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Minimal Art and Body Politics in City, 1961-1975

by

Christopher M. Ketcham

M.A. , 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 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

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4 Minimal Art and Body Politics in , 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 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 , , 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 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

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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, , , and Stanford Anderson for inviting me to their homes and offices and sitting for extended interviews. I am grateful, also, to 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 ; Municipal Archives of the City of New York; Manuscripts and Archives, Memorial Library, ; Bard Center for Curatorial Studies; New York City Parks Department Archive; and Special Collections, NYU; Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of ; Association for a Better New York; Whitney Museum of American Art Archives; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives; ; 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

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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 ” in . 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, coheres in the subject’s primal, embodied encounter with the object, not in any prior, allusive experience. Judd’s sculpture “can be sensed only in terms of its present coming into being as an object…”1 Krauss’s essay was a key foray in a debate amongst artists and critics over the relation of minimal art to the city and its architectures, which cohered in the pages of Artforum, Arts Magazine, and other publications in 1966 and 1967. On the one hand, critics such as David Bourdon, Michael Benedikt, and John Perreault, along with Dan Graham and , insisted on an urban frame of meaning for the new sculpture. They variously associated the work of Judd, Tony Smith, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and with modernist office buildings, suburban housing developments, and the ruins of urban renewal.2 On the other side of the debate stood the phenomenologists, led by Robert Morris and Rosalind Krauss, who found a theoretical foundation for the new sculpture in Merleau-Ponty’s freshly translated texts.3

1 Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 25. 2 David Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” Artforum 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 15- 17; John Perreault, “Union Made,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (March 1967): 26-31; Michael Benedikt, “New York Letter: Notes on the Whitney Annual 1966,” Art International 11, no. 2 (February 1967): 56-62; Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966-January 1967): 21-22; Dan Graham, “Photographs,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 175-179; Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 7 Sculptors, ed. Samuel Adams Green (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1965). 3 Many of Merleau-Ponty’s major texts, including Phenomenology of Perception, were first released in English translation by American publishers in the early- to mid-1960s. See, for example: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

11 These newly minted phenomenologists worried over the collapse of aesthetic experience into the everyday and, especially, the increasingly obscured line between sculpture and architecture. Sculpture had just achieved parity with , in part by embracing its own terms of autonomy. Its potential association with architecture constituted a threat to that hard-won status. If sculpture came too close to architecture, Morris argued with Krauss, it risked becoming a mere supplement to building or, worse yet, another indistinguishable object in a cluttered urban field. “The autonomous and literal nature of sculpture,” Morris insisted, “demands that it have its own, equally literal space.”4 Sculpture’s autonomous space, Morris contended, was to be “hostile” to painting and “independent of architecture.”5 By associating sculpture with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, and claiming a privileged embodied experience, minimal art’s phenomenologists sought to forestall what they feared would be the debasement of the new sculpture as it edged into the city. The phenomenological reading of minimal art, first championed by Krauss and Morris, largely prevailed and has subsequently become naturalized in historiography. In the canonical formation of minimal art, the city has been marginalized as a field of meaning even as artists working at the center of that discourse continued to engage urban architectures, spaces, and subjects. The works of Judd, Morris, Andre, Smith, and other artists at the heart of minimal art’s canon, are assumed to address the body directly. Within this primal encounter between body and sculpture, an experience of pure form and materiality seems possible. This embodied experience, in turn, is credited with provoking a heightened awareness of space and self, as well as a consciousness of the body as a primary site of knowledge. However, Krauss, Morris, and many adherents to the phenomenological reading of minimal art mobilized a depoliticized reading of Merleau-Ponty to serve as the theoretical basis of the new sculpture. The bodies that encounter a sculpture, in the writings of Krauss and Morris, are universal bodies. The space of sculptural experience is neutral and placeless, a sensorial and social oasis. The phenomenological enlightenment that comes with aesthetic experience, for Krauss, Morris, and others, is kept apart from and above the everyday life of the city.

4 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 43. 5 Ibid., 43.

12 The universal phenomenological body displaced the city to the margins of critical discourse. Yet minimal art has an urban history. Tony Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York City was organized by the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay and held in Bryant Park. Carl Andre’s first were made from materials scavenged from New York City’s streets, razed buildings, and the wasted spaces of urban renewal. He referred to an early studio on the Lower East Side as an “indoor vacant lot.” Dan Flavin, likewise, collected detritus from the street and incorporated the materials in in the early 1960s. His first light works were built with fixtures that he bought on Canal Street. David Bourdon, among the first critical advocates of minimal art, identified Flavin’s fluorescent tube sculptures with the everyday experience of walking in the city. “After leaving the gallery,” Bourdon wrote in his review of Flavin’s 1964 Green Gallery show, “we were startled by the window of the Samicraft Lighting Company (200 West 47th Street). A shop dealing in colored and fluorescent tubes, it looked like the Flavin show in the process of being dismantled. We crossed the street to study the windows. There was a remarkable similarity.”6 Donald Judd had his specific objects fabricated by Bernstein Brothers, a small manufacturer of sheet-metal products that more commonly made ductwork, roofs, and smoke stacks for city buildings. When Sol LeWitt sought a heuristic to describe the conceptual basis of his sculpture, he employed New York City’s zoning laws, which had just been revised in 1961 to facilitate the city’s transition from industrial manufacturing to managerial . LeWitt suggested that the idea precedes the form of his work, just as zoning regulations exist prior to and dictate the shape of the city and its buildings.7 The obscuring of the city in historiography has resulted in enduring omissions to which art historians have only recently returned. As Julia Bryan Wilson, David Raskin, and Shannon have argued, artists such as Morris, Judd, and Andre adopted the materials, methods, spaces, and class identities of industrial manufacturing. These artists identified with the factory worker at the very moment that this sector of labor and mode of production was being forced out of New York City, supplanted by the ascendant protocols of managerial

6 David Bourdon, “Dan Flavin,” The Village Voice, November 26, 1964, 11, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19641126&printsec=fron tpage&hl=en. 7 Sol LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 24-25.

13 capitalism.8 This revisionist trend to write the city back into the history of minimal art has come at the expense of phenomenology, which is ignored or rejected outright. But it cannot be. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as interpreted by Rosalind Krauss and Robert Morris, and embraced by Tony Smith, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, and many others, is a core part of the history of minimal art. The phenomenological polemics of Morris, Andre, Smith, and others are grounded in the urban history of their sculpture. This dissertation argues that phenomenology and urban history are equally relevant to an understanding of minimal art. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology resonated with artists in 1960s New York, in part, because it overlapped with an urban politics of the body that was simultaneously developing in the city. The pursuit of a sculpture that provoked a heightened sensorial awareness of body and space, and a consciousness of the body as the source of perception and spatial knowledge, echoed the urban theories of Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Edmund Bacon, and Christopher Tunnard. These urbanists drew from a Gestalt theory of perception, which opened a theoretical space that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—itself deeply influenced by and in dialogue with Gestalt theory—came to occupy and ultimately supersede. Their respective theories of the city resonated with the liberatory politics of phenomenology, which in turn echoed the urban politics of John Vliet Lindsay. The political significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology cohered in his positing of a subject who is physically immersed the world. The subject projects into a concrete world that preexists consciousness and is populated by other subjects and objects. This theory of the subject was central to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism and Cartesian intellectualism. He sought to supplant the passivity of the former and the idealism of the latter with what he referred to as “philosophy in the Marxist .”9 The embodied subject, who knows and moves into the world with intention, was also Merleau-Ponty’s

8 This thesis was first articulated in: Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist ( and : The University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, , and London: University of Press, 2009); Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); and David Raskin, Donald Judd (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 132.

14 counter to the alienation and fragmentation of experience in the modern world. The embodied subject, Merleau-Ponty contended, would become conscious of itself in the act of perception and, in turn, be made whole as a site of knowledge and the source of social and political action. The political stakes of this theory of the subject are clearly articulated in a 1946 essay, “Marxism and Philosophy.” There, Merleau-Ponty writes: The ‘subject’ is no longer just the epistemological subject but is the human subject who, by means of a continual dialectic, thinks in terms of his situation, forms his categories in contact with his experience, and modifies this situation and this experience by the meaning he discovers in them. In particular, the subject is no longer alone, is no longer consciousness in general or pure being for itself. He is in the midst of other consciousnesses which likewise have a situation; he is for others, and because of this he undergoes an objectivation and becomes a generic subject. For the first time since Hegel, militant philosophy is reflecting not on subjectivity but on intersubjectivity. […] Man no longer appears as a product of his environment or an absolute legislator but emerges as a product-producer, the locus where necessity can turn into concrete liberty.10

The concept of freedom and political action, which Merleau-Ponty first defined in Phenomenology of Perception, is bound to the subject’s recognition of and action towards others immersed in a shared world. “True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.”11 To take a political and social stance, for Merleau-Ponty, required one to first recognize oneself as an intersubjective body that is physically immersed in and engaged with a specific environment. “Thus to be a bourgeois or a worker is not only to be aware of being one or the other, it is to identify oneself as a worker or bourgeois through an implicit

10 Italics in original. Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy,” 134. “Marxism and Philosophy” was first published in Revue international 1, no. 6 (June-July 1946). It was published in English translation in 1964 in Sense and Non-Sense. 11 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 452.

15 or existential project which merges into our way of patterning the world and co-existing with other people.”12 The politics of immersive embodied experience are developed throughout Merleau- Ponty’s major philosophical texts, even as his affiliations shifted from Christian existentialism to Marxism to liberalism. In his earliest texts, and those most influential to artists and critics associated with minimal art, Merleau-Ponty was most explicit in his synthesis of Edmund Husserl’s foundational phenomenology and Karl Marx’s early humanist writings. While this may have appealed to Krauss, Morris, and other advocates of the phenomenological theory of sculpture, the political significance of Merleau-Ponty’s writings does not register in their art theory and criticism.13 When they employed phenomenology as a way to safeguard sculpture’s autonomy, isolating its space and audience from the world, the political significance of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy was negated. The logical progression connecting the body and environment to the social and political was

12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 447. 13 In the case of Merleau-Ponty’s American reception, it is partially true that, as Tony Judt has argued, “what was political in Paris became theoretical in London, before being reduced to the merely academic in its final resting place further afield.” Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in , 1930-1981 (New York and London: Press, 2011), 169. While this depoliticization may account for the uptake of phenomenology in art criticism, it does not account for the political reading of Merleau- Ponty that was readily available to American readers in the 1960s. The earliest English- language volumes, such as Sense and Non-Sense and Signs, focused on Merleau-Ponty’s most politically explicit essays and the editors and translators of these volumes emphasized the political and contextual significance of all of Merleau-Ponty’s writings. The politics of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy was also described in multiple important texts published in New York in the 1960s. See, for example: Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961), 72-73; and Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Press, 1967); and John O’Neill, Perception, Expression, and History: The Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). On Merleau-Ponty’s evolving political affiliations from the 1930s to his death in 1961, in addition to the texts by Rabil and O’Neill, see: Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Merleau-Ponty’s Political Thought: Its Nature and Its Challenge,” in Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context, ed. William L. McBride and Calvin O’ Schrag (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983): 14-25; Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of Existential Politics (Princeton, NJ: Press, 1988); and Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism (Lanham, MA & Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).

16 severed in its earliest stages. Instead, the body and its space were effectively walled off, both by theory and the gallery. Inaugurated mayor of New York City in January 1966, Lindsay’s rise to local and national prominence coincided with the rise of minimal art. At the same time that artists such as Andre, Flavin, and Judd were mining the material and social realities of New York City, and his administration sought to leverage their work, and that of their peers, using it to frame a new image of the city and deploying it as a tool of urban renewal. The Lindsay administration was amongst the most important early patrons of minimal art. A sculpture placed in a city park or plaza could reshape that urban space and reorganize the body politic within it, the administration believed, following the logic of urban theorists like Lynch, Jacobs, and Bacon. Minimal art was seen by the Lindsay administration, not just as a stimulus to the cultural life of the city, but also as something that was inherently urban. The new sculpture was both borne from the city, evidence of the dynamism of New York, and a mobile instrument of spatial revitalization. In an urban field that was increasingly seen as alienating, sculpture offered an aesthetic rupture with the everyday. Artists such as Tony Smith, Carl Andre, and Dennis Oppenheim refined the urban and delivered it to the realm of aesthetics in an abstract and reduced form. For some, such as , minimal art’s patron and gallerist, as well as Morris and Krauss, this aesthetic reduction resulted in a space of respite from the sensorial and social burden of the city, where the body could be made whole in isolation from the urban surround. For others, including Lindsay, key members of his administration such as August Heckscher and Doris Freedman, and urban theorists such as Edmund Bacon and Christopher Tunnard, this aesthetic operation could be deployed in the city. Sculpture, they believed, could provide a productive break within an increasingly homogenous urban field. There, sculpture’s rupture of the everyday held the promise to return the body to a concrete consciousness of self and others and reorient the embodied subject within the urban. The alienated and fragmented body would be made whole, not in a white-walled oasis, but in the city itself. These urbanists were responding to, and mostly against, ’s colonization of the city and the proliferation of new urban spaces that they deemed inhuman. In their turn to minimal art, urbanists such as Heckscher, Freedman, Bacon, and Tunnard, championed a mode of art that echoed the city’s inhumanity but also, they believed, held the potential to resolve it. In many ways, as will be discussed in subsequent

17 chapters, Smith, Andre, and Oppenheim embraced the ethics and procedures of negation and violence that were at the heart of urban renewal. Yet many of them were motivated to do so, paradoxically, to make the urban body whole and to provoke a heightened sense of self, others, and environment. The tension between negation and amelioration is at the core of minimal art’s urban significance. The city’s use of minimal art was closely related to the problematic visibility of politicized bodies. As Lindsay was confronted with inherited 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. Sculptures were deployed as tools to orient the body and the public within the city’s new spatial realities, including parks, corporate plazas, and housing developments. The Lindsay administration, for the most part, did not address these issues by promoting the work of women, minorities, or artists from other underrepresented communities. Instead, they deployed the work of particular artists associated with minimal art, all of whom were white men, positioning their work in the city as a means of organizing an ordered body politic. Minimal art, and its phenomenological polemics, had a lasting effect on the policies of public space that Lindsay and his administration developed and implemented. At the same time, this sculpture responded to and was informed by the social, spatial, and material realities of the city. Minimal art was, essentially, an urban art engaged with and by the city. Rather than perpetuate the historiographical opposition between minimal art’s phenomenology and its politics in the city, this dissertation pursues an urban history of minimal art and a social history of its phenomenology. It focuses on artists whose work constitutes a sustained engagement with the social, material, and spatial realities of New York City in the 1960s. Previous art historians, such as Caroline Jones, Pamela Lee, Julia Bryan-Wilson, David Raskin, and Joshua Shannon, have assessed the significance of minimal art in the broad context of New York City’s postwar transition from an economy rooted in industrial manufacturing to managerial capitalism.14 Building on their precedent, my research assesses the specific spaces and bodies in which this social and economic transition was contested and cohered, and to which minimal art was directed—parks, plazas, streets, piers,

14 Jones, Machine in the Studio (1996); Pamela Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers (2009); Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects (2009); and Raskin, Donald Judd (2010).

18 and highways. Chapter two considers Carl Andre’s turn to the street and the residual spaces of urban renewal as fields of sculptural meaning. Andre’s embrace of phenomenology and the seemingly neutral space of the gallery are assessed in the context of his polemical rhetoric of the street and the classed body. Tony Smith’s sculpture, the subject of chapter three, was deployed by the Lindsay administration as an instrument to counter the queer bodies that occupied Bryant Park. After this 1967 exhibition, Smith committed to developing a truly urban sculpture that reinforced the spatial order of the city, combatted the proliferation of meaningless spaces, and served as an inclusive platform for social exchange. Chapter four assesses the pioneering curatorial work of Doris Freedman, who directed the Office of Cultural Affairs for the Lindsay administration. Freedman developed a sculpture program in direct response to social, racial, and economic crises in the city, which subsequently became a model for other groups seeking to project authority over urban space. Chapter five considers Dennis Oppenheim’s work on the margins of the city, where he sought to locate minimal art on the street and develop sculpture to address the suburbanizing body organized around highways and sprawling developments. These artists, working at the center of minimal art’s canon and on its immediate periphery, were committed to the city as a site and source of work. In the 1960s and early 1970s, they drew continually from the formal, material, spatial, and social conditions of the city. They positioned their work, as did sympathetic urban authorities, as a response and sometimes even a remedy to the problem of the body in the city.

Body politics John Lindsay declared his candidacy for mayor of New York City on May 13, 1965. His declaration came less than two weeks after Carl Andre’s first solo exhibition closed at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and coincided with the first show of Sol LeWitt’s work, held at the John Daniels Gallery. The rise to prominence of minimal art corresponded with the political rise of John Lindsay, not just in chronological context but also in substance. The Lindsay administration and many of the artists associated with minimal art privileged the body as a site of knowledge. Both groups pursued strategies to heighten the spatial consciousness of the mobile body in an already modern urban space. They shared a claim that one first confronted the world through the body and came to know self and environment through direct, embodied experience. Andre, Morris, Smith, and other artists associated with minimal

19 art, asserted the body as an active participant in the unfolding of aesthetic experience. They developed forms that compelled the viewer to move around sculpture and to physically engage with it. Lindsay, in his campaign and tenure as mayor, deployed his own body as a means of framing and projecting an image of the city. And, informed by the urban theories of Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch, the Lindsay administration developed policies and programs through which the public could be reoriented to the city through embodied experience. Minimal art played a direct role in these programs and Lindsay was among its most important patrons. The Lindsay administration organized exhibitions that prominently featured minimal art, sponsored its installation on city streets, and adopted its phenomenological polemics. It was, of course, expedient for Lindsay to embrace the newest developments in sculpture, buttressing his appeal as the most urbane and forward-looking of candidates. More importantly, however, minimal art’s phenomenology reinforced the politics of the body that were at the heart of Lindsay’s approach to the city. There were two unifying themes through which Lindsay organized his mayoral campaign in 1965 and his first years in office: first, the campaign argued that the city was becoming a dangerous, brutal, and inhuman place. Second, the solution to this urban brutality was to assert a human presence in the city and to physically engage with people on the street. In the speech announcing his candidacy for mayor, Lindsay described a dramatic scene of physical and social decline and a city losing touch with its humanity. “Cities are for people and for living,” he declared, “and yet under its present tired management, New York City has become a place that is no longer for people or for living.”15 City streets, Lindsay claimed, “are dirty and unsafe.” Parks and playgrounds “are eroded, dirty, dangerous and uninhabitable in the darkness, and increasingly dangerous in the light.”16 The city was afflicted by crime and pollution, he argued. Housing, health care, and schools were neglected. City planners had failed to resolve the problem of slum living. Young families, and the companies that they worked for, were fleeing to the suburbs. In his brief speech

15 A full transcript of Lindsay’s speech was published in , along with two feature articles describing the announcement and the candidate’s tour of the five boroughs. John V. Lindsay, “The Text of Rep. Lindsay’s Declaration of Candidacy,” The New York Times, May 14, 1965. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/05/14/101546589.html?pageNum ber=20. 16 Ibid.

20 outlining the crises of New York, Lindsay even found room to worry over the state of sculpture, mentioning it as part of a broad decline in the city’s cultural production. Against this view of the city in decline, Lindsay organized an aspirational and abstract image of the public and public space. The image of the public, for Lindsay, was a one of social and economic diversity that cohered in the everyday life of the city. On the surface, this image emerged from the grassroots use of the city streets, plazas, and parks. Public space, according to this image, could be accommodating and conducive to the kinds of social exchange that Lindsay and many contemporaneous urban and architectural theorists believed was the city’s reason to be. Beneath the surface of this image of the public, framed by Lindsay’s progressive political rhetoric, capitalism’s arrangement and rearrangement of urban space is evident. An enduring idea of public art emerged in response to the concept of the public that developed in the 1960s. Moreover, what we now think of, or perhaps dismiss, as public art, was directly related to an urban space that was essentially new to postwar New York City: the plaza. Codified in the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which will be discussed in greater detail in chapters two and four, the plaza was defined as a privately owned open space that must remain accessible to the public. Fronting new corporate offices, such as Seagram Building (1952) and Lever House (1958), or surrounding modernist apartment towers, such as Kips Bay (1965), the plaza was promoted to break with the continuous wall of buildings that defined the street. Its open space would provide respite from the sensorial burden of the city and a restorative space of rest and recreation for office workers and urban residents.17 But the plaza had no public in early 1960s New York. Users had to be oriented to it and uses had to be organized for it. The idea of public art that developed in the 1960s was directed to the new space of the plaza and tasked with shaping its use and users. This was an innovative and exciting project that was debated in vanguard texts of art, architecture, urban, and political theory.18 To assess the innovative nature of public art in the 1960s, we have to read against

17 City Planning Commission. Zoning Resolution of the City of New York. New York: The City of New York, 1961, 14, 20, 27, and 31-32. 18 The term “public art” seems to have been used first to describe urban design before it was associated with sculpture. See: Christopher Tunnard, The City of Man (New York: Scribner, 1953), 291; and David A. Crane, “The Public Art of City Building,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 352 (March 1964): 84-94.

21 the grain of our familiarity with, and even derision of, this term. Phenomenology produced its own disciplinary projects and public art was one of them. The urban theories of Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch, which will be further assessed in subsequent chapters, fundamentally changed the conception of the city in the early 1960s. Their work decisively influenced the urban policies of Lindsay and his administration. Lindsay’s conception of the public and public space paralleled, and was likely indebted to, the influential theory of the environment articulated by Lynch. In the early 1960s, Lynch, an urban theorist based at MIT, developed a theory of the environment as a product of interaction between individuals and space that they inhabit. “Environment,” Lynch wrote in 1962, “is both social and physical. […] The man and his habitat must be known together.”19 Lynch’s environment was a space of exchange between the city—the city’s architectures and infrastructures— and its users. An adherent to the Gestalt theory of perception, Lynch saw the visual form of a city as a cognitive mediator between the body and politics.20 The perception of urban form, if well designed, could provide an impulse to social and political awareness.

19 Kevin Lynch, Site Planning (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1962), 4. See also: Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1961), 6. 20 In philosophy, as well as art and architectural theory, Gestalt theory establishes the field for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which invokes Gestalt psychology only to oppose and ultimately supplant it. The crucial difference is the relative importance of the object and subject in the respective theories of perception. For Gestalitists, including Lynch and James Gibson, the object remained central. Perception is structured by the specific form of the object, the clarity of edges, patterns, mass, and scale. The object mediates the subject and the social world in Gestalt theory. Merleau-Ponty retained aspects of the Gestalt theory of perception but he rejected what he viewed as the passivity of the subject who receives and responds to sense data. While Merleau-Ponty retained the basic idea from Gestalt of the directedness of perception towards an object, he turned to Husserl’s theory of intentionality to theorize an active, perceiving subject. For Merleau-Ponty, the social world both precedes and is produced by the active, intentional perception of the individual subject. As the discourse of perception shifted form Gestalt theory to phenomenology, there is a corresponding shift in the status of the sculptural object in organizing perception and mediating subject and environment. This shift is further discussed in chapters two and five. For Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Gestalt psychology, see: Merleau-Ponty, “I: Introduction: Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena,” and “II.1: Sense Experience,” in Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 3-63, 207-242.

22 An environment, however, was not just any urban space, according to Lynch. The city, he argued, had to be made consciously into an environment by planners and users.21 A good environment, he posited, “…allows individuals to orient themselves in it easily, which facilitates an understanding of the relationship between the observer and his world, and which presents itself in such a coherent way that it can be easily grasped in the mind.”22 In his classic and influential study of urban design, The Image of the City, published in 1961, Lynch argued that the city as environment would encourage precisely the kind of casual social contact that Lindsay would subsequently view as intrinsic to city life.23 The city as environment would be intelligible through direct perception and would encourage a heightened awareness of space and others through active, embodied experience. The users of the city would become, in turn, more communicative, less isolated, and, Lynch argued, “…a critical and attentive audience.”24 In the city as environment, in other words, the people would become a public. Lindsay employed a full-body approach to politics, positioning himself as the symbolic counter to the inhumanity of the city streets and the catalyst around which the public and the environment would cohere. The body, Lindsay made clear, was both the problem and the promise of the city. Ubiquitous campaign posters featured a radiant Lindsay

21 Kevin Lynch, “The City as Environment,” Scientific American 213, no. 3 (September 1965): 219. There is a certain overlap in the theory of environment developed by Lynch, beginning in the late 1950s, and that of Allan Kaprow who developed a theory of environment in the early 1960s. For both, an environment is a space of exchange between the user and their surroundings. It is an immersive space of embodied experience and, at least potentially, a space of social exchange. The crucial difference, however, is that an environment for Kaprow remained an aesthetic space apart from everyday life. Even as Kaprow sought to narrow the gap between art and life, his idea of an environment was an immersive space of art made with materials extracted from everyday life. An environment was, Kaprow argued, “an art of the city,” but there remained boundaries between those two terms. For Lynch, an environment was an aspirational ideal for the city. There was no distinction between an environment and the space of everyday life; rather, an environment is what the everyday life of the city could and should become, according to Lynch, when urban design became a product of planners and users rather than a space imposed by the former. For Kaprow’s theory of environment, see: Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, & Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 164-165, 183-184 22 Kevin Lynch “Proposal for a Major Project on the Means of Orientation in the City,” ca. 1954-1959, Kevin Lynch Papers, Box 1, MC 208, Institute Archive and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/35636. 23 Lynch, The Image of the City, (1961), 119-120. 24 Ibid., 110, 120.

23 walking down the street, followed by children. The portrait was accompanied by the slogan, “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.”25 Other posters promised that the public would, “Breathe Easier, Sleep Better, Feel Safer” with Lindsay and his team in office. Lindsay became famous for his walking tours throughout the city, particularly in its poorest communities. He attracted international media attention for his walks in neighborhoods that his rivals, such as Conservative candidate William F. Buckley, Jr., would never dream of entering. He made a point of visiting the parks and recreational spaces that he condemned in his declaration speech. His campaign photographer, Katrina Thomas, recorded scenes of Lindsay confidently striding through city streets, swarmed by children, carried on the shoulders of his supporters, playing in the city’s parks, and diving dramatically into city pools (Figure 1.1). Through his physical and highly visible engagement with the city, Lindsay projected an image of confidence, health, dynamism, and civic engagement. The city that cohered around the candidate’s body, the campaign suggested, could become equally safe, clean, and healthy. This was more than just retail politicking for Lindsay. It was a declaration of a concrete urban policy that Lindsay carried into his first term in office. It was also an embrace of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities fundamentally altered the discourse of the city. Lindsay projected his politics on the streets of New York and sought to tap into what Jacobs described as “the trust of a city street” and its “self- government function.”26 Jacobs, a strident critic of top-down urban renewal and modernist planning, located the meaning and vitality of the city on its streets. “Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users,” she wrote, “are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities.”27 The active use of the street and a heightened awareness of the urban environment, she contended, are the bases for public safety in the city. Casual public contact generates, “…a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need,” Jacob

25 Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 45. Cannato’s book includes an authoritative account of Lindsay’s 1965 campaign. 26 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 56, 120. 27 Ibid. 30.

24 wrote.28 Moreover, she argued, “Sidewalk public contact and sidewalk public safety, taken together, bear directly on our country’s most serious social problem—segregation and racial discrimination.”29

Figure 1.1. John V. Lindsay diving into a swimming pool on the campaign trail, Coney Island, 1965. Photograph by Katrina Thomas. Katrina Thomas/Museum of the City of New York. 2011.8.7.

28 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 56. 29 Ibid., 71.

25 Lindsay put Jacobs’s urban theory into practice on his walking tours, meeting people in the street, establishing connections with neighborhood leaders, and providing visibility to the everyday life of the city. The political capital that Lindsay accrued on his excursions proved invaluable during numerous urban crises, as Jacobs all but predicted. Faced with the looming threat of race riots in 1967 and 1968, for example, Lindsay walked with crowds of protesters and consulted with local leaders that he had met on previous walking tours. When Harlem was on the brink of rioting in July 1967, Lindsay appeared in its streets at three o’clock in the morning, deploying his body to diffuse the situation. He did the same thing on April 4, 1969, upon learning of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Lindsay effectively asserted his physical presence as tangible evidence of civic authority, solidarity, and equality in areas where all signs pointed to the absence of these values.30 Lindsay’s politics of the street was not limited to the assertion of his body. He also pursued policies to heighten the public’s awareness of the urban environment and encourage diverse uses of city streets and parks. Jacobs and many of her peers argued that postwar architects and urban planners had produced a city that was increasingly homogenous, monotonous, and repetitive. She described a seemingly infinite landscape populated by regimented housing projects, modernist office buildings fronted by plazas, meaningless open spaces, and parking lots. All of these postwar urban forms, Jacobs argued, were hostile to the dynamic life of the street. The result was a city that was, “overwhelming, inhuman, and incomprehensible.”31 The city, Jacobs argued, needed to encourage new forms that

30 Lindsay discussed his presence in urban areas facing social unrest in: John V. Lindsay, “Violence in the Cities: A Better Place to Live,” Speech delivered before the 44th Annual Congress of Cities, July 31, 1967, Vital Speeches of the Day XXXIII, No. 22 (September 1, 1967): 674-677; and John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969), 92-100. For early accounts of the politics of Lindsay’s walks in the midst of racial violence, see: Susanna McBee, “The ‘Other’ Pacification—To Cool U.S. Cities,” Life 63, No. 8 (August 25, 1967): 30-33; and John Neary, “The Lindsay Style,” Life 64, no. 21 (May 24, 1968): 81-82. Lindsay’s strategy of walking as a means of getting to know the city, establishing concrete lines of communication, projecting his political image, and diffusing social unrest is discussed by numerous historians. See for example: Joseph P. Viteritti, “Times a-Changin’: A Mayor for the Great Society,” in Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 18; Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Black and White,” in Sam Roberts, ed., America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2010), 18; and Cannato, The Ungovernable City, (2002), 43, 119-121, 133, 210-211. 31 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 382.

26 interrupted the infinite and homogenous urban expanse, reinforced the social order of the city, and made the underlying spatial logic comprehensible to everyday users. The Lindsay administration turned to minimal art as a mobile instrument of urban order. The sites in which they placed minimal art were the same sites identified as problematic by architectural and urban critics, such as Jacobs. And they were the same sites in which Lindsay sought to make his claim to the city most visible—parks, corporate plazas, sidewalks, and streets. It hardly mattered that some critics saw minimal art’s geometric and modular forms as homogenous, dull, and incomprehensible—the same terms used by Jacobs to condemn the modernist office towers and housing developments that were proliferating in the city. Advocates of minimal art also recognized a formal and conceptual equivalence between postwar architecture and urban planning and the work of Judd, Andre, LeWitt, and their contemporaries. Dan Graham was amongst the most outspoken in making the case for this equivalency in numerous photographs, slide shows, and publications in the mid-1960s. He positioned the simple, geometric, and serial structures common to minimal art as analogues to suburban tract housing, modernist apartment developments, and corporate office towers.32 These were the same structures that Jane Jacobs saw as destructive “concoctions grafted into cities.”33 When the Lindsay administration promoted exhibitions and installations of minimal art in the city, it did so in the plazas of corporate office towers, the lawns surrounding new housing developments, and in the open spaces deemed meaningless and hostile by Jane Jacobs and her allies.

32 Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966-January 1967): 21-22; Dan Graham, “Carl Andre,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1967-January 1968): 34-35; Dan Graham, “Photographs,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 175-179. Graham first public display of his slide show at the New Jersey State Museum’s Focus on Light exhibition, organized by Lucy Lippard and Richard Bellamy, and held from May 20 to September 10, 1967. On Graham’s comparison of the serial logic of urban and suburban planning, see also: Dan Graham, “Legacies of Critical Practices in the 1980s,” in Two-Way Power Mirror: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on his Art, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999), 21-22; Brian Wallis, “Dan Graham’s History Lessons,” in Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965-1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993), x; Alexander Alberro, “Specters of Utopia,” in Dan Graham: Models to Projects, 1978 to 1995 (New York: Gallery, 1996); Mark Wigley, “The Reluctant Artist,” in Dan Graham’s New Jersey, ed. Craig Buckley and Mark Wasita (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), 87-101. 33 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 115.

27 Lindsay’s patronage of minimal art was not, however, in conflict with his embrace of the urban politics of Jacobs. On the contrary, the fact that the logic of urban planning, or “anti-city planning” as Jacobs characterized it, cohered in minimal art would only have enhanced its appeal. Lindsay sought to encourage the social and economic diversity that Jacobs saw as central to urban life in the very places that Jacobs condemned as antithetical to the city. In part, this was a project of necessity. Lindsay inherited a city already populated with massive, modernist housing towers and corporate office buildings fronted by vacant plazas. However, these new housing developments and corporate offices were also the symbolic and spatial forms of managerial capitalism and Lindsay was committed to this new economic order of the city. As Graham suggested, the repetitive geometries of minimal art shared at least a superficial formal basis with New York’s postwar architecture. In the work of Judd, LeWitt, or their peers, the serialized forms and open spaces of the new architecture were abstracted, rendered aesthetic, and produced on the scale of the body. If minimal art could give meaning to the open space around sculpture—if it could create a space in which the subject moved and became conscious of self, others, and environment—perhaps it could do the same for the analogous urban spaces around repetitive towers. The modernist office buildings proliferating on Park Avenue, such as Lever House and the Union Carbide Building, projected an abstract corporate power that was dislocated from its roots in industrial production.34 Apartment towers, such as I. M. Pei’s Kips Bay Plaza, were conceived to house a new labor force of middle-class office workers, supplanting old-law tenements and the factory workers that lived in them.35 These new forms had to become the basis of the social life of the city if the economic transition from industrial production to managerial capitalism was to succeed. The new open spaces surrounding these buildings had to be integrated into urban life, even if Jacobs deemed them inimical to the street. They had to be made useful and fun. They had to appeal to the middle class families that were fleeing to the suburbs. Above all, these new spatial and architectural forms had to

34 Lever House (1952) and the Union Carbide Building (1961), designed respectively by Gordon Bunschaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore Owings, & Merrill, were used as models for the 1961 Zoning Resolution and promoted as the new architectural forms for the economic future of the city. Additionally, they were both built to house the headquarters of corporations engaged primarily with industrial manufacturing. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 2 and 4. 35 See chapter 4.

28 be made comprehensible, conducive to physical engagement and social interaction that Jacobs and Lindsay believed were essential to the city. Minimal art, with its underlying urban and suburban logic and its phenomenological claims, suited Lindsay’s central goal as he assumed office in January 1966. Lindsay wanted to encourage the diverse life of the street that Jacobs saw as characteristic of and other neighborhoods rooted in the spatial and architectural protocols of the 19th century industrial city. But he sought to encourage this dynamic urban life in the new spaces of managerial capitalism. Jacobs argued that the urban forms of the new economy disrupted the social life of the street, became obstacles for physical engagement of the city, and resulted in meaningless open spaces. Lindsay and his administration sought, not to supplant these new urban forms and return to the prior economic and spatial order, but to invest the new spaces of managerial capitalism with meaning. A sculpture placed in a park, plaza, or on a sidewalk might seem insignificant but, for Lindsay and his administration, it was a concrete object around which an environment and a public could cohere. A sculpture, they believed, was an object with the potential to generate social and spatial meaning. John Perreault was one of the first critics to recognize the functional potential of minimal art relative to the new economic and spatial order of the city. “Minimal art,” Perreault wrote in 1967, “has de-demonized a style of architecture too often dismissed as dehumanized and allows us to look at Park Avenue aesthetically and to appreciate Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street for the vision of our science fiction future that it is. The Minimal art feed-back into architecture itself…may entirely revolutionize the shape of our own environment.”36 Two years later, this aesthetic redemption could be seen, at least by critic Max Kozloff, as evidence of minimal art’s complicity in the ruination of the city, as forms and spaces of managerial capitalism spread unchecked. “It is not too far-fetched to say,” Kozloff suggested, “that the featureless, low-income city planning, and the dismal stretches of exurbia had much to do with the point of reference for this sculpture. […] Duplicitous

36 John Perreault, “Union Made,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (March 1967): 30. The Union Carbine Building and Lever House, as noted above, are located on Park Avenue, as is Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958). Another iconic example of the modernist corporate headquarters, Eero Saarinen’s CBS Building, is located on Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street (1965).

29 blankness, meaningless consumption of space: these were the artistic co-efficient, or rather metaphors, of an American atmosphere charged with corporate paranoia.”37 There is a striking recurrence of terms used by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Jacobs in their respective assessments of minimal sculpture and urban space. They both insisted on the essentially public nature of their subjects. For both Krauss and Jacobs, it is not just that minimal sculpture and the city exist in public but that they are opposed to the private. Throughout The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs argued for a clear delineation between public and private space. A fixed boundary is vital to ensure the safety of the street, to overcome discrimination, and even to raise children in the city.38 The boundaries between public and private, she observed, are blurred in the suburbs. When suburban spatial logic is imposed on the city in the form of massive, repetitive housing developments surrounded by useless lawns, Jacobs suggested, a territorial confusion ensues. In these forms of “anti-city planning” and “unurban urbanization,” the public life of the street moves into interior hallways, stairwells, and lobbies, where it cannot be adequately surveilled.39 The street, emptied of its appropriate users, loses its public significance and ultimately becomes a space of deviance and danger. The very meaning of the city as an urban space, according to Jacobs, depended on maintaining this boundary between public and private, allowing people to keep, “…a civilized public life on a basically dignified public footing and their private lives on a private footing.”40 Likewise, as Krauss began to write minimal art into the history of , she positioned its public identity against the internal preoccupations of . Minimal art, she argued was an art of external, public space that sharply diverged from the private fixations of the previous generation. In “Sense and Sensibility,” an essay published in Artforum in 1973, Krauss argued that and the minimal artists that followed him made meaning, “…a function of surface—of the external, the public, or a space that is no way a signifier of the a priori, or of the privacy of intention.”41 The space of abstract expressionism, Krauss suggested, was a space of privacy. It depended on a conception of

37 Max Kozloff, “Art,” The Nation, March 17, 1969: 347. 38 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 35, 40, 56, 72. 39 Ibid., 7, 16-25, 64-65, 76-80. 40 Ibid., 72. 41 Italics in original. Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” (1973), 47.

30 self, “…constituted prior to its contact with the space of the world.”42 The work of Morris, Judd, Andre, and Stella, on the other hand, staked everything on a “model of meaning…severed from the legitimizing claims of a private self.”43 Krauss continued this line of argument in her 1977 book, Passages in Modern Sculpture, one of the foundational texts of minimal art’s canonical formation and one in which its phenomenological basis passes from art criticism to art history. In Passages, Krauss states, “[minimal artists] are asking that meaning be seen as arising from…a public rather than a private space.” 44 The meaning of the work, Krauss argued, emerged on its external, public surface at the interface between sculpture, body, and surrounding world. The significance of this sculpture, she writes, “belongs to their exterior—to the point at which they surface into the public world of experience.”45 Krauss’s argument about the achievement of minimal art rested on distinguishing its public significance from the privacy of abstract expressionism. For Jacobs, the public and public space are concrete—real people in real streets, watching children play, chatting with neighbors, keeping an eye on strangers, and thereby insuring urban order and safety. Krauss’s definition of the public, on the other hand, occupies a heavily theorized space delineated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. For Krauss, following Merleau-Ponty, public space coheres between subjects and objects or, more precisely, between subjects and sculpture. For Merleau-Ponty, this is a space of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. It is the space of physical and social interaction in which one comes to both recognize oneself and produce originary meaning through the interaction. Above all, it is the existential space of the body—the space in which the body moves, perceives, and comes into being in the world. “The body is a vehicle for being in the world,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment…”46 Merleau-Ponty argued that one comes to know oneself in

42 Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” (1973), 47. 43 Ibid., 48. This quote is repeated verbatim in: Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 266. 44 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, (1977), 262. 45 Ibid., 267. 46 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 81-82. There is little explicit reference to Merleau-Ponty in urban and architectural criticism, even if his ideas broadly align with those of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and others who sought to reassert the body in the city. Architectural phenomenologists, such as Charles Moore and Christian Norberg-Schulz, drew from the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard rather than Merleau-

31 embodied experience, through an intentional act of perception directed at other subjects and objects in the world. One recognizes oneself as having a body in the world, with an external surface that interfaces with other bodies. “It is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things.’”47 Moreover, for Merleau- Ponty, the body moving through space is the origin of meaning that coheres prior to any form of conscious thought or symbolic representation. “Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia’ which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function.’’’48 The work of Judd, Morris, Andre, and others associated with minimal art is significant, according to Krauss, because it embraces the moment of phenomenological enlightenment and claims it for sculpture. Krauss, referencing Merleau-Ponty’s theory of lived perspective in her account of Judd’s sculpture, describes the recognition that one moves through space as a body to produce primary meaning. “The sculpture becomes,” Krauss writes, “an irritant for, and a heightening of, the awareness in the viewer that he approaches objects to make meaning of them, that when he grasps real structures he does so as meaningful, whole presences.”49 In the experience of Judd’s work, Krauss suggests, one recognizes oneself being in the world through the body and producing meaning in active, physical exchange with other bodies. In “Sense and Sensibility,” Krauss further locates the significance of minimal art, not in specifics of sculptural form or material, but in the existential awareness of one’s self as body that arises out of an active interface with the world. The project of sculptors in the mid-1960s is, she suggests, “…the discovery of the body as a complete externalization of the self.”50 Krauss continues, “Part of the meaning of much Minimal sculpture issues from the way in which it becomes a metaphorical statement

Ponty, who conceived of his phenomenology in strident opposition to Heidegger’s. Following Heidegger, the work of architectural phenomenologists was largely anti-urban, espousing a romantic view of nature and a fascination with the city as ruin. On architectural phenomenology, see: Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (: University of Press, 2010). 47 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 186. 48 Ibid., 140-141. 49 Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” (1966), 26. 50 Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” (1973): 49.

32 of the self understood only in experience.”51 For Krauss, minimal art was significant because it provoked an awareness of the body moving in space and because it privileged embodied experience as the originary source of sculptural meaning.52 Krauss’s identification of minimal art’s public surface and her attribution of the heightened awareness of the body as a site of meaning are reconcilable with Jane Jacobs’s theory of public space. At the heart of both is the idea that one moves through space, perceiving objects and the environment, and making meaning through the body. Jacobs and her allies argued that the public space of the street began at the exterior surface of architecture. This public space was, according to Jacobs, threatened by the architectures of managerial capitalism—the corporate office buildings and plazas multiplying on Park Avenue and Lower and the modernist apartment tower proliferating throughout the city. These new architectural forms interrupted the continuity of the street and the social life that cohered there, resulting in unusable and lifeless open spaces.53 While Jacobs’s vernacular is at odds with Krauss’s theoretical prose, both propose a clear linkage between forms and subjects. “Impersonal city streets make anonymous people,” Jacobs contended.54 Likewise, Vincent Scully, Yale’s influential architectural historian condemned the spatial effects of the modernist, corporate plaza. The exterior of a building, Scully argued, following Jacobs, is its “most democratic aspect, since it is the one that all the people of the city use. It creates the architectural space common to them all.”55 The proliferation of plazas fronting corporate offices, according to Scully, destroyed the common space of the street and the “popular life of the city.”56 Originally established in the renaissance as the archetypal space of humanism and public life, the plaza, now appended to the corporate office, was derided as asocial. The city, Scully and Jacobs feared, was becoming inhuman. At virtually the same moment, in the same city, Krauss and Morris began to argue that public space began at the exterior surface of sculpture that was scaled to the body and

51 Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” (1973): 49. 52 Michael Fried, of course, developed an argument along the same lines as Krauss but used it to denounce minimal art. He deployed prosecutorial terms to characterize sculpture’s recognition of the body as a “special complicity which that work extorts from the beholder.” Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 16. 53 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 74, 94, 296, 495, 498. 54 Ibid., 74. 55 Vincent Scully, “Death of the Street,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 95. 56 Ibid., 95.

33 compelled movement. The public surface of sculpture, they argued, provoked a heightened awareness of the body moving through space to make meaning. Even while rejecting the architectural significance of minimal art, Krauss and Morris claimed for sculpture the power to humanize public space at the same time that architectural critics were lamenting the dehumanization of public space in the city. In her account of the public space of minimal art, Krauss leaves unstated the politics of that space. To be a body in public in 1960s New York City was essentially political. To be a woman on the street, as Jane Jacobs insisted, was to embody a political position relative to a city undergoing social and economic upheaval. To be a gay man in Bryant Park, a factory worker, a longshoreman, a typist, or a white male banker—the specifics of class, race, and gender mattered as these bodies circulated in the city. However, Krauss, and almost all subsequent advocates of the phenomenological account of minimal art, adhere to a universal and seemingly depoliticized conception of the body and subjectivity.57 The subject that encounters a minimal sculpture can achieve a heightened experience of self, environment, and others. Yet, paradoxically, that subject remains abstract and the space through which it moves remains neutral and placeless. This is what Judith Butler described as the ideological character of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. It is, as Butler writes, “produced by the impossible project of maintaining an abstract subject even while describing concrete, lived experience. The subject appears immune from the historical experience that Merleau-Ponty describes, but then reveals itself in the course of the description as a concrete cultural subject, a masculine subject.”58 Seemingly innocuous, the abstract subject of Merleau-Ponty

57 See, for example: Hal Foster, “The Crux of ,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 35-70. This is true for virtually all art historians persuaded by minimal art’s phenomenological basis, at least until Amelia Jones, who is a key contributor to the widespread re-evaluation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in feminist theory. See, for example: Amelia Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History,” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, AU; Berlin, DE: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 71-90. 58 Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 95. While acknowledging Merleau-Ponty’s presumption of a universal subject, and the importance of Butler’s critique, Sara Ahmed argues that the Phenomenology of Perception also includes the terms for orienting and reorienting

34 and Krauss obscures the social and spatial circumstances through which the body moves. In the case of minimal art, the abstract subject and neutral space of phenomenology obscures the concrete uses of sculpture as it was deployed on New York City’s streets, parks, piers, and highways. In the canonical formation of minimal art, the artists who made the most polemical sculptures have been men and it is their work that has been privileged. The enduring exclusion of women from this canon, particularly dancers and performers, has facilitated the institutional alignment of Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and with the history of modern sculpture. Art historians have developed numerous strategies to combat and revise this exclusive canon. One strategy, advocated by Anna Chave, condemns minimal art as hyper-masculine and fascistic. The work of minimal artists, Chave contends, propagates an aggression and violence against women under the auspices of aesthetic experience.59 To counter this violence, Chave has sought to recenter the narrative of sculpture’s development around women, such as and , who were excluded from minimal art’s canon, while also interrogating the terms of their exclusion.60 This revisionist project is shared by art historians James Meyer and Kirsten Swenson. Without subscribing to Chave’s charges of violence, they argue for the significance of and Hesse in the development of minimal sculpture.61 Likewise, there has been an invaluable effort to broaden the historical account of minimal art beyond its sculptural base to include the work of dancers and performers such as , Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, , and Trisha Brown. Art historians such as Amelia Jones, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Susan Rosenberg have pursued the particularly urgent task of assessing the work of women who preceded and influenced

conceptions of body and sexuality. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 66-68. 59 Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44-63; and Anna C. Chave, “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End,” Art Journal 73, No. 4 (Winter 2014): 5-21. 60 Anna Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 149-163. 61 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 63-74, 222-228; and Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

35 the men at the center of minimal art’s canon.62 Another strategy, pursued most persuasively by Brian Wallis, assesses the destabilization of conventional ideas of gender, sexuality and power in some minimal sculpture. Unconvinced by Chave’s account of its violence, Wallis argues that the hyper-masculinity attributed to minimal art is not inherent to the work. Rather, it is a product of canonical formation and conscription into institutional narratives of modernist sculpture that tamed minimal art’s complex and critical engagement with sexuality and power.63 These art historians have done much to counter the assumed masculinity that has framed the canon of minimal art. However, the bodies described in Krauss’s phenomenological account still need to be assessed. In other words, the body that Krauss theorizes coming into being while moving around a sculpture by Judd or Morris is not the artist’s body but the viewer’s. Judith Butler saw in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology the potential to provide the theoretical ground for a historically situated conception of subjectivity. The first step is the rejection of abstract description. “For a concrete description of lived experience,” Butler writes, “it seems crucial to ask whose sexuality and whose bodies are being described, for ‘sexuality’ and ‘bodies’ remain abstractions without first being situated in concrete social and cultural contexts.”64 Minimal art was directed at specific bodies and spaces in 1960s New York City, even if Krauss and other phenomenologists subordinated the political significance of sculpture and neutralized its space to safeguard its autonomy. The phenomenological subject that cohered around minimal art, as described by Krauss, addressed specific sensorial and social needs in the city. These needs were described by urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and

62 Amelia Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning,” in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 39-55; Carrie Lambert Beatty, “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Studies in the 1960s,” in A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 103-110; Carrie Lambert Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Susan Rosenberg, “Trisha Brown’s Minimalism,” in A Different Way to Move: Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980, ed. Marcella Lista (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 136-143; and Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 65-150. 63 Brian Wallis, “Power, Gender, and Abstraction,” in Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961-1991, ed. Holliday Day (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1991), 100-113. 64 Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description,” (1989), 98.

