SELECTED WORK: AD REINHARDT, ABSTRACT PAINTING, 1960–61
Reinhardt’s Early Career
Adolph (Ad) Reinhardt was born in 1913 in Buffalo, New York, and subsequently relocated with his family to New York City. His parents were immigrants (from Germany and Lithuania) who, out of their socialist convictions, were attracted to New York by the city’s burgeoning workers’ movement. Reinhardt was a precocious teenager and had already worked as a commercial artist and book illustrator before he enrolled at Columbia University in 1931, where he studied under Marxist art historian Meyer Schapiro. In the 1930s Reinhardt took painting classes at Columbia’s Teachers College, the American Artists School, and the National Academy of Design, all while continuing to do commercial work on the side. In 1937 he was elected to membership in the group American Abstract Artists and that same year was hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, which paid him a small salary to produce paintings for the next four years. He was represented by Betty Parsons even before she opened her own gallery in New York and had regular exhibitions there beginning in 1946 and continuing until 1965. Before and after a brief stint in the U.S. Navy in the 1940s, Reinhardt studied Asian art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and became particularly interested in the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism.
Early in his career, Reinhardt had been associated with the New York School. In the 1930s and ’40s, Reinhardt’s paintings were comprised of either colorful biomorphic forms overlapping in harmonious arrangements and floating at the center of the work or interlocking geometric shapes patterned across the entire canvas, usually in a limited palette of three or four saturated colors. His paintings recalled Piet Mondrian’s grids as well as the works of Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, all of which Reinhardt encountered through imported magazines and, importantly, through the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. Later he was directly influenced by the work of American artist Stuart Davis (and Davis’s habit of listening to jazz music), which compelled him to take up brighter, louder colors. Although Reinhardt’s style shuttled between more organic shapes and hard-edged geometry, he remained wholeheartedly committed to pure abstraction, titling many works from this period simply Abstract Painting. He believed firmly that art should be created for art’s sake and that art was distinct from everyday life, though he viewed painting as a “responsible social act” and a “direct form of communication.”
Early in his career, Reinhardt had been associated with the New York School. In the 1930s and ’40s, Reinhardt’s paintings were comprised of either colorful biomorphic forms overlapping in harmonious arrangements and floating at the center of the work or interlocking geometric shapes patterned across the entire canvas, usually in a limited palette of three or four saturated colors. His paintings recalled Piet Mondrian’s grids as well as the works of Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, all of which Reinhardt encountered through imported magazines and, importantly, through the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. Later he was directly influenced by the work of American artist Stuart Davis (and Davis’s habit of listening to jazz music), which compelled him to take up brighter, louder colors. Although Reinhardt’s style shuttled between more organic shapes and hard-edged geometry, he remained wholeheartedly committed to pure abstraction, titling many works from this period simply Abstract Painting. He believed firmly that art should be created for art’s sake and that art was distinct from everyday life, though he viewed painting as a “responsible social act” and a “direct form of communication.”
Abstract Painting: Analysis
Reinhardt’s desire to strip away all elements extraneous to the task of painting—a modernist directive articulated most succinctly in the writing of critic Clement Greenberg—led him ultimately to pursue monochromatic abstraction, beginning around 1953. Reducing his paintings to a single color, sometimes with variation in tonal value, allowed Reinhardt to illuminate the most basic elements of painting, namely the canvas and the paint itself. He started with red and blue monochromes with strong contrasts of value, but eventually narrowed his focus, around 1956, to very dark gray and black canvases.
Abstract Painting, 1960–61, is paradigmatic of Reinhardt’s last body of work. The painting measures five by five feet (as did all of his monochromes after 1960) and appears, at first glance, to be a square of matte black paint. With attentive looking, however, one begins to see that the square is divided into a grid of nine squares, with the center of the work resembling a cross. What appeared to be solid black is in fact black tinted with other colors. The squares in the corners of the work have a reddish undertone, while the vertical squares at center are blue-black, and the horizontal bar that transects the work is greenish-black. Reinhardt’s extremely subtle tinting results, in part, from his method of draining the oil from his pigments once they have been mixed; the paint remains spreadable but has no shine once it dries on the canvas, which eliminates any reflective, mirror-like qualities that the black paint might have otherwise. The black surfaces instead seem to paradoxically generate light themselves.
Abstract Painting, 1960–61, is paradigmatic of Reinhardt’s last body of work. The painting measures five by five feet (as did all of his monochromes after 1960) and appears, at first glance, to be a square of matte black paint. With attentive looking, however, one begins to see that the square is divided into a grid of nine squares, with the center of the work resembling a cross. What appeared to be solid black is in fact black tinted with other colors. The squares in the corners of the work have a reddish undertone, while the vertical squares at center are blue-black, and the horizontal bar that transects the work is greenish-black. Reinhardt’s extremely subtle tinting results, in part, from his method of draining the oil from his pigments once they have been mixed; the paint remains spreadable but has no shine once it dries on the canvas, which eliminates any reflective, mirror-like qualities that the black paint might have otherwise. The black surfaces instead seem to paradoxically generate light themselves.
