process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/15139 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Kelly, Patricia M. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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