36 Kevin Lynch, who sought ways to promote an urban space in which people would have a heightened experience of self and environment. They promoted urban forms that encouraged people to perceive the city with intention and urban forms that became the basis of social exchange. John Lindsay, one could say, synthesized Jacobs’s theory of the city with the phenomenological account of minimal art and organized an urban sculpture program around this synthesis. The Lindsay administration organized sculpture exhibitions in city parks, supported installations on sidewalks and streets, and sought to use minimal art to revitalize the residual spaces of industrial manufacturing, in a sustained effort to address the problem of the body in the city.

Administering Sculpture Parks were at the center of John Lindsay’s politics. They were also the first sites in which his administration developed its sculpture program as part of broad effort to revitalize deteriorating urban spaces, project a new image of the city, and assert authority over the previous generations of power brokers. Lindsay staked his claim to the city in its parks. Park policy was a major topic of his 1965 mayoral campaign and new initiatives in parks and recreation were aggressively pursued early in his first term. The city’s parks were the most visible sites from which Lindsay mounted his challenge to Robert , whose power was grounded, at least symbolically, in his decades-long hold on the New York City’s Parks Department. Lindsay’s park policy was motivated to address social injustice in the city and to counter the image of urban violence, fear, and deterioration that he invoked throughout his campaign. Whereas Moses’s approach to the city and its public spaces was seen to exacerbate social and racial inequality, Lindsay worked to project an image of the city characterized by order and fun. The city, according to the image framed in Lindsay’s parks and public plazas, was a safe space conducive to business, family, and community. Sculpture played a crucial role in Lindsay’s promotion of public space as safe and ordered, and in his materialized rejection of Moses’s precedent. Lindsay’s park policy and his patronage of minimal art were guided by a small group of people that joined the administration during his first eighteen months in office. Thomas Hoving worked on the 1965 campaign and was appointed Parks Commissioner shortly after Lindsay was inaugurated on January 1, 1966. Hoving authored Parks and Recreation, a formative white paper published by the campaign in 1965, in which the core principles that

37 guided Lindsay’s parks policy were outlined. During Lindsay’s first year in office, Hoving sought to change the narrative of city parks by associating them with the latest developments in art. Borrowing from Allan Kaprow, for example, he launched sprawling, participatory events in that were promptly branded “Hoving’s Happenings.” By the end of 1965, Hoving turned to minimal art, organizing a major exhibition of Tony Smith’s sculpture for Bryant Park. In addition to being the first sculpture exhibition ever organized by the city, Smith’s Bryant Park show was also the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.65 When Hoving left the administration in early 1967 to head the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was succeeded as Parks Commissioner by August Heckscher, who substituted a leadership style marked by patrician erudition for Hoving’s dynamic showmanship. Heckscher was joined by Doris Freedman, a social worker and veteran of anti-Moses activism who arrived in May 1967 to direct the Office of Cultural Affairs. Heckscher and Freedman continued to develop Hoving’s cultural programming of city parks and public spaces. However, Heckscher and Freedman committed more exclusively to minimal art, capitalizing on its urban logic in a series of exhibitions and installations. Their sculpture programs constitute a synthesis of minimalism’s phenomenological polemics and the urban theories of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and others. Lindsay closely associated the state of the parks with the state of the city.66 In his 1965 campaign, Lindsay condemned the social and physical condition of the parks and, implicitly, Robert Moses’s management of public space. In the campaign’s white paper Parks and Recreation, Lindsay and Hoving argued that the public perceived parks as dangerous and deteriorating. The decrepit state of the parks in the 1960s, the campaign suggested, was the antithesis of the 19th century pastoral ideal on which they were founded to promote open

65 Smith’s exhibition, which opened in Bryant Park on January 20, 1967, is discussed in greater detail in chapter three. 66 Hillary Ballon considers Lindsay’s connection of physical form and social health in the city in the context of his approach to urban planning. See Hillary Ballon, “The Physical City,” in America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York, ed. Sam Roberts (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2010), 132-146. Mariana Mogilevich makes a similar argument regarding the spatial politics of the Lindsay administration’s public arts and recreation policies. See Mariana Mogilevich, “Arts as Public Policy: Cultural Spaces for Democracy and Growth,” in Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 195-224; and Mariana Mogilevich, “Landscape and participation in 1960s New York,” in Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 201-214.

38 space, health, and recreation in the city.67 In numerous campaign events, Lindsay repeated the idea that the parks were sites of fear, violence, and crime and he ran on the promise to “…to make parks and streets safe for people to walk in.”68 He also argued that existing parks failed to serve the populations with the greatest needs. Lindsay sought to place new parks in areas accessible to the poorest residents of the city, transforming blighted areas such as vacant lots and deteriorating piers into recreational amenities. Lindsay promised to revitalize existing parks, convert decaying industrial infrastructures to recreational uses, and organize new publics within them. Building on the founding intention of New York City parks to support “…man’s social nature,” Lindsay and Hoving reasoned that new parks in slum areas would foster “…an intensified sense of community...”69 Lindsay, Hoving, Heckscher, and Freedman developed an approach to public space that marked a fundamental break with the policies of Robert Moses.70 Following the publication of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Moses’s policies of slum clearance were increasingly seen to destroy communities and result in anonymous, dehumanized urban spaces. Lindsay made this case in the early 1960s, while representing New York City as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In a congressional speech on October 3, 1962, Lindsay condemned Moses’s approach to slum clearance and

67 John V. Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, White Paper, Campaign Press Center, John V. Lindsay for Mayor, October 8, 1965, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 91, Folder 86. 68 Lindsay’s remarks were quoted in a campaign press release that was circulated the morning after a campaign event in . “Lindsay Pledges to End People’s Fear of Crime and Violence if Elected,” press release, John V. Lindsay for Mayor, October 12, 1965, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 103, Folder 207. See also Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, (1965), 5-6. 69 Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, (1965), 1, 3; Thomas P. F. Hoving, “Think Big About Small Parks,” The New York Times Magazine, April 10, 1966, 12-13, 68-72. 70 The opposition to Moses that was signaled by Lindsay’s appointments to the Parks Department was recognized immediately. See Ada Louise Huxtable, “New Era for Parks,” The New York Times, Feb 10, 1966, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/02/10/121501024.html?pageNum ber=50. On Lindsay’s confrontation with Moses, see also: Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 1117-1131; Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 154-156; Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 93-108; and Roy Rozenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca and London: Press, 1992), 469-498.

39 urban renewal, noting their particularly devastating effects on displaced families and the identity of the city. “Up and down First, Second, and Third Avenues in Manhattan all New Yorkers have seen the rise of new, high-rise apartment buildings, usually red brick in color, rapidly built, and dull looking.”71 These apartments were filled, Lindsay suggested, not with middle-class families, but with childless couples paying unsustainable rents. “There was a neighborhood quality in the block before the bulldozers came in,” Lindsay concluded, echoing Jacobs. “That quality does not exist now.”72 Lindsay’s park policy, directed by Hoving, Heckscher, and Freedman, signaled a new approach to urban renewal that would focus on the revitalization of existing neighborhoods and the restoration of social health to declining areas of the city. Moses’s parks and playgrounds, of which he built hundreds in New York City, were increasingly viewed as perfunctory, homogenous, and meaningless spaces that were out of place in the city and out of step with the recreational needs of the city’s children. “We have had enough of the ‘swing, slide, and sandbox’ stereotype,” Hoving wrote, with obvious reference to Moses, “the black-topped, link-fenced asphalt prison, the standardized architecture….”73 In place of Moses’s static and standardized playgrounds, Lindsay promoted a recreational space inseparable from the everyday life of the city. He called for playgrounds, for example, that would offer, “a dynamic setting for inter-connected experiences that make up a total environment of play.”74 This recreational environment, Lindsay suggested, would, “…blend with and enhance the urban environment.” Small parks could become catalysts for the stabilization and improvement of neighborhoods, according to Lindsay, and, “…sociological instruments for community involvement and participation.”75 All of Lindsay’s promises stood in stark contrast to Moses, who favored slum clearance over neighborhood revitalization and recreational amenities for people with cars

71 Hon. John V. Lindsay, “Our City’s Need: Middle Income Housing; A Federal Need: A Department of Urban Affairs,” Speech in The House of Representatives, October 3, 1962, Congressional Record, 87th Congress, Second Session, 4-5, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 31, folder 9. 72 Lindsay, “Our City’s Need,” (1962), 5. 73 Hoving, “Think Big About Small Parks,” (1966), 68. 74 John Lindsay, “Statement by Mayor John V. Lindsay on the Announcement of $450,000 Demonstration Beautification Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Press Release, July 7, 1966, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 356, Folder 335. 75 Ibid.

40 rather than inner city parks accessible to mass-transit. In his park policy, Lindsay encouraged an active and physical engagement in the public that mirrored his embodied style of urban politics. In the parks, he sought to encourage a new diversity of uses and users. Arthur Rosenblatt, who served as a deputy administrator to Hoving, suggested that Lindsay’s reforms were conceived to open the parks to, “use by all people,” implicitly condemning Moses’s social and racial restrictions.76 The Lindsay administration effectively equated physical activity in the parks with a political engagement of public space. If the parks were seen as sites of safety, equality, and activity, these qualities would then be reflected in the surrounding city. The cultural programs pioneered in the parks by Hoving were, Rosenblatt argued, “designed to draw people back into the parks they had been afraid to use, and to prove that, by their very presence and continuing use, the parks could be both safe and pleasant.”77 The Lindsay administration believed that advanced sculpture could attract new users to parks and other decaying urban spaces and stimulate a heightened consciousness of the city. A public and an environment, they reasoned, would cohere in the parks around sculpture. This newly informed public would, in turn, make the parks and the city safer and foster community in the city’s beleaguered neighborhoods. To support these new aims, Lindsay pursued a bureaucratic consolidation of recreation and culture that effectively conflated play and aesthetic experience. Lindsay combined the Department of Parks, Office of Cultural Affairs, and Landmarks Preservation Commission, formerly distinct offices and departments, into a single bureaucratic entity that assumed broad authority to shape New York City’s public spaces. Led first by Hoving and then Heckscher, the Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration was responsible for the city’s new approach to playground design and its expanding use of public sculpture. Rejecting Moses’s standardized approach, Hoving argued, “We’ve got to get back to the concept that a park is a work of art.”78 This new bureaucratic formation also provided artists

76 Italics in the original. Arthur Rosenblatt, “Open Space Design: New York Shows How in its Park Program,” Architectural Record (August 1967): 112. 77 Rosenblatt, “Open Space Design,” 112. 78 Quoted in Bernard Weinraub, “Out of —A Happening Called Hoving,” New York Times Magazine, July 10, 1966, 15, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/07/10/82481537.html?pageNumb er=184.

41 with a powerful advocate in the city government and new exhibition spaces to accommodate sculpture conceived on urban scale. For artists seeking to work outside of the spatial, social, and economic limits of the gallery and museum, the city’s parks and public plazas offered an outlet. The administration embraced minimal art’s rhetoric of heightened perception of self, others, and environment. In this phenomenological orientation, Heckscher and Freedman saw a model of being in the city that reflected Lindsay’s politics of urban space. In its universal and accessible forms, the Lindsay administration saw a social politics that countered the pervasive images of violence and alienation that dominated popular accounts of the city. They subscribed to the notion that simple, geometric sculptures could be experienced directly, without recourse to learned systems of symbolic meaning. Accordingly, the unmediated and immediate experience of minimal art could be more accessible, egalitarian, and democratic.79 The Lindsay administration also promoted new approaches to landscape architecture and playground design that shared a phenomenological basis with minimal art. Architects and designers such as M. Paul Friedberg and Richard Dattner, who were favored by the Lindsay administration and their allies in urban planning and development, also used simple, geometric forms and modular constructions to create flexible and social urban spaces. The modular geometries of both minimal art and playground equipment were seen by the Lindsay administration as oriented to the needs of the city and capable of adapting to unpredictable urban conditions. Hoving spearheaded the consolidation of the Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration but much of the work developing the bureaucratic infrastructure was led by Heckscher. Heckscher was appointed Administrator of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and

79 Tony Smith, for example, championed an art that “everyone can understand.” Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. “Talking to Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, No. 4 (December 1966): 16. This democratic appeal was one of the reasons that Michael Fried condemned minimal art. Fried specifically rejected Smith’s idea of an aesthetic experience “accessible to everyone” and Morris’s aesthetics of “inclusiveness.” See: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 19, 22. Robert Morris has also articulated the idea that minimal art could be more accessible and democratic. See, for example: Benjamin Buchloh, , , and Robert Morris, “Three Conversations in 1985,” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 51-52. See also, David Bourdon, “Art for the City,” in Art for the City, ed. Samuel Adams Green (Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1967), unpaginated; and Eugene C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948- 1968 (New York: The , 1968), 7-9.

42 Commissioner of Parks in February 1967. He represented a shift away from Hoving’s dynamism and showmanship towards a management style informed by progressive theories of urbanism and social responsibility. Hoving, for example, famously organized high-profile happenings and other singular events in an attempt to change the public’s perception of city parks. Heckscher, in contrast, favored interventional strategies that could be repeated, such as sculpture exhibitions. He viewed Hoving’s happenings as rooted in the individual. In contrast, and echoing Rosalind Krauss’s designation of minimal art’s public nature, Heckscher sought new works and exhibition strategies, “…related to the life of the city rather than to the intense inner life of men and women.”80 One of the first projects pursued by the newly formed Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration was “Sculpture in Environment.” Organized by Freedman and Heckscher, the exhibition placed works in parks, plazas, and housing developments throughout Manhattan.81 Minimal art was prominently featured in works by Tony Smith, Antoni Milkowski, Paul Frazier, , and Bernard Kirschenbaum (Figures 1.2 & 1.3). The phenomenological discourse of body, space, and perception associated most closely with minimal art served as the exhibition’s organizing principle. Sculptures composed of simple geometric forms and modular constructions were deployed to heighten the public’s consciousness of the environment, assert the social character of space, and revitalize the city. Although temporary, Heckscher considered the works in “Sculpture in Environment” to be models for permanent installations. At the time of his appointment, Heckscher was already a prolific author and had served most recently as Special Consultant on to President John F. Kennedy and as Director of the Twentieth Century Fund, a progressive think tank that studied social and economic policy. From these positions, Heckscher mounted a fierce critique of Robert Moses’s methods of urban renewal and highway construction, deriding their dehumanizing effect on existing landscapes and communities. In his concluding report to President Kennedy, as Special Consultant on the Arts in 1963, Heckscher argued, “The urgency of slum clearance often means that a wrecking crew destroys in the process a humanely scaled

80 August Heckscher, Alive in the City: Memoir of an Ex-Commissioner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 160. 81 This exhibition will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.

43 and intricately woven community life.”82 In a speech the following year, he called for a new commitment to public art, including “radical sculpture,” to combat thoughtless urban planning and architecture that have resulted in an inhuman postwar city. “Indeed it is through the arts,” Heckscher argued, “perhaps more so than through other community endeavors, that we can restore meaning to the democratic process, make voluntary organization really come alive, and remind people that their own thoughts and actions count for something in the making of a community.” 83 The encounter with art in the city, Heckscher suggested, could the of stimulate the kind of grassroots activism and commitment to community that Jane Jacobs saw as crucial to the life of the city.

Figure 1.2: Lyman Kipp, Boss Linco, Central Park 1967. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

82 August Hecksher, The Arts and the National Government: Report to the President, May 28, 1963. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 9. 83 August Hecksher, The City and the Arts, Tenth Annual Wherret Lecture on Local Government (: Institute of Local Government, , 1964), 11, 16.

44

Figure 1.3: Antoni Milkowski, Diamond, Kips Bay Plaza, 1967. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Heckscher’s explicit connection between advanced sculpture, the formation of the community, and the body politic was a stark departure from Robert Moses’s conservative

45 tastes for art in city parks, as well as his mocking rejection of its civic efficacy.84 Moses saw little merit to public monuments in general but he particularly loathed modern sculpture.85 Heckscher sought to use the abstract sculpture that Moses abhorred to stimulate sociality, community, and meaning in the leftover spaces of Moses’s urban renewal. Moreover, Heckscher saw an essential feedback between advanced arts and the everyday life of the street. “If [people] have been aware of sculpture about them in the city,” he argued, “in the juxtaposition of things and in their odd, unexpected harmonies—they will have an eye for contemporary sculpture in the museum.”86 Heckscher believed that urban vitality was threatened by Moses’s policies of slum clearance, urban renewal, and highway construction. “But our modern cities diminish this essential domain, chopping away at the sidewalks and filling the roadbed with the roar of traffic. Under John Lindsay, as elsewhere in the country, there have been efforts to recapture the streets for human use. […] Significantly, John Lindsay’s greatest triumphs were in the streets. Here, on his walks through the ghetto areas,

84 Robert Moses, “Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues,” The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1943, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/14/85134462.html?pageNumb er=169; and Robert Moses, Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues, Part II” The New York Times Magazine, November 21, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/21/83953358.html?pageNumb er=183. Moses’s survey was published in The New York Times in 1943 but he renewed his critique of “modernistic” sculpture and the Lindsay administration’s patronage of it in the mid-1960s. His surrogate in the Parks Department, , nearly blocked the installation of Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure at Lincoln Center. After its installation, Moses often referenced it in his ongoing critique of modernist public art. Moses also publicly mocked artists working in abstract modes and Heckscher’s patronage of them. Doris Freedman mounted a memorable defense of the work of the Parks Department and Office of Cultural Affairs. See Murray Schumach, “Moses Warns Against ‘Hideous’ Sculpture,” in The New York Times, April 12, 1972, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/04/12/79466531.html?pageNumb er=36; and Doris Freedman, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, April 27, 1972, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/04/27/91327807.html?pageNumb er=42. See also Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York & its Art Commission (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 209-211. 85 Richard Witkin, “Morris Rejects Work By Calder,” The New York Times, April 6, 1965, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/04/06/101536370.html?pageNum ber=1; Harriet F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108. 86 Heckscher, Alive in the City, (1974),153.

46 raw life was being transformed into ritual, and ritual into drama.”87 Part of Lindsay’s political project, according to Heckscher, involved a conscious collapse of urban and aesthetic experience. A street for human use, Heckscher suggested, was a street that could be experienced as sculpture or theater. Doris Freedman joined Heckscher’s Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration in May 1967, assuming leadership of the Office of Cultural Affairs. She was tasked with developing and administering the city’s arts policy. Freedman’s professional background and education were in social work but in previous jobs she connected the arts with issues of social justice and civil rights. Before joining the Lindsay administration, for example, Freedman organized exhibitions and auctions to support the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). When Freedman started the Office of Cultural Affairs, she sought to continue the work that Hoving initiated with Tony Smith of opening up the city and its public to advanced sculpture.88 However, Smith’s exhibition was entirely contained in Bryant Park and both Freedman and Heckscher sought to deploy sculpture across a much wider territory and in more diverse urban spaces. They sought to match the use of sculpture, in other words, with Lindsay’s expansive and egalitarian social vision for the city’s parks and public spaces. There was no precedent in New York for an exhibition of sculpture dispersed throughout the city. Therefore, Freedman and Heckscher looked to Philadelphia for a model and to Samuel Adams Green for curatorial assistance. Green was hired by New York City as a “Sculpture Consultant” and worked with Freedman to curate the “Sculpture in Environment” exhibition and ongoing sculpture programs. Green had served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, where he organized pioneering exhibitions such as “7 Sculptors” of 1965, “Tony Smith” of 1966, and “Art for the City” of 1967. Each of these exhibitions represented an early institutional commitment to minimal art. “Art for the City,” for which Green installed sculptures in public spaces throughout Philadelphia, was especially fecund as it was amongst the first exhibitions to argue for minimal art’s social and instrumental potential in the city. It was the immediate model for

87 Heckscher, Alive in the City, (1974), 154. 88 Doris Freedman, interview by Barry Schwartz and Laurin Raikin, May 24, 1971, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1-8.

47 “Sculpture in Environment” and the reason that Green was hired by the Lindsay administration.89

Figure 1.4: Tony Smith, Night, 1966, Philadelphia, PA. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

With “Art for the City,” Green installed sculptures by Tony Smith, Antoni Milkowski, Alexander Liberman, Michael Steiner, Philip King, , Robert Grosvenor, and Forrest Myers in public spaces in Center City, Philadelphia’s primary municipal and corporate district. Additional artists exhibited sculptures and mock-ups for urban installations inside the galleries of the ICA. The exhibition built upon an idea of public art advanced in the 1966 Tony Smith exhibition, which Green organized in collaboration with Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. and was hosted jointly by the Institute of Contemporary Art and Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. In both locations, Smith’s sculptures were installed

89 Freedman, interview by Schwartz and Raikin, 1971, 12-13; Sam Green, interview with Judith Stein, in 40 Years, 6 interviews: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, ed. Johanna Plummer (Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005), 20.

48 outdoors in public spaces with the intention of disrupting everyday experience, altering the social and physical organization of space, and heightening perception of the city.90 “Art for the City,” likewise, featured Tony Smith. Green installed four of Smith’s sculptures on the plaza of the Municipal Services Building, while no other artist had more than two works in the show (Figure 1.4). The exhibition also drew heavily from New York’s , inviting all members of the cooperative to participate. Many were friends and peers to those in the rapidly consolidating canon of minimal art.91 They shared powerful patrons, such as Virginia Dwan, and the Park Place group invited Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson to mount shows in their gallery. The artists of the Park Place Gallery were known for large- scale sculptures built with industrial materials that challenged the spatial and institutional limits of conventional galleries and museums. However, their use of dynamic and syntactical arrangements of distinct parts represented a formal model against which minimal art was being theorized and defined. Many Park Place artists incorporated or implied movement in their sculptures, whereas the simple geometries and modular constructions favored Andre, Morris, Smith, and others associated with minimal art, compelled the viewer to move. Clear distinctions were made in “Art for the City” regarding the urban efficacy of these formal differences. In the exhibition catalogue, Sam Green and David Bourdon suggested that simple, geometric shapes could most directly appeal to a large public. “Employing universal shapes,” Bourdon wrote in the main catalogue essay, “usually geometric, often in modular units—the sculptors harbor no hidden meanings, no obscure symbols.”92 All of the sculptures included in the exhibition, however, were credited with the potential to alter urban space and the public’s perception of it. This urban function was seen as inherent to the work and necessary in a city overcome by sterile architecture. “It has

90 Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture (Hartford & Philadelphia: Wadsworth Atheneum & The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966). The exhibition is discussed at length in chapter two. 91 Park Place was an artist-run cooperative gallery that was founded in 1963. Its members were: Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, Edwin Ruda, Dean Fleming, , Peter Forakis, Robert Gosvenor, Anthony Magar, David Novros, and . For a good discussion of the shared but distinct terrain of minimal art and the Park Place group, see: Melissa Rachleff, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2016), 144-159, 193-194. 92 Samuel Adams Green and David Bourdon, Art for the City (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1967), unpaginated.

49 become increasingly evident that artists are paying more and more attention to the urban environment,” Bourdon argued. “Sculpture has come down from the pedestal to take a more immediate physical command of space, and is becoming more environmental. Having reached architectonic proportions, sculpture has logically gone outdoors, and now seeks public places.” 93 Bourdon further suggested that this mode of sculpture had the potential to address the problem of urban design and stand as an enduring monument to the progressive of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Bourdon’s and Green’s basic argument regarding the urban function of universal, geometric sculpture in “Art for the City” was shared and supported by Philadelphia’s powerful planner, Edmund Bacon. When the University of Pennsylvania denied Green permission to mount the exhibition on campus grounds, Bacon, who served as Executive Director of the City Planning Commission and wielded an influence in Philadelphia comparable to Moses’s in New York, supported the use of the city’s public spaces.94 Bacon also wrote the introduction to the catalogue, rhetorically connecting the sculpture in the exhibition to the theory of participatory urbanism that he proposed in Design of Cities, his important survey of planning published in 1967. In his introduction to Art for the City, Bacon argued that the modern artist must now reject the avant-garde’s isolation from society and become “…a valid participant in the life of the city.” “There is no doubt,” Bacon suggested, “that this action will result in a collision because the artist and the people have allowed themselves to stray far apart. The time has come for such a confrontation, and it will be a valid confrontation because it occurs in public places.”95 Bacon’s Design of Cities assessed the architectural organization of urban space and the public’s embodied perception of it. “Architecture,” he wrote, “is the articulation of space so as to produce in the participator a definite space experience in relation to previous and anticipated space

93 Green and Bourdon, Art for the City, unpaginated. 94 For more on Bacon, see: Gregory L. Heller, Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For national media in the 1960s attuned to Bacon’s urban planning theories and methods, see “The City: Under the Knife, or All For Their Own Good,” Time 84, no. 20 (November 6, 1964): 60-75; and “A City’s Future Takes Shape,” Life 59, no. 26 (December 24, 1965): 168-174. 95 Edmund Bacon, introduction to Art for the City (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1967), unpaginated.

50 experiences.”96 A participant, according Bacon, is an active user of the city who comes to know urban space through the body by walking. Bacon, like Kevin Lynch, believed that the city must be coherently shaped to communicate plan and function to the public in a way that was intelligible through the embodied experience. “It is one thing to delimit space by structural devices such as walls. It is quite another to infuse the space with a spirit which relates to the activities that take place in it and which stirs the senses and emotions of the people who use it.”97 For Bacon, the meaning of the city was grounded in the immediate sensation and embodied perception of urban space. This phenomenological meaning had to be cultivated through planning and architecture that made urban space knowable. A meaningful urban space would, Bacon argued, provoke a heightened awareness of the environment and a more active, critical engagement with the city. Sculpture, as Bacon suggested in his introduction to Art for the City, could play an important role in making the city more perceptible, investing urban space with spirit, and, thereby, in transforming the public into participants.98 Bacon’s management of urban planning in Philadelphia, and his view of the function of art within the city, served as an immediate model for the Lindsay administration in their efforts to oppose the legacy of Robert Moses. Sam Green was brought to New York City, implicitly, to extend Bacon’s strategies to make the city more perceptible through the body, to invest a new spirit in urban spaces, and to provoke heightened awareness and participation amongst the public. Along with Green, Heckscher also hired Karin Bacon,

96 Italics in the original. Edmund N. Bacon, Design of Cities (New York: The Viking Press, 1967), 21. 97 Bacon, Design of Cities, (1967),18. 98 Bacon’s theory of participation is not discussed by Claire Bishop but it belongs to the prehistory of participatory art that she describes in Artificial Hells. Bacon clearly recognizes the active role of the audience in the production of meaning, which Bishop sees as fundamental to the social turn in art, even if Bacon remains more closely bound to the object than the artists that Bishop focuses on. Bacon’s theory of participation, like Bishop’s, refuses the binaries between creator and audience, as well as active and passive experience. For Bacon, participatory urban and aesthetic experience is a shared product in which the planner or artist and the participant produce meaning in dialogue. In her prehistory of art’s social turn in the 1990s, Bishop focuses primarily on artists aligned with the radical left, including the Situationist International in the 1960s. However, as Bacon’s example makes clear, the theory of participation was not solely a product of Marxist thought (one that was then co-opted by neo-liberal globalists). The theory of participation was already contested territory in the 1960s, with advocates ranging from progressives such as Bacon, to militant, far left activists. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and : Verso, 2012).

51 Edmund’s daughter. She was to work in the Office of Cultural Affairs under Freedman. In his memoir describing his work with the Lindsay administration, Heckscher also referenced Bacon’s theory of embodied spatial awareness as one of the key goals of Freedman’s office.99 In a major speech on park policy and social justice in December 1967, Heckscher pointed to Philadelphia’s precedent for the revitalization of parks in response to race riots.100 Echoing Bacon, Heckscher argued that cultural interventions in urban neighborhoods brought people into the street and parks, made them more aware of their bodies and environments, and combatted the often grim and alienating experience of everyday urban existence. “The modern crisis is twofold,” he suggested in a 1967 speech. “It is in the relationship between man and man, and the relationship between man and the environment.”101 Heckscher, moreover, directly connected the heightened consciousness of body and environment that results from an aesthetic rupture in everyday experience to the emergence of a body politic and its role in the future of the city: “To know who one is, to feel part of a neighborhood, a city, a democratic government,” he argued, “ is to be saved as an individual; and through such the city itself may be saved.”102 The idea that one knows the self through the body in its encounter with other bodies in space is the central tenet of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. This tenet is paralleled in Bacon’s and Heckscher’s view of the city. For Merleau-Ponty, this embodied experience is the basis of knowledge as well as the foundation of the social and the political. Being, body, and world are mutually informing, according to Merleau-Ponty, and it is through intentional action that one can come to know the world, the body, and the self. “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world,” Merleau-Ponty suggested. “The body is a vehicle for being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment…”103 The idea of urban participation championed by Bacon and Heckscher

99 Heckscher, Alive in the City (1974), 164. 100 August Hecksher, “Recreation and the Urban Crisis,” Keynote address before the Congress for Recreation and Parks of the National Parks and Recreation Association, December 4, 1967, 4, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Departmental Correspondence, Box 64, Folder 808, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 101 Hecksher, “Recreation and the Urban Crisis,” (1967), 7, 13. 102 Ibid., 7-8. 103 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 75, 81-82. The idea of intentional action stated here refers to Husserl’s concept of intentionality, which was crucial for Merleau-

52 held much in common with Merleau-Ponty’s theory that the social and political is a product of an active, embodied encounter with the world.104 The political significance of Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology was the subject of sustained inquiry among American scholars in the mid and late 1960s, even if it was obscured in art criticism. Freedman and Green developed a novel exhibition strategy that connected these ideas about the city and the body politic to a phenomenological mode of sculpture. A single work in “Sculpture in Environment” encapsulated both the contest for urban authority waged by Moses and Lindsay and the latter’s patronage of minimal art as instrument of that political struggle. In his Placid Civic Monument, Claes Oldenburg engaged the legacy of Robert Moses in Central Park and its repudiation by the Lindsay administration (Figure 1.5). On the morning of the exhibition opening, Oldenburg directed a team of gravediggers to excavate a cubic hole in the park, immediately behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hole was refilled after lunch. At a ceremony to inaugurate the exhibition, which was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the same time that Oldenburg oversaw the digging, Lindsay referred to the work as “the square hole” and suggested that it had been dug to serve as “a final resting place for ex-Park Commissioners.”105 The joke was ostensibly directed at Hoving and Heckscher, who were

Ponty’s theory of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, sensation is not a passive receipt of sense data but a directional action towards the object of sensation. There can be no perception, meaning, or knowledge without intentional action. Merleau-Ponty’s take on intentionality is developed throughout Phenomenology of Perception. 104 Merleau-Ponty most directly describes the social and political stakes of his anti-Cartesian theory of consciousness in the final section of Phenomenology of Perception, “Part III.3: Freedom.” See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 434-456. He articulated the political stakes of phenomenology in numerous essays, most of which were collected and published in English translation in the early and mid-1960s. See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Metaphysical in Man,” “Marxism and Philosophy,” and “The War Has Taken Place,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 83-98, 125-136, 139-152. Albert Rabil, Jr.’s book, published in 1967, remains one of the most compelling analyses of Merleau- Ponty’s politics. See Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1967). See also John O’Neill, Perception, Expression, and History: The Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 105 Quoted in Robert E. Dallos, “Sculpture Stirs Unrest, Sight Unseen,” The New York Times, October 2, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/10/02/83147253.html?pageNumb er=55.

53 both in attendance, but the implicit target was Moses, the city’s most famous and longest- tenured Park Commissioner and the one ex-Park commissioner that Lindsay most wanted to bury.

Figure 1.5: Claes Oldenburg measuring Placid Civic Monument, 1967, Central Park. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

In 1943, Robert Moses had begun his caustic survey of the city’s public art by positing the grave as a suitable form for future monuments. Moses sarcastically wrote, “...in the future we ought to dig our memorials with a spade instead of building them up, so that you could look down into them as into a crypt, mine or well. Think of the simple dedication ceremonies we could have, free from panegyrics and platitudes.”106 In the latter moments of

106 Robert Moses, “Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues,” The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1943, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/14/85134462.html?pageNumb er=169.

54 World War Two, and with the rise of in New York City, Moses was bracing against the prospect of new war memorials and what he referred to as “horrible modernistic stuff in statuary.”107 He considered both out of place in the city’s parks. Heckscher, on the other hand, had closely studied the park design and pastoral theory of and . He considered Moses’s imprint on Central Park—the ball fields, parking lots, and standardized playgrounds—anathema to Vaux’s and Olmsted’s foundational principles.108 Heckscher’s approach to the park, following Lindsay and Hoving, was an explicit counter to Moses’s legacy and an attempt to return to Vaux’s and Olmsted’s social and spatial ideals.109 Specifically, Heckscher sought to restore the pedestrian spaces and pastoral experiences that he believed were at the heart of Vaux’s and Olmsted’s vision. Paradoxically, abstract sculpture was part of that approach. It is tempting to believe that Oldenburg’s inverted monument was an informed parody of Moses’s proposal. Even though Moses’s critique of public art occurred more than twenty years before Oldenburg’s, they held in common an anti-monumental stance.110 At the same time, Oldenburg also explicitly included Lindsay’s bureaucratic infrastructure within the scope of the work. Everything related to the planning, execution, and afterlife of Placid Civic Monument constituted the work’s content, according to Oldenburg, including the meetings and discussions within what he referred to as “…the aesthetic bureaucratic structure of the big city.”111 In notes taken immediately after he finished in Central Park,

107 Robert Moses, “Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues, Part II” The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1943, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/21/83953358.html?pageNumb er=63. 108 Heckscher, Alive in the City, (1974), 26-29. 109 Rozenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, (1992), 489-498. 110 Despite the twenty-four years that separated Oldenburg’s anti-monument and Moses’s anti-monument polemic, they were not entirely remote. As discussed above, Moses’s critique of abstract public sculpture was resurfaced in 1965 by Newbold Morris, Moses’s hand- picked successor in the Parks Department. Morris was embroiled in controversy when he attempted to reject a sculpture by slated for Lincoln Center. Morris even invoked Moses’s disgust with public art, particularly abstraction, as a justification of his rejection of the work by Calder. See: Richard Witkin, “Morris Rejects Work by Calder,” The New York Times, April 6, 1965, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/04/06/101536370.html?pageNum ber=30. 111 Oldenburg’s description of and instructions for executing Placid Civic Monument, as well as the notes that he took after the completion of the event in Central Park are published in

55 Oldenburg asked himself if the work was art. “No,” he answered, “it’s an aesthetic event turning the mechanism of the city into aesthetics, i.e., nonfunction…”112 The aesthetic bureaucratic structure of New York was, one could say, an invention of the Lindsay administration—first of Hoving, then Heckscher and Freedman. On the one hand, Oldenburg consigned this bureaucracy to a lifeless and useless hole. On the other hand, the bureaucracy resulted in work, action, and, perhaps most significantly, publicity. It was a generative aesthetic event. While very few people actually saw Oldenburg’s work, Lindsay’s pronouncement at the Whitney resulted in widespread press coverage of the exhibition.113 Placid Civic Monument was not just a commentary on successive bureaucratic visions for New York. As Oldenburg suggested, “the grave was chosen because of its high associational value…”114 One of those references was surely the anxiety amongst artists associated with minimal art, notably Tony Smith and Robert Morris, concerning the reading of their work as monuments.115 Even Oldenburg’s characterization of the associational depth of Placid Civic Monument echoed Smith, who had suggested in 1966 that his Die was a complicated piece, with “too many references to be coped with coherently.”116 The pure geometry of Placid Civic Monument was as important to Oldenburg as it was for Smith. The hole was dug according to Oldenburg’s exacting specifications and under his supervision, six feet long, three wide, and six feet deep. The rectilinear form was precise and the walls were

Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument, (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 60-62. See also Gregor Stemmrich, “Hypertrophies, Trophies, and Tropes of the Everyday: Claes Oldenburg’s New Definitions of Sculpture,” in Claes Oldenbrug: The Sixties, ed. Achim Hochdörfer and Barbara Schröder (Wien: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2012), 188-192. Stemmrich assesses the inclusion of administrative and bureaucratic protocols in Placid Civic Monument, as well as the work’s temporality and impermanence, relative to the emergence of and anti-Vietnam war activism. 112 Quoted in Haskell, Claes Oldenburg, (1971), 61. 113 Fred McDarrah’s photographs were published in, among other places, The New York Times and Time magazine. Grace Glueck, “Roland Penrose, Picasso Persuader,” The New York Times, October 15, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/10/15/105269342.html?pageNum ber=138; and “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time, October 13, 1967, 80-86. 114 Quoted in Haskell, Claes Oldenburg, (1971), 61. 115 See, for example: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum Vol. 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 20-23. 116 Quoted in Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture (Hartford & Philadelphia: Wadsworth Atheneum & The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966), unpaginated.

56 meticulously straight. In his notes, Oldenburg recorded Freedman’s observation that, “the diggers were conscientious of the geometry and ‘loving’.”117 Like Smith, Oldenburg based the size of his work on the size of the body. Smith’s Die is a six foot steel cube. However, Oldenburg’s sculpture lampoons the idea of sculpture as productive of a space for a mobile, open-ended experience heightening perception and self-consciousness. Instead, it poses sculpture as a final resting place for a resolutely static and unsensing body. Placid Civic Monument is, one could say, an inversion of the phenomenological rhetoric of the body that dominated the critical discourse of minimal sculpture as well as the Lindsay administration’s image of vitality for New York City’s public spaces. A contradiction was written into the relationship between the Lindsay administration and minimal art from the start—a contradiction that was, it would seem, knowingly engaged by Oldenburg. Despite its obscure and difficult polemics of form, its impulse towards negation, and its anti-humanist aesthetics, minimal art was pressed into the service of a humanist urbanism conceived to restore beauty to the city. In this conceptual mismatch, the seeds of divergence were already planted. In 1967, the utopic optimism of Lindsay’s urban vision was aligned with minimal art’s ascendant phenomenology. The concrete urban function and broader urban significance of minimal art was pursued with equal intensity by municipal agents within the Lindsay administration including Hoving, Heckscher, and Freedman; urban theorists and planners, including Edmund Bacon and Christopher Tunnard; and the artists themselves, including Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Carl Andre, and Dennis Oppenheim. By 1970, however, the social and economic realities of the city and the changing priorities of the artists made the union of advanced sculpture and progressive urbanism increasingly untenable. The instrumental role that Lindsay sought for sculpture could no longer accommodate minimal art’s negations and obscurities. New York City’s looming fiscal crisis left few resources for the administration’s cultural programming of public space. These efforts were largely overtaken by private entities seeking to establish their own claim to the city. This dissertation assesses minimal art’s urban history from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s in New York City. The rise and fall of John Lindsay’s progressive urbanism and the emergence and dispersal of minimal art constitute the two, overlapping narrative arcs in

117 Quoted in Haskell, Claes Oldenburg, (1971), 60.

57 what follows. There is no suggestion of a causal relationship between these arcs but they meet at crucial junctures. This urban history is punctuated by concrete points of intersection, failures and missed encounters, and, ultimately, the divergence of these two narratives. However, even in diverging, the respective paths of urbanism and minimal art were altered by their shared history. Subsequent generations of artists who sought to work in the city, and the patron institutions that emerged to facilitate their work, now had a point of departure and a model to work with and against. One can identify three periods in what follows. The first, spanning 1961 to 1965, constitutes something like a prehistory to both Lindsay’s and minimal art’s rise in which the ground of their shared urban field develops. In 1961, New York adopted a new zoning resolution that promoted deindustrialization and privileged the spatial protocols of managerial capitalism, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters. In addition to altering the social and economic identity of the city, the 1961 zoning protocols opened new spaces, materials, and scales to aesthetic production. The same year, Jane Jacobs published The Death of Great American Cities, which, along with Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, published a year earlier, established the theoretical foundation for Lindsay’s progressive urbanism. Between 1962 and 1964, many of the artists who would subsequently become associated with minimal art began to exhibit with increasing frequency, including Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and . The formal parameters of minimal art began to cohere in their solo exhibitions and, more importantly, in group shows assembled by gallerists and curators, including Richard Bellamy, John Myers, Sam Wagstaff, Jr., and . At this early stage, these artists and urbanists had intersecting concerns of body, space, and public. Both were informed, in part, by Gestalt theories of perception and John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. This overlapping theoretical territory would ultimately be superseded by the aesthetic turn to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which was first published in English translation in 1962. The second period, roughly from 1966 to 1968, begins with John Lindsay’s inauguration and includes minimal art’s cohering as a critical and institutional phenomenon. In Lindsay’s first two years in office, he channeled the extraordinary optimism that accompanied his political rise into experimental programs to address the city’s most pressing social and economic problems. The administration’s most successful sculpture exhibitions occurred during this period, such as Tony Smith’s solo show in Bryant Park and the

58 “Sculpture in Environment” exhibition, both of which will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters. In these events, Lindsay’s politics of inclusion, equality, and grassroots urbanism were aligned with and implicitly connected to minimal art’s phenomenology and claims of spatial authority. For artists seeking to work on an urban scale, the Lindsay administration offered a clear path out of the gallery and into city parks, plazas, and streets. However, the urban history of minimal art exceeds the boundaries of municipally sanctioned public art. Much of the work of Carl Andre, Tony Smith, and Dennis Oppenheim, for example, was produced beyond Lindsay’s mandate. Yet these artists and many of their peers consistently engaged the same discourse of the city and worked within the same context of urban renewal, planning, and development that Lindsay also occupied. Lindsay’s progressive social policies, including his administration’s pioneering sculpture exhibitions, had always been tied to his support for New York’s corporate tenants. His novel approaches to racial inequality and community empowerment, in particular, were pursued with sincerity, as the basis of Lindsay’s moral authority, and they had lasting effects on the city’s social and political life. However, these approaches were also inseparable from Lindsay’s image of the city as a safe and welcoming place for corporate investment. In the third period assessed in this dissertation, beginning in 1970, the balance of Lindsay’s political allegiances shifted from social liberalism to managerial capitalism, paving the way for the neoliberal privatization of urban space. Faced with mounting municipal debt, the looming threat of default, and the fading of progressive optimism, Lindsay lost the means to pursue novel social and cultural policies. In other words, Lindsay moved away from the sculptural reclamation of urban space, not so much because that strategy was deemed ineffectual, but because the administration was consumed by political and economic crises. Without the veneer of these progressive programs, Lindsay’s alignment with the newly minted power brokers of managerial capitalism was increasingly apparent. At the same time, the artists with whom the administration formerly sought to collaborate were producing work that could not easily be assimilated to or even aligned with Lindsay’s political narrative. This divergence is most apparent when, in May of 1971, Lindsay participated in an event celebrating the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge alongside Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and a number of their younger peers, including Gordon

59 Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, and Tina Girouard.118 Despite their shared space, the participants demonstrated none of the mutual recognition that characterized the collaborative exhibitions of urban sculpture held in 1967. Instead, both parties were now committed to an essentially private, mutually exclusive, and individual engagement with public space. In retrospect, it is not at all clear how minimal art could have ever been seen as the standard bearer for progressive public authority. Yet this dissertation shows how, for brief moments, it did just that. The loosely aligned projects of artists and urbanists allowed coincidence without coherence. The divergent urban claims were present in the earliest stages, when Tony Smith’s dark sculptures were deployed in service to a resolutely optimistic view of the future of the city, with little acknowledgement of Smith’s intended spatial hostility. Regardless, this dissertation seeks to move beyond the cynical dismissal of public art’s potential to assess its claims at moment when minimal art appeared at the crux of progressive urbanism, public space, and managerial capital. Once we understand the urban history of minimal art, we can understand that it has always been compatible with managerial capitalism and its protocols of spatial authority. This is not a story about the cooptation of sculpture but one of mutual exchange between New York’s artists and power brokers. Lindsay deployed minimal art as an instrument of spatial authority and this use continues to be a model for the city’s neoliberal regime. However, the spatial authority of sculpture was first asserted by artists. Andre and Morris, for example, initially directed this spatial claim towards the gallery and its entrenched dynamics of power, while artists such as Smith and Oppenheim worked in the city to ground their claim to public space. Once invested with this power, however, minimal art could be adopted and redirected by those seeking to make manifest their own spatial claim to the city, including Lindsay, corporations, and developers. While these power brokers sought to utilize minimal art as a symbol of their authority, artists sought to infiltrate the mechanisms of urban power by adopting the materials, scales, and discourses of real estate, development, infrastructure, and urban renewal.

118 The Brooklyn Bridge Event, organized by Alanna Heiss, and the wider Brooklyn Bridge Festival of which it was a part, will be discussed in greater detail in chapter six.