Reinhardt succinctly described his black paintings and defined his goals thus:
A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no– contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free–hand, painted surface (glossless, textureless, non–linear, no hard-edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings—a pure, abstract, non–objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self–conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti–art). |
From the Monochrome to Minimalism
The last bit of Reinhardt’s mission statement is essential: he wanted to create an art that was entirely interested in itself, not one that was responsive to its surroundings. That attitude toward painting and toward art in general clarifies Reinhardt’s closeness to the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, though he saw himself at the end of their possibilities—at the end of painting, in fact. As he put it, “I’m just making the last paintings which anyone can make.” Retrospectively, however, one understands that Reinhardt’s monochromes formed an essential bridge from modernist painting to Minimalism and Conceptualism, the movements that will dominate the rest of this section. Reinhardt had not been the only artist to take up the monochrome; the very first monochromes, by the Soviet artists Alexander Rodchenko and Kasimir Malevich, were exhibited in the early twentieth-century and “re-discovered” in the post-war period. Robert Rauschenberg had created all-white paintings in the 1950s, while the French artist Yves Klein painted monochromes throughout the 1950s and began exclusively making blue monochromes (in a color he patented) by 1957. Though all of these artists seemed to be making similar statements about the elemental facets of painting, they varied widely in the meaning they attributed to the monochrome.
Presaging the modes and methods that would concern many artists of the 1960s, Reinhardt argued that “the one direction in fine or abstract art today is in the painting of the same form over and over again. The one intensity and the one perfection comes only from long and lonely routine preparation and attention and repetition.” The artists explored below did not necessarily aim for perfection in their work, and they largely turned away from Reinhardt’s decree that art ought not to “reflect its surroundings.” Minimalists and Conceptualists also often employed other people (craftsmen and assistants) to produce their work, whereas Reinhardt insisted on the act of painting with his own hand. Despite these important differences, Minimalists and Conceptualists took Reinhardt’s monochromes as a point of departure because of their intensity, repetition, abstraction, and reliance on the grid as a compositional strategy. The subtle variations within formal constraints that defined the monochromes became the basis for works by Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and many others.
Presaging the modes and methods that would concern many artists of the 1960s, Reinhardt argued that “the one direction in fine or abstract art today is in the painting of the same form over and over again. The one intensity and the one perfection comes only from long and lonely routine preparation and attention and repetition.” The artists explored below did not necessarily aim for perfection in their work, and they largely turned away from Reinhardt’s decree that art ought not to “reflect its surroundings.” Minimalists and Conceptualists also often employed other people (craftsmen and assistants) to produce their work, whereas Reinhardt insisted on the act of painting with his own hand. Despite these important differences, Minimalists and Conceptualists took Reinhardt’s monochromes as a point of departure because of their intensity, repetition, abstraction, and reliance on the grid as a compositional strategy. The subtle variations within formal constraints that defined the monochromes became the basis for works by Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and many others.
SELECTED WORK: DONALD JUDD, UNTITLED (STACK), 1967
Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and spent his childhood in various cities across the Midwest. He attended high school in New Jersey and enlisted in the army after graduation, serving for a year in the Corp of Engineers stationed in Korea, surveying an airport landing strip and supervising the construction of prefabricated buildings. In 1948 Judd enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York; he left a few months later for the College of William and Mary but returned to the Art Students League after only two semesters, already committed to the idea of becoming an artist or architect. Judd subsequently enrolled in the general studies program at Columbia University, graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1953. After being included in several group shows in New York, Judd went back to school at Columbia in 1958 for a master’s degree in art history, studying with, among other well-known art historians, Meyer Schapiro. During that time, he began writing art criticism for the magazine Art News and subsequently wrote for a number of publications dedicated to contemporary art.
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Judd’s Early Career |
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Judd primarily made paintings. Initially he created abstract works based on landscapes and then shifted toward a more geometric abstraction. Anticipating his move toward sculptural objects, Judd created in 1961 a relief painting that had curved top and bottom edges, extending the painting out into space and away from the wall. By 1962, Judd abandoned painting altogether and began making three-dimensional, geometric objects either hung on the wall or placed on the floor. He had his first solo show in 1963, and the following year, he developed some of the forms for which he would become most famous, including his “progressions,” which are discussed further below. Although Judd is commonly called a Minimalist, alongside artists such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Frank Stella, it should be noted that he rejected the term, which had originally been used as a pejorative.
Today Judd is almost as well known for the spaces he created for his work as for the works themselves. In 1968 he purchased a five-story building in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, a favorite of bohemian artists in the 1960s and ’70s. He lived and worked there and over time created a permanent installation of his own objects as well as those of his fellow artists, including Flavin, whom he met in 1962. Judd later began purchasing properties in the small town of Marfa, Texas, and constructed spaces for living and working there, too. A number of sites in Marfa became permanent installations of work by Judd, Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Long, and others, and the town has increasingly developed into an art pilgrimage site over the more than two decades since Judd’s death in 1994.
