Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961-1975 By
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Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961-1975 by Christopher M. Ketcham M.A. Art History, Tufts University, 2009 B.A. Art History, The George Washington University, 1998 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ARCHITECTURE: HISTORY AND THEORY OF ART AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEPTEMBER 2018 © 2018 Christopher M. Ketcham. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author:__________________________________________________ Department of Architecture August 10, 2018 Certified by:________________________________________________________ Caroline A. Jones Professor of the History of Art Thesis Supervisor Accepted by:_______________________________________________________ Professor Sheila Kennedy Chair of the Committee on Graduate Students Department of Architecture 2 Dissertation Committee: Caroline A. Jones, PhD Professor of the History of Art Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chair Mark Jarzombek, PhD Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tom McDonough, PhD Associate Professor of Art History Binghamton University 3 4 Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961-1975 by Christopher M. Ketcham Submitted to the Department of Architecture on August 10, 2018 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture: History and Theory of Art ABSTRACT In the mid-1960s, the artists who would come to occupy the center of minimal art’s canon were engaged with the city as a site and source of work. These artists drew on the social, material, and spatial conditions of the surrounding environment, producing sculpture that addressed the problem of the city as a problem of the body. At the same time, minimal art was deployed by civic leaders, including New York City’s mayor John V. Lindsay, as an instrument to organize a public and project a new urban image in the midst of sweeping social and economic change. The work of Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Dennis Oppenheim and many of their peers, informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, promised to heighten one’s consciousness of self, others, and environment. The Lindsay administration and its allies positioned sculpture as an aesthetic rupture that could ameliorate the sensorial burden and alienation of urban life. The phenomenological and spatial claims of minimal art were adopted and mobilized by the city’s power brokers as they sought to assert authority over New York. This dissertation assesses the intertwined agency of artists, political leaders, corporate stakeholders, and private developers as they made proprietary claims for urban space. In the canonical formation of minimal art, the city has been marginalized as a field of meaning. The phenomenological reading has become naturalized in historiography. Rather than perpetuate this historiographical opposition, this dissertation pursues an urban history of minimal art and a social history of its phenomenology. It focuses on artists and organizers whose work constitutes a sustained engagement with the social, material, and spatial realities of New York City in the 1960s. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology resonated with artists in 1960s New York, in part, because it overlapped with a politics of the urban body that was developing simultaneously. The city’s use of minimal art was closely related to the problematic visibility of politicized bodies. As Lindsay was confronted with issues of race, gender, and class that emerged in the wake of massive social and economic transition, his administration turned to minimal art to serve as a tangible sign of order. Sculpture was deployed as a tool to orient the body and the public within the city’s new spatial realities. Thesis Supervisor: Caroline A. Jones Title: Professor of the History of Art 5 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have benefitted from the support of many people while working on this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest thanks to Caroline Jones, my advisor. I am incredibly grateful for her unwavering encouragement, guidance, and patience as I worked my way through research and writing. Her intellectual rigor and attention, as well as her critical reading, have immeasurably improved every aspect of this dissertation. Professor Jones has been an extraordinarily generous mentor, scholar, and advocate, not just in conjunction with my dissertation, but throughout my time at MIT. My additional committee members have continuously challenged and broadened my thinking. I would like to thank Mark Jarzombek for his incisive and unexpected feedback to my research and writing. Professor Jarzombek has provided me with a model of open and critical inquiry, as well as an insistent voice to read against the grain of historiography. I am grateful, also, to Tom McDonough, whose insightful comments have consistently sharpened my work and helped me define this project in its initial stage. The faculty and staff in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT have been incredibly supportive, since the moment I entered the program. I am grateful to HTC professors Kristel Smentek, Arindam Dutta, and Stanford Anderson for teaching me and guiding my work in and out of seminars. For their patience, guidance, and good humor as I navigated departmental and institutional protocols, I thank Kathaleen Brearley, Anne Deveau, and Renée Caso. My colleagues have been a source of sustaining inspiration. I owe special thanks to Alexander Wood and Sebastian Schmidt. They are not only brilliant interlocutors but, more importantly, great friends. I have also benefitted from conversations and friendships I have shared with Todd Satter, Jennifer Chuong, Deepa Ramaswamy, Kelly Presutti, Rebecca Uchill, Michael Kubo, and Eric Rosenberg. I am grateful to Monica Manolescu for her invitations to present my work in public forums and, even more so, for her encouraging comments on my research and writing. Thanks, also, to Cameron Cartiere and Jennifer Wingate, the editors of Public Art Dialogue, for the publishing opportunity and feedback. I owe many thanks to the discussants and interview subjects who generously shared their time, expertise, and experience with me. I am indebted to Carl Andre, Melissa Kretschmer, Dan Graham, Alanna Heiss, and Stanford Anderson for inviting me to their homes and offices and sitting for extended interviews. I am grateful, also, to Barbara Rose and Donald Wall, for their substantive email and telephone conversations, as well as to Robert Morris and Jennifer Winkworth for answering the many questions that I posed through email. The research for this dissertation would have been impossible without the assistance of many dedicated archivists and librarians. I owe special thanks to Amy Plumb Oppenheim, Director of the Dennis Oppenheim Estate, and Sarah Auld, Director of the Tony Smith Estate. They not only opened their archives to me but also gave me invaluable guidance and insight as I navigated their collected records, answering all of my myriad inquiries with 7 generosity and expertise. I am grateful for the assistance of numerous librarians and archivists at: Archives of American Art; Museum of Modern Art; Municipal Archives of the City of New York; Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Bard Center for Curatorial Studies; New York City Parks Department Archive; Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU; Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania; Association for a Better New York; Whitney Museum of American Art Archives; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives; Wadsworth Atheneum; and the MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections. My research was assisted by a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. My parents and brother will always be an essential part of my thinking on New York. I am grateful for all that they have done, and continue to do for me. To my wife Alex and our children Beatrice and Oskar: you shape and inspire my thought. With love and infinite thanks, I dedicate this dissertation to you. 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: Minimal Art and Urban Authority in John V. Lindsay’s New York………………………………………………………..11 CHAPTER TWO: Carl Andre’s Art of Zoning……………………………………………………………61 CHAPTER THREE: Tony Smith and the Body Politics of Bryant Park……………………………………119 CHAPTER FOUR: A Better New York, or the Politics of Public Sculpture……………………………………………………163 CHAPTER FIVE: Dennis Oppenheim’s Road Works…………………………………………….............233 CONCLUSION: Speculations in Real Estate and Sculpture…………………………………………….297 ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………329 ARCHIVES…………………………………………………………………………332 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..335 9 10 Chapter 1: Minimal Art and Urban Authority in John V. Lindsay’s New York In May 1966, Rosalind Krauss published “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd” in Artforum. It was among the first essays to associate minimal art with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While arguing for an essentially new aesthetic experience, autonomous and keyed to the body, Krauss leveraged her phenomenological reading of Judd’s sculpture against a growing tendency to parse the architectural basis of minimal art. The meaning of Judd’s work, Krauss argued,