60 Chapter 2: Carl Andre’s Art of Zoning

In the first major essay devoted to the work of Carl Andre, published in Artforum in October 1966, the critic David Bourdon suggested that Andre had “…razed structure to practice the art of zoning.”119 Bourdon was describing Andre’s earliest exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and The Jewish Museum in 1965 and 1966, which are now canonical for the history of minimal art. In those exhibitions, Andre developed the basic terms of his signature mode of sculpture: the placement of near-identical units of a single material in simple, modular configurations on the floor of the gallery. Andre’s first show at Tibor de Nagy in April 1965 was pivotal. He installed three large sculptures in the second floor gallery, housed above a beauty salon in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.120 This domestic setting was crowded with Crib, Coin, and Compound, all made from nine-foot long Styrofoam beams stacked to form massive walls and structures. The three sculptures consumed much of the gallery space and obstructed the movement of its visitors. Andre’s second exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, held in March 1966 following the gallery’s move to an office building in Midtown Manhattan, was more accommodating. There Andre installed eight Equivalents, each made from one-hundred-and-twenty sand-lime bricks placed on the gallery floor in distinct rectilinear configurations. The radical impact of the sculptures in both exhibitions, as reported by Bourdon and other sympathetic critics, was their projection into and disruption of real space.121 Andre described his goal at the time “to use the material as the cut into space” and later, “to seize and control the space.”122 These early works were immediately recognized as crucial moments in the history of modern sculpture. At the same time, Andre’s earliest advocates described his work through the rhetoric of the city and its architectures. Zoning, razed sites, and real space were not

119 David Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” Artforum 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 15. 120 On Andre’s recollection of the architectural context of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which was located at the time of Andre’s first solo exhibition at 149 East 72nd Street, see: Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum 8, No. 10 (June 1970): 61; and Carl Andre, Interview with Paul Cummings, September 1972, Archives of American Art. 121 Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” 17; see also Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 9, no. 6 (September 1965): 58; and Dan Graham, “Carl Andre,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1967/January 1968): 35. 122 Quoted in Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” (1966), 15; Andre, Interview with Paul Cummings, Archives of American Art, 1972.

61 neutral in 1960s New York City. They were the contested terms of urban renewal, community activism, modernist towers and open plazas, deindustrialization, and the rise of managerial capitalism. Andre’s art is an urban art, engaged with the discourse of the 1960s city. In his sculpture, Andre worked to synthesize the opposed spatial and social realities of a city in the midst of a sweeping economic transition. Compelling his audience to move across and around his sculptures, and claiming to provoke a heightened experience of space, self, and materiality, Andre sought to assert the body as a source of knowledge and site of class on the shifting ground of New York City’s urban and economic order. The critical rhetoric that emerged to describe Andre’s earliest exhibitions in the mid- 1960s situated his work squarely in the contentious discourse of a city undergoing radical social and economic change. The Comprehensive Amendment to the New York City Zoning Resolution of 1961 codified the social, economic, spatial, and architectural changes already underway in the 1950s and established the urban values of the 1960s. When Bourdon published his essay in 1966, the physical and social impacts of the zoning resolution still appeared regularly in the headlines of local and national press and shaped the mayoral platform of John V. Lindsay.123 The new zoning measures effectively marginalized industrial manufacturing, displaced working class populations, and encouraged an unprecedented boom in modernist, corporate office towers fronted by plazas. The 1961 Zoning Resolution privileged managerial capitalism in Manhattan, as well as the modernist towers and plazas

123 Stories about zoning ran regularly on the front page of and The New York Times in the mid- 1960s and were the subject of numerous columns by The New York Times’ powerful critic of architecture and urban planning, Ada Louise Huxtable. The impacts of zoning were also cover stories in magazines such as Look, Time, and The New Yorker. On the enduring and widespread debates about zoning in the popular press, and its place in the public consciousness during the 1960s, see: Seymour Toll, Zoned America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969), 294-296. Several of Huxtable’s important critiques of zoning, originally published in The New York Times between 1963 and 1970, are anthologized in: Ada Louise Huxtable, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971). For the importance of zoning to John V. Lindsay’s politics during his mayoral campaign in 1965 and his subsequent policies, see: Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, 2nd edition (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997); and Hillary Ballon, ‘The Physical City,” in America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2010), 132-146.

62 that constituted the symbolic forms of this economy.124 It created the space for a new type of city with new class formations and new social and economic priorities. Yet this transition was still in process in the mid-1960s. While the 1961 Zoning Resolution codified the spatial transition to a new economic order, industrial manufacturing remained part of the city’s identity, even if it was eroding rapidly. The New York City Planning Commission published two studies in the 1950s, in preparation for the new zoning measures, and the changing identity of the city is indexed in their respective accounts. In the 1950 study, Plan for Rezoning the City of New York, industrial manufacturing was still considered the indisputable economic basis of the city’s present and future. Manufacturing could still be described as the “lifeblood of the City” and measures to protect and encourage it are carefully outlined.125 By 1958, however, support for the city’s industrial base begins to give ground, literal and figurative, to the new spatial protocols of managerial capital. The 1958 study, Zoning New York City, acknowledged a pervasive shift in New York City’s labor markets, with large reductions in manufacturing and even larger increases in finance,

124 I borrow the term “managerial capitalism” from Barry Bluestone’s and Bennett Harrison’s economic and spatial history of deindustrialization in America. See: Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Bluestone and Harrison assess the economic factors of deindustrialization, including the widespread diversion of capital from productive investment in basic industries to unproductive speculation, as well as the physical and spatial dislocation of management from labor. While not a study of New York, Bluestone’s and Harrison’s study is indispensible in understanding the emergence of a new economic order in the city, beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their account of managerial capitalism corresponds to Robert Fitch’s account of New York’s office building boom, the emergent hegemony of finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE), their collective displacement of the spaces of industrial manufacturing, and the resulting problems of economic and spatial homogeneity. See also: Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London & New York: Verso, 1993). Even while corporations maintained far-flung sites of industrial manufacturing, in the 1960s the term “corporate” designated the spaces and personnel of management that were located in core metropolitan areas, particularly New York City, and increasingly dislocated production. As such, the terms “corporate” and “managerial capitalism” are used somewhat interchangeably in this chapter. 125 Harrison, Ballard, & Allen, Plan for Rezoning the City of New York, (New York: City Planning Commission, October 1950), xvi. This was the first of two studies commissioned by the New York City Planning Commission in preparation for new zoning regulations. Harrison, Ballard, & Allen was a prominent housing and planning consultancy firm. The second study, published in 1958 and prepared by the architectural firm Vorhees, Walker, Smith, & Smith, is cited below.

63 insurance, trade, and government.126 Expansive territories had to be rezoned, according to the study, to accommodate new office construction and new housing for the managerial workforce. The modernist office tower was codified as the symbolic form of the city’s new economic order. The remaining manufacturing districts should no longer be organized by use, the study argued, but according to their sensorial burden on the city. Manufacturing that threatened to emit “offensive noise, vibration, smoke and other particulate matter, odorous matter, heat…”127 and other dangerous byproducts should be relegated to the margins of the city. ’s Lever House (1952) and Mies Van Der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) were touted as models for the future of urban space and, implicitly, as visible negations of the city’s noxious industrial past.128 Rather than identifying new spaces in which an industrial economy could thrive, the 1961 Zoning Resolution hastened its demise. The old spaces of industrial manufacturing were deemed incompatible with the new image of the city and were rezoned to accommodate the needs of managerial capitalism. The sensorial burden of manufacturing, described in the 1958 study, was restated in the 1961 Zoning Resolution, as was the privileging of the modernist office tower.129 Nevertheless, there remained at least some

126 Vorhees, Walker, Smith, & Smith. Zoning New York City: A Proposal for a Zoning Resolution for the City of New York Submitted to the City Planning Commission. New York: City Planning Commission, 1958, 8-11. 127 Ibid., 176, 177-178. 128 Ibid., 128. 129 City Planning Commission, Zoning Resolution of the City of New York (New York: The City of New York, 1961), 14, 20, 27, 187, 190. James Felt, Chairman of the City Planning Commission and the primary author of the 1961 Zoning Resolution, introduced the legislation and argued for the core goal of moving industry to the margins of the city. He outlined his argument in: James Felt, “Modern Zoning and Planning Progress in New York,” Fordham Law Review 29, no. 4 (April 1961): 681-692. There are several critical histories of New York City’s postwar deindustrialization and emergent corporate order that assess the role of the 1961 Zoning Resolution. See: Toll, Zoned America; William K. Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982); Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London & New York: Verso, 1993); and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. For a measured account of zoning and the rise of corporate modernist architecture, see: Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960. Sharon Zukin assesses the role of new zoning regulations on the deindustrialization of Lower Manhattan, the opening up of lofts to artists, and the marketing of the loft as a new and lucrative model of real estate and gentrification. See Sharon Zukin,

64 residual advocacy for manufacturing in the city, even if it was rhetorically diminished and physically relegated to the margins. The authors of the 1961 resolution, for example, still sought to stabilize the manufacturing sector, if only now to strengthen the economic base of the city and protect a source of tax revenue during this transitional period.130 The effects of the 1961 Zoning Resolution were felt most dramatically in Lower Manhattan, where remnants of industrial manufacturing continued to exist alongside the ascendant spaces of managerial capital. As Jane Jacobs reported, “…outside the big offices that form the breathtaking skyline of lower Manhattan is a ring of stagnation, decay, vacancies, and vestigial industries.”131 Andre fed off of the social contradictions of Lower Manhattan, spatial and material resources from both the rising city of managerial capitalism and the decaying remains of industrial manufacturing. It is this site of radical urban change that Andre has repeatedly designated as a field of meaning for his work, even as the city largely disappeared from critical reception after Bourdon’s essay. It is where he has sought to frame his sculpture, routinely describing his method of walking in Lower Manhattan and scavenging for new materials. Andre’s simultaneous appeal to the worker and the capitalist, in both his sculpture and his polemical public persona, was a hallmark of local, urban politics in 1960s New York City. This conflicted class appeal was evident in the Zoning Resolution, which stated the importance of industrial manufacturing to the social and economic identity of the city while compelling its exit from Manhattan and relegating it to the margins of the city. The same conflicted class appeal characterizes the politics of Lindsay, who rhetorically supported manufacturing while expediting the managerial takeover of Lower Manhattan. Andre now refers to this as the “space between death and the apparatus.” The apparatus, he suggests, “is the establishment—everything official. And death is death.”132 He lived and worked in what

Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, paperback edition (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 130 City Planning Commission, Zoning Resolution of the City of New York, (1961), 182. 131 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 155. A similar contrast is described in: Ada Louise Huxtable, “Downtown New York Begins to Undergo Radical Transformation,” The New York Times, March 27, 1967, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/03/27/issue.html. 132 Carl Andre, interview with the author, December 3, 2014. Andre’s invocation of a totalizing apparatus, framed only by marginal existence and death, would seem to refer, at least implicitly, to Althusser’s theory of ideology. This reference is particularly chilling, given

65 he views, in a recent rumination, as the gray area that is constantly squeezed between these registers. As Andre developed his signature approach to sculpture, he synthesized the city’s spatial contradictions, engaging both the abstract space of managerial modernism and the concrete bodies that emerged to resist this new order. In his material and spatial strategies, as well as the social and economic forms framed and organized by his work, Andre engaged the obsolescing of industry and the superseding managerial spaces in the city. He projected an image of the artist in which the radical worker and the corporate manager cohere. Andre’s work and identity resonated with the politics of the city in 1960s New York. In its materiality, its spatial forms, and its incitement of the classed body, as Bourdon recognized at the time, Andre’s sculpture is an urban formation. His work drew on the materials of industrial manufacturing, from the remnant metal plates and timber beams in Lower Manhattan’s scrap yards and machine shops to the latest versions of modular Styrofoam blocks. Renouncing the studio, he declared the streets of Lower Manhattan as his site of production. At the same time, Andre ordered and sanitized the byproducts of industrial manufacturing, rendering them abstract and appropriate for aesthetic contemplation and phenomenological enlightenment. The spaces in which Andre exhibited, and to which his work was ostensibly directed as critique, were themselves entwined in the new order of the city in which industrial manufacturing was supplanted by managerial modernism. The 1961 Zoning Resolution recorded a faint hope for the survival of industrial manufacturing in the city in diminished capacity. In Andre’s work, it would remain in Manhattan, transplanted to the realm of aesthetics in a reduced material form. Following Bourdon’s essay, and despite Andre’s consistent grounding of his work in the streets of New York, the city is rarely referenced as a field of meaning in the literature on Andre’s sculpture. Themes of body, sensorial experience, place, and politics dominate the understanding of his work, particularly in the critical reception that first came to terms with it. Phenomenological accounts form the basis of formalist art histories that parse Andre’s

the respective roles that Andre and Althusser played in the violent deaths of their spouses. In Andre’s case, this personal history and its enduring impact on historiography, will be discussed below. For Althusser’s conception of apparatus, see: Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation),” (1970) in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85- 126.

66 place in the minimalist canon and the development of modernist sculpture.133 Biographical interpretations and class analyses of Andre’s work are also prolific in historiography. This approach is motivated, in part, by Andre’s regular reference to his formative early friendships with Frank Stella, Michael Chapman, and Hollis Frampton; his characterization of work on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 1960s as his finishing school; and, above all, by Andre’s polemical projection of an artistic identity aligned with the radical worker. The biographical approach is also fueled by the many controversies that have marked Andre’s personal and professional life, above all his contested role in the violent death of his then wife, Ana Mendieta, in September 1985.134 Anna Chave has indicted Andre as misogynist, masculinist, and blind to asymmetries of power and difference. According to Chave, the work and the artist enact an essential violence towards women that is consistently veiled and rendered non-threatening in historiography.135 Chave is right to ask whose bodies are engaged by Andre’s work and how, concretely, they are engaged. However, as Brian Wallis argued, there is little evidence in Andre’s reception to support Chave’s claim of the essential violence and misogyny of the work. The work has most often been associated with themes of openness and accessibility that could be, and has been, interpreted as an invitation for political participation and dialogue.136 If Andre’s work is about the body, as many of his

133 The most important entries in this historiographical thread are: Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, (New York: The Viking Press, 1977); and James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001). 134 Mendieta died after falling from the 34th floor window of their shared apartment in Greenwich Village on September 8, 1985. Andre and Mendieta had married in January 1985. Andre was arrested, indicted by a grand jury, and tried for Mendieta’s murder but he was ultimately acquitted in a trial by judge, rather than jury. The verdict remains polarizing, not only on the merits of the case, but also relative to the respective places of Andre and Mendieta in canonical art history. In many narratives of postwar art, Andre occupies a more central position than Mendieta and in many monographic accounts of Andre’s work, Mendieta’s death is not mentioned. Feminist artists, critics, and art historians have protested this absence as a double victimization and, more broadly, as potent evidence of art history’s enduring patriarchal bias. 135 Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44-63; and Anna C. Chave, “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End,” Art Journal Vol. 73, No. 4 (Winter 2014): 5-21. 136 Brian Wallis, “Power, Gender, and Abstraction,” in Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961-1991, ed. Holliday T. Day (Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1991), 100-113.

67 earliest critics suggested, the question of whose bodies are engaged and how they are positioned in social, economic, and cultural contexts remains vital. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s recent study of the Art Workers’ Coalition includes the most significant account of Andre’s politics. Bryan-Wilson parses Andre’s associations with the worker and the bourgeoisie as a means of establishing class contradiction and conflict in the context of antiwar activism in late 1960s New York as a field of meaning for Andre’s work.137 What follows owes much to Bryan-Wilson’s argument but seeks to understand the significance of those class affiliations in the context of the local politics of deindustrialization and corporate power in New York City. Bryan-Wilson refers briefly to the “obsolescing of the industrial” and “the dismantling of New York’s industrial base,” arguing that they are crucial contexts for the understanding of Andre’s work.138 If so, we have to ask how Andre concretely engaged deindustrialization and what his engagement meant in the spaces in which he exhibited. These opposed class identities held great significance in the social and economic transformation of New York City in the 1960s. To the extent that Andre adopted the guise of the worker, he was adopting an image of labor that was actively being suppressed as a possible identity in Manhattan. To the extent that he adopted the image of the manager, for example eschewing the manual labor associated with the conventional artist’s studio, Andre adopted the class role that was supplanting the worker. In both his public persona and in his work, Andre synthesized the broad social and economic transformations that were reshaping the city. Moreover, the politics of Andre’s work cannot be assessed without assessing his core phenomenological positions and the phenomenological orientation that marked much of his original reception. Whether or not he turned to Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s, as Bryan-Wilson argues, Andre’s work and reception were primarily guided by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body and its interpretation by Andre’s peers. One could argue that Marcuse found a ready audience amongst artists and critics in late 1960s New York because of the sympathies of Marcuse’s political philosophy with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which was already entrenched in the arts community. “Today’s rebels,” Marcuse argued, “want to see hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of

137 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 41-82. 138 Ibid., 76-77.

68 ordinary and orderly perception. […]…the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception…”139 Marcuse’s call for a revolution in perception as a ground for social revolution was met by artists, such as Andre, working since the early 1960s on modes of sculpture conceived to reorient perception. The politics of Andre’s work is the politics of the classed body in the urban contexts of 1960s New York.

The Economies of Aesthetic Space, or a Special Case of the World at Large When Andre first moved to New York City in 1957, aspiring to make art but lacking money for supplies, he began to scavenge for materials. From the streets of Lower Manhattan, he collected scraps of metal and wood, nails, broken glass, and other detritus and assembled these urban fragments into rough assemblages. Andre made his first carved sculptures, such as Last Ladder of 1959, from wooden beams stolen from razed building sites.140 He referred to the Lower East Side tenement where he lived and worked in the early 1960s as his “indoor vacant lot.”141 In published dialogues with Hollis Frampton, Andre grounded his collections of detritus, and the works that sprung from them, in the surrounding social and material context. “Is not 253 East Broadway, first floor rear, nothing but a special case of the world at large?,” he asked. “The junk pile there was of my own devising, but of the same class as all the other vacant lots in the great world. The only difference that I can see is nominal. You knew the name of the person responsible for that junk pile.”142 Between 1961 and 1962, Andre assembled (Pizza) from junk that he collected in the streets and vacant lots of Lower Manhattan (Figure 2.1). A jagged urban landscape of

139 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 36-37. Diana Coole offers a compelling case for the theoretical and political connections between Merleau-Ponty and the Frankfurt School. Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism (Lanham, MA & Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007). Erich Fromm, one of Marcuse’s Frankfurt School peers, considered Merleau-Ponty one of the key French Marxists that were leading a reinterpretation of Marx based on the whole of his writings, including, especially, its humanist dimensions. See Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961), 72-73. 140 Andre, Interview with Paul Cummings, 30-31; Hollis Frampton, “Dear Enno Develing,” in Carl Andre, ed. Enno Develing (: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1969), 9. 141 Frampton, “Dear Enno Develing,” 11. 142 Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues 1962-1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981), 65.

69 nails, shards of glass, and a broken ceramic plate protruding from a disc of Portland cement, Andre’s pizza and his indoor vacant lot remain a latent foundation of his work, testifying to its underlying basis in the city. This basis is absent from historiography or dismissed as aberrant. Before Andre destroyed much of the work in his tenement, Frampton photographed the space and the sculptures filling the indoor vacant lot. Frampton captured Untitled (Pizza) from above, starkly lit against a sweeping white cloth, as if a heroic relic of modernism. Andre’s urban fragments call to mind a model for a city built from its most insignificant material fragments.

Figure 2.1. Carl Andre, Untitled (Pizza), 1961-62. Photograph by Hollis Frampton. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Since he began showing in museums and galleries in the mid-1960s, Andre has rarely exhibited new work composed of materials collected from the city street, as he had in Untitled (Pizza) and other works made in the early 1960s. The bulk of his sculpture since the mid-1960s has been made from materials that he purchased, first from salvage yards and machine shops in Lower Manhattan and then from industrial suppliers. Yet, after leaving 253 East Broadway and abandoning the work therein, Andre’s work was not cut-off from the

70 city or held at a remove from the world to serve as a remote avant-garde critique. His materials, beginning in the mid-1960s, were sourced from the holdouts in Lower Manhattan’s manufacturing districts and the industrial suppliers that were moved to the margins of the city. Moreover, his work was conceived for and produced in a gallery space modeled on the corporate office. Andre developed an idea of sculpture that was opposed to the autonomous object placed in a room but, instead, implicated the room itself as part of the sculpture. The rooms in which Andre built his sprawling sculptures in the 1960s were involved in the physical, social, and economic transformation of the city. If Andre’s indoor vacant lot was a special case of the world at large, so were his canonical sculptures and the galleries in which he constructed them. Andre explicitly directed his sculpture at the city’s architecture, both in terms of the architecture’s spatial and structural limits and its social, institutional, and aesthetic conventions. His work was first shown in New York City in January 1965, when two distinct sculptures, both entitled Timber Piece, were included in the “Shape and Structure” group show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.143 These works set the tone for his subsequent solo exhibitions and signaled his enduring engagement with the architectural and institutional limits of the gallery. The exhibition, which included works by Donald Judd and Robert Morris, amongst others, was also one of the earliest exhibitions around which the discourse of minimal art began to cohere.144 When “Shape and Structure” opened, Andre’s Timber Piece stood as a massive columnar form constructed of fir beams (Figure 2.2). Each beam measured twelve inches square by three feet and they were stacked in squares. The completed work stood seven feet tall and four feet wide and deep. The weight of the work was too great for the floor of the gallery, which was housed on the second floor of a narrow and nondescript townhouse, built in the early 20th century, at 149 East 72nd street. Three days after the opening John Myers, Director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, informed Andre that the ceiling of the beauty parlor

143 The works were rebuilt for Andre’s 1970 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and both were exhibited under the original title. The sculptures are now known and differentiated as Timber Piece (Well) and Redan. These updated titles are used by the Museum Ludwig and Art Gallery of Ontario, which respectively own the works, and in the catalogue of the ’s 2014 retrospective, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010. 144 Meyer, Minimalism, (2001), 119-121.

71 below the gallery was groaning and the sculpture was threatening to fall through the floor.145 Andre responded by dismantling Timber Piece and building a new work from the same wood beams. Arranged in a long, low, zigzagging wall, the second version of Timber Piece distributed the weight of the beams across a larger area and averted the structural threat to the building (Figure 2.3). At the same time, the second Timber Piece occupied more floor space than first and functioned as a physical barrier within the gallery.

Figure 2.2. Carl Andre, Timber Piece, 1965 (reconstruction 1970). © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

145 David Bourdon, “More is Less, More or Less,” Village Voice, April 29, 1965, 16; Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 38-39; interview with the author, December 3, 2014.

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Figure 2.3. Carl Andre, Timber Piece, 1965 (reconstruction 1970). © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

This was more than an amusing episode. With Timber Piece, Andre first conceived of sculpture as a horizontal claim of space rather than a shaped mass. It was also Andre’s first modular sculpture, adaptive to the needs and limitations of the gallery. The two versions of Timber Piece clarified Andre’s approach to gallery space and served as an important moment in the emerging challenge for galleries and museums to house the ambitions of sculpture. In direct response to this dramatic exposure of the physical limits of the gallery, Andre began to conceive of sculpture as a means of spatial seizure, control, and obstruction. Shortly after the “Shape and Structure,” John Myers and Tibor de Nagy began to plan a move of their gallery from their domestic quarters on the Upper East Side to a Midtown office building. With his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in April 1965, Andre extended his challenge to the limits of the gallery and established the core concerns of much his subsequent sculpture. He positioned his work to disrupt the space of the gallery and directly engage the classed and gendered body of the viewer, who was again confronted with more stacked piles of building materials. It was seen by critics to do this in new, concrete, and dramatic ways. As with Timber Piece, Andre constructed Crib, Coin, and Compound, the three large works in the main room of the exhibition, with simple, modular units of a single material, placed directly on the floor of the gallery. Having experienced the structural limits of the building in his previous exhibition, Andre built Crib, Coin, and Compound with nine- foot planks of white Styrofoam (Figure 2.4). The material allowed Andre to reduce the load

73 while mounting a more significant spatial critique. “I wanted to seize and hold the space of that gallery,” Andre suggested, “not simply to fill it, but seize and hold that space.”146 The lightweight material allowed Andre to control the bulk of the main room of the gallery and forced the viewer to physically negotiate the works.

Figure 2.4. Carl Andre, Crib, Coin, and Compound, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1965. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

The three sculptures were placed on the floor of the gallery in a way that obstructed easy . To gallery visitors, Crib, Coin, and Compound seemed to function as an alternative architecture. The Styrofoam planks were stacked using basic structural techniques, identified in their titles, with each sculpture both occupying and defining a significant space. The largest work, Crib, was a towering square formation that partially blocked the gallery entrance. Built from successive pairs of planks stacked at right angles and standing over seven-feet tall, Crib enclosed a large empty space that the visitor could see into but could not enter. Compound, a two-foot tall square composed of three tiers of Styrofoam, also enclosed a large, inaccessible space in the middle of the gallery’s main room. At the far

146 Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum 8, No. 10 (June 1970): 61. See also Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, 38-39.

74 end of the room, Andre positioned Coin, a nearly six-foot tall quoined wall that framed an open space between the sculpture and the bay window overlooking 72nd street. Crib, Coin, and Compound crammed the space, impeding the gallery and its audience. To seize and hold the space of the gallery, Andre produced walls and surrogate structures that, in effect, negated the room. Crib, Coin, and Compound functioned, according to Andre’s critics, as an alternative architecture within and against the room that housed them. For Lucy Lippard, the works collectively functioned as a “displacement of space” and were “even more architectural than the work of other structurists...,” her name for the contemporary artists who would soon be codified as minimalists.147 According to Dan Graham, the sculptures “subsumed the bulk of the gallery’s interior space.”148 Bourdon suggested that “Andre jammed the main gallery with three monumental constructions…” and that he “…belongs to the same masonic order of master builders as Robert Morris and Donald Judd.”149 The domestic space of the gallery was displaced by monumental structures built with modular, white, industrially produced blocks of Styrofoam. These structures were surrounded by a space that was barely accessible or functional. Andre’s sculptural intervention at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery constituted a physical challenge to the gallery visitor and a commercial challenge to gallery owner by impinging the body’s passage and obstructing the room. The visitor was forced to move around the narrow margins of the gallery, the body confined to moving in the small space between the sculpture and the wall. The three constructions left no room for a conventional aesthetic experience that favored optical, static, and instant apprehension of the work of art. There was simply no room, as Lippard suggested, to step back and look at the work. “No attempt had been made to make them look like ‘art’,” Lippard wrote, “or in fact, to make them visible at all, since there was only room for the determined viewer to edge around the forms, and vantage points were denied.”150 Likewise, Dan Graham recalled the obstructive and anti-optical experience of the show. “The emplacement of the material,” Graham wrote in 1967, “literally impeded both any continuous perspective of the whole and the gallery audience’s

147 Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 9, no. 6 (September 1965) 58. 148 Dan Graham, “Carl Andre,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1967/January 1968): 34. 149 Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” 15; and Bourdon, “More is Less, More or Less,” 16. 150 Lippard, “New York Letter,” (September 1965): 58.

75 progress.”151 This rejection of optical aesthetic experience in favor of an embodied negotiation of the work of art was doubly significant in a gallery well known for promoting second-generation abstract expressionist painting in exhibitions regularly praised by Clement Greenberg. For Andre and his critical advocates, looking at the work of art was supplanted as aesthetic experience by walking around it. Crib, Coin, and Compound did more to obstruct the gallery than simply blocking the door and making it difficult for the visitor to move through the room. They also proved to be unmarketable. Andre received a six hundred dollar advance from the gallery to prepare for the exhibition.152 Yet the Styrofoam planks that he selected had little inherent value and Andre did nothing to alter or enhance the material. He did not carve or cut the planks. There were no autographic marks to identify the artist or the object. The units were simply stacked but not joined to each other or affixed in any way. Crib, Coin, and Compound were constructed from a material that was designed to be installed and then forgotten. The Dow Chemical Company, which manufactured the Styrofoam boards, promoted them as an inherently innocuous insulation material. In advertisements running at the same time as Andre’s show, Dow instructed customers to, “Remember Styrofoam. O.K. Now forget it.” (Figure 2.5)153 Andre also conceived the works to be disassembled, so that the pieces could be returned to the supplier or directed to other works after the exhibition. “The component units,” Graham later suggested, “possessed no intrinsic significance beyond their immediate contextual placement, being ‘re-placeable.’ Works are unpossessable by the viewer in the monetary sense, the sense of an artists being possessed of a vision or of satisfying personal inner needs

151 Graham, “Carl Andre,” (1967/1968), 34. 152 Interview with the author, December 3, 2014. 153 In the mid-1960s, Dow was actively attempting to expand the market of its Styrofoam boards. They were most commonly used as insulation in cold storage applications but, in numerous architecture publications, Dow advertised their use as insulation under roofs and behind walls in general construction. The “Remember Styrofoam. O.K. Now forget it.” advertisement ran in the following publications, amongst others: Architectural Record 137, no. 4 (April 1965): 147; Progressive Architecture (July 1965): 65; Progressive Architecture (August 1965): 71; Progressive Architecture (September 1965): 71.

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Fig. 2.5. Dow, “Remember Styrofoam. O.K. Now forget it.” As advertised in Progressive Architecture 46, no. 7 (July 1965).

of a viewer.”154 Crib, Coin, and Compound were, in fact, for sale but they did not find any buyers.155 They therefore, physically disrupted the gallery and eluded its market function. This failure to sell was surely a disappointment to Tibor de Nagy and John Myers. However, Andre eventually embraced the failure, subsequently promoting his work as a heroic repudiation of the corrupting art market, if only after Virginia Dwan emerged as his patron. In 1965, immediately after his first exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Andre was still

154 Graham, “Carl Andre,” (1967/1968), 34. 155 Several of the smaller works shown in the reception room were sold. See exhibition checklist in “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art.

77 hoping and waiting for a market to develop for his difficult work. “I make sculpture that anyone can do,” he stated, “and nobody seems able to buy.”156 By the middle of 1967, with Dwan’s backing, Andre could state unequivocally, “I produce works that anyone can do and which, therefore, no one would buy.”157 The circumstances of Andre’s first exhibition at Tibor de Nagy are crucial because they introduce Andre’s core concerns with the moving body, its space, and the architectural frame. These concerns were clarified as Andre’s work developed in the 1960s and as art theory and criticism were inflected by phenomenology. However, critics and historians have often positioned Crib, Coin, and Compound as the final example of Andre’s sculpture-as- structure, before he developed the decisive idea of sculpture-as-place, exemplified by the artist’s subsequent floorworks. This developmental sequence, from form to structure to place, is amongst the most entrenched aspects of Andre’s historiography and follows the artist’s own account of his evolving conception of sculpture.158 It also delineates an early and mature style that relegates a group of works in which Andre most concretely and aggressively confronts the body of the viewer and the spatial limits of the building. After the exhibition at Tibor de Nagy closed and Crib, Coin, and Compound were disassembled, Andre reused the materials in ways that extended their significance relative to the body and their potential to confront and displace existing architecture. As Lippard suggested, “the form is impermanent but the materials remain—somewhere—as keys back to the intellectual domain in which these pieces exist.”159 In February 1966, Andre used approximately forty-one pieces of the dismantled Styrofoam beams to construct a new

156 Carl Andre, quoted in Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (October- November 1965): 67 157 Carl Andre, quoted in “Strange Primary Structures,” Life 63, no. 4 (July 28, 1967): 44a. 158Andre has described his development of sculptural development as a progression from form, to structure, to place in numerous texts and interviews. See: Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” 15; and Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” 55. Among the most important historiographical precedents that adopt Andre’s basic terms, see: Graham, “Carl Andre,” (1967/1968), 34-35; Diane Waldman, Carl Andre (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1970), 14-15; David Bourdon, “A Redefinition of Sculpture,” in Carl Andre: Sculpture 1959-1977 (New York: Jaap Rietnman Inc., 1978), 13, 24-38. The most recent retrospective exhibition of Andre’s work, developed by Dia Art foundation and curated by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond in collaboration with Andre, used this formulation as its organizing principle. See Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond, eds., Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2014). 159 Lippard, “New York Letter,” (September 1965) 58.

78 sculpture in the Park Place Gallery at the request of David Novros, who was mounting his first solo exhibition. As Novros only intended to use the front room of the gallery, he invited Andre to install a sculpture in the back room. Andre occupied and obstructed the space, placing the planks on their shortest edge and arranging them in parallel, abutting rows to completely fill the room. The arrangement was conceived, according to Andre, “…to generate a kind of negative space, a place of no access…”160 The work physically excluded the viewer from the back room of the gallery. Then, in October 1966, Andre lent five of the Styrofoam planks to Yvonne Rainer for use as props in Carriage Discreetness, which was performed as part of Experiments in Art and Technology’s “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” at the 25th Street Armory in New York City. In this work, ten performers, including Andre, received instructions transmitted by radio from Rainer and Robert Morris, directing them to walk around the stage and execute mundane tasks with piles of material neatly arranged in a grid. In addition to Andre’s Styrofoam planks, the performers walked around and over, sat on, and rearranged foam rubber slabs and cubes, plywood and Masonite slabs, mattresses, and other materials. In both Rainer’s inventory of objects and Lucy Lippard’s review of the event, Andre’s Styrofoam was the only material to receive an authorial credit.161 In Rainer’s Carriage Discreetness, the relationship between the moving body and Andre’s modular, disassembled sculpture was made explicit.

160 Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” (1970), 61. See also David Novros, Oral history interview, October 22-27, 2008, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-david-novros- 15634#transcript. A diagram of the work, completed after the exhibition, inscribed Park Place Back Room Piece for David Novros, dated April 2, 1967, is in the collection. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/andre-diagram-of-reef-t02135. A similar work was exhibited under the title Reef at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion” exhibition, as well as in Andre’s 1970 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In both cases, Reef was made from a different type of Styrofoam that was yellow-orange rather than white. 161 Yvonne Rainer, “Objects to be manipulated in Carriage Discreteness,” in Work: 1961-73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 303; Lucy Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” Art International 11, no. 1 (January 1967): 42. See also Herbert Migdoll’s and Peter Moore’s photographs of Rainer’s performance, reproduced in Catherine Morris, 9 evenings reconsidered: art, theatre, and engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, , 2006), 24-25, 71.

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Figure 2.6. Carl Andre, Equivalents I-VIII, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1966. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

For his second solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which opened in late March 1966, Andre presented a series of sculptures that were decidedly less obstructive than his Styrofoam works. However, the new sculptures still implicated the total space of the gallery and the body of the viewer. The exhibition consisted of eight distinct rectilinear forms, each consisting of one hundred and twenty neatly piled, white sand-lime bricks. Equivalents I-VIII were placed directly on the gallery’s parquet floor with ample space for the visitor to walk between the forms (Figure 2.6).162 The rectangles were organized in four factors of sixty, with the bricks stacked in two layers, so that the units were arranged in three-by-twenty, four-by-fifteen, five-by-twelve, and six-by-ten units. Each factorial form was represented twice, once with the bricks placed on their short side and once on their long side. More important than their numerical formulation was their spatial impact. The gallery visitor was met with eight low forms, half of which were five inches tall with the other half nine inches tall, all below the height of the baseboard. There was nothing hanging on the gallery’s brand

162 An unattributed and undated memo on Tibor de Nagy letterhead stipulates a minimum of two feet of “clear space” between the sculptures. Carl Andre Folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1941-1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

80 new walls, whose clean white expanses were punctuated only by light switches and electrical outlets. Andre conceived of the Equivalents, not as positive forms but as cuts out of the room. “Rather than cut into the material,” Andre explained, “I now use the material as the cut in space.”163 The sculpture was defined, therefore, as the volume of the gallery that could not be occupied physically but that, nevertheless, dictated movement of the viewer. This description of the Equivalents show is well rehearsed in Andre’s historiography. However, the character of the gallery space that Andre sought to cut out, as if a raw material, is rarely described. This absence is stark given the ways in which Andre’s sculpture is understood to implicate the room. If this exhibition is the origin of Andre’s sculpture-as- place, as it is often positioned, the artist made clear that his idea of place depended on its difference from surrounding space. In an exchange with Dan Graham at a symposium at Windham College in April 1968, Andre defined place and distinguished it from art that aspired to the environmental. “The kind of place I mean is not to be confused with an environment,” Andre suggested, “because I think it is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. […] A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.”164 Andre’s use of sculpture to increase the gallery visitor’s perception of the general environment was alluded to by Mel Bochner in his canonical 1967 essay, “ Systems: Solipsism.” Bochner argued that Andre and Dan Flavin, “…exhibit an acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms.”165 This is echoed in Graham’s assessment that, “Andre’s work tends to be contextual if it means anything at all.”166 Likewise, Diane Waldman, writing in the catalogue for Andre’s retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1970, argued that “…the ironclad wedding of object to environment…” constituted a significant challenge to the autonomy of modernist art. Waldman suggested that Andre’s sculpture, “…disrupted the traditional heroic role of the art

163 Quoted in Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” (1966), 15. 164 Carl Andre, Robert Barry, and , Symposium at Windham College moderated by Dan Graham, April 20, 1968, transcript, Seth Siegelaub Papers Folder, Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam, I.A.20, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 165 Mel Bochner, “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967): 40. 166 Graham, “Carl Andre,” (1967/1968), 35;

81 object to the extent that Andre’s object is viable largely within the context for which it was conceived.”167 The intent to heighten one’s perception of the general environment was determined, by the artist and his critical advocates, to be the explicit goal of Andre’s idea of sculpture-as- place. This goal is also the precise junction between minimal sculpture, phenomenology, and urban theory in the 1960s. It links Andre’s conception of sculpture, body, and place to the respective ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Thomas Hoving, and John Lindsay. Each developed ideas to increase awareness of the environment through the body and conceived of spatial knowledge that was triggered by immediate and concrete sensorial response. If the Equivalents show represented a turning point in Andre’s personal history of sculpture, it also occurred at a crucial moment for the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Tibor de Nagy and John Myers had recently moved the gallery from the Upper East Side townhouse where Crib, Coin, and Compound had been exhibited to a new space in a Midtown office building. The Equivalents show was held in the new gallery space at 27-29 West 57th Street that de Nagy and Myers opened in the fall of 1965. The lease for the new gallery space on West 57th Street was executed in June 1965, three months after Andre’s first exhibition closed at the 72nd Street gallery and six months after Timber Piece threatened to collapse the floor.168 The new West 57th Street location brought the Tibor de Nagy Gallery to the growing heart of the art market and in the immediate neighborhood of peer institutions such as the Gallery, Sidney Janis Gallery, Stable Gallery, and Kootz Gallery. It also constituted a stark departure from the domestic architectural identity of the East 72nd Street space, as well as the gallery’s two previous locations. The first three iterations of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery were situated in converted residential spaces—respectively, a walkup tenement, an old mansion, and a townhouse. The fourth location, at West 57th Street, was situated in a building that catered to managerial clientele.169

167 Waldman, Carl Andre, (1970), 6. 168 George E. Lees, Vice President of Cushman & Wakefield, Inc. Real Estate, to Tibor de Nagy, July 6, 1965, Box 4, Folder 30, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1941-1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 169 Tibor de Nagy opened his first gallery in 1951 in a walk-up tenement at 219 East 53rd Street. In 1953, the gallery moved to an old mansion on the corner of east 67th Street and Madison Avenue, before moving again in 1961 to the townhouse on East 72nd Street. The

82 Anchored by the British Motor Corporation, 27-29 West 57th Street was marketed to de Nagy and Myers as a “completely modernized prestige office building.” Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm managing the building, promoted it as “an excellent opportunity for office tenants to occupy space in a prestige building in the Plaza Office District.”170 De Nagy and Myers, attracted by the location and the character of the building, further instructed their new landlords to produce a sterile space. Prior to the move, they asked for all light fixtures to be removed, all wiring to be hidden in a newly plastered ceiling, all electrical outlets to be recessed into the wall, all pipes in the main gallery to be boxed in, and all walls, doors, and window frames to be painted white.171 The Tibor de Nagy Gallery participated in a postwar trend towards homogenous and purified gallery spaces that aspired to the apparent neutrality of the corporate office. The corporate gallery space was exemplified by the Betty Parsons Gallery, which opened in 1947 at 15 West 57th Street. Subsequently identified as the “white cube” by Brian O’Doherty, these corporate gallery spaces were designed for the hushed and private contemplation of autonomous modernist paintings.172 They were insulated from the sensorial burden of the street, local determinations of style and materials, and the distractions of the social. described Betty Parsons’ archetypal and pioneering gallery as, “rinsed clean and bare,” and very white, with a purposeful emptiness. “The associations of such a place are,” Alloway contended, “scornful of the worldly effects…in more elaborately furnished galleries.”173 Parsons, of course, did not invent the white cube. She and her

gallery sites are noted and described in the following: John Bernard Myers, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World (New York: Random House, 1981), 115, 178-179, 203; and Oral history interview with Tibor de Nagy, conducted by Paul Cummings, March 29, 1976, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-tibor-de-nagy-12568. 170 Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., Brochure for 27-29 West 57th Street, Box 4, Folder 30, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1941-1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 171 Memo regarding “Alteration works to be performed by Landlord in the demised premises at 29 West 57th Str. 3rd floor,” Box 4, Folder 30, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1941-1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 172 Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part 1,” Artforum 14, no. 7 (March 1976): 24-29. 173 Lawrence Alloway, unpublished typescript of “An American Gallery,” ca. 1961-1968, Betty Parsons Gallery records and personal papers, ca. 1921-1991, Series 7.6, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

83 architects were drawing on an established form of hygienic modernism dating to early 20th century gallery spaces in Europe, such as Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Hall in Vienna. However, Parsons’ innovation was in her alignment of this hygienic aesthetic space with the architectural protocols of the managerial modernist office of postwar New York. The corporate gallery space launched by Betty Parsons represented a stark break from the domestic interiors favored in the first three iterations of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and other important galleries, such as the Martha Jackson Gallery and the Stable Gallery. The white-walled galleries also constituted the antithesis to New York’s opulent and eccentric gallery spaces, such as Art of This Century and Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, designed respectively by Frederick Kiesler and Wilder Green.174 Whereas the domestic gallery sought an intimate setting and eccentric spaces such as Marlborough-Gerson Gallery bespoke ornate luxury, the corporate, managerial spaces of the Betty Parsons Gallery and Tibor de Nagy Gallery presented the gallery as an efficient place of business. Artists such as Andre conceived of their work as an explicit response to this transactional frame. The white cube signaled the corporatization of aesthetic space in New York City. Its emergence in the late 1940s at Betty Parsons Gallery and its proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Gallery, and Dwan Gallery, coincides with a new form of corporate architecture, codified in the 1961 zoning laws, as well as the emergent hegemony of the managerial economy. Tibor de Nagy was a banker by day and Virginia Dwan was an heir to the 3M Company fortune. Even if the 57th Street galleries were situated in early 20th century buildings, as most were, they were spatially and socially equivalent to the modernist towers rising from empty plazas that were privileged by the 1961 Zoning Resolution. The apparently neutral, corporate gallery with clean walls, mandates of quiet, and solitary aesthetic experiences was a microcosm of the anti-urban values inhering in New York’s modernist postwar office buildings, at least according to architectural critics such as Jane Jacobs, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Vince Scully. The new zoning codes encouraged buildings to be set back on plazas, creating an envelope of open space that insulated the corporate office from the sensorial burden of the http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Alloway-Lawrence-typescript-of-An- American-Gallery--308500. 174 These opulent gallery spaces are described in: Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, 2nd edition (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), 515-522.

84 street. The architectural models for the new codes, Lever House and Seagram Building, stood on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan just a short walk from the 57th Street galleries.175 While recognizing the exceptional quality of Lever House and Seagram Buildings, many architecture critics and urban theorists nonetheless condemned the proliferation of this spatial model. The plaza was seen to break the frame of buildings that defined the street and fatally disrupt the social life and dynamic sensory experience of that public space. Vince Scully characterized the proliferation of this architectural model on Park Avenue as the “Death of the Street.” Peter Blake, writing in Architectural Forum, described the “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue.” Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs argued that this spatial model was an essentially inhuman intrusion in the city.176 The deadening effects that critics attributed to the anti-urban spaces of managerial capitalism were mirrored by the experience of the white cube galleries, such as the new Tibor de Nagy. The corporate offices were conceived as hygienic and orderly spaces purified of the noise, pollution, and crowds of the city street. The corporate gallery was, likewise, designed to insulate aesthetic experience from these same distracting and noxious elements. In both cases, the life of the city was suppressed in favor of emptiness and immunity to the sensorial and social chaos of the street. Both the corporate gallery and the modernist office building were viewed by advocates as oases and by critics as asocial and anti-urban. This anti-urban space was the general environment that Andre sought to alter. His intervention sought to make class, as it inhered in space and material, conspicuous to the body. Andre cut into an environment resistant to the social and sensorial experience of the

175 Voorhees, Walker, Smith, & Smith, Zoning New York City: A Proposal for the City of New York Submitted to the City Planning Commission (New York City Planning Commission, 1958), 128. See also the open space regulations in: City Planning Commission, Zoning Resolution of the City of New York (New York: The City of New York, 1961), 14, 20, 27, 31-32. 176 This critique of the modernist tower and plaza was articulated by numerous critics and theorists of postwar architecture in New York. Amongst the most significant examples, see: Jane Jacobs, “Downtown for People,” in The Exploding Metropolis, ed. William H. Whyte (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 157-158; “Union Carbide’s Shaft of Steel,” Architectural Forum 113, no 6 (November 1960): 114-121; Lewis Mumford, “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow,” Architectural Record 132, No. 5 (November 1962): 139-144; Vincent Scully, “Death of the Street,” Perpecta 8 (1963): 91-96; Peter Blake, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” Architectural Forum 122, no. 3 (June 1965): 13-19; Nathan Silver, Lost New York (New York: Houghton Mifflin, Inc., 1967), 13; Ada Louise Huxtable, “New York City’s Growing Architectural Poverty,” New York Times, February 12, 1968, 38;; and William H. Whyte, “Please, just a nice place to sit,” New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1972, 20-32.

85 street and laid his bricks over an archetype of the newly fortified economic identity of the city. Andre’s sand-lime bricks were acquired from the Brickworks in Queens.177 Assembled on the floor of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Equivalents simultaneously conformed to and disrupted the gallery—its economic and spatial identity; its function bestowing value, meaning, and status to the exhibited object; and the modes of experience that the gallery privileged. In some ways, Andre’s Equivalents, composed of orderly stacks of new, white bricks, matched the hygienic space of the gallery. Sand-lime bricks were prized for their morphological uniformity and material purity compared to clay bricks, which are essentially associated with the local properties of a specific terrain.178 Like the gallery in which Andre placed them, sand-lime bricks are homogenous and seemingly placeless. Yet the bricks and the corporate gallery are both distinctive products of the twentieth century city. The rectangular form of the bricks also conformed to the rectilinear pattern of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery’s parquet floor. All of the Equivalents were aligned with a sectional joint of flooring, further emphasizing the sameness of space and sculpture. In the second room of the gallery, a smaller version of the Equivalents made with small magnets was placed on the smaller floor with the same basic configuration and arrangement. Moreover, the works were far less confrontational than Crib, Coin, and Compound. The space around the Equivalents allowed for comfortable movement through the room; their seizure of space was more accommodating and less belligerent. However, the Equivalents were equally defined by their difference from the gallery and its protocols. The bricks were arranged on the gallery floor in neat piles with little to distinguish them from the stacks of bricks found in a supply yard or on a job site. As ordinary industrial building products that one could encounter in the everyday life of the city, the bricks were resistant to the aura of abstract and transactional value that the

177 Andre reported the source of the original bricks to the Tate Gallery when Equivalent VIII was purchased for the collection in 1972. When Andre remade the sculpture in 1969, the Long Island City Brickworks had closed, so the bricks for the new version of the sculpture were sourced elsewhere. See Ronald Alley, Catalogue of The Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than works by British Artists (London: The Tate Gallery, 1981), 11-12. 178 On the material properties and functional applications of sand lime bricks, see: Warren E. Embley, Manufacture and Properties of Sand-Lime Bricks (Washington, D.C., Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce, 1917); S. W. Barr and T. R. Ernest, A Study of Sand- Lime Brick (Urbana, IL: Illinois State Geological Survey, 1912).