Judd’s Essay “Specific Objects” and the Debate Over Minimalism
Judd wrote art criticism early in his career and utilized his reviews of contemporary exhibitions as ways of articulating his own aims as an artist. Published in 1965, Judd’s most influential text, “Specific Objects,” advocated recent artworks that could best be described simply as three-dimensional objects, rather than as paintings or sculptures. Judd goes on to describe a wide variety of works, not all of which would be considered strictly “Minimalist,” but which nevertheless meet Judd’s parameters, chief among them the notion that “three-dimensional work”—as opposed to “sculpture”—is meant to be perceived as a whole object, not as an accumulation of various parts that can be appreciated separately. Judd writes, “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.”
The most controversial aspect of Judd’s work, and his writing about it, was his contention that art ought to extend into real space (hence his emphasis on three-dimensionality), where it could engage the conditions of the environment around it, as well as viewers confronting it in space. The modernist art critic Michael Fried took issue with what he saw as the “theatricality” of such an arrangement in an oft-quoted 1967 essay titled “Art and Objecthood.” Fried derides the “stage presence” of Minimalist objects, which, he argues, turns the viewer into an active subject rather than simply a viewer. Minimalist objects are thus anathema to Fried’s modernist convictions, which rely on the parameters of artistic medium to judge what is good (or not so good) art, and also to separate art from other cultural forms (of which theater was one). Judd and Fried argued back and forth about these matters for years, without any resolution as to the legitimacy of Minimalist art.
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Untitled (Stack): AnalysisProduced in 1967, the object Untitled (Stack) consists of twelve units, each of which measures nine by forty by thirty-one inches, installed on a wall vertically with nine inches of space separating each unit. As a complete work, it resembles a sequence of thick shelves that extend from the floor upward to the ceiling at even intervals. Each unit in Untitled (Stack) projects nearly three feet from the wall, giving it a sculptural presence in the gallery. The boxes are precisely manufactured out of galvanized iron, left unfinished on the top and bottom and painted on the sides with emerald green lacquer paint used for custom Harley-Davidson motorcycles. While Judd had by 1967 limited his stacks and “progressions” (stacks arranged horizontally) to a few standard sizes and number of units, he varied their colors and materials, experimenting with vibrant hues that contrasted with the straightforward geometry and anonymity of his boxes.
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It is important to note that Judd has stipulated that Untitled (Stack), like his other stacks and progressions, can be altered depending on the height of the ceiling where it is installed; units can even be removed to maintain even distance between them. This flexibility is a sign of the importance of the work as a whole relative to its individual parts, and it also subtly draws attention to the work’s relationship to the architecture of the space. Just as the space between the component parts of the work is integral to its form, so are the various features of the gallery, museum, or domestic space that plays host to the work. While Judd’s interest in serial progression and repetition might be reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s approach to printed imagery, Judd insistently draws his work out into three dimensions and subordinates his objects to the demands of architecture. The result is that his objects direct the viewer to consider his or her body in space in relation to the art object and the architecture that contains it.
Larger Context: Fabrication and the Artist’s Hand
Judd’s stacks and progressions have an industrial look and feel owing, in part, to the fact that, beginning in 1964, the majority of Judd’s work was produced by a professional fabrication workshop several blocks from his New York studio. Disavowing traditional craft and the touch of the artist’s hand, Judd thought that he could realize his intentions more fully by employing professionals rather than by continuing to make objects himself. Similar to the way that Dan Flavin produced artworks by drawing diagrams of light pieces that could be assembled by anyone, Judd would draw the work he envisioned and then have it produced to his precise specifications. For both artists (and for many others), this manner of working aligned perfectly with the industrial aesthetic they engaged. This move away from the notion that art is something made in its entirety by an artist strongly influenced the concurrent development of Conceptual art, as we will see, which went even a step further in arguing that the production of the work was in fact secondary to the idea itself.
Judd’s stacks and progressions have an industrial look and feel owing, in part, to the fact that, beginning in 1964, the majority of Judd’s work was produced by a professional fabrication workshop several blocks from his New York studio. Disavowing traditional craft and the touch of the artist’s hand, Judd thought that he could realize his intentions more fully by employing professionals rather than by continuing to make objects himself. Similar to the way that Dan Flavin produced artworks by drawing diagrams of light pieces that could be assembled by anyone, Judd would draw the work he envisioned and then have it produced to his precise specifications. For both artists (and for many others), this manner of working aligned perfectly with the industrial aesthetic they engaged. This move away from the notion that art is something made in its entirety by an artist strongly influenced the concurrent development of Conceptual art, as we will see, which went even a step further in arguing that the production of the work was in fact secondary to the idea itself.
SELECTED WORK: SOL LEWITT, WALL DRAWING 1, 1968
LeWitt’s Early Career
Solomon (Sol) LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut. As a child he attended art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Syracuse University in 1949. He served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. After military service, he moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side. He studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he worked on the photostat machine (the precursor to today’s photocopier) and later helped the art department with production, which sometimes entailed creating whimsical illustrations for the magazine. From 1955–56, LeWitt worked in the graphics department of the newly established architecture firm I.M. Pei and Associates (many years before Pei achieved fame for several important buildings in the United States and the controversial glass pyramid at the Musée du Louvre in Paris). From 1960 to 1965, LeWitt worked at the Information and Book Sales Desk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and also worked as a night receptionist for the museum’s school.
