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 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. 1 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.