86 corporate space promoted.179 Andre’s Equivalents, likewise, called into question the clean white walls that served as the perceptual and commercial ground for modernist paintings and sculpture. The low-lying sculptures, all of which stood below the height of the baseboard and just above the height of a typical ankle, could not be seen in relief against the wall. They had to be looked down upon and moved around. The gallery’s white walls would have been seen as empty. By forcing the viewer to look down at his sculptures, Andre positioned the floor as the ground of perception rather than the wall and the mobile body as the site of aesthetic experience rather than the static eye. By altering the purified space of the corporate gallery largely by imposing the products of industrial manufacturing, Andre synthesized the opposed economic realities of the city in sculptural form. It is a synthesis that would be repeated and refined by Andre in many of his subsequent exhibitions.

The Dwan Gallery and the moment of phenomenological enlightenment Just two weeks before the Equivalents show opened, and before he settled on his anti- market identity, Andre wrote in a letter to John Myers, “The return of capital to the gallery is I feel my primary responsibility.”180 Following the gallery’s move move from 72nd Street to 57th Street, John Myers requested an increase in the gallery’s commission on the sale of Andre’s work from thirty-three percent to forty percent.181 However, none of the original Equivalents were sold by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and all but one of the bricks were returned to Long Island City Brickworks by Andre. In a subsequent letter to the gallery written a few months after the Equivalents exhibition, Andre reversed course. He described his work as “not saleable in the extreme” and testified to his willingness to sacrifice

179 The ordinariness of Andre’s bricks fueled the parody exhibition “Everyman’s Infinite Art” at Chapman College in 1966 and prompted the belated controversy in London when Equivalent VIII was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1972. See Harold Gregor, “Everyman’s Infinite Art,” Purcell Gallery, Chapman College, December 15-30, 1966. The exhibition pamphlet can be found in David Bourdon Papers, Box 12, “Carl Andre” folder, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition is discussed in Meyer, Minimalism, 82- 83. The controversy stemming from the Tate’s acquisition of Equivalent VIII has been widely discussed. For Andre’s account, see: Peter Fuller, “Carl Andre on his Sculpture, Part I,” Art Monthly 16 (May 1978): 5-6. 180 Carl Andre to John Meyers [sic], March 7, 1966, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art. 181 John Myers to Carl Andre, September 9, 1965, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art.

87 commercial success. Andre pivoted explicitly against the economic system of the gallery as it moved into a new managerial space. “I wish to be free to finance my work piece by piece and to be free to allow those persons willing to advance money to me to be able to profit fully from their support.”182 Andre sought, not to make art for a corporate gallery to sell, but a corporate patron that would unburden him from transactional pressure. He would find that patron in Virginia Dwan, whose New York gallery opened two floors above the Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 27-29 West 57th Street in November 1965 and who would soon begin to fund Andre’s work with her inheritance from the 3M corporation. The Dwan Gallery mirrored the Tibor de Nagy Gallery not only in its location and opening date but also in its architectural sensibility. Inspired by the low-profile look of the Leo Castelli Gallery, Virginia Dwan worked with David Whitney, who was Castelli’s gallery assistant at the time, to produce an empty exhibition space with white walls and a dark gray carpet. “The architecture was not to predominate,” Dwan suggested in a retrospective interview, “…we were able to get a suitably anonymous space built which functioned very well.”183 In her previous gallery in Los Angeles, Dwan saw the architecture and the white walls as a physical opposition to the street that offered a quietness and sacredness apart from the outside world and everyday life. The space was conceived, in Dwan’s words, “…to separate you from the street…to give a sense of setting aside one’s other rush-rush attitudes from the street and then go into this lit space.” 184 In New York, Dwan built on this experience and approximated the appearance of the corporate gallery. Unlike most of her peers, however, Dwan felt no pressure to sell the art that she exhibited.185 Andre first exhibited at the Dwan Gallery in the canonical “10” group show that opened in October 1966. His Field, a nearly four-foot square composed of six hundred and forty five ceramic magnets was arranged directly on the floor. Standing only one half-inch

182 Carl Andre to Tibor de Nagy and John Myers, January 26, 1967, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art. 183 Virginia Dwan, Oral history interview conducted by Charles B. Stuckey, March 21-June 7, 1984, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 75. 184 Ibid., 5, 20, 30. On the sterility and anonymity of Dwan’s New York gallery, and the relation of its architectural design to the emergence of minimal art, see: James Meyer, “The Art Gallery in an Era of Mobility,” in Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959-1971 (Washington DC, The of Art, 2016), 65; and Germano Celant, Virginia Dwan and Dwan Gallery (: Skira, 2016), 27. 185 Dwan discusses her private income and the lack of pressure to sell the work exhibited in her gallery in: Dwan, Oral history interview conducted by Charles B. Stuckey, 1984, 27-29.

88 tall, Andre’s sculpture was dwarfed by the surrounding sculptures of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris. The “10” show, organized by Dwan, Morris, , and Robert Smithson, was a crucial moment in the canonical formation of minimal art. It culled an unwieldy number of artists included in other related group shows of 1966, such as The Jewish Museum’s “Primary Structures” and the Guggenheim’s “Systemic Painting,” to a more coherent selection.186 More importantly, the critical rhetoric prompted by the Dwan show shifted the field of meaning, in Andre’s case, from architecture and urbanism to the phenomenological discourse of the body. Dwan saw the work in the “10” show as essentially compatible with her view of the gallery’s architecture—a refuge from the social and political realities of the city. “There were riots in the summer here,” Dwan recalled. “So this show for me was like a sanctuary; seeing these works grouped together was like going into a chapel or a place of meditation, or ‘contemplation’ is the term I prefer.”187 What the work accomplished, according to Dwan, was precisely the type of embodied awareness of self that is a central tenet of Merleau- Ponty’s philosophy of the body. Dwan suggested that the work in the “10” show, “…throws people back on themselves and gives a quiet opportunity for opening up and reflecting.”188 She stated the significance more directly in a letter to The New York Times art critic John Canaday, requesting his visit to the exhibition. Dwan simply wrote, “The work is phenomenological.”189 In her assignation of phenomenology to the works in the “10” show, Dwan was likely influenced by the co-organizer of the exhibition, Robert Morris. The first two parts of Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture,” in which he alluded to the phenomenological significance of the new sculpture, were published in the February and October of 1966 issues of Artforum.190

186 The “10” show at the Dwan Gallery was praised for the coherence of the included artists in the two major reviews. See: Lucy Lippard, “After a Fashion—The Group Show,” The Hudson Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1966/1967): 620-626; and Annette Michelson, “10 x 10: ‘concrete reasonableness.’,” Artforum 5, no. 5 (January 1967): 30-31. 187 Dwan, Oral history interview conducted by Charles B. Stuckey, 1984, 82-83. 188 Ibid., 82-83. 189 Virginia Dwan to John Canaday, October 13, 1966, Dwan Gallery Records, New York Exhibition Files, Box 2, Folder 38, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/dwan-gallery-los-angeles-california-and-new-york-new- york-records-6056/more#section_2. 190 Morris does not directly refer to Merleau-Ponty phenomenology in either essay, although it lurks close to the surface of Morris’s argument, particularly in “Notes on Sculpture, Part

89 In “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” published concurrently with the “10” show, Morris described the new work in terms that would subsequently be echoed by Dwan. “It is in some ways more reflexive,” he wrote, “because one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work…”191 The critical reviews of Annette Michelson and Lucy Lippard were equally important in establishing the phenomenological significance of the work in the “10” show. Dwan was greatly impressed by Michelson, recalling her regular presence in the gallery and her acute sensitivity to the exhibited work.192 Michelson was amongst the most important agents in the diffusion of phenomenology in American art criticism.193 She published a feature review of the “10” show in the January 1967 issue of Artforum. Without naming phenomenology, Michelson argued that the work in the Dwan exhibition demanded of art criticism a philosophical framework for comprehension.194 Lippard’s more expansive review largely accorded with Michelson’s call for a philosophical turn in art criticism. However, Lippard more fully developed the terms of immediate sensation that the work instigated, and further positioned embodied experience of the work in opposition to “everyday emotional and associative obsessions” that obscure aesthetic experience.195 The meaning of “rejective art,”

2,” which was published the same month as the “10” exhibition. See Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, No. 6 (February 1966): 42-44; and Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 20-23. 191 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” (1966), 21. 192 Dwan, Oral history interview conducted by Charles B. Stuckey, 1984, 176. 193 Michelson attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures in the 1950s and translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s Literary and Philosophical Essays for publication in the . Rosalind Krauss testified to Michelson’s influence, particularly in her review of the “10” show, in providing the conceptual and philosophical framework for the understanding of minimal art. See Rosalind Krauss, preface to , : Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 9-11. On Michelson’s pivotal influence introducing phenomenology to the critical discourse of minimal art, see: Malcolm Turvey, introduction to Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida, 13-34; James Meyer, “Der Gebrauch von Merleau-Ponty,” in Minimalisms: Rezeptionsformen der 90er Jahre: Festival der Berliner Gesellschaft, ed. Christoph Metzger and Nina Möntmann, trans. Almuth Carstens (Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 178-189; and James Meyer, “The Writing of ‘Art and Objecthood’,” in Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried, ed. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts, Toni Ross (Sydney, Australia: Power Publications, 2000), 61-96. 194 Michelson, “10 x 10: ‘concrete reasonableness.’,” (1967), 31. 195 Lippard, “After a Fashion—The Group Show,” (1966/1967), 625.

90 as Lippard called it, must come from active looking. “Thus the issue of introducing ‘other experience’ into art is, in the context of rejective styles…irrelevant.”196 The idea that there is a register of experience accessible to the sensing body that exists prior to and unencumbered by external meaning is the starting point of Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology.197 Andre’s work would no longer be seen as architectural, as Lippard had once argued in response to Crib, Coin, and Compound.198 Responding to Andre’s earlier show at Tibor de Nagy, as discussed above, Lippard had argued that the work displaced the existing space of the gallery. The three sculptures were structurally related to architecture, she contended and they effectively forced an embodied experience of the architectural surround. With Field, on the other hand, spurning this a priori field of association, Lippard and Dwan situated the meaning of his work in the viewer’s concrete and immediate sensorial experience. Andre, and many of his subsequent critical advocates, would adopt and extend these basic terms prioritizing embodied experience as the source of originary meaning. Following the “10” show, the significance of Andre’s modular arrangements of bricks, magnets, and metal plates was critically tied to the body. A hyper- sensorial experience of materials and a heightened perception of the self became the standard terms of criticism. This shift away from the discourse of building and towards phenomenology would become more pronounced in both Andre’s thinking and his critical reception in response to his subsequent solo exhibitions at the Dwan Gallery. In December 1967, Andre held his first solo exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in New York. It was known as the “Periodic Table” show because the opening invitation, exhibition poster, and advertisements in Artforum and Arts Magazine featured Andre’s modified table of elements. The exhibition included three sculptures, each composed of one hundred and forty-four units of aluminum, zinc, and hot-rolled steel. Each metal plate was twelve inches

196 Lippard, “After a Fashion—The Group Show,” (1966/1967), 626. Lippard’s refusal of architecture as a field of meaning rehearses a similar move by Rosalind Krauss in “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” as discussed in Chapter 1. Krauss stages the experience of architecture as a mode of understanding Judd’s work, only to reject it in favor of pure embodied experience and phenomenological meaning, without prior referent. See Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 24-26. 197 For this basic tenet of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, see particularly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “II.1: Sense experience,” in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 207-242. 198 See note 148 above. Lippard, “New York Letter,” (1965), 58.

91 square and three-eighths of an inch thick. The plates were arranged in three twelve-foot squares and placed directly on Dwan’s carpeted floor. 144 Steel Square and 144 Aluminum Square were placed in the main gallery, into which the elevator opened directly, and 144 Zinc Square stood alone in the side gallery (Figure 2.7). All of the works were intended to be walked on.

Figure 2.7. Carl Andre, 144 Steel Square (foreground) & 144 Aluminum Square (background). © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Like Andre’s Equivalents, the three sculptures in the “Periodic Table” show transferred the raw materials of industrial manufacturing into an essentially corporate space. “If my work had any significance,” Andre mused in 1978, “I was introducing into Modernism concerns which had escaped it, like industrial materials.”199 In the same year he stated, “The ‘crafts’ which I employ in my sculpture are stored not in the minds and muscles of artists but in the designs of the machines which mine & smelt & roll & cut my metal plates...”200 Andre’s metal plates were clearly grounded in New York’s industrial past and the

199 Peter Fuller, “Carl Andre on his sculpture, Part II,” Art Monthly 17 (June 1978): 8. 200 Carl Andre, unpublished dialogue with David Bourdon, 1978, David Bourdon Papers, Box 12 Folder 8, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This written dialogue

92 city’s superseding managerial order. However, this is not how the “Periodic Table” exhibition was received. The hyper-sensorial experience and the heightened consciousness of the body that were cultivated in the Dwan Gallery, and the sense of urban refuge that this corporate architecture sought to frame, masked the industrial content of the work exhibited in it. This obscuring of the industrial by the corporate at the Dwan Gallery echoes the dislocation of industrial manufacturing in Manhattan, as well as the abstraction of labor in managerial capitalism. The new corporate spaces of the city—the modernist towers, plazas, and white cubes—were designed to provide sanctuary from the city and relief from the sensorial burden of industry. In the context of the corporate gallery, Andre’s plates of steel, zinc, and aluminum were not experienced as industrial products but as pure materials detached from their industrial source, as if elemental products of nature. Andre promoted this reading when he described his medium as, “…the pure metals of commerce, as pure as they are,” implicitly acknowledging the abstraction of labor in New York’s new economic order.201 The laboring bodies that produced the metal plates were as far removed from the gallery as they were from the managerial offices and corporate headquarters that were taking over the city. Likewise, the noxious sensorial emissions of production, zoned out of the city, were equally imperceptible in the gallery. Andre’s sculpture ostensibly offered these naturalized materials to immediate sensorial experience, prior to and unencumbered by an industrial frame of meaning. He was credited with making pure material directly knowable through the body and provoking a moment of phenomenological enlightenment in those who encountered the work. Two aspects of the “Periodic Table” show were crucial for framing the phenomenological significance of the work: the promotional materials depicting Andre’s table of elements and the expectation that viewers could walk onto the plates and into the sculpture. Refusing the autonomous limits and optical protocols of modernist sculpture,

consists of index cards with questions typed by Bourdon and answers hand written by Andre. The dialogue was conducted in preparation for Bourdon’s essay in the exhibition catalogue of Andre’s retrospective exhibition that toured the United States from 1978 to 1980. Parts of the dialogue are quoted in Bourdon’s essay, although the quoted cited above is not. See David Bourdon, “A Redefinition of Sculpture,” in Carl Andre: Sculpture, 1959-1977 (New York: Jacob Rietman, Inc. 1978), 13-40. 201 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 40.

93 Andre’s floor works proposed a transgressive encounter between body and material. The sculptures were conceived to be virtually invisible but to generate a highly particularized knowledge of material properties in and through the body. Speaking of 144 Steel Square, Andre suggested, “You can stand in the middle of it and look straight out and you can’t see that piece of sculpture at all because the limit of your peripheral downward vision is beyond the edge of the sculpture. So you can be in the middle of a sculpture and not see it at all— which is perfectly all right.”202 His earlier sculptures depended on the object to structure perception and mediate one’s experience of the environment. However, as phenomenology decisively supplanted Gestalt theory, Andre, along with Tony Smith and Dennis Oppenheim, pursued an idea of sculpture as horizontal extension, with comparatively less emphasis on the object as a discrete thing around which one moves and to which one’s perception is directed. Standing respectively on plates of steel, zinc, and aluminum, critics reported on their physical experience of the materials. Philip Leider, reviewing Andre’s 1967 show in Artforum, wrote, “In spite of their flatness, the volumes that came into being were utterly convincing, the weight of the plates palpable against the soft rugs of the floor.” Writing in Pictures on Exhibit, Felice Ross suggested, “Each sculpture is composed of a single element. Meant to be trod upon, each one affords a different sensation in softness, resistance and sound.” 203 Framed by the periodic table advertisements, the materials were presented to embodied experience as if in a state of purity, prior to social and cultural meaning. Looking back at the show, Dwan suggested, “It was as if the sculpture had suddenly been melted down to its quintessential, natural form, that metal will find its own level. Here he was, taking these natural elements, and dealing with them directly as such.” She continued, “…here he was dealing with sort of purity of element in a very pure form, without imagery.”204 Dwan’s experience of the elemental purity of Andre’s materials could have been associated with her own corporate identity as heir to a founder of an industrial materials corporation. Instead, her experience was filtered through the phenomenological discourse of sensation and body. This became a canonical reading of Andre’s work when it was described

202 Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” (1970), 57. 203 Philip Leider, “Carl Andre, Dwan Gallery,” Artforum 6, no. 5 (January 1968): 46; Felice T. Ross, “Gallery Previews in New York,” Pictures on Exhibit 31, no. 4 (January 1968): 18. 204 Dwan, Oral history interview conducted by Charles B. Stuckey, (1984), 110, 114.

94 by Rosalind Krauss in Passages in Modern Sculpture. Assessing the widespread rejection of the interior, psychological space of sculpture in the 1960s, Krauss located the meaningful surface of Andre’s work in nature. Following Andre’s contention that the form of his sculpture was derived from his materials, Krauss suggested, “…the properties inherent to a specific material could be used to compose the work, as though what was being tapped was nature, instead of some aspect of culture.” She continued, “Andre’s work occupies an intransitive state: materials perceived as expressions of their own being.”205 Naturally, there is nothing about the elemental properties of steel, zinc, or aluminum that is essentially square. This was the commercial form given to the material by an industrial process that was masked by the phenomenological rhetoric of the body and its interface with the world as the site of meaning. The phenomenological reading of Andre’s work was reinforced and extended in response to Andre’s second solo show at the Dwan Gallery, which opened in April 1969. Andre installed three more floor works, identical in form to those in the 1967 exhibitions but now made from plates of magnesium, lead, and copper. Each work was again composed of one hundred and forty-four plates, arranged in a twelve-foot square, and stood three- eighths of an inch tall. Like the works in the 1967 show, 144 Magnesium Square, 144 Lead Square, and 144 Copper Square were made to be walked on. Critics responded with an even greater emphasis on the bodily experience of material properties provoked by these works. Andre linked this bodily experience to a heightened perception of the world, other people in it, and our essential humanness. By standing on 144 Magnesium Square and 144 Lead Square, according to Andre and his critical advocates, one could physically differentiate the materials based on a hyper-sensorial experience. By attending closely to the relative feel of the sculptures—the weight, temperature, and luster of the plates, as well as the sounds they make when walked upon—Andre and his critics argued that the viewer would attain not only a heighten perception of the materials but a heightened consciousness of the body as a sensing and knowing entity. In an interview with Phyllis Tuchman for Artforum, published shortly after his Dwan Gallery show in 1969, Andre described the explicit relationship between the experience of sculpture, the experience of one’s body, and the experience of one’s humanity. He based the

205 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), 272.

95 expansive significance of his sculpture in the minute sensation of materials and the heightened perception of self that this experience provokes. “There are a number of properties which materials have which are conveyed by walking on them: there are things like the sound of a piece of work and its sense of friction, you might say. […] But I believe that man is equipped with a subtle sense of detecting differences of mass between materials of similar appearances but with a different mass. […] Standing in the middle of a square of lead would give you an entirely different sense than standing in the middle of a square of magnesium.”206 Later in the interview, Andre directly connected the heightened sensation that one attains while standing on a sculpture to the recognition of one’s sensing body inhabiting a world with other bodies. “It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I’m interested in,” Andre suggested. “The sense of one’s own being in the world confirmed by the existence of things and others in the world. This, to me, is far beyond being as an idea. This is a recognition, a state of being, a state of consciousness— and I don’t wish at all to be portrayed as mystic in that. I think it’s a true awareness that doesn’t have anything to do with mysticism or religion. It has to do with life as opposed to death and a feeling that the true existence of the world in oneself. This is not an idea. An idea is a much lower category on my scale in that awareness, than consciousness.”207 Andre may or may not have read Merleau-Ponty but the tone and substance of these statements are informed by his phenomenology. They echo Merleau-Ponty’s thesis regarding the active, knowing body as the interface with the world and the site of the social. “The body is our general medium for having a world,” Merleau-Ponty argued.208 “It is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things.’”209 Embodied awareness is an experience particular to sculpture, according to Andre. It is a product of the physical, rather than optical, engagement of subject and object. “There is the self and all that is not the self,” Andre contended, “and sculpture has something to do about that fundamental feeling, whereas painting comes as a later stage…”210 The subject knows him- or herself in the act of sensing the object. In this primal moment of active and concrete

206 Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” (1970), 57. 207 Ibid., 60. 208 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 146. 209 Ibid., 186. 210 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 35.

96 sensation, for Andre and Merleau-Ponty, the world and the existence of other subjects in it are confirmed.

Figure 2.8. Carl Andre, Photograph by Larry Fried containing installation views of Carl Andre’s 144 Magnesium Square & 144 Lead Square at Dwan Gallery, 1969. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the “knowing touch,” in which one gains primary consciousness of the world and the self, was effectively established in the critical reception of Andre’s 1969 show at Dwan Gallery. Philip Leider, editor of Artforum, published a review of the exhibition in The New York Times under the title, “‘To Introduce a New Kind of Truth.’” Leider’s article was accompanied by a photograph taken by Larry Fried that included a partial view of 144 Magnesium Square and 144 Lead Square in the main room of the show (Figure 2.8). The clearly staged photograph and article publicized the embodied aesthetic experience and the transgression of opticality recommended for encountering Andre’s work. In Fried’s photograph, two gallery visitors are shown examining each sculpture. In the background, two women stand on 144 Lead Square and look intently at the metal plates, one bent at the waist to get a closer view. On 144 Magnesium Square, in the foreground of the photograph, a man and a woman are crouched in opposite corners of the sculpture carefully studying the materials. The man has reached down with his hand to touch

97 one of the plates. The caption accompanying the photograph read, “A matter not of truth to materials, but the truth of materials.” In the article, Leider describes the hyper-sensorial and extra-optical experience in which distinct metals can be differentiated. This tactile experience, according to Leider, distinguishes Andre’s work from abstract, modernist sculpture. “The work made of lead,” Leider observed, “‘looks’ the same as the one made of magnesium, but it weights three tons, while the magnesium work weighs only 450 pounds. It sounds different when you walk on it; it feels different when you touch it; each is warmer or colder than the others; each is more or less lustrous or dull than the others; each makes a different sound when something is dropped on it.” He then associated this material experience to a way of being in and knowing the world through the body that was new to art. Leider wrote, “If materials could be presented in such a manner as not to be overwhelmed or belied by form, it might be possible to introduce into art a new kind of truth, a new source, so to speak, of believability, a truth based so nakedly and explicitly on the facts of the real world as to suggest a revitalized and wholly different ‘realism.’”211 Without referencing it explicitly, Leider’s essay echoed Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of touch as a means of accessing the truth of object and self in the world. “In visual experience,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “…we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of the body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object.”212 As much as any other essay, Leider’s article popularized the idea that Andre’s sculpture offered a means of knowing pure material truth through the body. Fried’s photographs constitute, paradoxically, a visual aide to the tactile experience that Andre’s work ostensibly demanded. When 144 Magnesium Square, 144 Lead Square, and 144 Copper Square were included in Andre’s retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, curator Diane Waldman made similarly expansive claims for their phenomenological significance. “Andre is

211 Philip Leider, “To Introduce a New Kind of Truth,” The New York Times, May 25, 1969, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/05/25/110093041.html?pageNumb er=190. 212 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 316.

98 forcing us to engage his work by physical contact,” she argued, “a sensation that is always initially disorienting, encourages us to acknowledge our own existence first of all. This awareness, and the subsequent identification with his work, has the cumulative effect of forcing a recognition of nature.”213 The Guggenheim retrospective dramatically positioned Andre’s floor works as his most significant accomplishment. All six works from the 1967 and 1969 Dwan Gallery shows were installed on the main ramp of the museum. On the ground floor, Andre installed 37 Pieces of Work, a vast field of one thousand, two hundred ninety six plates of aluminum, copper, steel, magnesium, lead, and zinc (Figure 2.9). The sprawling square sculpture offered, according to Waldman, a direct and concrete knowledge of nature through the body. Andre, always more succinct than his critics, affirmed this idea of art prior to external meaning. “Art is what we do,” he argued. “Culture is what is done to us.”214 Andre had been building a case for an active, physical engagement with sculpture since his first shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In the context of his 1969 show at Dwan Gallery and his 1970 retrospective at the Guggenheim, this active, embodied engagement was charged with the existential and epistemological stakes of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. At a 1968 symposium at Windham College, Andre protested the institutional prohibitions on physical contact and privileging of disengaged aesthetic experience. He equated active, physical engagement with a subject’s essential means of being and knowing through the body. “The hardest thing to learn about art is,” Andre suggested, “that it stands by people, for people and it’s not an institutional thing, it’s not an idealist thing, it’s not a spiritualist thing, it’s a human thing for human beings literally, and people are more or less taught to be afraid of art, to stand back from it, do not touch either with your mind, your body or your soul really.” 215 For Merleau-Ponty, the theory of active, concrete engagement of the object and knowing through the body represented a counter to the passive apprehension of sense data that he associated with empiricism and the idea of a

213 Waldman, Carl Andre, (1970), 21. 214 Quoted in Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” Art in America 55, no. 1 (January-February 1967): 49. 215 Carl Andre, Symposium at Windham College moderated by Dan Graham, April 20, 1968, transcript, Seth Siegelaub Papers, Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam, I.A.20, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

99 constituting consciousness that he associated with Descartes’s idealism.216 For Andre, the theory of active, embodied experience served as a counter to the idealism of conceptual art and the passive experience privileged by the museum. Rejecting the disinterested basis of aesthetic judgment, Andre further argued that the criterion of judgment was whether or not a work of art met human needs.217

Figure 2.9. Carl Andre, 37th Piece of Work, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1970. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Given this phenomenological rhetoric of sensation, bodily knowledge and experience, truth, existence, consciousness, and being in the world that was associated with Andre’s floorworks, it comes as little surprise that Andre and his metal plates have been positioned as pioneering models for body art, even if his work would not be recognized as such by later theorists of this term. In ’s essay “Body Works,” for example, published in the inaugural issue of Avalanche, Andre was credited as a forerunner for artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, and Bruce Nauman who use their

216 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1962). See especially, I.3 “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,” 98-147; II.1 “Sense Experience,” 207-242; and III.1 “The Cogito,” 369-409. 217 Andre, Symposium at Windham College (1968).

100 bodies as medium. In their work, according to Sharp, one sees a collapse of subject and object, the body as an epistemological field, and the body as a place. Sharp argued that the experience of body works could heighten one’s sense of being, echoing a central claim of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.218 Sharp’s positioning of Andre as a pioneer of body art can also be seen as evidence of the exclusionary nature of minimal art’s canonical formation. Sharp fails to mention a single performance by Yvonne Rainer, Tricia Brown, Simone Forti, or any of the other women who directly influenced the work of Oppenheim, Acconci, Nauman, in addition to their influence on Andre. Those women who employed actual bodies as media were occluded in Sharp’s account of body art, while Andre’s metal plates are positioned as originary. As feminist critics charged of Merleau-Ponty, the body and the embodied experience assumed by Andre’s work are abstract and universal. This universal subject, as Sharp’s essay makes clear, is tacitly male. Andre has never explicitly directed his work to a gendered audience. However, he has often designated aesthetic experience as erotic and has occasionally described specific works as having a phallic relationship to space. In his interview with Paul Cummings, for example, Andre suggested that art “…is about an erotic relationship with the world.”219 Andre’s erotics confirm that the body, and the experiences that are available to it, are always gendered. Moreover, they are always charged with race and class. If Andre’s work assumes a body, and imposes a relationship between the body and sculpture, one could claim an inherent violence to his imposed orders, as Anna Chave does.220 Alternatively, one could see an opportunity in sculpture that is conceived to heighten one’s experience of one’s own body as well as the body of others. Feminist critics of Merleau-Ponty, including Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and Diane Coole acknowledge the universalizing of the male body in phenomenology, as well as the heteronormative concept of sexuality entrenched within it. At the same time, these theorists, along with Amelia Jones, note the critical potential of Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the body as a site

218 Willoughby Sharp, “Body Works,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970): 14-17. Andre’s role in the emergence of body art is discussed on page 15. 219 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 66. See also, David Sylvester, “Carl Andre,” in Interviews with American Artists (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 284. 220 See note 8. Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44-63; and Anna C. Chave, “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End,” Art Journal Vol. 73, No. 4 (Winter 2014): 5-21.

101 through which we know others, the world, and ourselves.221 “If the body expresses and dramatizes existential themes,” Butler argues, “and these themes are gender-specific and fully historicized, then sexuality becomes a scene of cultural struggle, improvisation, and innovation, a domain in which the intimate and the political converge, and a dramatic opportunity for expression, analysis, and change.”222 The early reception of Andre’s work does not acknowledge differences of race, gender, and power. The assumed body is not gender-specific nor fully historicized but Andre does not dictate the terms of experience. The recognition of the body as the site of knowing others and the world, as Butler, Young, and Coole note, is the first step towards acknowledging difference and power.

Return to the City The phenomenological rhetoric that Andre and his advocates used to describe the floor works seems to take us far afield from the urban basis of his sculpture. With a few exceptions, the city is absent from Andre’s critical reception and historiography. The exceptions are significant. While Andre’s New York-based critics saw his work as about the body, some critics reviewing shows outside of New York argued that his work was based in the material and spatial identity of Manhattan. Kurt von Meier, reviewing Andre’s solo exhibition at the Los Angeles branch of the Dwan Gallery, suggested that the work is essentially tied to New York City. “One of the most radical of the so-called minimal artists,” von Meier wrote, “…his work is still most possible as Art in New York. Of course it can be shown as Art elsewhere…but the artist himself says that it remains most fully and effectively

221 Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85-100; Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 51-70; Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism (Lanham, MA & Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 197-224. Amelia Jones has been the most important voice to argue for the feminist conscription of Merleau-Ponty in art history as a means of destabilizing formalist criticism. See, for example: Amelia Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History,” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, AU; Berlin, DE: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 71-90. 222 Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description,” (1989), 99.

102 “Art” in and for New York.”223 In his review of Andre’s floor work in a 1968 traveling exhibition in and Chicago, Lawrence Alloway returned to zoning as a heuristic and tied it to embodied consciousness. “What he does,” Alloway wrote, “is to take possession of the space about his piece (like a sculptural equivalent of Air Rights). To move into the zone is different from standing outside looking at it, and the difference is a movement of participation. By violating our expectations concerning the position and level of art, and by being in Andre’s case, mysteriously unemphatic, ground-plane sculpture brings into the spectators conscious attention his physical location and his doubt...”224 Likewise, Enno Develing, in his catalogue essay accompanying Andre’s 1969 exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, described Andre’s process of making sculpture as rooted in the artist’s experience of city. Develing recounted Andre’s process of walking through industrial sites and the streets of Holland to understand the urban environment before the artist committed to an approach to making sculpture for the exhibition. Of Andre’s process, Develing wrote, “…he noticed a vacant lot behind the museum, which has been used as a dump, awaiting its final destination as a building site for a new hotel. He at once inspected it and, as he later explained, almost felt like being in New York again. Seeing that dump and being used to them in New York somehow resettled a relationship with his environment in The Hague. After lunch he took a bag to the dump and collected a large quantity of old, sometimes rusty metals.”225 Develing connected Andre’s process of production to his embodied experience of the city. Before he could produce work for his exhibition in The Hague, according to Develing, Andre had to physically walk around the city and to get a bodily sense of the general environment. It was only after taking several long walks through the city and its warehouses, which Develing carefully describes in his catalogue essay, that Andre was able to produce new work. For Develing, Andre’s long walks in the city generated a heightened consciousness of the environment that was key to producing work. For Alloway, the experience of walking on the work generated a heightened consciousness of the body in the environment. All three of these critics directly connected the embodied experience of Andre’s work to the experience of the city.

223 Kurt von Meier, “Los Angeles,” Art International 11, no. 4 (April 1967): 51. 224 Lawrence Alloway, “Interfaces and Options: Participatory Art in Milwaukee and Chicago,” Arts Magazine 43, no. 1 (September/October 1968): 28. 225 Enno Develing, Carl Andre (The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1969), 44-45.

103 Following his shows at the Dwan Gallery and his triumphant exhibition of floor works at the Guggenheim, Andre insistently reasserted the city as the ground for his work. The relics of the street and its industrial past, Andre proclaimed, are relocated to the gallery and arranged to stimulate a pure sensation of materiality and a heightened awareness of self and space. In many of the same interviews in which Andre described the phenomenological significance of his sculpture, he pointed to New York City and his concrete experience walking its streets as his site and method of production. The materials for his floor works were more often bought than found in the street but the body and the city remained directly connected in Andre’s thoughts about sculpture. In the 1970 interview with Phyllis Tuchman in which Andre connects his sculpture to one’s sense of being in the world, he also grounded his work in the material experience of the city from which Untitled (Pizza) and his “indoor vacant lot” derived. “I found that it is necessary,” Andre suggested, “…to return to this state and to make sculpture as if I had no resources at all except what I could scavenge or beg or borrow or steal.”226 In subsequent interviews, he routinely describes the street and the vacant lot as substitutes for the studio and scavenging the city as the method from which his work emerged. “I have always been a scavenger,” Andre explained in 1972, “and one thing was going just along the streets and seeing all this stuff.”227 In the same interview, Andre subsequently clarified that scavenging was both the basis for all of his work and a methodological approach to the world. “What really my work has always sprung from is from scavenging from the world, finding in the world the concrete matter and it’s really in the tradition of direct cutting, it’s the ultimate absurdity of direct cutting in the world and that’s where it comes from, and the other methods have just been eye wash to one degree or another.”228

226 Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” (1970), 60. 227 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, 6. Andre discussed his scavenging throughout this interview. See also transcript pages 29, 30-31, and 41. Andre makes additional references to scavenging in the following: Andre and Frampton, 12 Dialogues 1962- 1963, 67; Carl Andre, interview by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970): 26; Achille Bonito Oliva, “Carl Andre Interviewed,” Domus 515 (October 1972): 53; Andrea Gould, “Dialogues with Carl Andre,” Arts Magazine 48, no. 8 (May 1974): 28; Peter Fuller, “Carl Andre on his sculpture, part I,” Art Monthly 16 (May 1978): 10; Carl Andre, Interview by Barbara Rose, Interview Magazine (June 17, 2013), http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/carl-andre. 228 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 58.

104 Four years later, in an interview with Peter Fuller, Andre was even more explicit in grounding, not just his early assemblages, but all of his work in the city. “Scavenging the streets, industrial sites, and vacant lots is perhaps similar, for me, to what drawing the figure is for Hockney. When I started making sculpture I had no resources except what I could scavenge, borrow, or beg. That was how my practice evolved. If I become too remote from that I think my work will lose whatever vitality it might have.”229 In all of these accounts, Andre connected his thinking about sculpture to a way of being in the city and knowing it through the classed body, negotiating the urban formations of industrial manufacturing and managerial capitalism. To produce work, as Enno Develing observed, Andre had to walk and physically engage with the city, the street, and its material identity. Long after Andre stopped using materials that he collected on the street in his sculpture, he continued to position the city as a field of meaning for the materials that he bought from scrap yards and industrial suppliers. Andre used this urban frame, in part, as a means of distinguishing his sculpture from . More broadly, Andre’s opposition to land art was part of his careful cultivation of an image of urban artist who made urban art. As land art emerged as a vital trajectory in the late-1960s, Andre resisted the association despite his participation in canonical exhibitions such as Dwan Gallery’s Earth Works in 1968. At Dwan, Andre exhibited three photographs of Log Piece and Rock Pile, two pieces that he produced on a summer residency in Aspen, Colorado. Yet, in his 1970 interview with Willoughby Sharp, Andre downplayed the significance of these works, describing them as exercises rather than sculptures and suggesting that Aspen was an inappropriate place for his work and working methods.230 In two subsequent interviews of 1972, Andre reiterated his lack of interest in producing earthworks by pointing to his comfort in the city and its basis as the site of his work. “I’m not a person of the countryside,” he told Achille Bonito Oliva, “I’m a person of the town.”231 And when the subject of land art was raised by Paul Cummings, Andre explained, “I just think I’m pretty much of a city boy and house-bound and I don’t have the romance of the wild open spaces.”232

229 Fuller, “Carl Andre on his sculpture, part I,” (1978), 10. 230 Carl Andre, interview by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970): 19, 23. 231 Carl Andre, interview by Achille Bonito Oliva, Domus 515 (October 10, 1972): 54. 232 Andre, Oral history interview by Paul Cummings, (1972), 56.

105 When Gianfranco Gorgoni sought to include a photographic study of Andre in his and Grégoire Müller’s 1972 book, The New Avant-Garde, Andre refused to have his work reproduced. Instead, Andre took Gorgoni on a walking tour of Lower West Side of Manhattan and directed him to photograph materials such as metal plates, bricks and wood beams that were piled on streets and sidewalks.233 In a book that strived to present a new image of the artist, virtually every other participant was theatrically represented while working, alongside photographs of completed work. In the most well known photographs from the book, for example, Richard Serra appeared casting molten lead and propping massive steel plates, Robert Morris drove a forklift, and Robert Smithson directed bulldozers and dump trucks. In all of these cases, Gorgoni and Müller conveyed an artistic identity that refers to Hans Namuth’s photographs of in the act of painting but grounded the new ideals of artistic identity in the equally heroic and masculine images of manual labor and construction. Only Andre and Walter de Maria do not appear in the act of producing or installing their work.234 Through Gorgoni’s photographs, Andre established the city as the direct source of his sculpture. Rather than a synthesis of manual labor and the autographic forming of raw material, as we see in the photographs of Serra, Smithson, Morris, Bruce Nauman, and , the photographs that Andre directed Gorgoni to take present the work of art as anonymous urban debris or sorted raw materials—the “metals of commerce.” Andre’s sculpture was already there, one could say, on the street. When Andre was not explicitly grounding his sculpture in the materiality of the city, he described it in terms that held great significance in the politics of the body in 1960s New York. Andre connected his mode of production and the aesthetic experience that his work provoked to walking in the city. As Enno Develing suggested, Andre had to explore The Hague on foot “to get acquainted with the general atmosphere” before he could produce sculpture. Andre then made works that compelled the viewer to walk. He positioned the road or path as an analogue to his sculpture and walking as a model of aesthetic experience. “My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road,” he told Phyllis Tuchman in 1970. “We either

233 Andre gave explicit directions to Gorgoni to photograph specific things and places in the city. Carl Andre, interview with the author, December 2014. 234 Andre appears in a single image—an extreme close-up of his face—while de Maria directed the authors to include photographs of his dealers in lieu of himself or his work. See Grégoire Müller and Gianfranco Gorgoni, The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of The Seventies (New York: Washington, & London: Praeger Publishers, 1972).

106 have to travel on them or beside them. But we don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it. Most of my works—certainly the successful ones—have been ones that are in a way causeways—they cause you to make your way along them or around them or to move the spectator over them. They’re like roads, but certainly not fixed point vistas.”235 Andre later clarified that the experience of the road that he referred to was walking, not driving. “I said long ago that my ideal sculpture is a road but better than that is the kind of path that gets worn down by people walking diagonally across a vacant field.”236 The experience of walking, for Andre, would reorient the body and heighten one’s awareness of the general environment. Andre was not alone in 1960s New York City in his emphasis on walking as means of heightening one’s embodied awareness of the general environment. It was a core aspect of Jane Jacobs’s approach to the city and, as we have seen, of John Lindsay’s urban politics. “You’ve got to get out and walk,” urged Jacobs.237 Jacobs argued that one could only know the city by physically experiencing it. This embodied engagement of the street was opposed to the “vicarious way to deal with reality” of architects and planners. For Jacobs, the physical form of the street must be conceived to encourage walking. Citing the research of urban theorist Kevin Lynch, Jacobs suggested that there must be some object of contrast on the street to heighten perception. As Andre proposed the use of sculpture to alter an environment and make it more conspicuous, Jacobs proposed the use of contrast to disrupt the increasingly homogenous city and to heighten one’s experience of the street.238 Both championed walking in the city as an intervention to counter the homogenous, abstract, and asocial order of managerial urban space. Both asserted the body as a site of knowledge in the city. By the mid-1960s, walking in New York City was a political act. The relative walkability of the city and the need to encourage more pedestrian space was a primary

235 Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” (1970), 57. Andre often cited the road as an analogue to his work. The reference first appeared in: Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” (1966), 17. 236 Brigitte Kölle and Carl Andre, “My Life as an Artist Would Have Ended Long Ago…: A Written Conversation with Carl Andre,” in okey dokey Konrad Fischer, ed. Brigitte Kölle (Köln, : Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007), 94. 237 Jacobs, “Downtown for People,” (1958), 159. 238 Ibid., 158, 164, 176, 183.

107 concern of urban planners and theorists influenced by Lynch and Jacobs.239 The call to walk fostered by Jacobs and her followers was opposed to the highway-centric vision of the city that had been endorsed by Robert Moses. It motivated John Lindsay’s approach to urban planning, as well as his method of dealing with political crises. Walking was a core part of his campaign for mayor in 1965, when posters featuring a confident Lindsay strolling down a city street appeared all over the city.240 He made regular walking tours to foster communication and project a political image in diverse communities Lindsay pursued policies that would encourage walking in the city. He prioritized spaces for walking over new highway construction in his 1969 comprehensive Plan for New York City.241 Lindsay described the ameliorative impact of his neighborhood walks and the physical outreach that they offered in his 1969 book The City, which served as a memoir of his first term and a vision for the future of the city. “But what we saw in early 1966 was that within the ghetto,” he wrote, “discontent and alienation were at the breaking point. We saw that a basic commitment to ending that alienation through greater contact was essential.”242 For Lindsay, Jacobs, and their allies in urban planning circles, walking was a means of asserting a progressive politics of the urban body. It was a means of knowing the city

239 See for example: Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York, Chicago, and : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 170; Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 245-250; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd; Whittlesey, Conklin, and Rossant; Alan M. Vorhees & Associates, The Lower Manhattan Plan (New York: The New York City Planning Commission, 1966); 1, 60; New York City Planning Commission, Plan for New York City 1969: A Proposal (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1969), 16, 21, 31, 136; Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1969); Van Ginkel Associates, Movement in Midtown: A summary of a study prepared in cooperation with Office of Midtown Planning and Development, Office of the Mayor, City of New York John V. Lindsay, Mayor (New York: Van Ginkel Associates, 1970); Simon Breines and William J. Dean, The Pedestrian Revolution: Streets without Cars (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); Simon Breines and William J. Dean, “Footpower in the Cities,” The Nation, September 27, 1975: 271-274; Boris Pushkarev and Jeffrey M. Zupan, Urban Space for Pedestrians: A Report of the Regional Plan Association (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1975). 240 John Neary, “The Lindsay Style,” Life 64, no. 21 (May 24, 1968): 74-82; Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 150; Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 43. 241 New York City Planning Commission, Plan for New York City 1969: A Proposal, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1969), 16, 31. 242 John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969), 92.

108 through the body and intervening in a conflicted urban space. Many artists in 1960s New York City developed sculpture that compelled walking or explored forms of walking in performances. These include some of Andre’s closest peers, such as Robert Morris, Richard Serra and Yvonne Rainer, as well as others in the wider orbit of minimal art, such as Trisha Brown and Bruce Nauman. Yet few connected the aesthetic significance of walking to the experience of the city as explicitly as Andre. Like Lindsay, Andre connected the politics of walking to an assertion of one’s humanity and a means of establishing the social character of space. When Andre proposed walking as a necessary part of his sculpture production and a means of perceiving a general environment, and when he produced work that framed walking as an aesthetic experience, he positioned his work squarely in the discourse of the city in the 1960s. Andre, who was so critical of the economics of the art market, remained largely within it. For all of his reference to the city, Andre produced very little work in its public spaces. While many of his peers mounted works and performances in New York City’s parks, streets, and vacant lots, Andre made no work in the city in the 1960s and only a few sculptures in the city’s public space since 1970. Other artists produced work in the street to defy the commercial and institutional protocols of the museum and gallery system. While he was still represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Andre repeatedly sought public commissions and other opportunities to make works outdoors and in the city. However, these projects never came to fruition. In a letter of 1965 to John Myers, Andre indicated that his primary aspiration was to produce large-scale outdoor commissions.243 In early 1967, he planned a project for the New York City Parks Department that was derailed when Thomas Hoving stepped down as commissioner.244 When Andre did produce work for New York City’s public spaces, it was almost always tied to a museum or gallery context. When his work was not obviously part of an institutional framework, it attracted little attention.

243 Carl Andre, letter to John Meyers [sic], October 4, 1965, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art. 244 The plans are referred to in multiple letters between Andre and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Tibor de Nagy, letter to Carl Andre, February 1, 1967, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950-1988, Archives of American Art; Carl Andre, letter to Tibor de Nagy, February 3, 1967, “Carl Andre” folder, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, 1950- 1988, Archives of American Art.

109 Andre installed his first two works on a city street in conjunction with his retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1970. Reef, which was originally made for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion” exhibition, was installed between two columns in the Guggenheim’s driveway.245 Consisting of twenty-five Styrofoam beams, Reef partially blocked the threshold between public and private space. It also called to mind the similarly obstructive work in Styrofoam that Andre had installed in his first exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and subsequently at the Park Place Gallery. Andre’s Fall was installed on the sidewalk in front of the museum (Figure 2.10). It consisted of twenty-one plates of hot- rolled steel, each bent to form a right angle. A six-foot horizontal section of each plate lay flat on the ground and a six-foot vertical section formed a wall supplementing the museum’s façade.

Figure 2.10. Carl Andre, Fall, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1970. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

245 The driveway originally connected the rotunda and the Monitor building, where the museum shop currently is housed. It was enclosed between 1974 and 1975, when the Guggenheim carried out structural renovations and additions designed by Donald E. Freed.