Solomon (Sol) LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut. As a child he attended art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Syracuse University in 1949. He served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. After military service, he moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side. He studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he worked on the photostat machine (the precursor to today’s photocopier) and later helped the art department with production, which sometimes entailed creating whimsical illustrations for the magazine. From 1955–56, LeWitt worked in the graphics department of the newly established architecture firm I.M. Pei and Associates (many years before Pei achieved fame for several important buildings in the United States and the controversial glass pyramid at the Musée du Louvre in Paris). From 1960 to 1965, LeWitt worked at the Information and Book Sales Desk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and also worked as a night receptionist for the museum’s school.
Though LeWitt was not an active critic in the same way as his contemporary Donald Judd, he did write several influential texts clarifying his approach to art-making. In the surprisingly humorous and accessible essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” published in 1965, LeWitt wrote:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
LeWitt’s anti-subjective approach to art-making contrasted sharply with that of most Abstract Expressionist painters, who saw the canvas as an arena for the exploration of ethical, spiritual, and existential concerns that were both personal and universal.
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
LeWitt’s anti-subjective approach to art-making contrasted sharply with that of most Abstract Expressionist painters, who saw the canvas as an arena for the exploration of ethical, spiritual, and existential concerns that were both personal and universal.
Some of LeWitt’s earliest works in pursuit of these ideas were three-dimensional objects he called “structures,” a term he preferred to “sculpture.” They initially took form, around 1965, as large-scale slabs of painted wood, arranged into geometric shapes that were hung on the wall or that rested simply on the floor, resembling abstract furniture. Around the same time, LeWitt began making what he called “modular structures,” which were lengths of wood (painted bright white) joined to form large open cubes, which were then sometimes joined horizontally or vertically into a series of open cubes. The modular nature of the structures made them appear as if they could go on ad infinitum, while their pristine whiteness made them appear abstract. One of LeWitt’s cubes was included, alongside work by artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Tony Smith, in the first major show of minimal art, an exhibition called Primary Structures at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966. While continuing to make three-dimensional structures, LeWitt began the next phase of his work, making wall drawings, in 1968.
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Wall Drawing 1: Analysis
The inaugural exhibition at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, which opened in 1968, was organized to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show featured works by fourteen artists, including Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman, all of whom produced abstract, non-representational art, which might be surprising given how outspoken many were about current political issues. The show’s curators, Robert Huot, Lucy Lippard, and Ron Wolin, wrote a statement in which they pronounced: “The artists and the individual pieces were selected to represent a particular esthetic attitude, in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.”
Sol LeWitt was among the artists chosen for the exhibition, for which he created the very first of his wall drawings. LeWitt’s structures had been based on predetermined elements that could be arranged and rearranged to create a variety of works; his wall drawings operated on a similar principle, carried out according to rules the artist defined in advance. Wall Drawing 1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B) consists of two side-by-side drawings, each measuring forty- eight by forty-eight inches, executed directly onto the wall with graphite pencils. Each square drawing is subdivided into four squares, each of which is constituted by four smaller squares. Each small square—of which there are thirty-two total—is patterned differently, with the squares of the left drawing made up of horizontal and vertical lines, and the squares of the right drawing made up of cross-hatched lines.
The inaugural exhibition at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, which opened in 1968, was organized to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show featured works by fourteen artists, including Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman, all of whom produced abstract, non-representational art, which might be surprising given how outspoken many were about current political issues. The show’s curators, Robert Huot, Lucy Lippard, and Ron Wolin, wrote a statement in which they pronounced: “The artists and the individual pieces were selected to represent a particular esthetic attitude, in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.”
Sol LeWitt was among the artists chosen for the exhibition, for which he created the very first of his wall drawings. LeWitt’s structures had been based on predetermined elements that could be arranged and rearranged to create a variety of works; his wall drawings operated on a similar principle, carried out according to rules the artist defined in advance. Wall Drawing 1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B) consists of two side-by-side drawings, each measuring forty- eight by forty-eight inches, executed directly onto the wall with graphite pencils. Each square drawing is subdivided into four squares, each of which is constituted by four smaller squares. Each small square—of which there are thirty-two total—is patterned differently, with the squares of the left drawing made up of horizontal and vertical lines, and the squares of the right drawing made up of cross-hatched lines.
The resulting thirty-two variations on tone serve almost as a manual for drawing, representing the permutational possibilities of basic drawing operations. Although LeWitt did not print the instructions for the drawing on the wall itself (as he would do a number of times later on), a viewer would be able to intuit the straightforward directives that generated the work. LeWitt drew the many thin, precise lines of Wall Drawing 1 himself, but it would not be long before he began to employ a number of draftsmen to carry out the wall drawings for him. As LeWitt had avowed in “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” the hand of the artist was secondary, the idea was the machine that produced the work, and the execution of the work was not paramount—all factors that contributed to LeWitt’s decision to allow his wall drawings to be produced by others. LeWitt would still receive top billing as the creator of the idea behind the work, but it should be noted that he typically credited his draftsmen as well, and most catalogues of LeWitt’s work continue to list under each work the name of the artists who helped realize it.
