Minimalism is against gestural, personal painting like Abstract Expressionism and against referential Pop art but like formalist painting, specifically color field painting, it is a self contained object, separate from anything external, and thus autonomous and present in its entirety immediately.

A Minimalist work of art interpreted as art-as-object that increasingly focused on rightness of proportion, scale, and surface was soon interpreted as an “open ended situation” (Morris) and the derogatory evaluation of Minimalism as “theater” (Fried) was embraced.

Minimalism was then interpreted as a critique of art-as-object. David Smith, Cubi II, 1960s Formalist sculpture- contextless, unrelated to site or viewer, Modernism Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1960s Minimalism, Meaning-as-context, the work stakes everything on the context in which they surface into the experience of the viewer; although each L-beam is identical in dimension, thickness, and weight, we cannot see all three of their shapes as the same because of real space’s effects (sense of gravitational pull on one, sense of light on another) Phenomenology of Perception- meaning as a function of the body’s immersion in the world Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Boxes), 1960s Minimalism, Meaning-as-context, space between the boxes belongs to the viewer, Modernism straddles Postmodernism A Postmodern Beginning: Postminimalism and Process art

Critiques of art-as-object from the 1960s through the 1970s Post-1965, much art can be loosely defined as “conceptual” because: it attacked art-as-object and art-as-commodification; it is Dada-like in its absurdities, and its self-determination, and in its challenge of traditional Western values including war “Conceptual” Site-Specific works Postminimalism and process art: Conceptual -piled or scattered materials; movement proper organic and ephemeral- “anti-form” Body art -emerged in part out of and against Minimalism and in part as Happenings, Fluxus alienated and radicalized responses to and Performance art American life in the 1960s- against familiar, restrained, “bourgeois” middle class- leading to -direct and free involvement with changeable materials and actual space! Eva Hesse, Ingeminate, mixed media Louis Bourgeois, Portrait, latex wall piece Works included in the “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in 1966, curated by Lucy Lippard; “formal muddling” Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1960s, mixed media Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning Subverts Minimalism’s rigidity, rationalism, and formalism in favor of malleability, absurdity and eccentricity, the anti-form and material instability; Hesse’s work has deteriorated incredibly since the 1960s and this is part its meaning! Sans II refabricated

Eva Hesse, Sans II, 1960s, latex Postminimalism and Process art, A postmodern beginning Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, 1960s 2008 In 1969 it’s a flexible, ethereal, multipaneled piece composed of fiberglass and latex, sheets of rubberized cheesecloth; it was able to lean against a wall and shudder with a passing breeze; by 2008, too fragile to be lifted out of its horizontal fittings, its rubberized cheesecloth is too hardened to shudder and the work deemed completely unexhibitable Postminimalism and Process art, A Postmodern beginning Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1960s, fiberglass and polyester resin, latex on cheesecloth Postminimalism and process art, A Postmodern beginning Louis Bourgeois, La Fillette (Little Girl), 1960s, latex over plaster Postminimalism, A Postmodern beginning Absurd eroticism, evoke the body but ambivalent; hung by wire=castration vs. cradled by Bourgeois in a famous photo by Robert Mapplethorpe=object of love Feminism (textbook pp. 114-124)- feminist appropriation of the symbolic phallus, which in Freudian psychology represents the female lack which she can only compensate for by having a male baby; this work’s title is “little girl”! Owns patriarchal symbols and then denies patriarchy in her transformation of them Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field, 1960s, sewn stuffed fabric, plywood mirrors, dimensions variable Postminimalism, A Postmodern beginning Accumulation (of phalli), repeated ad infinitum; “obsessive repetition”- hybrid of regular Minimalist units and serial Pop images Feminism- a different kind of critique of patriarchy through the symbolic phallus