110

Fall was first exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden in 1968, when it was included in the “Art of the Real” exhibition. At MoMA, Fall was isolated from the street, secluded within the walled garden. At the Guggenheim, its installation on the sidewalk constituted an institutional appropriation of public space. Diane Waldman, the curator of Andre’s retrospective, had to petition the city for permission to install the work on the sidewalk in front of the museum. In her letter to the New York City Commissioner of Highways, Waldman indicated that Fall was conceived for an outdoor space, which the Guggenheim lacked, and gave assurances that the work would only take up six of the sidewalk’s twenty-five foot width. The installation would leave “more than ample room for pedestrian traffic,” Waldman suggested, and “in no way present a hazard to the public.”246 Regardless of its relative safety, Fall represented an incursion in public space. Abutting the low wall that extended along Fifth Avenue to the corner of East 88th Street, Fall both obscured the partition between institutional and urban space, and extended the former into the latter. At the same time, Fall seemed closer in character to the street than the museum. Its rigid form and scuffed surface countered the curved, white walls of the building. Uncharacteristically, the steel plates used for Fall retained white markings scribbled and printed at the foundry. The thickness of the plates—one inch instead of the three- eighths of an inch that Andre typically used for his floor works—was the standard size of steel road plates that were a familiar sight on streets throughout the city. Yet neither Fall nor Reef registered in the reviews of the exhibition. Even John Perreault, a critic and street art pioneer who reviewed the show for The Village Voice, simply noted the two outdoor works before discussing the floor works, which he considered the primary interest of the exhibition.247 Fall and Reef received even less attention in Peter Schjeldahl’s review in The New

246 Diane Waldman, letter to Vincent Gibney, Commissioner of Highways, City of New York, September 21, 1970, Exhibition Records, File 234, Box 1136, Folder 18, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives 247 John Perreault, “Solutions?,” The Village Voice, October 8, 1970, 18-20. Perreault was an organizer, along with and Hannah Weiner, of the guerilla exhibition “Street Works,” held in multiple installments in New York City in Spring 1969. See: John Perreault, “Street Works,” Arts Magazine 44, no. 3 (December 1969-January 1970): 18-20; and Lucy Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time: A Survey of Street Works Downtown,” in New York—Downtown: SoHo, ed. René Block (Berlin: Akademie der Künste—Berliner Festwochen, 1976), 183-191.

111 York Times and neither work was mentioned in reviews by Grégoire Müller in Arts Magazine or Hilton Kramer in The New York Times.248 Andre installed three works in Manhattan’s public plazas in the later 1970s and early 1980s. Like the two outdoor works at the Guggenheim, the plaza installations failed to garner much critical attention. In 1979, Andre installed two sculptures in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, at Second Avenue and 47th Street. On the lower portion of the multi-level plaza, Andre placed Fermi, which was a massive square formation composed of one hundred and twenty-one fir timbers, each measuring twelve-by-twelve-by-thirty-six inches. On the upper deck of the plaza, he installed eighty-nine additional fir blocks in two rows of alternating vertical and horizontal orientations. Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times suggested that Andre’s sculptures were “…so low-profile that it makes you long for an old-style equestrian statue…”249 In 1981, Phyllis Lambert asked Andre to make a work for the Seagram Building Plaza. He installed Fermion, made of one hundred blocks of granite, in the center of the public plaza (Figure 2.11). The work, which was dwarfed by the expansive space of the plaza and by the massive tower behind it, was never reviewed. This was a measure of success for Andre. Noting the relationship between the large open space, the mass of the building, and the relatively small sculpture, Andre declared, “…it worked. Because I never wanted my work to be particularly conspicuous. Ideally, if you didn’t feel like experiencing my work, fine, don’t. I didn’t want stuff to knock you in the eye.”250 The low-profile experience that inspired Grace Glueck’s nostalgia for the equestrian sculpture was an affirmation of Andre’s goal to cultivate an aesthetic experience of the body rather than the eye. His floor works at the Guggenheim were conceived to disappear in one’s peripheral vision, so that one could sense the elemental identity of the metal plates through their temperature, weight, and the sounds that they made when walked upon. It would seem that Andre’s work requires an institutional setting for this experience of heightened material and spatial awareness to register. Andre’s metal plates, bricks, and

248 Peter Schjeldahl, “High Priest of Minimal,” The New York Times, October 18, 1970, 23; Grégoire Müller, “Carl Andre at the Guggenheim,” Arts Magazine 45, no. 2 (November 1970): 57; Hilton Kramer, “Andre ‘Carpets’ at Guggenheim,” The New York Times, October 3, 1970. 249 Grace Glueck, “New Sculpture Under the Sun, From Staten I. to the Bronx,” The New York Times, August 3, 1979. 250 Carl Andre, interview with the author, December 3, 2014.

112 wood beams stood in stark contrast with the homogenous and cleansed space of the gallery and museum. This contrast between the material remains of New York’s eroding industrial base and the purified, anti-urban space of the corporate gallery was conceived to heighten one’s awareness of body and space. When Andre deployed these same material strategies in the street and public spaces of the city, no one noticed. Installed outside, his sculptures lacked the spatial and material contrast with surroundings and, more importantly, they did not require any transgressions of bodily comportment. In a gallery, particularly in the 1960s, a sculpture conceived to be walked on beckoned one first to breach conventions of appropriate behavior. On a New York street, however, walking on metal plates or around piles of materials is an everyday experience that provokes little conscious thought.

Figure 2.11. Carl Andre, Fermion, Seagram Building Plaza, 1981. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

113 By the early 1980s, there was little conflict between New York City’s fading industrial order and the corporate takeover of space. The opposition had been resolved. The city was no longer in the midst of a social and economic transition, as it had been in the mid-1960s, when Andre’s bricks and metal plates could register in both the industrial past and the corporate future. Andre’s blocks of smooth cut granite offered no material, spatial, or morphological contrast with the public plaza. Fermion did not engage the body in unexpected ways that could compel a greater awareness of the general environment, the body, or the city. It presented a conventional aesthetic experience in a now conventional urban space. Andre’s plaza works, in short, did not present the kind of contrast of form or use that Jane Jacobs called for and Andre pursued to reorient the body and heighten perception of urban space. Andre’s most impactful public sculpture was installed in Hartford in 1976, rather than New York City. Regardless, it gives us an indication of his goals for urban art. Stone Field Sculpture is constructed of thirty-six large boulders of local brownstone, gneiss, basalt, sandstone, and soapstone (Figure 2.12). They are arranged in eight rows, with increasing numbers of boulders of decreasing size in each row. Several feet separate the boulders within a row, allowing one to comfortably walk between the stones, and there is even more space between the rows. The linear arrangement organizes the asymmetric arc of land into a grid, although the natural variability of the stones’ size, texture, and color effectively confounds the imposed spatial order. Stone Field Sculpture was an explicit attempt by Andre to revitalize an urban, public space and to reorient the body within it. Unlike his public projects in New York, Andre did not attempt to build an urban sculpture out of materials grounded in the economic order of the city. Instead, with Stone Field Sculpture Andre introduced resolutely natural materials into Hartford’s urban field. In Hartford, Andre worked self-consciously as if an urban designer, attempting to rezone a section of the city by changing its use, clarifying the sensorial experience of the city and reorienting the body within it. The sculpture, which was commissioned by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, was conceived to transform a leftover and vacant space in the heart of the city into a functional park. To achieve this aim, Andre employed the top-down spatial techniques of the urban planner and claimed to create a new urban space for the working class. While Andre’s encouragement of

114 walking and his idea of sculpture to heighten perception of space align with Jane Jacobs, his approach to spatial seizure and the city owe more to Robert Moses.

Figure 2.12. Carl Andre, Stone Field Sculpture, 1976. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

115 “Of course,” Andre suggested, “everything that’s public in America is imposed on people from above. Nothing ever gets generated by the public. My work is imposed as much as any architectural monstrosity, but that’s the social order that we have.”251 As he did in his early shows at Tibor de Nagy and Dwan Gallery, Andre synthesized these core urban contradictions. With Stone Field Sculpture, he defined a space by imposing an order from above and by claiming that the meaning of the work will be directed from below, through use. Andre’s goal was to create an essentially social space. “I hope the people of Hartford who pass that way benefit,” he suggested. “What was formerly just a bleak stretch of lawn is now a place which invites loitering, standing about, taking of lunch, leaning against stones, and talking to your neighbor. I hope it’s helped to civilize that small section of Hartford. A park is a civilizing influence.”252 The civilizing effects of Stone Field Sculpture, according to Andre and his critics, would occur through the body, “loitering” and “leaning.” The formerly vacant urban space would be revitalized through the embodied engagement of the public with the boulders and the social interaction between bodies. The sliver of land that Andre’s sculpture occupies is in the center of Hartford, surrounded by major historical, cultural, social, and corporate sites. It is immediately adjacent to the Wadsworth Atheneum; Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground; the beaux-arts Travelers Tower and Tower Square, home of Travelers Insurance; and Bushnell Towers & Plaza, a modernist residential development designed by I. M. Pei. The plot of land allocated to Stone Field Sculpture was surrounded by meaningful public spaces but, one could say, the site itself was marginal and meaningless. To create meaning, Andre pursued strategies of social, formal, and material contrast that would encourage the type of heightened embodied awareness of the city that Jane Jacobs called for and Andre worked towards. Rather than use materials that he found in the city or could be regularly experienced in it, Andre obtained a geological survey of and selected stones common to the region.253 The boulders ostensibly referred to the gravestones in the adjacent Ancient Burying Ground but in

251 Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, “Indentations in Space,” New Yorker (Nov 21, 1977): 52. 252 Peter Fuller, “Carl Andre on his sculpture, Part I,” Art Monthly 16 (May 1978): 5. 253 Cathleen T. Calmer, letter to Carl Andre with attached “Geological Report for Public Sculpture in Hartford,” January 27, 1976, “Carl Andre” file, Wadsworth Atheneum Archives. Calmer, an employee of the Wadsworth Atheneum, forwarded the geological report to Andre. The reports included information prepared by several local geologists with expertise in the types of rock common to Connecticut.

116 Andre’s work, the stones were massive and uncut. They were seemingly transported from a pristine natural landscape directly into the city.254 John Russell, reviewing the work for The New York Times, wrote, “At one stroke Carl Andre has brought prehistory to life and given a new dimension of time, feeling and experience to an area badly in need of it.”255 In bringing these seemingly raw, natural objects into the city, Andre sought to create a serene space of rest and relaxation opposed to the urban but within the city. For David Bourdon, who first situated Andre’s work in the discourse of the city in the mid-1960s, Stone Field Sculpture organized a space for the body. “By and large Stone Field is a tranquil, meditative space,” Bourdon wrote, “Being in the piece differs remarkably from viewing it from the outside. Inside Stone Field, the visitor tends to experience the boulders as other bodies; he also becomes acutely aware of his own size in relation to the progressively sized rocks.”256 According to Bourdon, the urban significance of Andre’s work was bound to its phenomenology. For Andre, this experience had the capacity to change the subject. Stone Field Sculpture created a space filled with surrogate bodies around which the urban subject could attain a heightened sense of self in immediate and concrete perception, which, according to Andre, would be civilizing and social. This is the moment of self-consciousness and the basis of genuine social interaction that was described by Merleau- Ponty. Stone Field Sculpture demonstrates the ultimate function of phenomenological sculpture in the city. In Hartford, Andre sought to organize a new kind of space in the city that would heighten one’s consciousness of body and city and stimulate social exchange. The social activity organized by Stone Field Sculpture could reorient that body and revitalize an asocial and

254 The lack of work conventionally associated with sculpture caused a major controversy when the Stone Field Sculpture was installed, as some local residents protested the discrepancy between Andre’s fee and the relative lack of evident material manipulation on the artist’s part. For details on the uproar, see: Tompkins, “Indentations in Space;” Fuller, “Carl Andre on his sculpture, Part I;” and Diane Henry, “Some Residents of Hartford Are Throwing Stones at Sculptor’s Extended ‘Serenity of the Graveyard,’” The New York Times, September 5, 1977, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/09/05/92272232.html?pageNumbe r=21 255 John Russell, “ Art People,” The New York Times, September 2, 1977, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/09/02/75681978.html?pageNumbe r=60. 256 David Bourdon, “Carl Andre,” Arts Magazine 52, No 4 (December 1977): 5.

117 vacant urban space. “What you have to ask about every work of art,” Andre suggested, “does it leave you in a better condition than it found you?”257

257 Quoted in Russell, “Art People,” (1977).

118 Chapter 3: Tony Smith and the Body Politics of Bryant Park

Figure 3.1. Tony Smith overseeing installation in Bryant Park, January 20, 1967. Photograph by New York City Parks Department. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

On the morning of January 20, 1967, Tony Smith arrived in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan to meet a truck full of his stark plywood sculptures, painted black, and ready for assembly (Figure 3.1). This was to be an important day for the artist and for the city. It was Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York and the first sculpture exhibition organized and sponsored by the city and held in a city park. It introduced Smith’s work to a broad audience and established a new approach to public space and urban renewal advocated by John Vliet Lindsay, who was inaugurated Mayor of the City of New York one-year earlier. This exhibition was to serve as a model for the instrumental use of art to revitalize the city and reorganize the body politic. Bryant Park was the site of competing claims for authority in 1960s New York. The Lindsay administration fought for control against both the gay community that used the park and the previous generation of power brokers that shaped New York’s public spaces. Public sculpture was the medium through which this dispute materialized. Smith’s sculptures were deployed to change the use of Bryant Park,

119 discouraging non-conforming activities deemed deviant, encouraging a safe space of corporate leisure, and attracting a new public that conformed to Lindsay’s ideals. By aligning his administration with vanguard sculpture, Lindsay projected a new image of progressive civic authority and order. At the same time, the failure of the exhibition in Smith’s eyes—his recognition of the essentially suburban identity of the work—would motivate his pursuit of a sculptural form appropriate to an urban scale and context, with the phenomenological potential to address the problem of the body in the city. The basic contours of Smith’s Bryant Park show are well known. It is an important moment in the historiography of minimal art, postwar public sculpture, and the Lindsay administration. Smith’s exhibition is viewed as an inaugural moment in the civic patronage of art in postwar America and evidence of Lindsay’s progressive cultural policies. However, there is little overlap in these historiographies. Despite its status as the first public art exhibition organized by New York City, there has been limited study of the urban significance of Smith’s work for the Lindsay administration. This chapter assesses the political stakes of the Lindsay administration’s use of vanguard sculpture to revitalize the public spaces of New York City, as well as Smith’s expanding conception of urban form. The phenomenological turn in mid-1960s sculpture, in which Smith played an important role, resonated with city politics and contemporaneous theories of urban design. In all three fields, the mobile body was posited as a site of knowledge. However, the body in the city is always charged with race and gender and the authority over the embodied production of knowledge is rarely distributed with equality. Lindsay is typically remembered for his politics of tolerance and his support of marginalized and minority groups. His tolerance, however, did not readily extend to the gay community. Lindsay considered the increasingly open presence of the gay community in Midtown Manhattan to be a threat to his corporate image of the city and his national political ambitions. The Tony Smith exhibition was planned at a moment of intense condemnation of gay cruising in Bryant Park by members of the Lindsay administration, including Thomas Hoving, Lindsay’s Parks Commissioner and the organizer of the exhibition. The instrumental use of Smith’s sculptures to reorient the park and to counter the queer appropriation of public space is a key episode in the postwar development of public art. It sheds important light on the Lindsay administration’s politics of public space and, more generally, on the civic deployment of art to accomplish those politics. It is also a

120 crucial moment in the development of Smith’s sculpture. There is no evidence to suggest that Smith was aware or supportive of the Lindsay administration’s homophobic rhetoric of exclusion in Bryant Park. However, after the Bryant Park exhibition closed, and feeling dissatisfied with the relation of his work to the city, Smith worked to develop an alternative mode of urban sculpture on phenomenological grounds that incorporated the mobile body and encouraged social exchange and inclusiveness. Smith’s idea of urban sculpture was directly informed by the shape of the city and his belief that aesthetic experience could provoke an intensified awareness of self, others, and the urban environment. His subsequent pursuit of urban sculpture as an embodied field of exchange and inclusion suggests the limits of these oppositions, even as they remain entrenched in the idea of modernism.

Suburban Minimalism, before Bryant Park Smith’s sculpture had been exhibited just a few times prior to the show in Bryant Park. He was represented by a single sculpture in the “Black, White and Grey” exhibition held in 1964 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the 1966 Whitney Annual, and the “Primary Structures” show at The Jewish Museum in the same year. All three exhibitions are now recognized as crucial events in the institutional consolidation of minimal art.258 His first solo exhibition was organized, not by a commercial gallery, but by curators Samuel Wagstaff and Samuel Green for concurrent museum shows held in November and December of 1966 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Most of the works in these early exhibitions, including those in the Bryant Park show, were mock-ups for sculptures to be produced in steel. They were simple geometric forms constructed in plywood and roughly painted with a dull black finish. Several works were based on simple combinations of rectangular prisms, such as The Elevens Are Up (1963), which was included in the “Black, White and Grey” show (Figure 3.2). This work was composed of two 8’ x 8’ x 2’ forms, placed in parallel with a four foot gap between them. The Elevens Are Up was, therefore, a cubic form with a corridic space in which the viewer could enter and traverse the interior of the sculpture. Other sculptures, such as Willy (1962),

*An earlier version of this chapter has been published in Public Art Dialogue 7, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 138-159. 258 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 2001).

121 were composed of asymmetrical, sprawling and arching combinations of tetrahedral and octahedral forms. Most famously, Smith ordered a simple cube, the six-foot Die (1962), to be fabricated in steel.

Figure 3.2. Tony Smith, The Elevens Are Up, 1963. Photograph by New York City Parks Department. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The plywood sculptures were built and first displayed in the yard of Smith’s house and studio in South Orange, New Jersey. Before landing in his backyard, Die and the smaller Black Box (1962) were fabricated by the Industrial Welding Company of Newark, after Smith encountered the manufacturer’s billboard on his regular commute from South Orange to Manhattan.259 Smith saw his backyard, not just as a place of fabrication or storage but as the natural and most appropriate home of these early works (Figure 3.3). “The work was done at a time when I never thought of it in connection with the art world, whatever,” Smith

259 The details of the fabrication are described in: “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time (October 13, 1967): 84.

122 reported in a 1968 interview. “I thought of it in relation to my backyard. […] I saw a void out there among the leaves and got a certain amount of kick out of filling it.”260

Figure 3.3. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The suburban context in which Smith lived and worked was likely how many people, particularly the New York audience, were first introduced to his work. In an interview with Samuel Wagstaff, published in the December 1966 Artforum to publicize the exhibition in Hartford and Philadelphia, ten of the sixteen photographs of Smith’s sculpture were set in

260 Tony Smith, interviewed for “Art of the Sixties: The Walls Come Tumbling Down,” Eye on Art CBS, 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqsNSprAsss

123 his yard, framed by an unkempt lawn and a leafy surround of trees and shrubs.261 This interview, and Smith’s sculpture, became a ubiquitous point of reference amongst his peers and critics, who were alternately attracted to or repelled by Smith’s account of boundless aesthetic experience on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. In an oft-quoted passage, Smith described the trip: When I was teaching at in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.262

Smith’s critics and younger peers seized on this passage. Its fecundity for the expansive aesthetic ambitions of the 1960s was recognized immediately, debated in several of the most important texts on minimal art, and has subsequently become a standard point of reference in historiography. The original debate over the precise nature of embodied experience that Smith described and its relative aesthetic merits, dividing art historian Michael Fried from artists such as Robert Morris, played a crucial role in the canonical formation of minimal art. Morris’s turn to phenomenology prioritized a mobile experience of sculpture that was open and durational, analogous to Smith’s experience of the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike and anathema to Fried’s aesthetics of instantaneity.263 However, this phenomenological focus

261 Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. “Talking to Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, No. 4 (December 1966): 14-19. 262 Ibid., 19. 263 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42-44; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 42-44; Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, No. 10 (Summer 1967): 19-20. The passage also plays a particularly important role in the criticism of Lucy Lippard, who was Smith’s most dedicated

124 obscured the local significance of Smith’s story.264 By 1966, the mystical drive on the New Jersey Turnpike that Smith described was not a transgressive act; it was a typical experience of the suburban commuter. Smith was also not the only one recognizing the aesthetic significance of the suburban highway and its challenge to sculpture. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were numerous accounts of highway aesthetics in prominent texts of urban design. When Smith’s account was published in 1966, for example, Kevin Lynch had already described the New Jersey Turnpike as a “monumental industrial landscape.”265 And the idea that the highway and sculpture were analogues was already something of a trope in the discourse of urban planning, having been established in the writings of Lynch, Sigfried Giedion, Christopher Tunnard, and Boris Pushkarev.266 As a student of architecture with an enduring interest in urban design, Smith would have been familiar with Sigfried Giedion’s landmark account of the sculptural form of highways and aesthetic experience of driving in Space, Time and Architecture.267 In 1941, in

early advocate, and in the theoretical texts of Robert Smithson. See: Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible,’” Art International 11, no. 6 (Summer 1967): 24-27; Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” Artforum 5, No. 10 (Summer 1967): 40; and Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum 7, No. 1 (September 1968): 45-46. The debate remains contested in the historiography of minimal art. See: Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, No. 5 (January 1990): 52-53; and Meyer, Minimalism, (2001), 229-234. 264 There are a few notable exceptions in which different aspects of New Jersey’s suburban identity are assessed. Caroline Jones examines the role of Smith’s narrative as a model for artists seeking a site of production beyond the studio, through the suburbs, and into the technological sublime. Jones also makes an important historiographical contribution to the debate over the significance of Smith’s highway excursion. See Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 275-280, 315-318. See also Kelly Baum, “On the Road,” in New Jersey as Non- Site (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), 11-13. 265 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Meyer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), 14. 266 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA; The Harvard University Press, 1941), 554; Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1963), 159, 169-170, 176-177, 266; Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Meyer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), 4. 267 Smith’s studied architecture with Lázsló Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. He subsequently studied briefly with at Taliesin and worked on

125 terms that would be echoed by Smith, Giedion had described the new scale of the highway as it moved through and altered the American landscape. Moreover, Giedion had seen the highway as a formal and spatial equivalent of sculpture. “These bridges, their mounting drives, and the modern sculpture of numberless single or triple cloverleaves prove that the possibilities of a great scale are inherent in our period.”268 Giedion argued that highway experience was essentially aesthetic and, like Smith, recognized this as a mobile and durational aesthetics. “As with many other creations born out of the spirit of this age,” he wrote, “the meaning and beauty of the parkway cannot be grasped from a single point of observation…It can be revealed only by movement…269 Like Smith’s formative account, Giedion’s highway was resolutely suburban. He pointed specifically to the Northern State Parkway in Long Island and the Merritt Parkway in Westchester County as exemplars. Giedion’s ideal of the highway was formed in response to Robert Moses’s pastoral parkways, which then ran around Manhattan, into Westchester, and across Long Island.270 Giedion described the seamless integration of road and nature on Moses’s parkways, which framed dramatic views of the landscape punctuated by soaring infrastructural monuments. “The road is laid into the countryside, grooved into it between the gentle green slopes blending so naturally into the contiguous land that the eye cannot distinguish between what is nature and what the contribution of the landscape architect.”271 The harmonious relationship between road and landscape, according to Giedion, was incompatible with the city. “[The parkway] simply has a different scale from that of the existing city,” Giedion wrote presciently, before Moses’s brutal introduction of the highway

several of Wright’s residential projects. Smith continued to work as an architect through the early 1950s. His architectural work is well documented in: John Keenen, “Architecture,” in Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor, ed. Robert Storr (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 36-70; and Craig Buckley, “‘A Definite and Persistent Monster’: Tony Smith’s Urban Vision,” Perspecta 44 (2011): 70-85, 197-200. 268 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA; The Harvard University Press, 1941), 554. 269 Ibid., 554. 270 Giedion credits Moses specifically and includes numerous aerial photographs of Moses’s most important highway projects, including the Triborough Bridge, Grand Central Parkway, and Henry Hudson Parkway. Ibid., 554-558. On Giedion’s embrace of Moses, see: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1982), 298-302. 271 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, (1941), 552.

126 to the inner city began in the late 1940s. “No facilities of approach can really accomplish anything unless the city changes its actual structure.”272 As Fried, Morris, and many others recognized, Tony Smith was highly attuned to the sensation and perception of an ambulatory body and how movement impacted the reception of his sculpture. His recognition of industrial and technological forms as a model for art was a crucial point of contention amongst his peers. What was less often recognized was Smith’s equal sensitivity to the different modes of mobility that potentially framed aesthetic experience. For Smith, the embodied experiences of driving on a highway or the streets of South Orange, walking on a city street or through Bryant Park, were fundamentally different. Many of the same urban and architecture theorists that described the aesthetics of highway experience also argued that the sensorial information gleaned from distinct environments and mobilities was, likewise, specific to them.273 Smith’s recognition of these differences was only hinted at in his interview with Wagstaff. Yet his privileging of a mobile, embodied experience of sculpture that unfolds over time echoed an idea of the city first posited by Giedion and Lynch. Smith’s account of his drive on the unfinished highway was celebrated by artists such as Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim for its location of aesthetic experience outside of the museum and gallery, as well as its recognition of significant form in the industrial and infrastructural landscape. The passage was also couched in a call for a radically new approach to public art. This new public art was to be drawn from and responsive to the urban environment, rather than the interior architecture of the gallery. “I view art as something vast,” Smith professed, and continued:

272 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, (1941), 554. The parkway and the highway are related terms, for Giedion, with the former serving as something like the ideal form of the latter. The terminological distinction was largely rendered moot by Moses, who used his authority over New York’s city and state parks to build sprawling highway systems, ostensibly to provide access to public parks. The distinction between Moses’s early parkways and his postwar introduction of the highway to the city is well described in numerous texts, including, most famously: Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974). 273 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960); Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Meyer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), and Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1963).

127 I think highway systems fall down because they are not art. Art today is an art of postage stamps. I love the Secretariat Building on the U.N., placed like a salute. In terms of scale, we have less art per square mile, per capita, than any society ever had. We are puny. […] In Hackensack a huge gas tank is all underground. I think of art in a public context and not in terms of mobility of works of art. Art is just there.274

In some ways this passage reflects a conventional view of public art as a means to express the grandeur and authority of the nation. The departure from convention occurs with the equation of public art and public works. Smith was afforded the opportunity to think of and produce “art in a public context” for his 1966 solo exhibition in Hartford and Philadelphia. This joint exhibition, curated by Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. and Sam Green, directly informed Smith’s show in Bryant Park. Both the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Institute of Contemporary Art included sculptures in public spaces adjacent to their respective museum buildings. As the Wadsworth Atheneum was the larger venue, showing twelve of the twenty sculptures in the joint exhibition, Smith pushed to include more works outside the museum. Smith and Wagstaff placed four sculptures in Tower Square, a public space between the museum and neighboring Travelers Tower. A fifth piece, Generation, was included in the catalogue but not constructed for the exhibition due to a lack of funds. Thirty feet in height, width, and depth, with three openings that a viewer could walk through, Generation was conceived for a public square.275 It was to be, in Smith’s words, “…a monument that people can walk under and through…” likely intended for Hartford’s Constitution Plaza.276 Nevertheless, Smith constructed four major sculptures for Hartford—Amaryllis, Spitball, The Snake is Out, and Cigarette—all plywood mock-ups based on the modular extension of a tetrahedral unit. Like Generation, these works were conceived to stimulate physical engagement and alter the experience of public space.

274 Wagstaff, Jr. “Talking to Tony Smith,” (1966), 17. 275 Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture (Hartford & Philadelphia: Wadsworth Atheneum & The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966), unpaginated; Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. to Thomas Hoving, November 23, 1966, Series 1.1, Box 1, Folder 27, Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, circa 1932-1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 276 Smith’s plan is described in a memorandum from Samuel Wagstaff to James Elliot, Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, June 8, 1966, Tony Smith File, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Archives.

128

Figure 3.4. Tony Smith, Amaryllis, 1965. South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Amaryllis is the smallest and, perhaps, the simplest of the four shapes (Figure 3.4). It is composed of a pair of matching prisms derived from tetrahedrons—a horizontal element and a vertical element that extends from a forty-five degree angle from the ground plane. Despite its rigid and abstract geometry, Amaryllis presented an alternately looming or recumbent form, eleven-and-a-half feet tall and long, and seven-and-a-half feet wide. Lucy Lippard described the sculpture as if encountering the changing pose of a symbolic body: “Amaryllis…is rather benignly, even pathetically anthropomorphic from one angle…From another angle, it rears up in angry dignity, a complete transformation not only of form, but

129 of content.”277 The extreme changes in affective appearance that Lippard experienced walking around the work, perceiving it from all sides, were likewise emphasized in the exhibition catalogue through a ten-photograph sequence of the sculpture sited in Smith’s South Orange yard.278

Figure 3.6. Tony Smith, Cigarette, 1966, Tower Plaza, Hartford, Connecticut. Photograph by Edward Saxon. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

While Smith may not have succeeded in placing a twenty-nine foot tall sculpture in Constitution Plaza, he was able to construct the fifteen foot tall, twenty-six foot wide Cigarette for Tower Square (Figure 3.5). Cigarette is composed of four prisms, based on the modular extension of a tetrahedral unit. The prisms are combined to form an asymmetric arch under and through which people could walk. Like Amaryllis, a description of the form

277 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible,’” Art International 11, No. 6 (Summer 1967): 24. 278 Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith, (1966), unpaginated.

130 depends on one’s position relative to the work: it is recessive or expansive, open or folding in on itself. The arch was carefully installed to frame the rotunda entrance to the Beaux-Arts Travelers Tower and the neoclassical portico of Hartford’s Center Church, which enclosed Tower Square along with the Wadsworth Atheneum. As one moved around or through Cigarette, its angular black lines would seem to fracture the surrounding mass of buildings, breaking up the uniformity of their facades and the insistent verticality of their towers and steeples. The dark, asymmetric, and dynamic sculptures stood in stark contrast to the architecture surrounding them. Cigarette, placed between the street and the entrance to one of Hartford’s largest office buildings, also impinged upon the routine movement of workers traversing the space, forcing them to go through the sculpture or around it. In Tower Square, Smith was given his first opportunity to use art to disrupt the public’s everyday experience of the environment. To be accepted, as Smith warned, Amaryllis, Spitball, The Snake is Out, and Cigarette demanded social, physical, perceptual, and spatial adjustments. Smith’s unpredictable, inassimilable forms altered the way the public engaged urban space through the body, disrupting the regular patterns of movement, as well as the social and architectural organization of space. Smith left no doubt about the relation between these works and the public context in which they were installed. “I think of them as seeds or germs that could spread growth or disease,” he wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “They are not easily accommodated to ordinary environments, and adjustments would have to be made were they to be accepted. If not strong enough, they will simply disappear; otherwise they will destroy what is around them, or force it to conform to their needs. They are black and probably malignant.”279 Like the highway, as described by Giedion, Smith viewed his sculpture as essentially antithetical to the existing space of the city. Just as Giedion saw Moses’s suburban highways as seamlessly and gently integrated with the bucolic landscape, Smith’s sculptures seemed comfortable and docile, even natural, in his verdant suburban backyard. And, like Moses’s highways, the same sculptures would seem hostile and threatening, according Smith, when introduced to the everyday environment of the city. In either case, the city would either be destroyed or made

279 Tony Smith, quoted in Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith, (1966), unpaginated.

131 to conform to the needs of forms transplanted from the suburbs and imposed on urban space.

Body Politics in Bryant Park Two weeks after the exhibition opened in Hartford, Wagstaff sent a letter to Thomas Hoving, New York’s City’s Parks Commissioner, suggesting an exhibition of Smith’s work in a city park.280 Hoving, who had been appointed by John Lindsay in January of 1966, agreed that a park would be an ideal setting for Smith’s work and expressed his delight at introducing New Yorkers to the artist. He promptly signed on to the idea and assigned Barbaralee Diamonstein, Special Assistant for Cultural Affairs, to work out the details.281 Wagstaff assumed the exhibition would take place in Central Park but Hoving and Diamonstein decided on Bryant Park. Diamonstein wrote to Smith to clarify the location, promoting the open space and the architectural frame of Bryant Park, which is more immediately felt than in Central Park. “The open park area against the strong architectural background,” Diamonstein suggested, “will, we think, make a particularly effective and relevant setting.”282 Open space and architecture were not the only merits, however. Located in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, Bryant Park was a key site in Lindsay’s plan to reform the city’s open spaces, reorient the body politic, and project a new image of the city. When running for mayor in 1965, Lindsay made the redemption of city parks a cornerstone of his campaign. He argued that the health of the parks was tied directly to the health of the public, the economy, and the city.283 Less than one month before Election Day,

280 Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. to Thomas Hoving, November 23, 1966, Series 1.1, Box 1, Folder 27, Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, circa 1932-1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 281 Thomas Hoving to Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. to December 2, 1966, Series 1.1, Box 1, Folder 27, Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, circa 1932-1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 282 Barbaralee Diamonstein to Tony Smith, January 17, 1967. Thomas Hoving File, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. A copy of this letter can also be found in Series 1.1, Box 2, Folder 16, Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, circa 1932-1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 283 Mariana Mogilevich’s study of the metaphoric connection between the state of the parks and the state of the city is an important precedent for my argument. She argues for the importance of the parks as part of Lindsay’s spatial strategy to organize a public through the arts and secure the city’s status as a global art capital. See, Mariana Mogilevich, “Arts as Public Policy: Cultural Spaces for Democracy and Growth,” in Summer in the City: John

132 Lindsay released a white paper on Parks and Recreation, authored by Hoving, which outlined some of the principles that remained at the core of Lindsay’s approach to the city throughout his first term in office. The white paper argued for the use of parks to counter the urban renewal strategies of Robert Moses and address their debilitating social effects. Lindsay and Hoving proposed the rehabilitation of decaying parks and the construction of new parks in slums and deindustrialized areas.284 The park system, Hoving wrote, was conceived to support “man’s social nature” through “open spaces for health and recreation.”285

Figure 3.7. Tony Smith exhibition, 1967, Bryant Park, New York City. Photograph by David Gahr. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 195-224. 284 John Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, October 8, 1965, (New York: Campaign Press Center, John V. Lindsay for Mayor), Series VI, Box 91, Folder 86, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 285 Ibid., 1.

133 Lindsay and Hoving imagined the city’s parks, particularly those in commercial and business districts, to be spaces apart from and devoid of urban activity. These parks should be “a pool of space removed from the flow of traffic…an outdoor living room, human in scale, enclosed and protected, and sheltered from noise.” 286 Hoving emphasized the need to restore pastoral park spaces, especially in Midtown Manhattan, to provide places of rest and stimulation for office workers. The Midtown park, Hoving suggested, “…should be imaginative—something more than pavement to walk on. It should be a delight to the eye…”287 In Bryant Park, the Lindsay administration sought to project an image of corporate hospitality through the imaginative use of open space. Moreover, Hoving and Lindsay sought to organize a body politic in the Midtown park that conformed to their corporate ideal. The Tony Smith exhibition was part of the plan to produce this new, corporate public. Lindsay’s goals for Bryant Park were in stark contrast to the realities of its use in the mid-1960s. It was not a pastoral oasis for the office workers who populated the surrounding buildings, nor a place to rest and refresh the senses. According to the Lindsay administration, Bryant Park was a site of danger, deviance, vagrancy, and vice. In 1964, Newbold Morris, Commissioner of Parks under Mayor Robert Wagner, complained that the park was a refuge for derelicts who spent their time drinking and littering. Morris proposed a café to encourage a new clientele.288 Hoving rejected his predecessor’s plan but he agreed with Morris’s basic assessment of the problems troubling the space. Along with the drunks, vagrants, and litter, “homosexual activity” was added to the list of deviance afflicting the park. 289 Hoving described the problem in ominous terms. Despite police reports suggesting that Bryant Park was not a center of violent crime but merely a hangout for “winos and homosexuals,” Hoving pronounced it “a disaster area because of the people who frequent it…the slimiest elements of society.” He hoped to transform the park into “an

286 Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, 4. In this passage Hoving was quoting from: Robert Zion and Harold Breen, New Parks for New York (New York: Architectural League of New York and Park Association of New York, 1963), unpaginated. 287 Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, 12; Zion and Breen, New Parks for New York, unpaginated. 288 Guy Telise, “Cafe is Suggested for Bryant Park,” The New York Times, June 4, 1964, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/06/04/0106976211.html. 289 “Hoving Calls a Meeting to Plan for Restoration of Bryant Park,” The New York Times, June 22, 1966, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/06/22/82811668.html?pageNumbe r=49.

134 entertainment magnet, attracting better people.”290 In 1966, Hoving announced a plan to rehabilitate the park and its clientele by introducing a curfew, banning drinking, and introducing daytime entertainment.291 Evidently, there were some bodies that did not conform to Lindsay’s and Hoving’s image of the city, nor its cultivation of a corporate public and mainstream body politic. It was, above all, the public expression of homosexuality that the Lindsay administration objected to. While Lindsay was generally lauded for his tolerance and support for oppressed groups, New York’s gay community remained a target of raids, entrapment, arrests and institutional repression throughout the 1960s.292 Lindsay did work behind the scenes to ease repressive police tactics, such as entrapment, but he refused to openly support the gay community or address the demands of activist groups such as the Mattachine Society.293 In his characterization of the “slimiest elements of society,” Hoving was implicitly referring to gay prostitution; however, the official line between cruising and prostitution was obscured by police tactics. Many of New York’s bars catering to gay men were closed or subject to

290Edward Burks. “Hoving to Upgrade Bryant Park Area,” The New York Times, June 24, 1966, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/06/24/82814888.html?pageNumbe r=17. 291 Ibid. 292 On the persecution of gay men in New York City parks in the postwar period, see: Roy Rozenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 479. On the criminalization of homosexuality in the 1960s and state violence against gay communities in New York, and the emergence of gay activist groups to counter persecution of liberal and progressive institutions, as well as the conservatives, see: John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 293-295; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009) 214-254; and Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 11, 13, 42-48. On Lindsay’s reception by gay activist groups, see Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 217-223; and David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 44-47, 236-244. 293 Lindsay, for example, met privately with Mattachine leaders to discuss specific policies of police entrapment and general attempts by the police to enforce strictly noise and zoning ordinances among gay communities in Greenwich Village. See: Stephanie Harrington, “The Mayor Comes to MacDougal Street,” The Village Voice, May 5, 1966, 1, 32; and Carter, Stonewall, 44-47.

135 regular raids in the mid-1960s, so select open spaces such as Bryant Park served as a primary meeting site for the gay community. The struggle for control of Bryant Park played out on its public sculpture through rival acts of appropriation and aesthetic negation. Andrew Petrochko, supervisor of the park, complained that gay men were his biggest headache because, in addition to taunting businessmen, they painted the faces of the 19th century memorials to Goethe and William Earl Dodge with lipstick and rouge.294 This cosmetic appropriation constituted a claim made by the gay community to the public space, marking Bryant Park as a cruising site. Petrochko’s description of the painted faces of Goethe and Dodge, and Hoving’s characterization of the park’s users as the “slimiest elements of society,” played into both the public anxiety and Lindsay’s political anxiety about the increasingly open presence of gay men in the city’s streets and parks. Richard Doty, in a major essay on the gay “colonization” of the city for The New York Times in 1963, described painted faces of men, not just as a sign of homosexuality, but of prostitution specifically. It was a symptom, according to Roty, of the “inverted world” shaped by gay men in New York.295 One of Hoving’s first acts to combat the inverted world of Bryant Park was to bring in Tony Smith’s sculptures. For Hoving, Smith’s sculptures could straighten out the queered space by countering the appropriation and inversion of Goethe and Dodge. On the one hand, the dark, brooding, and severe forms would seem an odd choice. Given Smith’s characterization of their potential infectiousness and malignancy, his sculptures might seem more compatible with those social elements deemed “slimiest” by Hoving. On the other hand, Smith claimed that his sculptures were most at home in a bucolic suburban ideal and potentially destructive in other surroundings. “The pieces seem inert or dormant in nature,” Smith suggested, “and that is why I like them there, but they may appear aggressive, or in

294 “Hoving Calls a Meeting to Plan for Restoration of Bryant Park,” The New York Times, June 22, 1966, 49. 295 Robert C. Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” The New York Times, Dec. 17, 1963/1963, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/12/17/89990450.html?pageNumb er=1. On the national media attention to the increasing openness of gay culture in American cities, see also: Paul Welch, “The ‘Gay’ World Takes to the City Streets,” Life 56, no. 36, June 26, 1964: 68-74. https://books.google.com/books?id=qEEEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1& lr=#v=onepage&q&f=false.

136 hostile territory, when seen among other artifacts.”296 Hoving sought, one could argue, to leverage the hostility of Smith’s sculpture to destroy any vestige of urban presence in the park. In so doing, Hoving sought a return to the 19th century pastoral spaces in the city, which were conceived, as he suggested in 1965, to “eradicate even the faintest trace of urban activity.”297 Hoving was aware of this suburban frame and Smith’s characterization of his work as hostile to urban space. In his letter to Wagstaff accepting the exhibition, Hoving gratefully acknowledged the receipt of Wagstaff’s exhibition catalogue, which included numerous photographs of Smith’s sculptures installed in verdant suburban settings.298 Smith’s statement regarding the hostility of his sculpture when removed from nature was even included in a Department of Parks Press Release.299 The implicit goal in introducing Smith’s work to Bryant Park, therefore, was to transfer their bucolic envelope to the heart of the city, supplanting urban deviance with suburban social values. The malignant potential that Smith attributed to his sculpture had the functional value, for the Lindsay administration, of disrupting the existing social and spatial order of the park. In the mid-1960s, cruising was seen as an explicitly urban activity and its eradication in Bryant Park was a priority for the Lindsay administration. The condemnation of gay cruising in city parks echoed the homosexual panic that proliferated in popular media the 1950s and 1960s.300 The suburbs, and the attendant associations of domesticity and family values, were implicitly positioned as both immune to this threat and the antidote to it.

296 Tony Smith, quoted in Wagstaff, Jr., Tony Smith, unpaginated. 297 Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, (1965), 4. August Heckscher, Hoving’s successor also described the pastoral identity of New York City Parks and the attempt to preserve that pastoralism at all costs. See: August Heckscher, Alive in the City: Memoir of an Ex-Commissioner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 28-29. 298 Thomas Hoving to Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. to December 2, 1966. 299 Press Release, February 21, 1967, Department of Parks, City of New York. Thomas Hoving File, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. 300 For examples of the urban dimensions of the homosexual panic in mid-1960s popular media, see: Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern;” and Paul Welch, “The ‘Gay’ World Takes to the City Streets,” Life, June 26, 1964, 68-74. See also: Hanhardt, Safe Space, 11, 13, 42-48; Canaday, The Straight State, 214-254; and John D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Preiss and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 226-240.

137 The idea that one could address urban crises by imposing a suburban form on the city was not unique to the Lindsay administration. In an attempt to attract affluent residents who would otherwise move to the suburbs, the administration embraced a readymade discourse of open space that was viewed by both advocates and critics as essentially suburban. Lewis Mumford was amongst the most prominent proponents of a suburban cure to the problems of the city, as both a critic and a founding member of the Regional Planning Association. In numerous essays, Mumford had positioned the city and suburbs as opposed spatial and social formations.301 Yet, in his essay “The Social Function of Open Spaces,” Mumford suggested that a spatial essence of the suburbs could be distilled and transferred to the city, where suburban social values would then take root. The congested city, he argued, “…must introduce, into its overbuilt quarters, sunlight, fresh air, private gardens, public squares and pedestrian malls, which will both fulfill the social function of the city and make it as favorable a place as the old suburb for establishing a permanent home and bringing up children.”302 This type of thinking was anathema to critics such as Jane Jacobs. She maintained that these essentialized suburban spaces—the small open spaces that were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily in plazas surrounding office buildings and apartment towers—exacerbated urban crises.303 As “concoctions grafted into cities,” Jacobs argued, they threatened the vitality of everyday urban life.304 Jacobs was not prone to biological metaphors. However, given her association of suburban concoctions with urban destruction, decay, and, death, it would be little stretch to connect her thinking to Smith’s malignancies. In a space deemed too urban by the Lindsay administration, a metastatic suburban growth could seem like a solution. The pastoral ideal that Hoving and Lindsay associated with the Midtown parks of the 19th century might have described Bryant Park prior to Robert Moses’s 1934 overhaul.

301 Lewis Mumford, “Megalopolis as Anti-City,” Architectural Record 132, no. 6 (December 1962): 101-108; Lewis Mumford, “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow,” Architectural Record 132, no. 5 (November 1962): 139-144. On the exclusionary space of the suburban subdivision and its opposition to the diversity of the city, see also: Stanford Anderson, “People in the Physical Environment: The Urban Ecology of Streets,” in On Streets, ed. Stanford Anderson (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1978), 3-4. 302 Lewis Mumford, “The Social Function of Open Spaces,” Landscape 10, no. 2 (Winter 1960-1961): 6 303 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 7, 16-25. 304 Ibid., 115.

138 Moses had replaced the existing Victorian design, featuring a network of small walking paths, scattered groups of trees and shaded benches, with a rigidly geometric French garden design.305 Originally designed as a bucolic place for a leisurely walk, it had once been the very type of space that Lindsay now desperately wanted to cultivate in the city’s commercial districts. However, Moses had transformed Bryant Park into a stately and formal display. Moses’s Bryant Park was dominated by a great, sunken lawn that was framed by volute hedges, a stone balustrade, a grid of garden beds planted with London Plane trees, and the rear face of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library. With little chance to redesign Bryant Park again, Lindsay nevertheless sought to promote a use of the park that was closer to its original conception as a place to stroll, refresh the senses, and escape the pressures of the city. Smith may have offered a way Lindsay to instill suburban social values in Bryant Park to counteract what he viewed as its illicit and deviant appropriation. Five of Smith’s sculptures were placed on Moses’s great lawn: Night, We Lost, Marriage, and The Snake is Out. Amaryllis and Spitball sat on the park’s upper terrace, between the great lawn and the library (Figure 3.8 & 3.9). Cigarette was installed at the formal entrance to the park, on 6th Avenue at 41st Street (Figure 3.10). For the most part, the sculptures were arranged in harmony with the rigid garden design, processing in pairs along the park’s central East-West axis. Only Cigarette and The Snake is Out, the most complex and looming forms, disrupted the tidy organization of space. As in Hartford, Cigarette was situated to function as an arch and obstruction, reorganizing the flow of movement into and out of the park at its entrance by forcing pedestrians to go through or around it. Likewise, The Snake is Out, also a massive arching form composed of a tetrahedral prism, stood between the park entrance and the library. This position not only obstructed the stairs leading from the great lawn to the upper terrace, it also disrupted the sight lines organized by many of Bryant Park’s landscaped features, which framed the library as the primary view. In other words, Cigarette and The Snake is Out disrupted the sensorial organization of the park and the spatial protocols of movement that followed from that organization. The ambulatory experience associated with Smith’s work also constituted a return to the leisured walking that was part of Bryant Park’s original design.