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Larger Context: Minimalism’s Relationship to Architecture
Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings, a number of which have been re-created since his passing with the blessing of his estate. While LeWitt’s earliest wall drawings were ephemeral, meant to be on view for a few weeks or months and then painted over, he also created drawings later in his career that were permanent or semi-permanent additions to institutional or even domestic spaces. Regardless of their longevity, LeWitt’s wall drawings engaged the architecture of the space in which they were executed, drawing attention to walls, floors, doorways, and ceilings, each of which was differently engaged by each drawing—many of which fluctuated in size and complexity depending on the size of the space.
The relationship between LeWitt’s objects and architecture was noted early in his career, even before the debut of his wall drawings; in 1965, a critic reviewing LeWitt’s first solo show came up with the term “sculptecture” to describe his work. The term did not stick, but it shows how critics of Minimalist sculpture were coming to terms with the ways in which such objects engaged with the spaces where they were exhibited, as Donald Judd’s work and writing had also made clear. LeWitt’s ultimate appeal to architecture—or, more accurately, his desire to bridge the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture—was based in Minimalism’s interest in bodily, spatial experience, as well as in Conceptual art’s interest in the transformative qualities of art contexts such as galleries and museums. Whereas Donald Judd had highlighted architectural space through three-dimensional objects, LeWitt melded his work to the architecture itself, fully engaging its flatness and usual invisibility as a means of drawing attention to it.
The relationship between LeWitt’s objects and architecture was noted early in his career, even before the debut of his wall drawings; in 1965, a critic reviewing LeWitt’s first solo show came up with the term “sculptecture” to describe his work. The term did not stick, but it shows how critics of Minimalist sculpture were coming to terms with the ways in which such objects engaged with the spaces where they were exhibited, as Donald Judd’s work and writing had also made clear. LeWitt’s ultimate appeal to architecture—or, more accurately, his desire to bridge the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture—was based in Minimalism’s interest in bodily, spatial experience, as well as in Conceptual art’s interest in the transformative qualities of art contexts such as galleries and museums. Whereas Donald Judd had highlighted architectural space through three-dimensional objects, LeWitt melded his work to the architecture itself, fully engaging its flatness and usual invisibility as a means of drawing attention to it.
SELECTED WORK: JOSEPH KOSUTH, ONE AND THREE CHAIRS, 1965
Kosuth’s Early Career
Joseph Kosuth was born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio. He was a precocious child and studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design from age ten to seventeen. He also took private lessons from the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper, and from 1963 to 1964, Kosuth studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 1964 he received a scholarship to study at the American Center in Paris, where he met some of the foremost Existentialist thinkers and met the artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp. He returned to the United States in 1965 and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). While still a student, he befriended Ad Reinhardt, who remained a close friend until Reinhardt’s death in 1967.
Together with two friends, Kosuth founded an exhibition space called the Museum of Normal Art in 1967 (the same year he was given a teaching position at SVA), which gave early exposure to his own work, as well as to the work of artists such as Robert Ryman, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven, all of whom would become known for their contributions to a burgeoning movement that Kosuth called “Conceptual art.” In 1969, Kosuth became the American editor of the British journal Art-Language, which published important early Conceptual works, and also had his first solo exhibition at the preeminent Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. By then he had already been developing for a number of years a cerebral, philosophical approach to art-making, which he deepened through more rigorous study of anthropology and philosophy at the Graduate Center of the New School for Social Research in 1971.
Joseph Kosuth was born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio. He was a precocious child and studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design from age ten to seventeen. He also took private lessons from the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper, and from 1963 to 1964, Kosuth studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 1964 he received a scholarship to study at the American Center in Paris, where he met some of the foremost Existentialist thinkers and met the artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp. He returned to the United States in 1965 and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). While still a student, he befriended Ad Reinhardt, who remained a close friend until Reinhardt’s death in 1967.
Together with two friends, Kosuth founded an exhibition space called the Museum of Normal Art in 1967 (the same year he was given a teaching position at SVA), which gave early exposure to his own work, as well as to the work of artists such as Robert Ryman, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven, all of whom would become known for their contributions to a burgeoning movement that Kosuth called “Conceptual art.” In 1969, Kosuth became the American editor of the British journal Art-Language, which published important early Conceptual works, and also had his first solo exhibition at the preeminent Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. By then he had already been developing for a number of years a cerebral, philosophical approach to art-making, which he deepened through more rigorous study of anthropology and philosophy at the Graduate Center of the New School for Social Research in 1971.