305 On Moses overhaul of Bryant Park, see Anne Kumer, “From the Archives: The 1934 Moses Renovation of Bryant Park,” Bryant Park Blog, November 1, 2010. http://blog.bryantpark.org/2010/11/from-archive-1934-moses-renovation-of.html.

139

Figure 3.8. Tony Smith, The Snake is Out & Marriage (foreground), Amaryllis & Spitball (background), 1967, Bryant Park, New York. Photograph by David Gahr. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.9. Tony Smith sitting on Willy, with Amaryllis, The Snake is Out, and Spitball, 1967, Bryant Park. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

140

Figure 3.10. Tony Smith, Cigarette, 1967, Bryant Park. Photograph by John A. Ferrari. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Albeit temporary, the exhibition was an important challenge to the spatial legacy of Robert Moses. Smith’s sculptures constituted an aesthetic negation of the figurative sculptures populating the park. The exhibition mounted by Lindsay and Hoving not only countered the appropriation of public sculpture by the gay community, it also countered Moses’s authority over New York’s public spaces. During his long tenure as Parks Commissioner, Moses’s taste for conventional figurative sculpture and his rejection of abstraction were well known.306 In 1960, when Newbold Morris assumed leadership of the Parks Department and served as a surrogate Moses, patronage of figurative public sculpture

306 Robert Moses, “Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues,” The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1943, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/14/85134462.html?pageNumb er=169; and Robert Moses, “Mr. Moses Survey’s the City’s Statues, Part II” The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1943, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/11/21/83953358.html?pageNumb er=183.

141 rooted in 19th century aesthetics became an unofficial policy of the Parks Department.307 When Hoving installed Tony Smith’s monumental geometries on Moses’s great lawn, the departure from the former regime could not have been starker. Numerous critics viewed the exhibition as the advent of a new era for the city’s parks and for the civic commitment to advanced public art.308 Hoving effectively associated the Lindsay administration with vanguard sculpture and, implicitly, aligned Moses with a retrograde and conservative past. It is hard to see how these stark sculptures were not more at home in the city than the suburbs. Surely their asymmetric, geometric forms cutting through space in unpredictable angles contrasted with the insistent verticality of the surrounding architecture. Their rough black-painted surfaces diverged from the orderly arrangements of grey stone, red brick, glass, and steel surrounding them. However, it is even harder to see how these formal qualities would communicate a suburban or pastoral ideal. Yet this is exactly how they were received. In an extraordinary review of the exhibition, The New York Times art critic Grace Glueck simply recorded quotes from park-goers, almost all of whom cast the sculpture as an antidote to the urban environment. “It gives a little class, a little culture, to the park,” reported a visitor from Queens. “They make the park look more like a park,” a Department of Sanitation employee added.309 A feature article in Time suggested that Smith wanted to

307 On Newbold Morris’s relation to Moses, see: Harriet F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108; Richard Witkin, “Morris Rejects Work By Calder,” The New York Times, April 6, 1965, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/04/06/101536370.html?pageNum ber=1. On Moses ongoing authority over major Parks Department decisions after Newbold Morris assumed control of the department in 1960, see: Caro, The Power Broker (1974), 1064- 1065; Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 148; Rozenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, (1992), 488. 308 Hilton Kramer, “A Sculpture Show in Bryant Park,” The New York Times, February 2, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/02/02/83022748.html?pageNumb er=32; Grace Glueck, “Bringing Back Beardsley,” The New York Times, February 19, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/02/19/83576008.html?pageNumb er=115; Michael Benedikt, “New York Letter: Tony Smith,” Art International Volume 11, no. 4 (April 20, 1967): 63-64. 309 I have found no other example of Glueck’s criticism that is populated with so many quotes from the public. Grace Glueck, “Bringing Back Beardsley,” The New York Times, February 19, 1967,

142 create “…architectonic mastodons, varied enough to refresh the eye after a stark grid of city walls and streets…”310 Harold Rosenberg, likewise, set his experience of the sculptures apart from the experience of the city. “Smith’s constructions, for all their feeling of weight, communicate a sense of intangibility alien to this park enclosed by high buildings and heavy traffic,” Rosenberg reported. “The geometrical compositions, all different, are beautifully angled to infuse into their immediate surroundings a sense of gentle motion, as of a ship at anchor.”311 Even those critics who asserted the architectural basis of Smith’s work recognized its functional difference from the buildings surrounding Bryant Park. Hilton Kramer described the influence of the International Style on Smith but distanced the work from what he argued was a bankrupt architectural style. Kramer credited Smith with preserving “a purity of vision now fallen on evil times.”312 Finally, in one the most significant reviews of the exhibition, Michael Benedikt wrote, “Coming from the bustle of the surrounding streets and onto the Smith site was, indeed, an event in itself. The works have an enormous calming presence…” Benedikt seemed completely convinced by the pastoral transformation of Bryant Park provoked by Smith’s sculpture. “He seems to want to engage, not rectilinear box structures […] but the irregular outdoors, with its rolling ground, indeterminate lateral spaces, skies.”313 Even while surrounded by massive walls of stone, concrete, brick, and glass, Smith’s work prompted Benedikt to experience the city as a verdant pasture. Throughout the

http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/02/19/83576008.html?pageNumbe r=115. 310 “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time (October 13, 1967): 84. 311 Harold Rosenberg, “Defining Art,” The New Yorker (February 25, 1967): 109. 312 Kramer, “A Sculpture Show in Bryant Park,” (1967). 313 This is a particularly important review because it was anthologized in Gregory Battock’s 1968 collection of essays, Minimal Art, as was Harold Rosenberg’s “Defining Art,” quoted above. As such Benedikt’s and Rosenberg’s essay have a place in one of the most significant sources of the critical consolidation of Minimal Art. The review of Smith’s exhibition is combined with several other reviews authored by Benedikt under the title, “Sculpture as Architecture.” The quote here is taken from the anthologized version of the essay, as the original passage published in Art International contains an awkward grammatical error that was subsequently corrected. See Michael Benedikt, “New York Letter: Tony Smith,” Art International 11, no. 4 (April 20, 1967): 63-64; and Michael Benedikt, “Sculpture as Architecture: New York Letter, 1966-67,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock, California Paperback Edition (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 89.

143 exhibition, critics described Smith’s sculptures as gentle forms around which an oasis that provides sensorial relief from the city could cohere. For Lindsay and Hoving, the critics’ bucolic experience of rolling hills and gentle waves would have satisfied their goal to establish a pastoral retreat in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Smith’s sculptures seemed to successfully recast Bryant Park as a place to relax, refresh the senses, and immerse oneself in nature. It is not so clear, however, that Smith’s work was as successful in disrupting the deviant behavior that the Lindsay administration saw as the greatest threat to the park. There is no evidence to suggest that the exhibition dissuaded the gay community from continuing to use the space. Moreover, one could argue that Smith’s sculptures were conducive to cruising. The placement of Smith’s works disrupted the park’s sight lines, foiling surveillance, and introduced large, shadowy objects that encouraged lingering. Numerous critics, theorists, and artists, also contended that Smith’s sculptures heightened one’s experience of self, others and the environment. Cruising, in many ways, was already a model of this heightened perceptive and social experience. As Mark Turner has argued, cruising has always constituted a means of cutting through the alienation and anonymity of everyday urban life.314 It is a way of moving through the city with a heightened perception of environment and others with an explicitly social goal. Turner’s definition of cruising as “…a process of walking, gazing, and engaging another (or others)…” could also stand as a description of the aesthetic experience associated with Smith’s sculpture.315 Scott Burton was an early critical advocate of Smith’s work, publishing a substantial review of the 1966 exhibitions in Philadelphia and Hartford in ARTNews. Burton was amongst the only critics to associate the physical engagement compelled by Smith’s work with an open, individual, and personal response. Burton largely agreed with the phenomenological reading of Smith’s work, first described by Robert Morris. “This is art of which we take direct physical cognizance,” Burton suggested in a 1967 lecture. “We walk around it. All sculpture exists in physical space, of course, but what is new is to be made so

314 Mark W. Turner, Backwards Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 9, 57-60, 122. 315 Ibid., 60.

144 aware of it.”316 For Burton, however, the expressive aspects of Smith’s sculptures left room for an individual and associative experience that clearly distinguished his work from the imposed, homogenous experience and universal body assumed by other minimal art. “Tony Smith,” Burton contended, “is the first artist in a very long time to bring that full, almost exuberant, physical awareness to sculpture.”317 Whereas Hoving saw Smith’s work as a means of cultivating a space of exclusion and control, Burton, an openly gay critic, saw the potential for a space of inclusion to cohere around Smith’s sculpture. Burton’s account of the embodied experience of Smith’s work echoed the basic terms of Robert Morris’s phenomenological theory of sculpture, in which Smith’s sculpture played a central role. Morris’s essays effectively changed the terms of Smith’s reception, provoking a shift in the frame of reference from the city and architecture to the body. Morris begins “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” with a quote of Smith regarding the scale of Die as relative to the human body and concludes it with a photograph of Die sitting in Smith’s South Orange backyard. Smith’s rationalization for the size of the six-foot cube—larger than an object, smaller than a monument—is deployed by Morris as a model for understanding the importance of human scale in the embodied experience of sculpture.318 “In the perception of relative size,” Morris writes, “the human body enters into the total of sizes and establishes itself as a constant on that scale.”319 This scale not only structures how one responds through the body to a sculpture, according to Morris, it also organizes the encounter with sculpture as a subject-object exchange with the potential to enhance the subject’s awareness of him or herself existing in space.320 Morris does not reference Merleau-Ponty in the first two parts of “Notes on Sculpture,” but his account of the epistemological and aesthetic significance of Smith’s work is fundamentally indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. It would not be lost on either Morris or Smith that Merleau-Ponty employed a life-sized die, which one could walk around,

316 Scott Burton, “Tony Smith and Minimalist Sculpture,” lecture at the , Minneapolis, October 10, 1967, in Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art & Performance, 1965- 1975, ed. David J. Getsy (Chicago, IL: Sobercove Press, 2012), 58. See also: Scott Burton, “Tony Smith: at the New Frontier,” ArtNews 65, no. 8 (December 1966): 35-44. 317 Burton, “Tony Smith and Minimalist Sculpture,” (1967), 63. 318 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 20. 319 Ibid., 21. 320 Ibid., 21.

145 as a heuristic to describe the relation between body and thing, subject and object.321 “Here is a die,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “let us consider it as it is presented, in the natural attitude, to a subject who has never wondered about perception, and who lives among things. The die is there, lying in the world. When the subject moves round it, there appear, not signs, but sides of the die. He does not perceive projections or even profiles of the die, but he sees the die itself at one time from this side, at another from that, and those appearances which are not yet firmly fixed intercommunicate, run into each other, and all radiate from a central Würfelhaftigkeit which is the mystical link between them.”322

Figure 3.11. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

321 Morris had repeatedly suggested that Die is the only work by Smith that influenced his thinking on body and scale. See: E. C. Goossen, “The Artist Speaks: Robert Morris,” Art in America 58, no. 3 (May-June 1970): 111. 322 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 324.

146 For Merleau-Ponty and for Morris, the perception of a die, scaled to the body, occurs in time. One walks around the cube sensing its sides and assembling a primary knowledge of it as an object. In this process of perception, one gains knowledge, not just of the die as object, but also of oneself as an active subject and the body as an interface with the world. “A thing is,” Merleau-Ponty concludes, “therefore, not actually given in perception, it is internally taken up by us, reconstituted and experienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world, the basic structures of which we carry with us, and of which it is merely one of the many possible concrete forms.”323 Or, as Morris put it, “the object itself has not become less important. It has merely become less self-important.”324 In the primal embodied experience of sculpture, such as Smith’s Die, Morris argued, one becomes aware of both the work and, “…oneself existing in the same space as the work…”325 Sculpture, according to Morris, could provoke this phenomenological awareness of the self—a coming into being as a body stimulated by the encounter with the sculptural object. This argument follows from Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture Part 1,” which was published in February 1966. In this earlier essay, which is in dialogue with Michael Fried’s and Clement Greenberg’s theories of medium specificity, Morris asserts sculpture’s specificity as a medium based on the specific sensorial experience that it organizes. Much of the essay refutes the conflation of sculpture and painting in the criticism of Greenberg and Fried. Sculpture, according to Morris, is physical, concrete, literal, obdurate, and tactile; it exists in real space and confronts gravity. Painting, on the other hand, is immaterial, optical, and non- tactile; it resists gravity.326 Sculpture’s gravity and physicality, however, are independent and autonomous of architecture, according to Morris.327 Lucy Lippard, Smith’s most dedicated critical advocate, synthesized Morris’s phenomenology with the urban, grounding the body in the city. Over the span of three essays published by Lippard between summer 1967 and January 1968, the increasing impact of Morris’s essays and the spread of phenomenology are evident. In Lippard’s first essay, published in the Summer 1967 issue of Art International, she describes Smith’s near total independence from prevailing styles of sculpture, pointing instead to his derivation of form

323 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 326. 324 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” (1966), 23. 325 Ibid., 23. 326 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, No. 6 (February 1966): 42-44. 327 Ibid., 43.

147 from industrial and urban architecture and infrastructure. Clearly influenced by Smith’s account of his drive on the New Jersey Turnpike, and likely influenced as much by Dan Graham’s analogic reading of minimal art and urban and suburban forms, Lippard concludes her essay by extending this association.328 She lists “…water towers, windowless buildings, highways, parking lots, concrete pill boxes, and military and utilitarian architecture…” as models for understanding the relationship of Smith’s sculptures to the modern landscape.329 Likewise, in a review published in the Hudson Review at the end of 1967, Lippard continues to point to the industrial and technological environment of Northern New Jersey as a source of form. However, now echoing Morris, Lippard begins to assert the essential difference and autonomy of Smith’s sculpture from architecture.330 In Lippard’s third essay, published in January 1968 as a review of Smith’s exhibition at the in Washington, D.C., the body and the sensorial protocols organized by the sculpture replace architecture as a frame of reference. “A large geometric object can ‘look like’ a building in reduced scale,” Lippard argued, “but that has nothing whatsoever to do with being a building. Even when a sculpture can be entered, it remains sculpture.”331 Smith’s sculpture is “unvisualizable,” and must be concretely sensed to be experienced.332 Lippard suggests that Smith’s sculpture can only be known through immediate and concrete sensorial experience. Through this direct experience of co-presence, Lippard argues, the viewer will gain a heightened awareness of the body in space.333 While she comes to reject the idea of architecture as a model for sculpture, as form or experience, Lippard locates an urban function in phenomenological aesthetics. She suggests that sculpture, such as Smith’s, could be used to deal with some of problems associated with urban renewal and the architectural environment. Specifically, Lippard suggests that

328 Lippard had just curated the Focus on Light exhibition at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Open from May 20 to September 10, 1967, this was the second public exhibition to show Dan Graham’s Transparencies, a slide show that posed minimal art as analogue to suburban and urban architecture. 329 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible,’” Art International 11, No. 6 (Summer 1967): 24. 330 330 Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 20, No. 4 (Winter 1967-1968): 654-655. 331 Lucy Lippard, “Escalation in Washington,” Art International 12, No. 1 (January 20, 1968): 43. 332 Ibid., 42, 43, 45. 333 Ibid., 42-43.

148 sculpture could be moved around cities and used to heighten the public’s awareness of their environment, their senses having been dulled by static and familiar urban experience.334

Project for a Parking Lot For Smith, as well as Hoving and many of the critics responding to the Bryant Park exhibition, city, body, and sculpture were related terms. Smith described the works in the park as presences, implying their status as surrogate bodies—an idea embraced by Smith and appropriated by Clement Greenberg and Fried to broadly denounce minimal art.335 Smith conceived of his sculptural presences as a means to heighten bodily awareness, reorient the body in space, and stimulate social exchange between bodies. However, the sculptures in Bryant Park were scaled to the body, according to Smith, rather than the city. “My pieces so far have not been made for city spaces,” Smith asserted, “they have just been put into them.”336 The Bryant Park sculptures failed to satisfy, according to Smith, because the architectural surround overwhelmed them. As a result, the sculptures appealed only to the eye and not the body. “What was plastic in suburbia,” Smith wrote, “became graphic in the city.”337 When moved from his backyard in South Orange to Bryant Park, the works did not function as sculptures. They had no substantial relation to the city and were reduced to mere marks. Smith sought a truly urban sculptural form. To avoid the graphic reduction that occurred in Bryant Park, he sought to incorporate the mobile body as a plastic element within the sculptural field. Rather than conceiving of sculpture as an object to be placed in the city, Smith developed an idea of sculpture as a space to be developed. He seized on the discourse of open, underutilized urban space and suggested that this space could become the

334 Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” (1967-1968), 654, 656. 335 For Smith’s use of the term presence, see: “Presences in the Park,” Time February 10, 1967; and Tony Smith, draft of an interview conducted by Renée Sabatello Neu for the Museum of Modern Art, July 25, 1968. Renée S. Neu file, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. Greenberg and Fried pick-up the term shortly after its appearance in Time and promptly invert its positive attributes. See: Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” Art International 11, no. 4 (April 20, 1967): 21; and Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, No. 10 (Summer 1967): 16, 19. 336 Quoted in Peter Wolf, “The Urban Street,” Art in America 58, No. 6 (November- December 1970): 118. 337 Cecile Abish, Carl Andre, Beverly Pepper and Tony Smith, “Statements by Sculptors,” Art Journal 35, No. 2 (Winter 1975-76): 129.

149 medium for urban sculpture that stimulated social activity. Smith argued that a truly urban sculpture could ameliorate the sensorial burden of the city and stimulate the social without, however, acting as a malignant antithesis of the urban. On the contrary, now Smith saw urban sculpture as an open space of inclusion conceived in fundamental harmony with the existing plan of the city. Smith articulated his idea of urban sculpture adequate to the scale of the city, yet conceived for the body, at a conference in Minneapolis on urban design and renewal. The conference, “Hennepin: The Future of an Avenue,” was convened in April 1970 to initiate a discussion on the spatial, commercial, and architectural diversity of the main entertainment strip in Minneapolis. Responding to the abundant parking lots, strip clubs, bars, and their competing advertisements, the conference organizers sought new ideas for making Hennepin Avenue, as well as the surrounding area of Downtown Minneapolis, more appealing for the pedestrian.338 A variety of artists and architects presented widely ranging ideas about Hennepin Avenue, Downtown Minneapolis, and urban space in general. In addition to Smith, presentations were given by , Robert Venturi, M. Paul Friedberg, Walter Netsch, Barbara Stauffacher-Solomon, James Seawright, and Otto Piene. Smith began his presentation with a diagnostic analysis of the spatial form of Minneapolis and the social problems that result from the urban plan. His argument closely follows Kevin Lynch’s classic study of urban form, The Image of the City, as well as the follow- up The View from the Road, which Lynch wrote with MIT colleagues Donald Appleyard and Jon Myer. In both, Lynch and his collaborators assess the relative legibility of the city and the public’s perception of, and orientation in, the urban environment. Objects in the city, according to Lynch, mediate the urban subject and the environment, organize perception and knowledge, and stimulate the social. “A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened.”339 In complex urban environments, Lynch argued for the benefit of simple, repetitive, geometric forms to reinforce urban design

338 The conference was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Downtown Council, and Minneapolis Planning and Development Department. Ronald Tulis to Tony Smith, February 16, 1970, Project for a Parking Lot folder, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. 339 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 10.

150 and facilitate the public’s understanding of it.340 Lynch, who drew from Gestalt theories of perception, rhetorically privileged the eye in grasping the image of the city. However, this image was produced, according to his account, in an immersive, durational, and mobile experience of the body that resonated with Morris’s and Smith’s phenomenological theory of sculpture. Good urban design was the antidote, Lynch suggested, of isolated and anonymous urban experience. A subject equipped with a clear image of the city would be “highly aware of his environment.”341 Environmental awareness, in turn, fosters communication and, “heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience.”342 The key for Lynch was provoking an intensity of experience within the city, organized by clear urban forms, which would combat the fragmentation of perception and social isolation of everyday life. With a strong visual framework, Lynch argued, the city could become more inclusive, tolerant, and democratic. Echoing Lynch, Smith suggested that the problem with the downtown area of Minneapolis is that the public cannot readily perceive its form nor the relation of the city center to the greater urban plan. Minneapolis is organized centrifugally, following the freeway system that loops around the city, Smith suggested, but the downtown area is organized by a grid plan. “I think of Minneapolis as being a very wide, broadly spread out ring. A ring of freeways of course the natural elements, the lakes, rivers and parks and beyond that the suburbs. There are radial arteries going from the central city to the suburbs. […] One doesn’t feel this ring. […] And this gives me the sense of the downtown area as being terribly empty of certain elements which are very prominent if one is traveling around in a motor car…”343 There is a formal and spatial disconnect, according to Smith, that makes it difficult for people to engage the center and, in fact, leads people away from the urban core. Lynch had identified just such a discrepancy in Los Angeles and suggested that it presented a major obstacle to orientation and imageability. In Image of the City and The View from the Road, Lynch and his colleagues, argued that the highway, as it navigates the city,

340 Lynch, The Image of the City, (1960), 105-106. 341 Ibid., 10. 342 Ibid., 5, 109-111. 343 Tony Smith, transcript of conference proceedings, “Hennepin: The Future of an Avenue: Two Open Forums,” April 24, 1970, Reel 1A-B, 14-5. Project for a Parking Lot folder, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York.

151 should orient the driver within the general urban environment.344 The image of the city must be reflected in the experience of the highway. When there is a discrepancy in the experience of the highway and the city, the driver will become disoriented when transitioning between these spaces and mobilities.345 In his conference paper, Smith suggested that cities since the Renaissance had perspectival systems that organized the body in the city. One could understand the urban plan through an immediate and concrete perception of architecture. This, he argued was lacking in Minneapolis. “The city is in actual fact too spaced out,” Smith suggested. “…[S]o many buildings have been torn down, that when we are in the downtown area, instead of feeling the sense of the streets in the classical way…we have a sense of being somewhat lost—that is, one wanders around looking for the most intense urban life that Minneapolis offers.”346 On the envelope for his plane ticket to Minneapolis, Smith succinctly described the problem while observing an aerial view of the city and its surround: “Difficulty of orientation in spite of great clarity of grid itself—reason—sameness of building masses and open spaces…”347 Lynch, likewise, had argued that the spread of undifferentiated space and the shift between grid systems are obstacles to knowing the city through the body.348 Los Angeles he had suggested, a decade before Smith, was also, too “spread out” and “spacious” and this resulted in an experience of exhaustion and disorientation. The coherence of Los Angeles and Minneapolis, for Lynch and Smith, was fragmented and disrupted by vacant, useless spaces. The sense of being somewhat lost that Smith attributes to Minneapolis would be evidence, for Lynch, of an incoherent image of the city, or its absence altogether.

344 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1964), 2-4, 14, 17-18. 345 Lynch, The Image of the City, (1960), 40-42. 346 Tony Smith, transcript of conference proceedings, “Hennepin: The Future of an Avenue: Two Open Forums,” April 24, 1970, Reel 1A-B, 14-5. Project for a Parking Lot folder, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. See also Charles Whiting, “Sculptor suggests ‘defined’ endings for theater area,” The Minneapolis Star, April 15, 1970 12C; and Lucy Lippard, “The New Work: More Points on the Lattice, An Interview with Tony Smith,” in Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture (New York: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., 1971), 16. 347 Tony Smith, handwritten notes on plane ticket envelope, ca. April 1971. Project for a Parking Lot folder, Tony Smith Estate Archives, New York. The conference participants also took a helicopter tour of the city to provide this aerial view. 348 Lynch, The Image of the City, (1960), 39-40, 61-62.

152 Smith and Lynch believed that the city needed symbolic and spatial elements to orient the pedestrian and driver and to give meaning to urban space.349 In Minneapolis, Smith suggested, “…what must be established is some kind of force which would intensify the urban life—the lack of confrontation and centralization generally.”350 To meet this need, Smith proposed a new sculptural form conceived to reorient the body in the grid—a sculpture as spatial field that would echo and reinforce the grid form of Downtown Minneapolis. In the sculptural field, the body would be a plastic element, people could confront each other without impediment, and one would experience a greater intensity of urban life through the body. The contextual frame of nature and the theoretical frame of the pastoral invoked by Smith in the mid-1960s were abandoned in Minneapolis in favor of an entirely urban conception of sculpture and open space. Smith’s Project for a Parking Lot, presented at the Hennepin conference, was first conceived in 1968 as a direct response to urban renewal. Smith admitted that he would still tear down buildings, even though this often leaves residents with no place to go; however, instead of building offices, luxury apartments, or parking lots, Smith would simply leave an open space. This space, Smith stipulated, would have no trees, no lamp posts, and no street furniture; it would simply be a square space paved with large square slabs of black granite, arranged in a grid.351 Paradoxically, in his solution to the problem of a city’s vacant and underutilized space, Smith retained much of the formal logic of the parking lot that he condemned. Project for a Parking Lot would remain a paved field that interrupts the city’s mass of buildings. The sculpture would be even more resolutely empty than the parking lot that it ostensibly replaced. Project for a Parking Lot would, in effect, refine the urban grid and rescale it to the human body.352 This could, conceivably, reinforce the systemic organization of

349 Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer, The View from the Road, (1964), 6, 8. 350 Tony Smith, transcript of conference proceedings, “Hennepin: The Future of an Avenue: Two Open Forums,” April 24, 1970, Reel 1A-B, 14-15. 351 Ibid., 16-17. In addition to the conference transcript, Smith references this proposal is in several interviews. See: Tony Smith, “Project for a Parking Lot,” Design Quarterly 78/79 (1970): 64-66; Lucy Lippard, “The New Work: More Points on the Lattice, An Interview with Tony Smith,” in Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture (New York: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., 1971), 10, 15-16. 352 On Smith’s extended engagement with the form of the grid, and his particular admiration for Manhattan’s urban design, see: Craig Buckley, “‘A Definite and Persistent Monster’: Tony Smith’s Urban Vision,” Perspecta 44 (2011): 70-85, 197-200.

153 space and make it perceptible to the urban subject. Or, one could say, Project for a Parking Lot would produce the urban plan as an image. Smith’s plan for a repaved and refined Parking Lot ran counter to contemporaneous proposals for vacant space in the city. Most urban designers and theorists agreed that empty, undeveloped, and underutilized space was a significant problem. The parking lot was amongst the most derided urban forms, along with garbage-strewn vacant lots, and rotting piers. The proliferation of parking lots in the city was condemned by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, and August Heckscher. This diverse group of urban critics and theorists saw it as a particularly destructive form of blight because it facilitated, and even encouraged, an ever-increasing accumulation of automotive traffic. Solutions to the urban parking lot fell into two opposed categories. Most argued that parking lots should be reclaimed and made to serve the recreational needs of city residents. Parking lots, according to this model, should be converted to parks that would function as natural oases. Mumford, for example, suggested that parking lots misused open space, which resulted in the “architectural blankness” of a city and its social life. This open space should be reclaimed, “for meeting and conversation, for the play for children, for gardening, for games, for promenades, for the courting of lovers, for outdoor relaxation.”353 William Whyte described the small open spaces in a city—parking lots, vacant lots, and other odd lots—as the last landscape of the city and precious resource that needed to be preserved.354 Heckscher, likewise, described the “disturbing emptiness” of parking lots in the city. He suggested, channeling Lynch, that these empty and misused spaces could be replaced with large green spaces that “give to a city coherence that allows the urban dweller to have a feeling for a whole.”355 These converted open spaces would, according to Heckscher,

353 Mumford, “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow,” (1962), 144. 354 William H. Whyte, The Last Landscape (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1968), 10, 163-181. 355 August Hecksher, with Phyllis Robinson, Open Spaces: The Life of American Cities (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1977), 3-4. While Heckscher articulated his thoughts on open space most comprehensively in this 1977 book, related ideas were developed in numerous publications in the 1960s, which were in dialogue with Jacobs, Mumford, and other contemporary urban theorists, as well as in his work with the Lindsay administration. See, for example: August Heckscher, “The Quality of American Culture,” in Goals for Americans: The Report of the President’s Commission on National Goals and Chapters Submitted for the Consideration of the Commission (New York: Columbia University, 1960): 127-146; August Heckscher, The Public Happiness (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 34-35;

154 enhance the communal feeling for space, encourage a better understanding of the environment, and make perceptible the relationship between the city and the natural forces that shape its topography.356 Mumford, Whyte, and Heckscher implied that the space of the parking lot would be better used a refuge from the city’s architectural and sensorial burdens and a space in which the city dweller could enjoy a direct encounter with nature. Others, most notably Jane Jacobs, believed that parking lots should be reintegrated into the functional fabric of the city. They should yield to buildings and become, in effect, more urban. Le Corbusier’s vision for towers in parks, Jacobs suggested, had degenerated into towers in parking lots.357 To accommodate parking lots and other automotive facilities, Jacobs argued, “city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. […] City character is blurred until every place becomes more like every other.”358 However, for Jacobs, the answer was not more parks designed according to the 19th century pastoral ideal of open space, as Heckscher and Mumford suggested. These open spaces, according to Jacobs, often became “dispirited city vacuums” that, like parking lots, interrupted the dynamic life of the street.359 She argued that open spaces—whether parks or parking lots—should be made more like the street and, therefore, conducive to a diversity of everyday uses and users.360 Smith eschewed both model solutions to the urban parking lot. His Project for a Parking Lot, instead, offered an intensification of the harsh urban environment that others sought to ameliorate. Rather than a new street or a natural oasis in which all traces of urban life are eradicated, Smith proposed a harsh open space of cold stone. His Parking Lot would provide no sensorial respite from the city and no place to rest. It would remain an open space that broke the frame of buildings defining the street. However, Smith rejected his own prior pastoral ideal of nature through which the discourse of open space was so often organized and with which the city was to be saved from itself. In 1967, Lucy Lippard had pointed to the parking lot as a precedent for Smith’s sculpture, amongst other infrastructural forms,

August Heckscher, The Individual and the Mass (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1965), 16-17, 26; and August Heckscher, Alive in the City: Memoir of an Ex-Commissioner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 28-29. 356 Hecksher and Robinson, Open Spaces, (1977), 4, 15, 217. 357 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), 342-343. 358 Ibid., 338. See also 234-235. 359 Ibid., 89. 360 Ibid., 111.

155 suggesting that they resist “…a romantic absorption of the landscape into art…”361 When Smith sought to redeem the space of the parking lot for the city, his sculpture moved even closer to that spatial model. “There wouldn’t be any streets or grass or benches,” Smith insisted, “nothing but pavement and the people who happened to cross and stand on it.”362 The desolate space of Project for a Parking would seem to share much with the “dispirited city vacuums,” “architectural blankness,” and “disturbing emptiness” that Jacobs, Mumford, and Heckscher attributed to existing urban parking lots and sought to alleviate. Despite his seeming continuance of the vacant space of the parking lot, only rid of its cars, Smith embraced many of the social goals espoused by the parking lot’s critics. Even though they devised divergent solutions, Jacobs, Mumford, Whyte, and Heckscher agreed that the parking lot had to be reclaimed by the city and revitalized as a social space. Likewise, Project for a Parking would be a space, according to Smith, “…where people could not only confront one another with any degree of identity that they cared to have, but where in a certain sense they might have a sense of themselves as unrelated to anything else…[…]…the human being walking across it and so on would create a certain kind of intense life which has many dimensions that can’t be found in the routine patterns of transportation, business, home life and such things.”363 In Project for a Parking Lot, social and aesthetic experiences are conflated, intensifying the former. The public would enjoy an unencumbered space of social exchange. The communication that Mumford and Heckscher called for would be fostered and the intensity of urban life that Jacobs and Lynch sought would also cohere. In this intense, immersive experience of space, the subject would be oriented to the city, as both an urban design and a social community. At the same time, according to Smith, the individual could gain an existential self-awareness through the embodied experience of space. While this continued the phenomenological project that Smith set forth in Hartford and Bryant Park in 1966 and 1967, it refused the formal limits of the sculptural object that remained scaled to the body

361 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible,’” Art International 11, no. 6 (Summer 1967): 26. 362 Tony Smith, quoted in, Lucy Lippard, “The New Work: More Points on the Lattice, An Interview with Tony Smith,” in Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture (New York: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., 1971), 10. 363 Smith, transcript of conference proceedings, “Hennepin: The Future of an Avenue,” 16- 17.

156 and dwarfed by the city. And it refused the politics of instrumental use. Whereas Smith’s sculptures were used by Hoving in Bryant Park to promote an exclusionary space, with Project for a Parking Lot Smith proposed a sculpture that was explicit in its inclusivity.

Figure 3.12. Tony Smith, , 1968, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

While Smith never realized Project for a Parking Lot, it was conceived in a sequence of sculptures that he began to develop in the immediate aftermath of the Bryant Park exhibition.364 In several works constructed and planned between 1967 and 1970, starting with Stinger, Smith experimented with the open square and forms of sculpture with accessible

364 Smith discusses the relational development of these works in numerous places. See, for example, Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: Talk About Sculpture,” Art News 70, No. 2 (April 1971): 68; and Lucy Lippard, “The New Work: More Points on the Lattice, An Interview with Tony Smith,” in Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture (New York: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., 1971), 10-15.

157 interior and exterior spaces. Stinger was first exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden for the 1968 exhibition “The Art of the Real” (Figure 3.12). Smith designed a tetrahedral prism extending horizontally along the ground plane to form a square with an open center. The square has a large opening on one side, so that an otherwise enclosed interior space can be entered. Stinger’s walls are thirty-two feet long and, like Die, six feet tall. Eugene Goossen, the curator of “The Art of the Real,” described the immersive and physical experience framed by Stinger and Die. The immersion in sculpture resulted, Goossen suggested, in a phenomenological awareness of object and self. “To confront one of these works is to know the cube on a scale that allows us to experience it fully without being handed ideas about it. […] Smith’s attack allows for the broadest range, from pieces that stand aloof and alone to those than can, like Stinger, envelop the viewer and force him to experience them.”365 This immersive experience, according to Goossen, has turned the perceptual function of art on its head. Rather than looking into an illusive space to view a spiritual or religious ideal, Smith produced a real space that one can walk into, “forcing the spectator to perceive himself in the process of his perception.”366 While teaching in Hawaii in 1969, Smith continued to develop immersive forms and began to think of the people inside sculpture as plastic elements. He first constructed Hubris, which was composed of two large squares, each containing a grid of eighty-one smaller squares. One large grid was an open space, while the other grid was populated by 81 abutting tetrahedrons. The two square grids constituted distinct spatial experiences—the former was intended to be accessible and traversable, while the latter was crowded and imposing. Smith experienced the work as essentially hostile and was surprised when he learned that college students played amongst the , even though Hubris presented no flat ground on which to stand.367 In his proposal for Project for a Parking Lot, published in Design Quarterly in conjunction with the Hennepin Avenue conference, Smith included a photomontage of Hubris (Figure 3.13). In what amounted to a kind of precursor for Project for a Parking Lot,

365 Eugene C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 11. 366 Ibid., 11. 367 Lippard, “Tony Smith: Talk About Sculpture,” (1971): 68. A photomontage juxtaposing a Hubris maquette with two people walking towards it communicates something of the hostile experience that Smith recounts. See Tony Smith, “Project for a Parking Lot,” Design Quarterly, 64.

158 Smith included two people walking across the flats stone slabs, towards an imposing field of pyramids.

Figure 3.13. Tony Smith, Photomontage with Hubris, 1969. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

159

Smith also conceived Haole Crater for the University of Hawaii, which, while never realized, bore a direct relationship to his conception of Project for a Parking Lot. Haole Crater was to have two pedestrian levels: an open sunken square, accessible by ladder, and a raised sidewalk surrounding it. Smith described the work, and the possible ways of experiencing it, as follows: The lower square is, of course, necessary to sculpture as such. But I feel that people should be able to walk around it and look into it. […] I also think that people should be able to cross the rim and descend into the pit; looking up, they would only see the sky. […] No matter what, the sculpture requires the walk for purely plastic reasons.368

Keenly aware of the embodied experience of sculpture and the reduction of the work in Bryant Park to the graphic, Smith sought a form of sculpture as spatial field in Stinger, Hubris, Haole Crater, and several other works from the end of the 1960s. This sculptural space would incorporate the viewer as a plastic element. The sculpture would no longer be a presence, as Smith termed his earlier sculptures, or a surrogate person, as Fried postulated in “Art and Objecthood.” Instead, Smith’s sculpture after Bryant Park was conceived as a field with the potential to organize the body as a site of knowledge and to produce space as intensely social. As Smith began to conceptualize the form of Project for a Parking Lot in 1968, it cannot be considered a sculptural solution to a spatial problem that was limited to Minneapolis. Initially conceived a year after the Bryant Park exhibition, and with Smith’s recognition of the graphic reduction of works like Cigarette in mind, Project for a Parking Lot was a direct response to the American city in the context of urban renewal. The parking lot, for many urban critics and theorists, was a leftover space of urban renewal—archetypal residua of a flawed approach to the city. For Smith, this space should not be negated. It should not be filled with trees and made into a park or seamlessly reintegrated with the surrounding city. The parking lot should instead, Smith argued, be honed. “For me,” Smith wrote in his published description of Project for a Parking Lot, “the dramatic consists in the confrontation of an individual with he most intense expression of a specific time and place. What is

368 Tony Smith quoted in Lippard, “The New Work,” (1971), 15.

160 monumental consists in giving this expression the clearest and most economical form.”369 In Project for a Parking Lot, Smith embraced this residual space of urban renewal as an expression of a specific time and place and sought to clarify its form. While he engaged the discourse of urban renewal and open space, his solution to the problem of the parking lot set him apart from contemporaries like Jacobs, Mumford, Whyte, and Heckscher. In Bryant Park, Smith promoted a dual reading of his sculpture as both hostile and hospitable. The public was invited to enjoy a physical exchange with the work, which came with the possibility of phenomenological enlightenment. However, Smith warned that the work might also destroy its surroundings. With Hubris and Project for a Parking Lot, the same duality is manifest. Smith believed that the field of tetrahedrons in Hubris would be as hostile as his flat surface would be welcoming. Project for a Parking Lot, again, offered an open space, ostensibly for public benefit. However, the space itself would be barren and harsh with no protection from the elements. One only needs to imagine an attempt to cross Smith’s hard granite field on a windy, wintry day in Minneapolis. This may be an ideal environment to gain existential awareness of the city and the social but it would not likely be a nice place to spend one’s lunch break. With Project for a Parking Lot, the idea of a sculptural field for the body was tied explicitly to the spatial legacy of urban renewal and the difficulty of knowing the city through the body. He first articulated the idea in a 1968 interview that aired on CBS’s “Eye on Art.” “I would almost rather look at nothing than something. If I were a town planner, I would knock down those buildings just the same as all the other town planners, except for the fact that I wouldn’t build anything else up on it. I would pave one of them—I mean, not even greenery or anything like that, just some statement of some kind of fundamental humanity. It might be just something about taking a 200 x 800 city block and paving it with granite that might say something human too.”370 Whereas his sculptures for Bryant Park were originally conceived to fill a void in his backyard, as he suggested in the same interview, Smith now conceived of sculpture as the void itself. Smith appropriated and refined the vacant space of urban renewal and thought to use that refined void to ameliorate the problems of orientation and alienation caused by urban renewal. The humanity of the city would no longer be

369 Smith, “Project for a Parking Lot,” Design Quarterly, (1970), 64. 370 Tony Smith, interviewed for “Art of the Sixties: The Walls Come Tumbling Down,” Eye on Art CBS, 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqsNSprAsss.

161 figuratively imposed on a park, as it was in Bryant Park. Rather, in Project for a Parking Lot and related works, Smith worked to clarify and intensify the city itself as a spatial formation, creating an immersive sculptural field that could, ostensibly, reorient one to the city. The humanity of the work, and of the city itself, would reside in its openness, inclusion, and in the social exchange that cohered within the space of sculpture. At the same time, Smith built the harshness of the city into his uncompromising sculptural field. There would be no pastoral or suburban softening of urban space. If one were to gain a heightened experience of the city in Project for a Parking Lot, Smith made clear that the experience would not necessarily be comfortable.

162 Chapter 4: A Better New York, or the Politics of Public Sculpture

On April 9, 1956, a few dozen young mothers discovered Robert Moses’s plan to turn a small play space in Central Park into a parking lot. The following morning, the mothers met in the park, pushing their children in strollers, to protest the plan and physically obstruct the demolition. They used their bodies, in the most concrete sense, to save a threatened urban space from bulldozers. The protests continued into the summer and, when the mothers prevailed over the parking lot, their actions were seen as the first successful challenge to Moses’s authority. The mothers’ victory signaled an emergent grassroots activism directed at New York’s public spaces and the beginning of the end of Moses’s top down approach to public space.371 One of those young mothers was Doris Freedman.372 A decade later, she was hired by the Lindsay administration to head New York City’s Office of Cultural Affairs and administer the city’s arts policy. Freedman joined the Lindsay administration in May 1967. By October, she had organized “Sculpture in Environment,” an ambitious exhibition that placed large-scale sculpture in the parks, plazas, and the open spaces around new housing developments spanning Manhattan, from Battery Park to Harlem. Building on the precedent of the Tony Smith exhibition, which was held in Bryant Park in January 1967, Freedman used “Sculpture in Environment” to make the case that the city could offer safe parks, open spaces, recreational amenities, and new housing to the white, middle class families that were fleeing to the suburbs. Sculpture was deployed to frame these key attributes and to project an image of corporate leisure and family-friendly recreation.

371 The protests and their impact on Moses’s authority were regularly reported in New York City’s daily newspapers. See, for example: “Central Park Mothers Vanquish Bulldozers Set to Raze Play Area,” The New York Times, April 18, 1956. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1956/04/18/84884452.html?pageNumb er=33; and Charles G. Bennett, “Moses Yields to Mothers; Drops Tavern Parking Lot,” The New York Times, July 18, 1956. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1956/07/18/86649826.html?pageNumb er=1. See also: Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 984-1004; and Roy Rozenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 481-483. 372 Doris Freedman, interview by Barry Schwartz and Laurin Raikin, May 24, 1971, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 5-6.

163 Freedman served as a crucial liaison between the city government and New York’s real estate developers. She was the daughter of Irwin Chanin and the niece of Henry Chanin, both major commercial and residential real estate developers in New York City. As the Office of Cultural Affairs had a modest budget, Freedman relied on Irwin and Henry Chanin, David Rockefeller, and other members of New York’s powerful private sector to fund “Sculpture in Environment.”373 The exhibition was a model, not just in the use of sculpture to revitalize urban space, but also in the type of public/private collaboration that Lindsay saw as vital to the management of the city. The urban use of sculpture that Freedman initiated with “Sculpture in Environment” was further developed in her “Sculpture of the Month” program and, after she left the Office of Cultural Affairs, her founding of the Public Arts Council and . Other departments within the Lindsay administration also pursued Freedman’s methods of sculptural intervention in public space. When Lindsay and his Marine and Aviation Department sought to convert the city’s decaying industrial waterfront to recreational use in 1970, they hired Barbara Rose to mount a sculpture exhibition and workshop on a vacant pier. In the early 1970s, when New York City was on the brink of default, Lindsay supported additional attempts by private organizations to use sculpture to shape and manage public space, such as the Association for a Better New York (ABNY). The ABNY, which was founded by Lewis Rudin, one of New York’s most powerful real estate developers, purchased simple geometric sculptures by Antoni Milkowski, Lyman Kipp, and others, and placed them in public spaces throughout the city. Lindsay’s sculpture program, whether implemented by his administration or private interests, promoted the managerial order of the

373 For a full list of the exhibition’s sponsors, see: August Heckscher, Sculpture in Environment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967). Barbara Rose describes Freedman’s connections to Irwin and Henry Chanin, David Rockefeller, and other members of New York’s “ruling elite” in: Barbara Rose, “The Heroes of the Beautiful City,” New York Magazine, January 3, 1972, 50. For more on the real estate interests of Irwin and Henry Chanin, see: Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, & David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, second edition (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 442-443, 662, 1069, 1109; Diana Agrest, A Romance with the City: Irwin S. Chanin (New York: The Cooper Union, 1982); and Paul Goldberger, The City Observed: New York: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135-136, 205-206.

164 city. Lindsay, in a letter of support to ABNY, stated this explicitly, writing, “The destiny of New York City and the future of its corporate tenants are united.”374

Civil Disorder and the Politics of Public Sculpture August Heckscher, Lindsay’s Administrator of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, was the public face of New York City Parks in 1967 and the host of “Sculpture in Environment.” He promoted the show as an aesthetic intrusion into everyday life and a means of enhancing the cityscape.375 However, the exhibition was conceived and organized by Doris Freedman in direct response to the summer’s race riots. “In 1967,” Freedman recalled, “tragedies were occurring throughout the United States. Violence. Groups of people suddenly erupting in very frightening ways. And people in responsible positions got very nervous, began to re-evaluate hopefully, began to wonder, ‘How do we deal with this?’ New York was certainly a place that was also very volatile…”376 This violence constituted a threat to the social and economic transition to which Lindsay was dedicated. The city’s corporate future could only be secured if the city was made safe and Lindsay believed that a visible commitment to diversity and social justice was an important part of this endeavor. Freedman cast “Sculpture in Environment” as just such a tool to confront the volatile state of the city. This was an urgent endeavor, particularly after the summer of 1967, when local and national media perseverated on urban violence. 1967 was the third consecutive year in which major race riots broke out in cities across the country. Sensational coverage of riots in Detroit, Newark, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Tampa, Minneapolis, Buffalo, and numerous other cities dominated local and national media. Reports were published on a near daily basis from May through August in The New York Times, on a weekly basis in Time, and almost as

374 John V. Lindsay, to Association for a Better New York, February 9, 1971, “The Very Beginning” folder, Association for a Better New York Archives, New York. 375 August Heckscher, foreword to Sculpture in Environment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967); and “First City-Wide Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit Scheduled for October 1-October 31,” press release, September 13, 1967, Office of Cultural Affairs, Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, City of New York, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 25, Folder 10, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library. 376 Doris Freedman, interview by Barry Schwartz and Laurin Raikin, May 24, 1971, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 10-11.