“Art After Philosophy”
In 1969, Kosuth’s engagement with the work of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, the minimalist objects and critical essays of Donald Judd, and the writings of analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein led him to pen an influential series of essays titled “Art After Philosophy,” originally published over three issues of the arts magazine Studio International. In “Art After Philosophy,” Kosuth attempts to define art’s current condition, concluding that “works of art are analytic propositions,” meaning that they are tautological statements of their status as art, as declared by the artist’s intention and the object’s placement in an art context. Kosuth cites Ad Reinhardt’s writings as an important precedent for his own, finding resonance with Reinhardt’s conviction that “art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art.” In Kosuth’s words, “art indeed exists for its own sake” and should not perform functions—such as entertainment, visual experience, or decoration—that can easily be performed by other cultural forms. Kosuth finally takes pains to distinguish his own brand of Conceptual art from that of some of his contemporaries, noting that all art is in some sense “conceptual,” but his work (and that of several peers) is conceptual in its intent, meaning that it sets out to investigate the notion of “art” as an idea and does so through a variety of means.
One and Three Chairs: Analysis
Kosuth’s first major conceptual work, One and Three Chairs, executed in 1965, consists of a wood folding chair, a mounted photograph of a chair, and a mounted photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of “chair.” All three elements are typically grouped closely together, with the folding chair displayed on the floor and the photograph and photographic enlargement of the definition hanging on the wall. Altogether, the elements pose a series of questions that build on one another. What exactly constitutes a chair? Is it the physical object, its linguistic definition, or its (photographic) representation? What is the functional relationship between objects, images of objects, and definitions of (or names for) objects? And finally, what about this arrangement makes it a work of art? Is the chair not simply a chair anymore?
The influence of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades is evident in Kosuth’s work with objects and definitions, as the everyday chair suddenly becomes a different kind of object simply by being entered by the artist into a specific context, namely the art exhibition. The presence of the definition alongside the real thing not only prompts a viewer to consider the gap between the physical reality of an object and language’s ability to describe it, but also then to consider how the definition of art has expanded to the degree that Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs satisfies its terms. Kosuth often subtitled his work “Art as Idea as Idea,” which might seem obtuse but indeed captures what he was trying to do: demonstrate that art itself is a concept unlike any other, but one that can only be defined, frustratingly, in its own terms. The chair, for example, has not changed in any way whatsoever upon entering the gallery or museum, except for the fact that it is now called “art.” The application of the term radically changes the object’s status without its physical form changing one bit; Kosuth abstracts from this movement of the readymade the notion that art has nothing to do with how something looks (with “aesthetics,” that is), and rather everything to do with an artist’s intentions and the contextual frame of the gallery or museum.
The influence of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades is evident in Kosuth’s work with objects and definitions, as the everyday chair suddenly becomes a different kind of object simply by being entered by the artist into a specific context, namely the art exhibition. The presence of the definition alongside the real thing not only prompts a viewer to consider the gap between the physical reality of an object and language’s ability to describe it, but also then to consider how the definition of art has expanded to the degree that Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs satisfies its terms. Kosuth often subtitled his work “Art as Idea as Idea,” which might seem obtuse but indeed captures what he was trying to do: demonstrate that art itself is a concept unlike any other, but one that can only be defined, frustratingly, in its own terms. The chair, for example, has not changed in any way whatsoever upon entering the gallery or museum, except for the fact that it is now called “art.” The application of the term radically changes the object’s status without its physical form changing one bit; Kosuth abstracts from this movement of the readymade the notion that art has nothing to do with how something looks (with “aesthetics,” that is), and rather everything to do with an artist’s intentions and the contextual frame of the gallery or museum.
SELECTED WORK: EDWARD RUSCHA,
EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966
Ruscha’s Early Career
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska. His family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1941. In 1956, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles, where he attended Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts, called CalArts), from which he graduated in 1960. A year later, he spent several months touring Europe with his family and made a number of small paintings of Art Nouveau street signage in Paris. Upon returning to the United States, Ruscha— paintings in hand—introduced himself to New York gallerist Leo Castelli, who became his dealer a little over a decade later. Once back in California, Ruscha found a way forward after seeing Jasper Johns’s 1955 hybrid painting-sculpture Target with Four Faces reproduced in a magazine. Ruscha began making Pop-style paintings that featured a single word—“oof,” “boss,” “spam”—executed in a cartoonish style against a fairly minimal background. Ruscha has said that he chose words that struck him as particularly American, humorous, and capable of producing multiple meanings. He saw these paintings as transformative: “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.”
Around this time Ruscha also made paintings of gas stations, reduced to their bare geometries and depicted at an exaggerated angle reminiscent of classic Hollywood films, in which buildings were shot from below to make them look imposing and strange. In 1962, Ruscha was included alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and others in the exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, one of the first exhibitions of what would eventually be called Pop art. Ruscha’s works were in dialogue with Surrealism, historical strategies of trompe l’oeil, and also with the burgeoning Conceptual art movement, which shared Ruscha’s preoccupation with the relationship between text and image.
Around this time Ruscha also made paintings of gas stations, reduced to their bare geometries and depicted at an exaggerated angle reminiscent of classic Hollywood films, in which buildings were shot from below to make them look imposing and strange. In 1962, Ruscha was included alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and others in the exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, one of the first exhibitions of what would eventually be called Pop art. Ruscha’s works were in dialogue with Surrealism, historical strategies of trompe l’oeil, and also with the burgeoning Conceptual art movement, which shared Ruscha’s preoccupation with the relationship between text and image.