165 frequently in Life. Photographs of violent confrontations between black protestors and white police, dead and wounded bodies lying in the street, National Guardsmen and their tanks patrolling the city, and block after block of burned out buildings were ubiquitous in the popular media.377 These photographs, often appearing adjacent to coverage of the military conflict in Vietnam, conveyed an image of the American city as a spreading war zone in the summer of 1967. New York City avoided the scale of riots that devastated other American cities in 1967 and Lindsay was lauded for his leadership. Yet the fear remained that the city was on the brink of violence and crisis. In July 1967, during the worst moments of Detroit’s riots, three nights of violent protests broke out in East Harlem and minor outbreaks of looting and violence spread down 5th Avenue into Midtown Manhattan. Despite three deaths, numerous injuries, and substantial property damage, the Lindsay administration largely maintained control of the city. Nevertheless, local newspapers explicitly associated the devastation in Detroit with the violence in New York and feared escalation in the latter. On

377 For a few characteristic examples of the major media coverage of urban riots, see “Newark—And Beyond,” The New York Times, July 15, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/07/15/83617085.html?pageNumb er=17; William V. Shannon, “Violence and the Cities: The Search for a Pattern Goes on,” The New York Times, August 27, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/08/27/133057142.html?pageNum ber=164; “Cities: Recipe for Riot,” Time 89, No. 26 (June 30, 1967): 20-21; “Races: Sparks & Tinder,” Time 90, no 3 (July 21, 29167): 15-21; “Cities: The Fire This Time,” Time 90, no. 5 (August 4, 1967): 13-18; Russell Sackett, “In a grim city, a secret meeting with the snipers,” Life 63, no. 4 (July 28, 1967): 27-28; “Quench Riots—and Look Beyond,” Life 63, no. 5 (August 4, 1967): 4; “Detroit Aftermath,” Life 63, no. 6 (August 11, 1967): 55-60. There are several important studies of media coverage of race riots in mid-1960s American cities. See, for example: Erika Doss, “Visualizing Black America: Gordon Parks at Life,” in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 221-243; Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Martin Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Emily Hage, “Reconfiguring Race, Recontextualizing the Media: ’s 1968 Fortune and Time Covers,” Art Journal 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 36-51. There are numerous studies of the structural and urban basis of these race riots. See, for example: Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: The Press, 1989); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Classic Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York and London” New York University Press, 2007).

166 July 25 and 26, for example, The New York Times front page headlines read, respectively, “U.S. Troops Sent into Detroit; 19 Dead; Johnson Decries Riots; New Outbreak in East Harlem,” and “Troops Battle Detroit Snipers, Firing Machine Guns From Tanks; Lindsay Appeals to East Harlem.”378 Lindsay, however, was committed to a rhetoric of order and refused to describe the periodic outbursts of violent protest in New York as riots.379 Urban violence was a major focus of Lindsay’s political agenda and his increasingly national profile. His novel strategies to address violence, including cultural and recreational outreach throughout the city, fueled Lindsay’s rise as a spokesperson for American cities and led to speculation about a potential presidential candidacy.380 In a speech given at the height of the riots, Lindsay outlined the root causes of urban violence including racial inequality, unemployment, and inferior education. In addition to advocating for long-term and systemic measures to address these core issues of social injustice, he argued that the public needed tangible signs of change. “In short,” Lindsay suggested, “they want to see something. They

378 For more on the disorders and riots in East Harlem and Midtown, see: Homer Bigart, “Looters Invade Midtown; East Harlem Stays Calm,” The New York Times July 27, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/07/27/83623633.html?pageNumb er=1; Homer Bigart, “Renewed Violence Erupts in 2 Puerto Rican Areas,” The New York Times, July 26, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/07/26/90381596.html?pageNumb er=1; and Jack Newfield, “John Lindsay Emerges from Summer and Smoke,” The Village Voice (September 7, 1967): 1, 30. 379 There were at least five significant disorders in New York City in 1967 according to the Kerner Report, commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to assess the recurrent urban riots and for which Lindsay served as Vice-Chairman. Two of those disorders, including the riots in East Harlem, were classified as “serious,” indicating multiple days of fires, looting, and violent crowds. Three other disorders were classified as “minor,” which did not meet criteria for a riot, including the violence on Fifth Avenue. Otto Kerner et al, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The New York Times Edition (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 113, 158-159. On Lindsay’s avoidance of the term “riot,” as well as the fear of imminent violence held by some white communities, see: Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 133, 139-140, 213-214. 380 For examples of national media attention describing Lindsay’s strategies to avert riots and maintain calm, see: Susanna McBee, “The ‘Other’ Pacification—To Cool U.S. Cities,” Life 63, no. 8 (August 25, 1967): 30-33; and John Neary, “The Lindsay Style,” Life 64, no. 21 (May 24, 1968) 74-82. For a contemporaneous, negative view of his handling of urban crisis see: “John Lindsay’s Ten Plagues,” Time 92, no. 18 (November 1, 1968): 20-29.

167 want visible, palpable evidence that their city cares about the conditions under which they live and is working to change them.”381 Access to parks, recreation, and cultural resources was one of the most immediate measures that his administration took to ease tensions in the city, reinforce communities, and project an image of calm and order. In long-neglected slum areas, the Parks Department moved quickly to establish vest pocket parks and playgrounds, transforming vacant lots into spaces of play and leisure. In existing parks, particularly the most prominent and those proximate to the New York’s most affluent corporate and residential neighborhoods, the Lindsay administration sought to organize new uses and publics to displace those deemed illicit, deviant, and dangerous. They sought, in other words, to create an environment in parks that appealed to the largely white, middle and upper class residents who were rapidly abandoning the city for the suburbs. When Freedman joined the Lindsay administration in May 1967, she immediately began to study the files cataloguing the Tony Smith exhibition in Bryant Park.382 In the precedent of Smith’s exhibition, Freedman saw the potential to use sculpture as the palpable sign of change that Lindsay had called for to address to urban violence and social injustice. For Freedman, the work of Thomas Hoving and Barbaralee Diamonstein, the organizers of the Smith exhibition, constituted an “…opening up of the city to the public…”383 In direct response to the volatile summer of 1967, Freedman sought to build on this precedent, using sculpture to open up broader sections of the city to the public. She sought to use sculpture, in other words, to produce the city as an environment. With Heckscher and Samuel Adams Green, who was hired by the city as a sculpture consultant, Freedman identified twenty-four artists who worked on an urban scale and invited them to install sculptures in the city. While the participating artists worked in diverse styles, minimal art was prominently featured in works by Tony Smith, Antoni Milkowski, Paul Frazier, Lyman Kipp, and Bernard Kirschenbaum. Moreover, the phenomenological discourse of body, space, and perception associated most closely with minimal art served as

381 John V. Lindsay, “Violence in the Cities: A Better Place to Live,” Speech delivered before the 44th Annual Congress of Cities, July 31, 1967, Vital Speeches of the Day 33, no. 22 (September 1, 1967): 674. 382 Freedman, interview by Schwartz and Raikin, May 24, 1971, Archives of American Art, 4, 7-8. 383 Ibid., 7-8.

168 the exhibition’s organizing principle. Sculptures composed of simple geometric forms and modular constructions were deployed to heighten the public’s consciousness of the environment through embodied experience, assert the social character of space, and revitalize the city. Sculptures were installed, primarily, in three types of public spaces: city parks, corporate plazas, and the green spaces adjacent to new housing developments. These were the contested spaces of John Lindsay’s image of the city. They were the sites in which Lindsay sought to project an image of calm, safety, and diversity to counter the recent narratives of violence and disorder. In the midst of the 1967 riots, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a Commission on Civil Disorders, led by Chairman Otto Kerner, Governor of Illinois, and John Lindsay, who served as Vice Chairman. The Kerner Report, as it became known, famously concluded, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”384 Discrimination and segregation, the commission argued, threatened the future of America. The commission saw the flight of white, middle- class residents to the suburbs as a specific phenomenon that exacerbated urban segregation and inequality.385 The sites that Freedman and Heckscher identified for “Sculpture in Environment” were conspicuous in their appeal to the white, middle class public that was leaving the city for the suburbs. Central Park, Battery Park, and several smaller community parks were the sites in which Lindsay sought to project a family-friendly image of the city. They were also the sites in which he sought to exercise his authority over the city’s public spaces and express his opposition to Moses’s legacy, which was already entwined with social and racial inequality. Plazas were a proliferating urban form in Midtown Manhattan and the symbolic space of managerial capitalism. Lindsay saw the plaza as a crucial open space that could serve a site of corporate leisure, recreation, and social vitality. However, it was also a spatial form that was under withering attack from New York’s most influential critics of architecture and urban planning, who viewed the plaza as meaningless, dehumanizing, and anti-urban.386 The

384 Otto Kerner, et al, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The New York Times Edition (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 1. 385 Ibid., 244-247. 386 See below. The most strident critiques of the corporate plaza include: Jane Jacobs, “Downtown for People,” in The Exploding Metropolis, ed. William H. Whyte (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 157-158; Vincent Scully, “Death of the Street,” Perspecta

169 green spaces adjacent to modernist housing towers were, likewise, seen as appealing sites of middle-class leisure by developers and as meaningless, unusable spaces by urban theorists and architecture critics. The residential developments that were selected for the exhibition were models of the social and racial diversity that Lindsay and the Kerner Commission believed was necessary for the future stability of the American city. When President Johnson selected the Kerner Commission, he avoided high profile and militant leaders of the black community and instead chose members who would appeal to a “white, moderate, responsible America.”387 One could say the same thing about the intended audience and sites selected for “Sculpture in Environment.” In their attempt to open the city’s parks and plazas up to the public and use sculpture as a palpable sign of change, Green, Freedman, and Heckscher adopted Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology and the sculpture associated most closely with it. Their immediate goal was to use sculpture to stimulate a heightened consciousness of body and environment and, in so doing, to humanize the city and invest its public spaces with meaning. In their estimation, minimal art offered a participatory aesthetic experience that could serve as a model for active engagement of the environment and a means of increasing social and spatial awareness. “Sculpture in Environment” was not singularly devoted to minimal art. In fact the exhibition presented a survey of postwar trends in sculpture. Nevertheless, the exhibition’s principals were derived from the phenomenological theory associated with minimal art, as well as the inherent urban logic that Freedman attributed to its universal, geometric forms. Freedman was likely influenced in this respect by Robert Morris, the artist most closely linked to the phenomenological turn in sculpture. The first two parts of Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” had been published in Artforum in 1966 and they remained at the center of the discourse as “Sculpture in Environment” was being planned in 1967. These essays provided the terms to understand the relationship between the body and simple

8 (1963): 91-96; Peter Blake, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” Architectural Forum 122, no. 3 (June 1965): 13-19; and Ada Louise Huxtable, “New York City’s Growing Architectural Poverty,” The New York Times, February 12, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/02/12/77170988.html?pageNumb er=38. 387 Tom Wicker, introduction to Otto Kerner, et al, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The New York Times Edition (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), v.

170 geometric forms that proliferated in sculpture in the mid-1960s, as well as the potential public significance of sculpture’s increasing size.388 Morris’s argument, echoing Merleau- Ponty, that the physical participation compelled by the new sculpture heightened one’s awareness of body, self, and environment, was rehearsed by numerous critics and curators, including Green, Freedman, and Heckscher. The object, Morris argued, “is in some ways more reflexive, because one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space of the work is stronger than in previous work, with its many internal relationships.”389 The belief that simple geometric forms were more democratic because they could be understood by anyone was, likewise, a view shared by Morris and the organizers of “Sculpture in Environment.”390 In “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Morris posed the question, “Why not put the work outside and further change the terms?”391 With the increasing size of sculpture relative to the body, its requirement of physical participation, and the heightened consciousness of surrounding space that it provoked, Morris pointed to the potential for a new mode of public sculpture. He immediately answered his own question, suggesting that the need for a more public mode exists but the new work was unfit for “architecturally designed sculpture courts” or for placement “outside cubic architectural forms.”392 Morris’s preference for a more public mode “without architecture as background and reference” could explain his halting relationship with the “Sculpture in Environment” exhibition. He was invited to participate and conceived of a sculpture for the show. He was listed in the press release, featured in August Heckscher’s announcement, and noted in an article in The New York Times publicizing “Sculpture in Environment.”393 Ultimately, however, Morris was not included in

388 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42-44; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20-23. 389 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” 21. 390 Morris confirmed the intended democratic appeal of the work that he describes in “Notes on Sculpture” in an interview with Benjamin Buchloh. Benjamin Buchloh, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris, “Three Conversations in 1985,” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 51-52. 391 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” (1966), 21. 392 Ibid., 21. 393 “First City-Wide Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit Scheduled for October 1-October 31,” press release, September 13, 1967, Office of Cultural Affairs, Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, City of New York, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 25, Folder 10, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library; “Sites are Chosen for 19 Sculptures in Parks’ Display,” The New York Times September 14, 1967,

171 the exhibition.394 For Freedman, on the other hand, the expanding size of sculpture presented an opportunity for the city.395 Regardless of his absence or his growing skepticism about the potential of public art in the city, Morris’s terms for assessing recent sculpture resonated in the reception of “Sculpture in Environment.” His phenomenological theory of sculpture became the primary criteria of aesthetic judgment according to which the included works and the exhibition as a whole were measured. Numerous critics assessed the work based on whether it heightened sensation, stimulated perception of self and environment, or increased engagement with the city. In The New York Times, Edwin Bolwell wrote, “If people are puzzled, it means they are looking at the sculpture. And if they are looking at it, it means they are involved with their environment. That’s what this show is all about.”396 In a major article in Time featuring the work of Tony Smith and “Sculpture in Environment,” the unnamed author notes the new “civic scale” of American sculpture and describes its potential to address the sensorial fatigue of the modern city. “What Tony Smith and fellow monumentalists want to create,” the author suggested, “is architectonic mastodons, varied enough to refresh the eye after the stark grids of city walls and streets, strong enough to war with jet-generation girders, large enough to command space-age piazzas.”397 Time included a six-page spread of color photographs of public sculpture in cities around the country. Six of the twelve photographs depicted “Sculpture in Environment” and all but one of those emphasized the embodied and active engagement that the works

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/09/14/83135074.html?pageNumb er=55. 394 In an email exchange, Morris suggested that his proposal may have been rejected but he did not recall the details. Robert Morris, email to the author, June 15, 2015. Suzaan Boetteger suggests that Morris proposed a work composed of jets of steam, which was subsequently installed at Western Washington University in the early 1970s. Boettger suggests the work was rejected by Sam Green for “Sculpture in Environment” because it was too ephemeral and difficult to produce. Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 6, 260 n. 19. 395 Freedman, interview by Schwartz and Raikin, May 24, 1971, Archives of American Art, 4, 12-13. 396 Edwin Bolwell, “Sculpture on the City’s Sidewalks Sparks Interest and Irreverence,” The New York Times September 26, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/09/26/83634793.html?pageNumb er=1. 397 “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time, October 13, 1967, 85.

172 compelled. A child hangs upside down, for example, from Alexander Liberman’s Alpha, which was installed in Battery Park. In Seagram Plaza, a man in a suit leans forward to touch ’s . A woman in Astor Place pushes Bernard Rosenthal’s massive black cube, Alamo, with her bare foot. And four children sit inside Antoni Milkowski’s Diamond, which was installed in front of I. M. Pei’s Kip’s Bay housing development. In The Village Voice, John Perreault described the essentially public nature of minimal art, lamenting the absence of Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson, and argued that their work was needed on New York’s streets. “‘Sculpture in Environment’ is important,” Perreault wrote, “not only for the art and artists involved but also for New York.”398 Hilton Kramer and Lucy Lippard, typically on opposite side of the judgment of 1960s sculpture, agreed that the exhibition was largely a failure. But their terms of failure echoed Morris’s polemic on the public potential of the new sculpture, as well as the need for it given the social and architectural condition of New York City. Both Kramer and Lippard concluded that much of the work included in “Sculpture in Environment” was mediocre in quality and private in nature. “Works of art designed for public sites and executed on a monumental scale…assume another kind of burden,” Kramer argued, “at once civic and esthetic. They are obliged to speak not only the language of the studio but also, as it were, the language of the street.” The works selected by Green and Freedman, he suggested, failed to address the problems of the city. “To most of these sculptors, the language of the street is as alien as Sanskrit,” Kramer wrote. “They are simply—all too simply—speaking the language of the studio on a public platform…[…]…they have responded with an almost uniform indifference to the actual problems—problems of space and human traffic, problems of scale and visual discretion—that ought to have been among the first concern of artists aspiring to enhance our beleaguered environment.”399 While less hostile, Lippard also argued that the majority of the works in the show were studio-oriented and unsuited to public needs, scale, or space. “One cannot just take a

398 John Perreault, “Going Public,” The Village Voice (October 12, 1967): 14-15, 17. 399 Hilton Kramer, “The Studio Vs. the Street,” The New York Times October 15, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/10/15/105269339.html?pageNum ber=139.

173 sculpture out of the studio,” she suggested, “dump it into the gutter, and call it public art.”400 However, Lippard singled out the contributions of Tony Smith and Claes Oldenburg as evidence of an innovative and committed approach to public art and lamented the absence of Morris and Carl Andre, whom she positioned with Smith and Oldenburg at the vanguard of new monuments and public art. Like Morris and Heckscher, Lippard argued that the best new art could function like a rupture in the city, stimulating a greater consciousness of the environment amongst an otherwise “hurried or insensitive urban audience.”401 She was more explicit than Morris, though, in stating the social and political stakes of the best new public art. “The Utopian aspect of the large scale and towering grandeur of much recent art also reflects an attempt at a new kind of social contact,” Lippard contended. “Art in the 1930s, despite its would-be ‘proletarian’ styles and subjects, failed to make contact with the working classes. Today artists may be exploiting the American respect for bigness, trying to reach the public by sheer impressiveness, by overwhelming, awe-inspiring scale, form, and beauty.”402 “Sculpture in Environment” has barely registered in the historiography of minimal art. The exhibition is largely ignored by historians parsing minimal art’s canonical formation, despite the organizers’ embrace of Robert Morris’s phenomenological theory of sculpture, the contributions of artists at the heart of minimal art’s canon such as Tony Smith, and the inclusion of lesser known artists associated with minimal art, such as Antoni Milkowski, Lyman Kipp, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Paul Frazier.403 “Sculpture in Environment” has

400 Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 20, No. 4 (Winter 1967- 68): 650, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3849578. 401 Ibid., 652-656. 402 Ibid., 653. 403 The most detailed and substantive historiographical account of the exhibition appears in Suzaan Boettger’s Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Invested in complicating the association between earthworks and the American west, Boettger positions “Sculpture in Environment” as an early move by sculpture out of the gallery and into public space. Boettger goes further than any other historian in listing the participating artists and the sites of installation, effectively grounding the development of earthworks in the city. However, her argument about the primacy of the exhibition for a history of earthworks rests on her analysis of a single work: Claes Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument. Suzaan Boettger’s Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 1-8. The exhibition is also discussed in monographic studies of several participating artists. However, in these studies, as in Boettger’s, the analysis is largely limited to a single artist and is used to support an argument about the development of a trajectory of work. See, for example, Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970, 107; Gregor Stemmrich, “Hypertrophies, Trophies, and Tropes of the

174 not had a significant place in historiography because, perhaps, at a moment of intense sculptural polemics, the selection of work was decidedly eclectic. The participating artists constituted a survey of recent trends in sculpture including high modernism, pop, kinetic, assemblage, and minimalist. None of the most important texts in the historiography of minimal art mentions “Sculpture in Environment.”404 Much of this same core historiography reinforces the exclusive canon as received and remains invested in an ideal of art’s autonomy carried over from the postwar theories of modernism. The polemics of “Sculpture in Environment” had less to do with the particulars of the work than the place of sculpture in the city. Even as the exhibition’s polemics occupied the phenomenological turf shared by minimal art and urban planning, Green and Freedman had little interest in committing to minimalism’s rapidly cohering canon. Informed by contemporaneous urban theory that argued for the concrete function of monumental sculpture in the city, the exhibition directly opposed the vestigial ideal of art’s autonomy. However, if we accept Perreault’s contention that the exhibition was important as much for the city as it was for the art and artists, we have to go beyond the art historical significance of the exhibition, to ask after its urban significance. What did the work selected by Green and Freedman mean in the city and, more specifically, in the immediate spatial and architectural contexts in which the works were installed? If the city needed sculpture, as Perreault, Lippard, and Kramer contended, as did

Everyday: Claes Oldenburg’s New Definition of Sculpture,” in Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, ed. Achim Hochdörfer and Barbara Schröder (Wien: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2012), 188-192. Historians of public art, such as Harriet Senie and Michele Bogart assess “Sculpture in Environment” in the context of New York City’s patronage of public sculpture. Senie and Bogart describe the primacy of the Lindsay administration, and Doris Freedman particularly, in the development of civic support for sculpture. Harriet F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130-132; Michele H. Bogart, “The Patronage Frame, New York City’s Mayors and the Support of Public Art,” in A Companion to Public Art, ed. Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie (West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2016), 388-390. 404 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977); Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996); Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: The Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998); Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); and James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

175 the exhibition’s organizers, in which urban spaces did this need cohere and how did the sculpture meet that need?

The Private Space of Public Sculpture Freedman and Heckscher selected only one location that was proximate to any of the summer riots of 1967. At the Lenox Terrace apartment complex in Harlem, they installed two sculptures by Alexander Calder, Little Fountain and Triangle with Ears (Figure 4.1). The two stabiles, both biomorphic abstractions cut from steel plates and painted black, were placed on the lawn at the center of the development. Lenox Terrace opened in 1958 with six, sixteen-story red brick buildings on West 135th Street, between Lenox and 5th Avenues. Calder’s sculptures would have been visible from many of the apartments’ prominent balconies. The balconies are also an indication of the social status of the building, which was designed to house middle- and upper-income residents.405 It was amongst Harlem’s most desirable addresses and was lauded for the diversity of class and race that it housed, including local leaders, celebrities, and middle-class workers.

Figure 4.1. Alexander Calder, Photograph by Fred McDarrah of Alexander Calder’s Little Fountain and Triangle with Ears at Lenox Terrace, New York, 1967. Fred W. McDarrah, All Rights Reserved. © 2018 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

405 Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, (1997), 877-878.

176 The diverse community and vital social life that was cultivated in the development’s first decade was described in a feature article in The New York Times Magazine in 1968. Just a few months after “Sculpture in Environment” closed and Calder’s sculptures were removed, Ernest Dunbar described the diversity at Lenox Terrace. “The affluent and the marginal,” he wrote, “celebrities and cliff-hangers, custom-tailored and off-the-rack types, Ph.D.’s and blue-collar workers—all mingle in the elevators of the Terrace in a potpourri of color, class and life style.”406 Dunbar further described the active community that cohered among the residents and the resulting safety and stability relative to the surrounding neighborhood. He suggested, “…in view of its residents, if you want respectability without sterility and security without conformity, there’s no place like the Terrace.”407 There is no suggestion of a causal relation between the Calders and the community at Lenox Terrace. In fact, there is little evidence that Calder’s sculptures attracted any attention. Rather, the significance is in the selection of the site. Lenox Terrace was a model of the diverse community that New York could cultivate and what the American city, according to Lindsay and the Kerner Commission, needed to survive. The placement of Calder’s work, perhaps the most well known artist in “Sculpture in Environment,” publicized the type of community that Lindsay viewed as both resistant to urban violence and an antidote to it. The other housing development featured in “Sculpture in Environment” was decidedly less diverse than Lenox Terrace but no less significant for Lindsay’s image of the city. Antoni Milkowski’s massive Diamond was placed on the plaza between two large apartment buildings in Kips Bay, spanning 1st and 2nd Avenues between East 30th and 33rd Streets (Figure 4.2). The identical pair of buildings, faced with stark grids of concrete and glass, had been designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 1965. The complex was developed by William Zeckendorf of Webb and Knapp, a major owner and developer of corporate and residential real estate in Manhattan.408 Kips Bay featured over one thousand luxury apartments and was explicitly designed to be family friendly, with plentiful open spaces and

406 Ernest Dunbar, “The View from Lenox Terrace,” The New York Times Magazine, March 3, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/03/03/90029469.html?pageNumb er=352 407 Ibid. 408 “The Wheelings and Dealings of William Zeckendorf,” Architectural Forum 112 no. 6 (June 1960): 130-131, 195, 198, 202, 210, 216; Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, 288.

177 recreational amenities just a few blocks from Midtown Manhattan’s proliferating corporate headquarters. It was the type of housing that was conceived to appeal to office workers who were otherwise drawn to the security and space of the suburbs.

Figure 4.2. Antoni Milkowski, Diamond, Kips Bay Plaza, 1967, Kips Bay, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

178 Zeckendorf characterized the Kips Bay development as the ideal place to raise a family. “Here we created something new in city housing—a sense of place and unity with buildings, gardens, and play areas…”409 This sentiment was supported by The New York Times’ famed theater critic, Brooks Atkinson, who described the drama of family life at Kips Bay in 1968, including the excited masses of children who played in the wide space between the two buildings.410 Ada Louise Huxtable, likewise, considered Pei’s building “the first important breakthrough” in residential housing to meet the needs of New York’s rapidly changing workforce.411 Milkowski’s Diamond, a sixteen-foot tall structure fabricated in Cor-Ten steel, echoed both the stark formal articulation of Pei’s buildings and the social ambition stated by Zeckendorf. Milkowski’s work was composed of two V-shaped units confronting each other to enclose an interior space. As photographs published in the exhibition catalogue, The Village Voice, and Time suggest, the sculpture was appropriated by children as a play space.412 Pei and Milkowski both used modular units to frame an open space, ostensibly to stimulate social activity within it. Zeckendorf’s development, however, was controversial from the start, wrapped up in the changing politics of urban renewal. The new complex displaced a mixed-use neighborhood that was known for its diversity of class and ethnicity. In addition to what The New York Times described as an “intricate” ethnic residential population, the neighborhood had been home to numerous commercial and factory buildings that were razed to make way for Pei’s buildings. The ten-acre property had been acquired by Webb and Knapp in 1958, at the urging of Robert Moses, and the development was subsidized by Title I Federal Housing

409 William Zeckendorf with Edward McCreary, The Autobiography of William Zeckendorf (Chicago: Plaza Press, 1987), 237. 410 Brooks Atkinson, “The Drama of Life in Kip’s Bay,” The New York Times, April 6, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/04/06/88935873.html?pageNumb er=38 411 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Our New Buildings: Hits and Misses,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1962, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/04/29/93832164.html?pageNumb er=213 412 See note 17 above. August Heckscher, Sculpture in Environment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967); and John Perreault, “Going Public,” The Village Voice, October 12, 1967, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19671012&printsec=fron tpage&hl=en.

179 Grant. Rather than supporting new lower- and middle-income housing developments for existing residents, to replace their tenements and slums, however, the subsidy was used at Kips Bay to build luxury housing that the working class families in the razed neighborhood could not hope to afford. Whereas the developers and advocates of clearance characterized the tenement neighborhood as dilapidated, the existing residents argued that it was a vibrant and well cared for community.413 The displacement of the existing community at Kips Bay and other similar developments resulted in a ban on urban renewal projects, such as Zeckendorf’s, which were intended only for luxury housing.414 Milkowski’s Diamond was fabricated by Robert Pinkerton Boiler Works, a small manufacturing company founded in the late 19th century that specialized in alloy and steel fabrication located just north of Albany.415 It was the type of manufacturer that would have been common in Manhattan until the early 1960s, and its workers would have populated the type of community that was displaced by Zeckendorf’s Kips Bay. While Milkowski has largely receded from the historiography of minimal art, in 1967 he remained in the orbit of its core canon. Beginning in 1966, he taught sculpture at under Eugene Goossen and his work was most often associated with that of Tony Smith, who taught in the same department from 1962 to 1974. Milkowski was included in several important exhibitions organized by Goossen around which the discourse of minimal art began to cohere in the mid-1960s. He was included, for example, alongside Carl Andre as the only sculptors in Goossen’s “8 Young Artists,” held in 1964 at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, a suburb just north of New York City. This was one of the first group exhibitions to recognize the tendency in advanced sculpture towards essential, reductive geometric forms and modular structures. Goossen suggested that the forms developed by Milkowski and Andre were more accessible, as they could be experienced physically and

413 John Sibley, “A Wrecking Ball Casts a Shadow,” The New York Times, November 12, 1964 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/11/12/97433016.html?pageNumb er=39. 414 Martin Arnold, “Luxury Housing Limited by City,” The New York Times, March 6, 1962 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/03/06/90136249.html?pageNumb er=1. 415 There are several bills for the fabrication of Milkowski’s sculpture from Robert Pinkerton Boiler Works, Inc., including Diamond, in the records of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which represented Milkowski. Tibor de Nagy Papers, Artists Files: Antoni Milkowski, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

180 directly, without recourse to allusive, personal, or symbolic content.416 Goossen further linked the accessibility of Milkowski’s work to his industrial materials. “If there is any a priori determinant as to the ultimate dimensions of the forms,” Goossen wrote, “it is likely to be found in the standard widths and lengths of rolled steel as it comes from the mill.”417 Goossen included Milkowski in two additional exhibitions that played important roles in the canonical formation of minimal art: “Distillation,” at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1966, and the MoMA’s “The Art of the Real,” of 1968. In addition to Milkowski, the latter exhibition included works by Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Lyman Kipp, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson, representing MoMA’s first major engagement with minimal art. With both shows, Goossen continued to connect formal reduction in sculpture with immediate, physical experience. In the catalogue for “Art of the Real,” Goossen’s argument was fully informed by minimal art’s phenomenological discourse. “The new attitude,” he wrote, “has been turning art inside out: instead of perceptual experience being accepted as the means to an end, it has become the end in itself. […] Consequently the very means of art have been isolated and exposed, forcing the spectator to perceive himself in the process of his perception.”418 As with Robert Morris’s key theoretical texts on sculpture, a politics of accessibility is implicit in Goossen’s account of body and perception. With Diamond, Milkowski continued to use milled, Corten steel. As in Goossen’s reading, this delivered industrial manufacturing into the realms of aesthetics and the city in a reduced, abstract form. What was left out of Milkowski’s abstraction of industrial manufacturing was labor. What remained was the body, but in place of the worker, it was the

416 E. C. Goosen, 8 Young Artists (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 1964), unpaginated. See also Meyer, Minimalism, (2001), 109-112. Meyer’s account of “8 Young Artists” is significant. He devotes three pages to an assessment of Goossen’s early attempt to identify the formal qualities of the new abstraction. However, it is also symptomatic of the tendency in Meyer’s account, and in much historiography of minimal art, to reduce the diverse field to singular figures. Milkowski is only mentioned briefly, while the bulk of Meyer’s assessment is devoted to Andre’s contribution to the show. “8 Young Artists” was Andre’s first public exhibition but it would be hard to argue that his single sculpture played a more central role in the show than Milkowski, who was represented by three sculptures. 417 E. C. Goosen, 8 Young Artists: Then, 1964 and Now, 1991 (New York: Hunter College of The City University of New York, 1991), 14. 418 Eugene C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 11.

181 universal body of phenomenology—the unspecified public that could access the simple form, according to Goossen—and the body of the child at play framed in the photographs of “Sculpture in Environment.” The direct, physical experience that Goossen associated with Milkowski’s simple geometric sculptures appealed to Freedman, Heckscher, and Green who saw it as accessible and democratic. However, as deployed in Kips Bay Plaza, Diamond was not intended to restore the logic of industrial manufacturing to this landmark space, cleared of its tenements and factories. Rather, Diamond was used to organize a new form of space and to orient the body within it. Given the “new” neighborhood, these were not random bodies. Kips Bay was designed to appeal to the largely white, upper class residents who were otherwise attracted to the suburbs. It was designed to appeal, in other words, to the corporate managers, bankers, and lawyers employed in Midtown Manhattan whom Lindsay desperately wanted to keep in the city. Of less concern were the working class populations that formerly resided in the neighborhood, displaced as light industry itself left Manhattan. Milkowski’s Diamond helped organize and promote the development’s semi-suburban identity. This is precisely what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the new unurban urbanization,” in which isolated, park-like housing developments replace the mixed-use neighborhoods that had once defined the city.419 Placed in the vast lawn between Pei’s buildings, Diamond highlighted the property’s expansive open space. Photographed with children reaching to touch it, or playing on and around it, the sculpture framed and publicized the recreational and family-friendly amenities that this new type of housing could offer. Goossen recalled that he was hired by the Hudson River Museum to organize the “8 Young Artists” show in 1964 because Martin Reis, the assistant director, “wanted something to stimulate greater interest in contemporary art in his suburban constituency.”420 It was the same constituency that Freedman and the Lindsay administration sought to attract to Kips Bay. Kips Bay was developed to house New York’s corporate workforce and Milkowski’s Diamond was used to frame the social and spatial amenities that luxury apartments in the city could offer. Many more works in “Sculpture in Environment” were installed in corporate plazas, the archetypal space of managerial capitalism in postwar New York. Lever House and

419 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 7, 47-48, 114-115. 420 Goosen, 8 Young Artists: Then, 1964 and Now, 1991, 3.

182 Seagram Building set the precedent for the privately owned public space in the 1950s, and both Park Avenue buildings were used as models for the Comprehensive Amendment to the New York City Zoning Resolution of 1961. The revised zoning regulations encouraged new office buildings to devote a greater percentage of the property to public space in exchange for an increased height allowance. The 1961 Zoning Resolution privileged managerial capitalism in Manhattan, as well as the modernist towers and plazas that constituted the symbolic forms of this economy.421 By the mid-1960s, the proliferation of the corporate plaza was the subject of widespread denunciation by critics of architecture and urban planning. While recognizing the exceptional quality of Lever House and Seagram Buildings, including their plazas, many architecture critics and urban theorists nonetheless condemned the repetition of this spatial model. As plazas proliferated, they were increasingly seen as meaningless and useless. They were seen to break the frame of buildings that defined the street and fatally disrupt the social life and sensorial experience of the city. Ada Louise Huxtable suggested that the redundant

421 The 1961 Zoning Resolution is discussed at length in Chapter 2, “The Art of Zoning: Carl Andre’s Urban Sculptures.” City Planning Commission, Zoning Resolution of the City of New York (New York: The City of New York, 1961). The New York City Planning Commission commissioned two important studies that substantially informed the Zoning Resolution of 1961 and included the key terms that privileged corporate use in Manhattan over industrial manufacturing. See: Vorhees, Walker, Smith, & Smith. Zoning New York City: A Proposal for a Zoning Resolution for the City of New York Submitted to the City Planning Commission. New York: City Planning Commission, 1958; and Harrison, Ballard, & Allen, Plan for Rezoning the City of New York, (New York: City Planning Commission, October 1950). James Felt, Chairman of the City Planning Commission and the primary author of the 1961 Zoning Resolution, introduced the legislation and argued for the core goal of moving industry to the margins of the city in: James Felt, “Modern Zoning and Planning Progress in New York,” Fordham Law Review 29, no. 4 (April 1961): 681-692. There are several critical histories of New York City’s postwar deindustrialization and emergent corporate order that assess the role of the 1961 Zoning Resolution. See: Toll, Zoned America; William K. Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982); Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London & New York: Verso, 1993). For a measured account of zoning and the rise of corporate modernist architecture, see: Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960 (1997). Sharon Zukin assesses the role of new zoning regulations on the deindustrialization of Lower Manhattan, the opening up of lofts to artists, and the marketing of the loft as a new and lucrative model of real estate and gentrification. See Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, paperback edition (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

183 plaza demonstrated, “how the new zoning, like the old zoning, is to be used exclusively as a tool for profit.”422 The plaza, according to New York’s most important architecture critics, produced dead space rather than open space.423 For “Sculpture in Environment,” Freedman placed sculptures in the most significant and controversial plazas in Midtown Manhattan. The Seagram Building and Lever House respectively hosted Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk and an untitled work by Josef Levi. Sculptures were also placed in the plazas adjacent to the newly constructed corporate headquarters of CBS, Union Carbide, General Motors, and Time & Life. All of the plazas associated with these buildings were described by architecture critics as spatially bankrupt and antithetical to urban life. They were seen as serving only to project an image of corporate identity and maximize the profitable use of land at the expense of the city and the public. In an unpublished manuscript that Freedman began in 1967, she described the function of art to give meaning to these new urban spaces. “One of the significant facts of these times has been the monstrous growth of our cities, dehumanizing in the crumbling slums as well as the sanitized glass towers.” Many artists, she continued, “…try to ‘neutralize a brutalized environment’ to give a place an identity…”424 A decade later, in a her published walking tour of Lower Manhattan, Freedman continued to argue for sculpture’s function in

422 Ada Louise Huxtable, “More on How to Kill a City,” NYT March 21, 1965, 471 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/03/21/96700885.html?pageNumb er=471 423 This critique of the modernist tower and open plaza was articulated by numerous critics and theorists of postwar architecture in New York. Amongst the most significant examples, see: Jane Jacobs, “Downtown for People,” in The Exploding Metropolis, ed. William H. Whyte (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 157-158; Lewis Mumford, “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow,” Architectural Record 132, No. 5 (November 1962): 139-144; Vincent Scully, “Death of the Street,” Perpecta 8 (1963): 91-96; Peter Blake, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” Architectural Forum 122, no. 3 (June 1965): 13-19; Ada Louise Huxtable, “New York City’s Growing Architectural Poverty,” New York Times, February 12, 1968, 38; Nathan Silver, Lost New York (New York: Houghton Mifflin, Inc., 1967), 13; and William H. Whyte, “Please, just a nice place to sit,” New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1972, 20-32. 424 There are numerous unpublished manuscripts written by Freedman in the Public Art Fund Archive in which similar sentiments are articulated. Doris Freedman, unpublished manuscript draft titled “Art for the City,” 1967, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 22, Folder 14, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library.

184 the “…humanizing of our cities…”425 To neutralize a brutalized environment, for Freedman, was to assert the humanity of space. Sculpture, she believed, could orient the body within the environment and, in turn, shape environmental meaning around the body. The Union Carbide Building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill (SOM), opened in 1961. The reception of its plaza, and the urban function of the building itself, set the stage for a sustained critique of the corporate contribution to public space. The building itself was seen as a coherent expression of Union Carbide’s identity. Architectural Forum described it as a public relations asset. “It is, first, a striking ‘corporate image.”426 For a company with no retail presence, which dealt primarily in material science and chemical manufacturing, the commitment to good architecture was a means of advertising. The plaza fronting the building on Park Avenue was seen by Architectural Forum as part and parcel of the corporate image but, nonetheless, a fundamentally problematic addition to the city. “At sidewalk level, Union Carbide makes a generous donation of open space to crowded Manhattan, and thus emulates other, new corporate giants in need of good public relations.”427 This generous contribution, however, was rebuked for its destruction of the street. “Those who care about urban scale and order,” the unnamed author suggested, “will regret that this building, with all its excellent qualities, marks the inevitable demise of the one unified boulevard on Manhattan island.”428 The repetition of this spatial model, the author concluded, “…is likely to be an urban disaster.”429 For “Sculpture in Environment,” David von Schlegell installed an expansive aluminum sculpture on Union Carbide’s plaza (Figure 4.3). Von Schlegell, like Milkowski, worked at the edge of minimal art without ever matriculating into its canon.430 He was included in the landmark “Primary Structures” exhibition at The Jewish Museum in 1966

425 Doris Freedman, Walking Tour Guide of Public art in Lower Manhattan. New York: Public Arts Council/Municipal Arts Society and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 1977, unpaginated. 426 “Union Carbide’s Shaft of Steel,” Architectural Forum 113, no. 6 (November 1960): 119- 120. 427 Ibid., 117. 428 Italics in the original. Ibid., 115 429 Ibid., 120. 430 Unlike Milkowski, von Schlegell rejected the association with minimal art that came with his inclusion in the “Primary Structures” exhibition and refused to adhere to what he viewed as the strict formal and philosophical polemics around which the canon cohered. Jay Jacobs, “The Artist Speaks: David von Schlegell,” Art in America 56, no. 3 (May/June 1968): 50-59.

185 and spent his career constructing geometric, modular sculptures with industrial materials. His untitled work at Union Carbide consisted of two large triangular prisms, made in aluminum, and a long framework of stainless steel tubing seen to connect them. One triangular prism lay on its side, bolted to the ground. The other prism was suspended in the air, supported by the cantilevered steel framework, rising twenty-five feet above the plaza at a dynamic angle. The entire work spanned over sixty feet.

Figure 4.3. David Von Schlegell, Untitled, 1967, Union Carbide Building Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

In many ways, Von Schlegell’s sculpture matched the corporate identity of Union Carbide. In the 1960s, the company established a major Aerospace Materials division and was expanding rapidly in the field of rocket design and propulsion technology.431 Von Schlegell, who served as a pilot in the Air Force during World War II and an engineer for Douglas Aircraft before that, experimented with static, aerial forms. In the “Primary

431 “New Activities,” Missiles and Rockets 16, no. 18 (May 2, 1965): 41; Herbert Koshetz, “Carbon Fibers Going into Space,” The New York Times, December 22, 1966, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/12/22/82547386.html?pageNumb er=58.

186 Structures” catalogue, Kynaston McShine suggested that Von Schlegell’s work “…seems inevitable in terms of the jet and Space Age.”432 The simple geometric form of sculpture installed at Union Carbide, positioned parallel to the façade of the building, likewise reiterated the stark grid of SOM’s steel and glass curtain wall. At the same time, Von Schlegell’s sculpture recalibrated the space of the plaza and impacted pedestrians’ pattern of movement. Placed at the edge of the plaza and the sidewalk, the work marked the boundary between privately owned public space and the street. Hovering over a substantial part of the block, the work appeared vaguely unstable and potentially dangerous. It would have forced anyone entering or exiting the front of the building to walk around or under it. When preparing for the exhibition, the city required von Schlegell to submit extensive calculations proving that his sculpture was safe.433 Heckscher suggested that the works in “Sculpture in Environment” would “…intrude upon our daily walks and errands…”434 Von Schlegell’s work stood as a physical obstacle to the office workers and clientele of Union Carbide. This kind of intrusion, Heckscher’s believed, could animate a subject inured to the routine movements of everyday life in the city. The critical rhetoric deriding the plaza sharpened throughout the 1960s, as more new corporate headquarters took advantage of the revised zoning regulations. The most notable examples included the Time & Life Building, which was designed by Wallis Harrison and opened in December 1959; Eero Saarinen’ CBS Building, which opened in 1965; and General Motors Building, which was designed by Edward Durell Stone and was still under construction in 1967 when “Sculpture in Environment” was mounted. Harrison’s unremarkable plaza for the Time & Life Building, on 6th Avenue and 50th Street received little attention when it opened in 1959. However it became the subject of condemnation as the critique of the plaza mounted in the mid-1960s. In his biting 1965 essay, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” Peter Blake argued that Harrison’s plaza contributed to a spatial disaster. “Time & Life building turned its back, literally, upon all its future neighbors to the north.”

432 Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1966), unpaginated. 433 Jacobs, “The Artist Speaks: David von Schlegell,” (1968), 57. 434 Heckscher, foreword to Sculpture in Environment, (1967), unpaginated.

187 Blake continued, “at Sixth Avenue plazas popped up at random and for no particular reason.”435 The CBS Building plaza provoked similar critique. While most architecture critics effusively praised Saarinen’s severe tower, they described its plaza as hostile to the city. Blake lauded the building as a singular example of tower architecture but saw its plaza as a destructive space. “And so CBS stands aloof, alone, serene,” Blake wrote. “And by its very presence, it offers a mute but unmistakable commentary on the slaughter on Sixth Avenue, the slaughter that is our cities today.”436 Bethami Probst, reviewing the CBS Building for Progressive Architecture, saw the building as a success but deemed the plaza an antagonistic space that discouraged use. Comparing CBS to the Seagram Building, Probst suggested, “…The raised Mies plaza is a public place with two formal pools, fountains, and trees; the Saarinen plaza is sunken and lacks even these amenities, existing exclusively to help articulate the tower.” The CBS plaza, Probst concluded, “is a bravura declaration of apartness.”437 The most caustic critique, however, was reserved for the General Motors Building plaza. The building was considered something of an abomination from the start, as its construction necessitated the razing of McKim, Mead, & White’s iconic Savoy Plaza Hotel.438 The General Motors Building plaza, on 5th Avenue at 58th Street, would face the city-owned Grand Army Plaza. Ada Louise Huxtable, in her article “More on How to Kill a City,” condemned the construction of General Motors’ redundant open space in the strongest terms, describing it as a “rape” of Grand Army Plaza. “The Plaza area, a fortuitous combination of a perfectly scaled square and well related buildings,” Huxtable wrote in 1965, before construction began, “is about to be mutilated as a coherent, justly proportioned element of civic design.”439

435 Peter Blake, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” Architectural Forum 122, no. 3 (June 1965): 15, 17. 436 Blake, “Slaughter on Sixth Avenue,” (1965), 18. 437 Bethami Probst, “CBS: Somber Power on Sixth Avenue,” Progressive Architecture XLVI, no. 7 (July 1965): 190. 438 Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, (1997), 1122-1124. 439 Ada Louise Huxtable, “More on How to Kill a City,” The New York Times, March 21, 1965, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/03/21/96700885.html?pageNumb er=471; see also Ada Louise Huxtable, “Architecture: Fun and Games,” The New York Times, June 19, 1966,

188 All of these plazas were featured in “Sculpture in Environment.” Marisol’s monolithic Three Figures was placed in Grand Army Plaza, directly across the street from the General Motors Building, which was nearing completion. Two sculptures by , Offering and Exclosure, occupied the CBS Building plaza. And Les Levine’s All Star Cast was placed in front of the Time & Life Building. These three works, along with the Newman at Seagram Building, the Levi at Lever House, and the von Schlegell at Union Carbide, represented a sustained attempt to redefine the contested space of the plaza and orient the body within it. When Lindsay had suggested that Heckscher serve as co-chairman of the citywide Cultural Showcase, of which “Sculpture in Environment” was one part, Lindsay argued that Heckscher would advance the public/private partnership in the management of public space. With Heckscher on board, Lindsay wrote, “This merges the private, quasi-public and public all together and indicates to the country the oneness of the City and its people during this special occasion.”440 The corporate plaza was a space in which the boundaries between private, quasi-public, and public were, likewise, merged. Conceived and built to project corporate identity and private power, the plaza was explicitly codified as public space, defined in the 1961 Zoning Resolution as “an open area accessible to the public at all times.”441 Yet the plaza was privately owned and managed, “a tool for profit” according to Huxtable, and a place more hospitable to the projection of corporate power than to the pedestrian. Les Levine dealt directly with the spatial contradictions of the corporate plaza. Critics singled out his All Star Cast, installed on the Time & Life Building plaza on 6th Avenue at 50th Street, for its successful use of the site and engagement of the body (Figure 4.4).442 Most of the plaza sculptures were seen as overwhelmed by their architectural environments, including those by Newman, Nevelson, and Marisol. In contrast, Levine’s work was lauded,

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/06/19/82459777.html?pageNumb er=109 440 John Lindsay, letter to Elinor C. Guggenheimer, Commissioner of City Planning, March 14, 1967, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 29, Folder 505, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 441 City Planning Commission. Zoning Resolution of the City of New York. New York: The City of New York, 1961, 27-32. 442 Jeanne Siegel, “In the Galleries: Sculpture in Environment,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 2 (November 1967): 58.