Every Building on the Sunset Strip: Analysis
Ruscha produced sixteen photo books between 1963 and 1978, issuing them in large editions as a way of eschewing the tradition of limited-edition and handcrafted artist’s books. Every Building on the Sunset Strip was the fourth photobook Ed Ruscha produced, following books documenting gas stations along Route 66 between Oklahoma City and L.A. (Twentysix Gasoline Stations); small fires (Various Small Fires and Milk); and apartment buildings in L.A. (Some Los Angeles Apartments). Each of the books documented something rather banal, grouping together an arbitrary number of simple photographic images with no particular narrative thread or larger argument. Every Building on the Sunset Strip, published in 1966, was no exception: it was an accordion-folded book that, when fully opened, stretched 25 feet long, with a continuous panoramic image of all of the buildings along both sides of Sunset Boulevard in L.A. To photograph the so-called Sunset Strip, Ruscha stood in the back of a pickup truck with his camera while a friend drove; Ruscha chose to work early in the morning, when there were no pedestrians or traffic to disrupt their filming. As a result, the typically bustling artery—which was in an unincorporated part of L.A. County, allowing its nightlife to flourish—appears in the book as a desolate sequence of storefronts and billboards.
Though Ruscha has perhaps ironically denied the influence of L.A. on his work, Every Building on the Sunset Strip fully engages L.A.’s car culture, from the manner in which Ruscha produced the photographs to his decision to stitch the images together to create a continuous panorama, mimicking the way that most Angelenos experience the Sunset Strip as they drive along in their cars. (In order to see the full book when opened, one has to physically move along its twenty-five feet, further mimicking a drive down Sunset.) Although Ruscha did not set out to document the city’s streets for historical or archival purposes, he has re-photographed Sunset Boulevard roughly every three years, resulting in an extensive archive of film reels and photographs that were acquired by the Getty Foundation in L.A. in 2011. It is unclear whether the archive constitutes an artwork, but that ambiguity between photographic record and work of art is precisely what Ruscha has cultivated over the course of his career.
Ruscha produced sixteen photo books between 1963 and 1978, issuing them in large editions as a way of eschewing the tradition of limited-edition and handcrafted artist’s books. Every Building on the Sunset Strip was the fourth photobook Ed Ruscha produced, following books documenting gas stations along Route 66 between Oklahoma City and L.A. (Twentysix Gasoline Stations); small fires (Various Small Fires and Milk); and apartment buildings in L.A. (Some Los Angeles Apartments). Each of the books documented something rather banal, grouping together an arbitrary number of simple photographic images with no particular narrative thread or larger argument. Every Building on the Sunset Strip, published in 1966, was no exception: it was an accordion-folded book that, when fully opened, stretched 25 feet long, with a continuous panoramic image of all of the buildings along both sides of Sunset Boulevard in L.A. To photograph the so-called Sunset Strip, Ruscha stood in the back of a pickup truck with his camera while a friend drove; Ruscha chose to work early in the morning, when there were no pedestrians or traffic to disrupt their filming. As a result, the typically bustling artery—which was in an unincorporated part of L.A. County, allowing its nightlife to flourish—appears in the book as a desolate sequence of storefronts and billboards.
Though Ruscha has perhaps ironically denied the influence of L.A. on his work, Every Building on the Sunset Strip fully engages L.A.’s car culture, from the manner in which Ruscha produced the photographs to his decision to stitch the images together to create a continuous panorama, mimicking the way that most Angelenos experience the Sunset Strip as they drive along in their cars. (In order to see the full book when opened, one has to physically move along its twenty-five feet, further mimicking a drive down Sunset.) Although Ruscha did not set out to document the city’s streets for historical or archival purposes, he has re-photographed Sunset Boulevard roughly every three years, resulting in an extensive archive of film reels and photographs that were acquired by the Getty Foundation in L.A. in 2011. It is unclear whether the archive constitutes an artwork, but that ambiguity between photographic record and work of art is precisely what Ruscha has cultivated over the course of his career.
Larger Context: West Coast Conceptualism
While artists such as Ruscha and Joseph Kosuth are both referred to as Conceptual artists, the West Coast brand of Conceptualism engaged by Ruscha had a distinct flavor. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, Ruscha, alongside John Baldessari, Allen Ruppersberg, Chris Burden, and many others, produced work that had a cool, ironic tone. Ruscha has said that he desires a head-scratching reaction to his work, a “huh?” moment of disbelief, confusion, and disdain, which is reflected in the work of his West Coast peers as well. Ruscha and Kosuth shared an “informational” style, but Ruscha’s work—particularly his photo books—had a deadpan, humorous quality that Kosuth’s cerebral work did not. The influence of Marcel Duchamp loomed large for Ruscha, who had seen Duchamp’s first ever retrospective, rife with deadpan readymades, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963; Warhol was in the general consciousness as well, having had his first solo show, of Campbell’s Soup Cans, in L.A. the year before. Compared to New York, which was the veritable center of the art world in the 1960s, L.A. was often considered marginal and even provincial (Ruscha disavowed its relevance to his work), but it gave rise to a number of important Conceptual practices that engaged themes specific to L.A., from everyday car culture to the spectacle of the Hollywood film industry.
SELECTED WORK: HANS HAACKE, NEWS, 1969/2008
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Haacke’s Early Career
Hans Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1936, just a few years before the outbreak of what would become the Second World War. From 1956 to 1960, he studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in the town of Kassel, Germany, where he was a student of Stanley William Hayter, an English painter and printmaker. From 1961 to 1962 he studied on a Fulbright grant at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1965, he moved to New York, where he has lived ever since; he held a teaching position at Cooper Union from 1967 to 2002. Despite the critical acclaim his work has garnered, Haacke has been relatively reclusive. He actively resists being photographed and has given only a few interviews, believing, as a true Conceptualist, that his work should stand on its own, and that he, as an artist, should not be an object of interest.
Some of Haacke’s earliest works borrowed formally from Minimalism while exploiting Conceptualism’s interest in the context in which art is shown. The work Condensation Cube, 1963–65, consists of a sealed plexiglas cube filled with a small amount of water. Responding to exterior fluctuations in light, temperature, and humidity, condensation forms inside the box, leaving rivulets of water on its sides. Through a fairly minimal, non-didactic gesture, Condensation Cube attests to the impact of context on an artwork’s appearance, presaging the claims made in Joseph Kosuth’s writings about Conceptualism. Haacke would become best known, however, for the work he developed in the late 1960s and has continued to the present day, work that is insistently and explicitly political. Haacke’s turn to such work coincided with his involvement in the Art Workers Coalition, formed in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War and to advocate for the Civil Rights Movement and for the rights of all artists to be represented in civic arts institutions.
News: Analysis
Haacke’s 1969 work News originally consisted of a teleprinter (a proto fax machine or computer terminal) connected to a live feed of political and economic news transmitted from wire services commonly employed by newsrooms around the world. The machine, which bore the logo of United Press International, would spit out lines of news items onto long, narrow spools of paper, which were then cut and affixed to the gallery walls. (In later installations, museums allowed the paper to gather into a pile on the floor, to dramatic effect.) News was first shown in a 1969 exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York and later that year in a large group exhibition called Prospect in Düsseldorf, Germany. For the German exhibition, Haacke dictated the revised concept as follows:
A telex machine installed in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle prints all the news communicated by the German press agency DPA. The printouts will be put on display for further reading one day after being communicated, and on the third day the rolls of paper will be labelled and dated, then stored in plexiglass containers.
A telex machine installed in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle prints all the news communicated by the German press agency DPA. The printouts will be put on display for further reading one day after being communicated, and on the third day the rolls of paper will be labelled and dated, then stored in plexiglass containers.
In 1970, News was included in an important show titled Software - Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at New York’s Jewish Museum, which explored the idea of software as a process or a program carried out by a machine or by the audience based on instructions formulated by the artist. Although the show featured works created with the help of computer technology, the premise clearly drew on precedents generated by Minimalist and Conceptual artists who had been working on instructional art (where the machine was mere metaphor) for at least half a decade. Where News diverged to some degree from those earlier works of Minimalism and Conceptualism was in its political implications: Haacke aimed to bring the outside world directly into the gallery, not through engaging the body of the viewer through architectural space (Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt) nor through a fairly didactic treatment of language (Joseph Kosuth) or a deadpan depiction of the everyday (Ed Ruscha), but through a constantly spooling machine that recorded current events as they happened.
The Development of Institutional Critique
What Haacke was formulating out of his reflections on Minimal and Conceptual art would eventually develop into a robust genre of artistic practice that has been labeled “institutional critique.” The year after creating News, Haacke installed a work in the exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art that invited visitors to vote on a current political issue and deposit their answers in one of two transparent ballot boxes in the gallery space. The question he asked visitors was, “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” The Rockefellers, Haacke knew, had not only influenced politics for many decades in New York, they were also major donors to the city’s arts institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art; Governor Nelson Rockefeller himself had served as trustee, treasurer, and president of the Museum’s board. Many of Haacke’s subsequent works would focus on these sorts of links between art institutions, arts patrons, and political and economic systems that are often unjust. His work has been censored a number of times, most famously when his planned solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was cancelled in 1971 because museums shied from the troubles they would invite by airing such sensitive (sometimes outright damning) information in their galleries. In a letter to Haacke explaining the cancellation of his show, Thomas Messer, then the director of the Guggenheim, wrote, “art may have social and political consequences but these, we believe, are furthered by indirection and by the generalized, exemplary force that works of art may exert upon the environment, not, as you propose, by using political means to achieve political ends, no matter how desirable these may appear to be in themselves.” Although Messer’s view might today seem surprisingly conservative, his position—that politics and art ought to remain separate—was widely held, and had to be constantly battled by artists like Haacke, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler, and many others, who believed that art was indeed charged with addressing the urgent political issues of the day, not sideways but head-on.
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