189 not as sculpture, per se, but as a useful social intervention at one of New York’s busiest intersections.443

Figure 4.4. Les Levine, All Star Cast, 1967, Time & Life Building Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

All Star Cast consisted of eight large panels of clear plastic Acrylite, which had been heated and shaped into rounded forms. Levine arranged the panels in pairs and positioned them to form a cross, leaving a passage through which people could enter and traverse the work’s interior space. Levine exhibited similar works in two shows earlier in 1967: Star Machine at Finch College Museum of Art’s “Schemata 7” and The Star Garden (A Place) in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden. All three works were conceived to be almost invisible, supplanting optical with embodied aesthetic experience. “The purpose,” Levine

443 John Perreault, “Going Public,” The Village Voice, October 12, 1967, 17 https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19671012&printsec=fron tpage&hl=en

190 suggested, “was to make a piece that would be so close to not existing and yet exist,”444 They were designed to be entered, not to be looked at.445 Levine contended that the experience of the near-invisible work, inside and out, would heighten one’s perception of body, others, and environment. “The viewer is more aware of his own physiognomy and of the people and objects outside…”446 Levine made a similar argument in the catalogue accompanying “Schemata 7.” “I am trying to create an art that does not rely on contemplation…but is one that involves the person in a kinetic experience. By kinetic I mean a relationship of movement to his own body, not kinetic in the fact of art that moves…[…] When you walk into the STAR MACHINE you feel a type of space—you become totally aware of the space and then you realize all of a sudden that you cannot see that space…”447 Levine was after a phenomenological experience emerging prior to thought, which gave the participant an immediate and concrete knowledge of self, other and space. Within the plaza, widely condemned as a dehumanized and dead space, Levine created an alternate spatial device that asserted the body as a site of knowledge. But, rather than using this heightened awareness of self and other to provoke social exchange, Levine’s All Star Cast framed the body as a commodity sealed in a plastic bubble. “It packages people in endless space and makes them look more beautiful, shiny and new,” the artist suggested.448 All Star Cast produced the body for consumption, within the wider environmental context of this resolutely corporate space. While praising the work in The Village Voice, John Perreault described exactly this type of commodified experience of the body, while viewing the work from the outside. “I sat and watched it for almost an hour,” Perreault wrote, “for not only is it a peculiar experience to walk through it, it is also very, very interesting to watch other people walk through it. Each person becomes a ‘star,’ a character in a real life movie. A bum, a tourist, a hippie, a mother with children, a dog—hundreds of people walk through it every hour and become its content.”449 If the plaza was a quasi-public space, controlled by a private entity but ostensibly open and accessible, Levine’s All Star Cast reversed its spatial

444 Quoted in Elayne H. Varian, Schemata 7 (New York: Finch College Museum of Art Contemporary Study Wing, 1967), unpaginated. 445 Les Levine, “The Star Garden (A Place),” press release, The Museum of Modern Art, April 21, 1967, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2603?locale=en. 446 Levine, “The Star Garden (A Place),” (1967). 447 Quoted in Varian, Schemata 7, (1967), unpaginated. 448 Ibid. 449 Perreault, “Going Public,” (1967), 17.

191 order. He created a quasi-private place with limited access within the otherwise open plaza. Inside the work, one could have a solitary aesthetic experience that heightened perception of self and city. From the outside, the body was effectively consumed by the gaze of the public, which now assumed the power of the corporation to produce the body as commodity.

Parks & Playgrounds The plaza was the archetypal space of managerial capitalism in 1960s New York. Lindsay staked the future of the city on the smooth transition from an industrial to a managerial economy. As corporate headquarters and their plazas proliferated in Midtown and Lower Manhattan, the need to humanize those spaces had become urgent. The Lindsay administration used the “Sculpture in Environment” exhibition to showcase a means of orienting the body within this seemingly dead, dehumanized space without controverting the plaza’s corporate function. The city’s parks had other problems. Their public image was framed by fear and anxiety, fueled by proliferating media reports of crime, vice, and violence.450 The revitalization of the parks was a key part of the transition to a managerial economy. Lindsay, Hoving, Heckscher, and Freedman sought to turn the city parks’ reputation for violence on its head. They strived to supplant the popular image of crime in the parks with an idea of parks as a safe space to be leveraged against urban violence. For the Lindsay administration, the city’s parks could serve as an outlet for organized political protests and, more broadly, for the cultivation of social and racial diversity. It was in the parks that the Lindsay administration sought to alleviate the social pressures leading to violence, promote the city’s open spaces to residents fleeing to the suburbs, and project an image of calm, order, and diversity. Both the criminal reputation of the parks and the wider urban problem of racial unrest had to be solved before the city’s managerial future could be secured. The sculptural rebranding of city parks began with Hoving’s Tony Smith exhibition, held in Bryant Park in early 1967. “Sculpture in Environment” built upon this precedent. In a major speech, just one month after the close of “Sculpture in Environment,” Heckscher acknowledged both the violent reputation of New York’s parks and their potential to positively contribute to racial and social justice. “The parks of the great city and

450 Rozenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, (1992), 472-480; Cannato, The Ungovernable City, (2001), 59-61.

192 its recreation programs,” he argued, “are vitally involved in the greatest problem of all: the racial tensions of our time, the search for wider justice and a more equable social order.”451 While acknowledging the image of parks as sites of crime, Heckscher called for new uses and new users to revitalize these key urban spaces and combat the prevailing image of danger that dominated the popular imaginary. “In brief,” Heckscher suggested, “I hold that the open spaces of the City—the parks and what goes on within them—are reflections of the mood and temper of our society. If they are empty or dead spaces, then watch out for the explosion that will burst out somewhere from the sullen depths of the great city! If they are alive, then at least there is hope. It is these open places that the cultural trends of our cities reveal themselves; it is here that the minglings and integrations can occur most visibly, and in ways which prepare for the deeper harmonies out of which a true social peace can be constructed.”452 Heckscher saw parks as potential spaces of social and racial diversity that could address the urban segregation that the Kerner commission cited as a cause of race riots. This potential had to be actively cultivated, as did the public, otherwise entropic social forces would overwhelm the parks. “People must be encouraged to come out of their houses,” Heckscher argued. “The parks are the natural setting for outdoor community life. However without the proper guidance and continual revitalization, parks can become the sink holes in which anti-social, destructive elements breed and thrive.”453 It was the goal of “Sculpture in Environment” to restore vitality to the parks and to reorganize the public within them. “Sculpture in Environment” placed works in parks throughout Manhattan. Offering and Alpha by Alexander Liberman were placed in Battery Park. Richard Stankiewicz’s untitled sculpture was installed in Foley Square Park, also in Lower Manhattan. Forrest Myers placed four searchlights in Tompkins Square Park, projecting them over the East Village. Tony Smith installed Snake in the Lincoln Center plaza, which was administered by the Parks Department. And ’s Midas and Fog were installed in Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side. The heart of the exhibition, however, was Central Park, which

451 August Hecksher, “Recreation and the Urban Crisis,” Keynote address before the Congress for Recreation and Parks of the National Parks and Recreation Association, December 4, 1967, 1-2, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Departmental Correspondence, Box 64, Folder 808, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 452 Hecksher, “Recreation and the Urban Crisis,” (1967), 2-3. 453 Ibid., 9-10.

193 hosted works by Bernard Kirschenbaum, Lyman Kipp, and Claes Oldenburg, as discussed in chapter one. Central Park had both the worst reputation for violence amongst city parks and, for Heckscher, the greatest potential to promote diversity and community. “I often think of Central Park as a kind of hyphen between the affluent downtown and Harlem at the north end,” Heckscher suggested. “In the past two years, Central Park has become a big city common, a ‘centre ville’ for all of New York City and all kinds of people. This did not happen unaided. Events had to be programmed to bring down the ghetto residents from the north. Similarly events brought north the more affluent residents from the south. The results were good all around.”454 The sculptures of Kipp and Kirschenbaum featured simple, large geometric forms, quintessential of the iconography of minimal art, that compelled the active, physical engagement that Heckscher and Freedman believed would stimulate urban awareness and community. Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument constituted an ironic negation of these phenomenological aesthetics. All three works stood as a repudiation of Robert Moses’s legacy in Central Park. Kirschenbaum’s untitled sculpture was installed on the terrace overlooking Bethesda Fountain, one of the most prominent locations in the park (Figure 4.5). The Bethesda Terrace was a symbolic space invested with civic values that the Lindsay administration sought to restore and promote. Calvert Vaux had designed the terrace as a space of contemplation and inspiration where New Yorkers could view the landscape, experiencing in it a heightened sense of freedom and democratic aspiration.455 It was also conceived, more concretely, as a place of class integration, where the diverse publics of New York City could meet.456 If, as Heckscher contended, Central Park functioned as a hyphen between rich and poor, as well as white and black New Yorkers, Bethesda Terrace was a site that had been designed to encourage social encounters between these otherwise isolated publics. On the terrace, Kirschenbaum installed a large cubic structure, built in painted wood. Measuring eight feet on each side, the work was a commanding presence in the otherwise unfettered space. Kirschenbaum included a small opening on one side of the sculpture, perhaps one foot wide, allowing a person to enter the work. The inside walls were curved

454 Hecksher, “Recreation and the Urban Crisis,” (1967), 11. 455 Rozenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, (1992), 133-135. 456 Ibid., 136, 332.

194 and the space would have been cramped, only slightly wider than the entry. From inside, a person would have had a view of the Bethesda Fountain and the landscape behind it, narrowly framed by the walls of the sculpture. Kirschenbaum’s sculpture compelled an active, physical engagement of both the work and the surrounding landscape. Without the sculpture, the view from the terrace is organized by the Bethesda Fountain that sits just below it. Kirschenbaum’s monolithic form altered this view, partially obscuring the fountain or blocking it entirely, depending on the vantage point of the viewer. This sculptural reframing of the immediate environment, and the rupture of the familiar view, placed renewed emphasis on the contemplative function that Vaux originally conceived for the terrace. The mobile and participatory aesthetic experience asserted the social aspect of body and space that, according to Heckscher and Freedman, stimulated the formation of urban community.

Figure 4.5. Bernard Kirschenbaum, Untitled, 1967, Central Park, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

195

Figure 4.6. Lyman Kipp, Boss Linco, 1967, Central Park, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Lyman Kipp’s Boss Linco, installed on the , was firmly aligned with minimal art’s phenomenological orientation (Figure 4.6). It was a sculpture conceived for the mobile body. The work consisted of five modular rectangular cuboids, constructed of painted wood. The boxes were arranged to form a massive post and lintel passage, standing fourteen feet tall. The four posts were painted bright red and the single box that served as the lintel was bright yellow. The wide passage between the posts could easily accommodate several people at once. Its bulky form would also have stood as an assertive presence in a

196 space that was designed to accommodate an ambulatory crowd. Like the Bethesda Terrace, where Kirschenbaum’s sculpture was installed, Vaux and Olmstead designed the Central Park Mall as both a social space and a formal mechanism to heighten the public’s experience of the surrounding environment.457 Heckscher and Freedman wanted to emphasize these foundational principles of park design, which they felt were sacrificed by Moses in favor of sports fields. They believed that the embodied encounter with simple, geometric sculpture such as Kipp’s would compel a greater consciousness of oneself, others, and the environment. The social, in other words, would be grounded in the moving body. Installed on the park’s main promenade, Boss Linco compelled the kind of physical participation that Heckscher and Freedman wanted to encourage. It beckoned the public to pass through or consciously walk around. Either way, it was an unavoidable presence. Kipp’s Boss Linco also conformed to the exhibition’s mission to promote the parks as safe and fun for families. Fred McDarrah’s widely circulated photograph of the sculpture, for example, featured a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller through the structure.458 In Time magazine, Kipp’s sculpture was described as, “gigantic, candy-colored building blocks.”459 The fact that the sculpture’s title referred to a then well-known trucking company would likely have only enhanced the work’s charm to children. The appeal to families was made not just with isolated sculptures, such as Boss Linco, but by the wider conflation of sculpture and playground equipment. Only a fine line separated these two categories in the Office of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, newly consolidated under Hoving and Heckscher. The office hired sculptors to design playground equipment and classified playground equipment designed by landscape architects as sculpture. This was a stark departure from the work of Robert Moses, who famously pursued a standardized approach to playgrounds, installing identical equipment, facilities, and surfaces in the hundreds of playgrounds that he built throughout the city.460 In effect,

457 Rozenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, (1992), 133. 458 McDarrah’s photograph of Kipp’s Boss Linco was reproduced in The New York Times, Arts Magazine, the Village Voice, and other publications, in addition to the exhibition catalogue. 459 “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time, October 13, 1967, 80-86. 460 On Moses’s standardized playgrounds, see: Caro, The Power Broker, 487-489; Heckscher, Alive in the City, 27; Thomas P. F. Hoving, “Think Big About Small Parks,” in Small Urban Spaces: The Philosophy, Design, Sociology and Politics of Vest Pocket Parks and Other Small Urban Open Spaces, ed. Whitney North Seymour, Jr., (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 83.

197 the Lindsay administration made visible their opposition to Moses’s legacy in urban recreation by associating their new playground designs with the advanced sculpture that Moses despised. Under the auspices of a single department responsible for recreation and culture, the Lindsay administration collapsed the difference between sculpture and playground equipment, aesthetic experience and play. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Fred McDarrah’s photographs of the “Sculpture in Environment” exhibition, published in the catalogue and widely circulated in local and national press. Almost every photograph of a minimal sculpture taken by McDarrah features the playful interaction of a child.461 Paul Frazier’s monolithic Cuboid Shift # 2, installed on a sidewalk near City Hall, is approached by a smiling little boy (Figure 4.7). Charles Ginnever’s Midas and Fog, both composed of multiple parallelepipeds, are surrounded by children in Charles Schurz Park (Figure 4.8). A small boy stands under Anthony Milkowski’s Diamond in Kips Bay Plaza. An infant crawls towards Tony Smith’s monumental Snake, installed at Lincoln Center (Figure 4.9). And, as mentioned above, a mother pushing a toddler in a stroller are pictured walking underneath Lyman Kipp’s massive post-and-lintel structure, Boss Linco, composed of modular rectangular boxes. In contrast, none of the McDarrah’s catalogue photographs of sculptures by artists associated with high modernism, pop, or kinetics feature children. Rather they are pictured in isolation on sidewalks, plazas, and parks, or admired by office workers. The Lindsay administration was already known for their promotion of New York as “Fun City.” McDarrah’s photographs promote the use of minimal art to create spaces of play and, implicitly, to project an image of the city that is safe for the family.

83. On Lindsay’s and Hoving’s rejection of Moses’s playground precedent, see: Michael Gotkin, “The Politics of Play: The Adventure Playground in Central Park,” in Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture: Papers from the Wave Hill—National Park Service Conference, edited by Charles A. Birnbaum (Cambridge, MA: Spacemaker Press, 1999), 60-77; and Mariana Mogilevich, “Landscape and participation in 1960s New York,” in Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 201-214. 461 August Heckscher, Sculpture in Environment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967). In addition to the catalogue, McDarrah’s photographs were featured numerous reviews of the exhibition. See: Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 20, No. 4 (Winter 1967-68): 650-656; “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time October 13, 1967, 80-86; and John Perreault, “Going Public,” The Village Voice October 12, 1967.

198

Figure. 4.7. Paul Frazier’s, Cuboid Shift # 2, 1967, City Hall Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.8. Charles Ginnever’s Midas and Fog, 1967, Charles Schurz Park, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

199

Figure 4.9. Tony Smith, Snake, 1967, Lincoln Center, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Another work by Kipp, Tripoli, was featured in an essay by Jay Jacobs in Art in America, a few weeks after “Sculpture in Environment” closed. Jacobs credited the Lindsay administration with inaugurating a new era in the theory of play and the practice of playground design.462 This represented, according to Jacobs, an explicit rejection of Moses’s ubiquitous precedent. Kipp conceived Tripoli for children and submitted a model to the National Playground Sculpture Competition, which hosted by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. One of five finalists and presented as a scale model, Kipp’s Tripoli was to be composed of five large rectangular blocks of welded steel, over thirteen feet long, painted in primary and secondary colors. The blocks would be stacked in three levels in a horizontal formation, creating a structure to climb over and spaces to crawl through. Kipp’s description of Tripoli was informed by the same phenomenological theory of body and space

462 Jay Jacobs, “Projects for Playgrounds,” Art in America 55, no. 6 (November/December 1967): 39-53.

200 fundamental to the overlapping discourses of minimal art and the Lindsay administration. “When you work specifically for children,” Kipp explained, “the exploration of spatial relations becomes a primary consideration. This piece was the result of a series of studies using closed masses as the terrain for action as well as open interior spaces as a means of encouraging active participation in the physicality of the sculpture.”463 Kipp’s pursuit of a form to encourage active, physical, participatory experience mirrored the Lindsay administration’s broader approach to the urban playground. As with sculpture, the Lindsay administration advocated for playground equipment composed of simple, geometric, and modular forms. Playground equipment built from simple, modular units was also valued for its flexibility. It could be deployed in small parks, vacant lots, and anywhere else in the city with urgent needs. Just as the simple geometries of minimal sculpture were devised to encourage a participatory aesthetic experience, simple geometric playground equipment was seen to encourage participatory play. The Office of Recreation and Cultural Affairs argued that heightened participation with sculpture and playground equipment, could stimulate social exchange, urban meaning, and community. Lindsay, in a statement celebrating a Department of Housing and Urban Development beautification grant, suggested that modular, portable playgrounds could stabilize and anchor threatened neighborhoods. “We will show,” Lindsay argued, “that a playground need not be a static arrangement of predetermined play pieces, but can offer a dynamic setting for inter- connected experiences that make up a total environment of play.” This type of facility, he suggested, “…has great potential as a sociological instrument for community involvement and participation.”464 Arthur Rosenblatt, who was hired by Hoving as a design consultant for parks and playgrounds and promoted by Heckscher to First Deputy Administrator of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, expanded on Lindsay’s connection between playground design and neighborhood revitalization. “Quality design pays off,” Rosenblatt argued. “Excellence in civic architecture can change the environment of entire areas of a city,” Rosenblatt continued, “not only evoking further physical improvement but lifting the spirit of those

463 Quoted in Jacobs, “Projects for Playgrounds,” (1967). 41. 464 Press Release, “Statement by Mayor John V. Lindsay on the Announcement of $450,000 Demonstration Beautification Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” July 7, 1966, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 356, Folder 335.

201 who live in such areas.”465 The Lindsay administration’s new approach to playgrounds was a concrete means of demonstrating the city’s commitment to improving the conditions in slums and deteriorating neighborhoods. Whereas Moses was quick to condemn those neighborhoods and rarely built recreational amenities for those residing in them, the Lindsay administration saw new playground design as a means of social and spatial revitalization. If Kipp’s Boss Linco and Tripoli represented sculpture’s embrace of play, the work of M. Paul Friedberg constituted a contemporaneous move by a playground designer towards sculpture and minimal art. Friedberg was at the vanguard of playground design in mid-1960s New York. The Lindsay administration actively promoted his new playgrounds in the city and Friedberg, in turn, was a vocal and persuasive advocate for Lindsay’s progressive politics of play, participation, and community revitalization. Friedberg designed numerous playgrounds in New York in the 1960s, including celebrated designs for Riverside Towers, PS 166, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, Carver House, and Jacob Riis Plaza. His playgrounds were widely credited with humanizing formerly lifeless and useless urban sites.466 In many of his designs, Friedberg used large, simple geometric forms to organize a total space of play. Rejecting standardized and single-use equipment, such as swings and slides, Friedberg built massive pyramids, platforms, cubes, and tunnels in brick, concrete, and wood. These basic forms were conceived to encourage varied and multi-use play, active and physical experience, and social exchange. The form of equipment did not dictate the

465 Arthur Rosenblatt, “Open Space Design: New York Shows How in its Park Program,” Architectural Record (August 1967): 124. 466 Friedberg’s projects were a fixture in leading architectural journals and local media in the mid- to late-1960s. See, for example: “Making Public Housing Human,” Progressive Architecture 66, no. 1 (January 1965): 177-179; “Lincoln Logs,” Architectural Forum 124, no. 3 (April 1966): 82; Edward K. Carpenter, “Frog Into Prince,” Progressive Architecture 67, no. 7 (July 1966): 170-172; “Urban Playscapist,” Progressive Architecture 67, no. 8 (August 1966): 70, 72; Lisa Hammel, “2 Playground Designers who Used to Be ‘Rebels,’” The New York Times, November 29, 1972, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/11/29/79481554.html?pageNumbe r=38. Friedberg’s work in 1960s New York City remains central in the historiography of postwar playground design and theory. See: Mariana Mogilevich, “Landscape and participation in 1960s New York,” in Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 201-214; Gabriela Burkhalter, “The Playground Project,” in 2013 Carnegie International, ed. Daniel Bauman, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2013), 277-288; Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 2005), 54-55; Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, (1997), 139-141.

202 play, in other words; rather, it was shaped by the child’s physical and imaginative engagement with the total environment. Friedberg’s philosophy of play overlapped with the phenomenological orientation of minimal art. He believed that public space was brought to life through a careful balance of people and forms and that the social was a product of the immediate experience and interactions between these people and forms.467 In his 1970 manifesto, Play and Interplay, Friedberg suggested that the city was essentially hostile to the senses and produced a public that was insensate and asocial. The insensate subject could not communicate with others or know the city. “The urban environment,” Friedberg argued, “has the power to desensitize the perceptions, cause an unnecessary physical strain, create a lingering disorientation, intensify a growing apathy and lack of involvement, limit the capacity to communicate with others, reduce the ability to learn and develop.”468 Friedberg argued that good design, particularly in the marginal and leftover spaces of urban renewal, could heighten the public’s sensorial experience of the city, stimulate social exchange, and become the basis for urban knowledge. Through recreation, Friedberg wrote, “people can become more aware of each other, more responsive to each other, more fully developed as human beings.”469 This was true for adults and children, according to Friedberg, both of whom were susceptible to the corrosive and alienating urban sensorium. “Play is not only for the development of physical and manual skills,” Friedberg suggested, “it is also a training ground for social interaction, as through play children become accustomed to interrelating with others.”470 To combat urban alienation and stimulate social space, Friedberg argued, children needed playgrounds that engaged all of their senses and encouraged active, embodied play. Adults, likewise, needed to encounter design in everyday life that could heighten sensation, perception, and awareness of the self, the other, and the city. For Friedberg, the embodied play of the child, and the social experience that emerged

467 “Urban Playscapist,” (1966), 72. 468 M. Paul Friedberg and Ellen Perry Berkeley, Play and Interplay: A Manifesto for New Design in Urban Recreational Environment (London: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 15, 103. 469 Friedberg and Berkeley, Play and Interplay, (1970), 12. 470 M. Paul Friedberg, Playgrounds for City Children (Washington, D.C.: Association for Childhood Education International, 1969), 9.

203 from that play, was the model for an active, engaged urban subject.471 “The urban adult,” Friedberg argued in Play and Interplay, “whose recreational environment is the whole city, needs a city that catalyzes social interplay, that stimulates and satisfies him, that is dynamic and constantly providing the possibility of re-creation.”472 Immediate sensorial response provoked by simple, geometric structures was the basis of spatial knowledge, embodied self- consciousness, and social exchange, according to Friedberg, just as it was for Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith, as well as Antoni Milkowski, Lyman Kipp, and many others associated with minimal art. In 1966, Friedberg worked directly with the Lindsay administration on the Department of Housing and Urban Development beautification grant to design modular, portable play systems. To articulate the formal principles of his designs, as well as their urban and social significance, Friedberg turned to minimal art as a heuristic. He designed four models of modular playground systems that could be stockpiled and quickly deployed to vacant lots and other leftover or marginal sites in neighborhood lacking sufficient recreational amenities. The modular systems included stacked wood timbers, steel bars, and simple concrete forms. He described each system as a “giant primary structure.”473 The beautification grant that funded Friedberg’s models was announced less than a month after the close of Kynaston McShine’s landmark “Primary Structures” exhibition at The Jewish Museum. Friedberg’s reference to the new sculpture was not just rhetorical; his modular playground designs were directly comparable in form and material with the work of artists in the exhibition, above all Carl Andre’s sculpture. For the “Primary Structures” show, as discussed in chapter two, Andre installed a row of one hundred and thirty seven bricks, spanning two rooms. A year prior, in two exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Andre built simple, modular sculptures from wood beams and, subsequently, Styrofoam planks. He emphasized the modularity of both materials, first rebuilding Timber Piece when its weight

471 Friedberg and Berkeley, Play and Interplay, (1970), 12, 15, 17, 37, 101-103. This is a core phenomenological conceit of Merleau-Ponty, who pointed to the child as a model for articulating the foundational role of embodied perception in the production of knowledge and meaning. 472 Friedberg and Berkeley, Play and Interplay, (1970), 103. 473 Friedberg, Playgrounds for City Children, (1969), 11, 44. The modular systems are also described in Arthur Rosenblatt, “Open Space Design: New York Shows How in its Park Program,” Architectural Record (August 1967): 118.

204 threatened the gallery’s structural integrity, and then reusing the styrofoam planks from Crib, Coin, and Compound for a subsequent work at the Park Place Gallery and in a performance by Yvonne Rainer.474 Andre built and then rebuilt Timber Piece out of beams of fir in January 1965. In January 1966, Friedberg built an experimental playground in a vacant lot in Bedford Stuyvesant using fir beams stacked in simple structures.475 This experimental playground became the basis for the modular systems that Friedberg designed for Lindsay’s beautification grant. Friedberg later suggested, again echoing Andre, “It may someday be the responsibility of the park agencies to dump a truckload of styrofoam in an area and let the children build what they wish.”476 An urban space, according to Friedberg, could be fundamentally transformed through the addition of modular materials that could be formed into giant primary structures by children and adults. The participatory and embodied play around primary structures could, according to Friedberg, become the basis of community. Like Andre, Friedberg sought to fundamentally alter the use of a space by deploying flexible, modular, and easily demountable structures. By these means, a vacant lot could be transformed into a space of full-body recreation and social exchange, or, as Lindsay suggested, “…a dynamic setting for inter-connected experiences that make up a total environment of play.”477 No one in the Lindsay administration pursued the conflation of play and aesthetic experience more steadfastly than Doris Freedman. The narrowing gap between sculpture and playground equipment was at the heart of her approach to urban space. In her 1967 manuscript draft on urban art, she described the move of sculpture into the playground as part of the natural progression of modern art and, in turn, the sculptural articulation of playground equipment as part of the history of public art. “As modern art has brought emotion to the surface,” she wrote, “public art has brought sculpture down from the pedestal to be touched walked through or climbed over; has moved paintings from behind

474 See chapter two. 475 “Lincoln Logs,” Architectural Forum 124/3 (April 1966): 82; Friedberg, Playgrounds for City Children, (1969), 38-43. 476 Friedberg, Playgrounds for City Children, (1969), 11. 477 Press Release, “Statement by Mayor John V. Lindsay on the Announcement of $450,000 Demonstration Beautification Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” July 7, 1966, John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592), Box 356, Folder 335, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

205 the velvet ropes onto the walls of playgrounds and into communities.”478 In draft outlines for the same manuscript, Freedman included chapters on the Friedberg’s playgrounds as part of the history of public art in New York City, alongside chapters on Tony Smith, Kenneth Snelson, Claes Oldenburg, Alexander Calder, and other artists whose work was installed in public spaces in the city.479 After “Sculpture in Environment,” Freedman sought to build upon its success with a “Sculpture of the Month” program. This was to be a more flexible program than “Sculpture in Environment,” with the capacity to place single sculptures in less central, more diverse neighborhoods throughout the city. In a proposal for “Sculpture of the Month,” dated March 1970, Freedman described contemporary artists as a “natural resource of the city” and argued that the scale of the new sculpture, as well as its relation with architectural space, made its public exhibition, “conceptually correct and physically necessary.”480 Freedman again sought to work with Robert Morris, mentioning him in the initial proposal for “Sculpture of the Month” and in a memorandum to Heckscher. Once again, however, the work with Morris never materialized.481 The inaugural work in the program was Cleament

478 Doris Freedman, unpublished manuscript draft titled “Art for the City,” 1967, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 22, Folder 14, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library. 479 Doris Freedman, unpublished draft with heading “Chapter Outline for ‘Art in the City of New York: A Guide Book to Public Art,’” Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 22, Folder 14, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library. In 1977, Freedman published a walking tour of public art in Lower Manhattan that draws on the manuscript drafts in the Public Art Fund Archive. However, the published guide is far more limited in scope and does not include the history of public art that Freedman was developing in her drafts. Doris Freedman, Walking Tour Guide of Public art in Lower Manhattan. New York: Public Arts Council/Municipal Arts Society and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 1977. 480 Doris Freedman, “Proposal for Sculpture of the Month,” March 1970, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs of the Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs Administration, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 21, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library; and, Doris Freedman, memorandum to Commissioner Heckscher, March 3, 1970, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 21, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library. 481 Morris suggests that his repeated attempts to mount a work in New York City, all unrequited, contributed to his growing belief that the term “public art” is an oxymoron. Robert Morris, email to the author, June 15, 2015

206 Meadmore’s Upstart, a twenty-foot, two-ton twisting form installed at the corner of 5th Avenue and 60th Street.482 Under the auspices of “Sculpture of the Month,” Freedman and her successor, Courtney Callender, also facilitated canonical works of minimal art. These included Richard Serra’s To Encircle a Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, a massive steel work embedded into the pavement on 184th Street at Webster Avenue in the Bronx and included in the 1970 Whitney Annual; and Carl Andre’s Fall, which was placed on the sidewalk in front of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the occasion of Andre’s 1970 retrospective.483 However, the Office of Cultural Affairs played a largely behind-the-scenes role in these sitings, and did not attempt another large-scale exhibition such as “Sculpture in Environment” during Lindsay’s tenure. Before leaving her position in the Office of Cultural Affairs in May 1970, Freedman’s attention turned towards flexible programs, such as theater workshops and movie mobiles that could be oriented to poor and minority neighborhoods not directly served by prior city-sponsored cultural events. However, the curatorial methods that Freedman pioneered with “Sculpture in Environment,” as well as her view of the urban significance of minimal art, became the basis of ongoing exhibitions and events in New York City, organized by other departments within the Lindsay administration as well as private real estate interests.

Pier 45 Since the early stages of his campaign for mayor in 1965, Lindsay had his sights set on New York City’s industrial waterfront. The city’s piers, like its parks, were in a state of decay. Many were vacant, underutilized, or misused. If the plaza was the archetypal space of managerial capitalism in 1960s New York, the pier was the symbolic space of economic transition. In its decaying state, the waterfront was a relic of the city’s past in industrial manufacturing and shipping. Lindsay, along with the private power brokers of Lower

482 Grace Glueck, “Malevich Through Minimal Eyes,” The New York Times, February 25, 1968, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/02/25/88927086.html?pageNumbe r=190. 483 Both works are listed in letter from Courtney Callender to Doris Freedman that accounts for the ongoing program after Freedman left office. Courtney Callender, letter to Doris Freedman, March 23, 1971, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270, Doris Freedman Papers, Box 21, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library.

207 Manhattan, above all David Rockefeller, sought to seize the waterfront and reorient it to serve the needs of the city’s corporate, managerial future. Lindsay’s park policy framed his approach to the piers. “The commercial decay of New York piers,” Lindsay argued during his 1965 campaign, “must be turned into a recreational bounty.”484 By aligning the city’s piers with its parks, Lindsay hoped to provide accessible recreational amenities to poor and minority communities, particularly African Americans and Puerto Ricans who were chronically underserved and systemically spurned by Robert Moses. If the city could organize new publics on the piers, Lindsay believed, the waterfront could become an ideal space of diversity and community that would ultimately make the city safer. This broad goal aligned closely with the powerful real estate interests that viewed the waterfront as a massive, untapped resource that was ideally located for residential development to house the city’s rapidly growing managerial workforce. When Lindsay sought to revitalize the city’s parks, he had turned to sculpture whose unitary, geometric forms were seen to encourage the social use of space. On the piers, Lindsay again turned to sculpture, and what he and his staffers believed were participatory aesthetics of minimal art specifically, to stimulate the recreational use of space and the formation of a new community. Until 1970, state law curtailed non-maritime uses of the waterfront. In March 1970, under pressure from Lindsay and New York City’s powerful real estate interests, New York State passed Act 6249, which would allow the city to utilize the waterfront for any public, commercial, or maritime use.485 Lindsay’s first step to reorient the waterfront was to hire Barbara Rose to organize a festival of sculpture and performance on Pier 45. Rose, whose status as a leading critical advocate of minimal art was secured with the publication of “ABC Art” in 1965, was touted by the Lindsay administration as the singular authority capable of organizing an exhibition of sculpture on the pier.486

484 Lindsay, Parks and Recreation, (1965), 4. 485 New York State Assembly Act 6429, March 25, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1600, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 486 Rose’s connections and credentials are lauded in a letter from Robert Rickles, Commissioner of the Department of Air Resources, with which Rose was contracted to work, and the New York City Director of Budget, Frederick O’R. Hayes. Rose’s qualifications are described to justify Rickles’s request to forgo budgetary oversight because, Rickles argues, only Rose has the competence to adequately provide this oversight. Robert

208 Rose’s Pier 45 Festival was to feature works by Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Forrest Myers, Trisha Brown, Mark Di Suvero, and others. It was modeled on the urban exhibition strategies developed by Doris Freedman. Rose envisioned the “Pier 45 Festival” as space of exchange between the arts community and the broader public that effectively joined the utopian premise of advanced public art with Lindsay’s utopian social vision for the piers and the city.487 The Pier 45 Festival was conceived by the Lindsay administration more concretely, as a means of publicizing the social and economic transition on the waterfront. It was the first step in reorienting the piers by attracting a new public and communicating a new use. Robert Rickles, the Commissioner of the Department of Air Resources, which managed Pier 45, stated the goal of the exhibition succinctly. “It will be [the artists’] task to use art as a new form of communication to develop public support for municipal environmental programs.”488 Ultimately, Rose’s event was derailed by existing communities with competing claims for the piers, namely the longshoremen who remained committed to maritime uses and the gay community who were already using the city’s vacant piers as recreational spaces. For much of the city’s history, the piers had been its economic heart. The city’s status as the nation’s preeminent capital of industrial manufacturing rested on the accessibility of the waterfront, where raw materials from around the world were distributed to the city’s manufacturers and finished goods were shipped out to the rest of the country. By the mid-1960s, however, many of the piers in the Hudson and East Rivers sat vacant and decaying. Containerization had rendered the city’s waterfront obsolete as a major commercial hub. Container ships required massive waterways, staging areas, and gantries that could not be housed in the city. Major shipping operations moved to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, which could accommodate the container ships that could no longer sail into New York Harbor.489 In 1958, nineteen percent of all domestic shipping in the United States went

N. Rickles, letter to Frederick O’R. Hayes, September 9, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1597, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 487 Barbara Rose, telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015. 488 Robert N. Rickles, letter to Frederick O’R. Hayes, New York City Director of Budget, September 9, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1597, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 489 On the social, economic, and infrastructural transition of the city’s waterfront in the 1960s, see: “Back to the Waterfront: Chaos or Control?” Progressive Architecture 47, no. 8

209 through Manhattan. By 1971, this had dropped to three percent. In the 1960s, over seventy- five percent of longshoremen jobs disappeared, declining from fifty thousand to twelve thousand positions. Almost half of the city’s piers had become vacant, decayed, or unusable by 1970.490 While New York continued to invest in commercial piers that would never be used, and the International Longshoreman’s Association demanded a renewed commitment to maritime shipping, the city’s power brokers recognized that the industrial economy would never return to the waterfront. The 1969 Plan for New York City, commissioned by Lindsay’s City Planning Commission, stated this conclusion bluntly. “The Manhattan waterfront is a priceless asset. Instead of being wasted on obsolete functions, it should be opened up for recreation, commerce and housing…”491 Lindsay’s 1969 plan represented a near total commitment to The Lower Manhattan Plan compiled by the City Planning Commission in 1966, which saw finance as the singular social and economic identity of the area.492 Both plans constituted a public affirmation of David Rockefeller’s private vision for Lower Manhattan, deindustrializing the area and rebranding it as a global center of finance and

(August 1966): 128-139; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Downtown New York Begins to Undergo Radical Transformation,” The New York Times, March 27, 1967, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/03/27/issue.html. On the social and economic history of New York’s waterfront, see: Ann L. Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water- Bound: Planning and Developing Manhattan’s Waterfront from the Seventeenth History to the Present (New York & London: New York University Press, 1987). For a sense of the centrality of the piers to the social and economic identity of New York until the 1930s, there is no better source than the New York City Guide, produced for the Federal Writer’s Project as part of the Works Project Administration. The original guide, which was first published in 1939, was republished in 1970 with a foreword written by Lindsay. See: Federal Writers’ Project, New York City Guide, ed. Chester D. Harvey and James Reed (New York: Octagon Press, 1970). 490 The statistics on the decline of industrial shipping in New York City are drawn from the following: Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd; Whittlesey, Conklin, and Rossant; Alan M. Vorhees & Associates, The Lower Manhattan Plan (New York: The New York City Planning Commission, 1966); 2-8, 57-59; New York City Planning Commission, The Waterfront: Supplement to Plan for New York City (New York: City Planning Commission, January 1971), 24-25; Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water-Bound (1987). 491 New York City Planning Commission, Plan for New York City 1969: A Proposal (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1969), 17. A comprehensive urban plan was a required by the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban development for cities to gain access to federal urban renewal grants. The 1969 plan was New York City’s first comprehensive plan. 492 Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd; Whittlesey, Conklin, and Rossant; Alan M. Vorhees & Associates, The Lower Manhattan Plan, (1966), 1-8, 59.

210 banking.493 The future of the waterfront and its public had to be reoriented to the city’s future as a capital of managerial capitalism. Lindsay’s and Rockefeller’s image of a renewed Lower Manhattan depended on top- down gentrification and the willful production of new communities in what they viewed as a vacant space. There were two major obstacles to this corporate takeover. First, the waterfront was largely isolated from the social life of the city. Moses’s arterial highway system had made the piers inaccessible and the decaying industrial infrastructures had made them dangerous and inhospitable. In 1966, Progressive Architecture described the waterfront as a wasteland cut-off from the urban environment. “Although Manhattanites live on an island, most of them never go near water: A ring of highways around the periphery of the land cuts them off from the shore; heaps of rubbish and rotting piers attract only the most ardent slummers; and polluted waters keep away people as effectively as they kill fish.”494 The waterfront, in other words, was virtually invisible to the public that Lindsay and the developers of Lower Manhattan sought to attract. The two communities that used the waterfront, regardless of its state of obsolescence, were also obstacles to Lindsay’s plans. The International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA), the powerful mafia-backed union of maritime workers, was vehemently opposed to any non-maritime use of the piers. The union protests and pickets against Lindsay’s plans for recreational use of the piers were buttressed by the threat of retaliatory violence.495 As soon as Lindsay announced his intention for the

493 On David Rockefeller’s role in reorganization of Lower Manhattan, see: Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York (New York, The Viking Press, 1977), 18-21, 87-97; Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York. London & New York: Verso, 1993. On the function of the waterfront in this plan for reorganizing the city, see: “Back to the Waterfront: Chaos or Control?,” (1966), 130; Huxtable, “Downtown New York Begins to Undergo Radical Transformation,” (1967); and Ann Buttenwieser, “Fore and Aft: The Waterfront and Downtown’s Future,” in The Lower Manhattan Plan: The 1966 Vision for Downtown New York, ed. Carol Willis (New York: Princeton Architectural Press & The Skyscraper Museum), 21-27. 494 “Back to the Waterfront: Chaos or Control?” (1966): 128. On the role of the arterial highway system making the waterfront inaccessible, see: Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water- Bound, (1987), 155, 198. Nathan Silver describes the recreational use of the waterfront prior to the construction of the highway system. Nathan Silver, Lost New York (New York: Houghton Mifflin, Inc., 1967), 184-187. Moses’s vehemently defended his highways against the charge that they made the waterfront inaccessible. Robert Moses, The Expanding New York Waterfront (New York: Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, 1964). 495 Barbara Rose, telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015. The ILA was widely seen to have a close working relationship with the Italian mafia. The latter was

211 Pier 45 Festival, along with the construction of facilities for theatre, movies, concerts, and exhibitions on nearby piers, the ILA objected and demanded instead a renewed commitment to industrial shipping and investment in port facilities.496 The piers that projected into the Hudson River from Greenwich Village were also an illicit but cherished recreational space for the local, gay community. In 1966, when Hoving’s Department of Parks first proposed an “experimental recreational project” on the Morton Street Pier (Pier 42), the plans threatened to disrupt what was viewed as an essential neighborhood refuge.497 The Lindsay administration had, in fact, come to an agreement with Greenwich Villagers in 1966, after thousands petitioned the city government to continue using the pier as “a respite from the din, dirt and heat of the city.”498 When, in 1970, the Lindsay administration proposed to erect a movie theater on the Morton Street Pier, and connect it to Pier 45 via a new waterside park, the grassroots community erupted in protest. Lindsay received dozens of letters opposing the theater and the publicity campaign.499 Over two thousand people signed a neighborhood petition supporting the community use of the pier in “as-is” condition. “The signatures were obtained on the pier itself in the course of a few days,” Vera Schneider, Chair of the Neighborhood Committee for the Morton Street reported to have near total control of the New York and New Jersey ports in the 1960s. Sandy Smith, “The Mob,” Life 63, no. 10 (September 8, 1967): 101-103; Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977),151-166. 496 George Gent, “City Plans for Use Piers as Cultural Playground,” The New York Times, September 2, 1970, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/09/03/78810820.html?pageNumbe r=36. 497 Hoving’s plans are described in: Thomas Hoving, letter to Hon. Leo Brown, Commissioner of Department of Marine and Aviation, New York City, November 22, 1966, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Departmental Correspondence, Box 64, Folder 806, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. The use of the pier as a recreational space by members of the Greenwich Village community is described in: Edward C. Burns, “Morton St. Acapulco-on-Hudson Reopened for Holiday Tanning,” The New York Times, July 1, 1966, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/07/01/121726430.html?pageNumb er=37. 498 The 1966 petition is described in: Vera A. Schneider, Press release “About this Pier” Neighborhood Committee for the Morton Street Pier,” undated (ca. 1970), Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1596, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 499 Dozens of letters opposing Lindsay’s 1970 plans for Pier 42 are collected in: Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1599, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records.

212 Pier explained in a letter to Lindsay, “and are only a small sample of the overwhelming feeling in this community against any commercial exploitation of its only sanctuary from crowds, noise and ballyhoo. Such exploitation, far from improving the image of the city, would ruin one of its finer assets—a peaceful refuge that until now the city government has had the wisdom and sensitivity to leave open and unspoiled in response to the wishes of the people who love it.”500 Lindsay was unmoved by the sentiment. The longshoremen and the Greenwich Villagers did not conform to Lindsay’s or the developers’ corporate image of Lower Manhattan. On September 2, 1970, Lindsay announced his plan to convert the “dowdy old waterfront” into a “cultural and recreational playground.”501 Lindsay promised an outdoor movie theater on Pier 42, a new park between Pier 42 and Pier 45, a theatre on Pier 47, an ethnic festival on Pier 62, and a performance space on Pier 86. The highlight of the plan, however, was to be a “waterfront gallery” on Pier 45, opening on September 12. A photograph of Lindsay presenting the Pier 45 Festival was published on the front page of The New York Times, above the fold. On Pier 45, according to the press release, “some of New York’s leading artists will create sculptures and graphics on the pier with the public invited to watch and in many instances participate. Their material will include many of the products of New York’s environment. Half a dozen sculptures, too large to be exhibited in regular galleries, will also be shown on the pier.” 502

500 The 1970 petition and the community opposition is included and described in: Vera A. Schneider, Chairman of the Neighborhood Committee for the Morton Street Pier, letter to John V. Lindsay, September 11, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1598, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records; and Rachel Wall, Chair of Community Board 2, Office of the Borough President of Manhattan, telegram to John V. Lindsay, September 11, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1597, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 501 George Gent, “City Plans to Use Piers as a Cultural Playground,” The New York Times, September 3, 1970. 502 Office of the Mayor, Press Release, September 2, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1602, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. Lindsay also described the centrality of the Pier 45 Festival and the involvement of advanced artists to his push for non-maritime use of the piers in a letter to one of his closest advisers. See, John Lindsay, letter to Bethuel Webster, September 1, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 11, Folder 140, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records.

213 The purpose of the exhibition, Lindsay argued, was to reintroduce New Yorkers to the waterfront and to promote it as a space of leisure akin to the Thames for Londoners and the Seine for Parisians. “Hopefully,” Lindsay wished, “[the events] will bring the waterfront closer to the public, and will encourage both the public and private sectors to focus on the problems and opportunities of the Port.”503 The Pier 45 Festival continued to celebrate the aesthetics and urban politics of participation, which Doris Freedman developed in “Sculpture in Environment.” However, on Pier 45, participatory aesthetics was deployed as an instrument of top-down gentrification. The goal was to use participatory aesthetics to attract a new public to the piers that could supplant the current users and lay the social foundation for the conversion of the waterfront from its industrial past to its recreational future. The event also sought to frame the city itself as a sculpture, equating urban and aesthetic experience and seeking to produce a public with a heightened consciousness of their environment. Diversity, which Lindsay still saw as the key to securing the city’s managerial future, was sought in both the participating artists and in the public whom the exhibition wanted to attract. Rose was hired by the city in part because of her connections to diverse groups of artists, including artists associated with the defunct Park Place Gallery, ’s Experiments in Art & Technology group, and artists associated with minimal art.504 Rose suggested that she got involved with the project to combat the increasing narrowness of the art institutions and to work for the mass audience that the new, large-scale sculpture compelled.505 Rose and Lindsay believed that a diverse selection of artists that cut across lines of style, class, and ethnicity would help attract an equally diverse audience.506 The participatory sculpture would, in turn, encourage social exchange and a greater awareness of the pier and the city through embodied experience. Diversity and social exchange were emphasized as the immediate goals of the exhibition in a memo, likely written by Rose, that Lindsay attached to his fundraising appeals for the Pier 45 Festival. The festival’s purpose, as the memo outlined, was “to provide points

503 Quoted in Gent, “City Plans to Use Piers as a Cultural Playground,” (1970). 504 Robert N. Rickles, letter to Frederick O’R. Hayes, September 9, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 85, Folder 1597, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 505 Barbara Rose, “Why I Work for the City,” New York Magazine September 21, 1970, 58-59. 506 Barbara Rose, telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015.

214 of contact and social interaction between diverse groups in an art-oriented situation. […] To provide a public meeting place where continuous and changing activity will engage diverse groups. To allow artists from many different social and ethnic backgrounds to cooperate in a public festival.”507 The pier festival was organized in six sections: three static exhibitions of sculpture and prints, the latter offered for sale, and three sections of flexible environments and performances, including a section that encouraged the public to participate in the production of sculptural environments. Each section emphasized diversity and participation in a distinct way and encouraged direct social exchange between artists and the public. The roster of participants was dominated by white, male artists; however, Rose made numerous substantive efforts to present a somewhat more diverse face of art to the city. Trisha Brown and Lynda Benglis would to be included in the performance section, and Benglis was also slated to contribute a floating sculpture in the Hudson. An entire section was to be devoted to a continuous “light and sound environment” constructed by Lloyd McNeil. Additional but unnamed African American artists would also have been represented, presumably, in the print section that was to feature “leading New York galleries as well as galleries in Harlem and other ghetto areas.”508 Much of the goal of diversity would have to be accomplished, it seems, in the social exchange provoked in the embodied experience of the sculptures. In a section of the event described alternately as “Very Large Sculpture” or “super-scale sculpture,” Rose intended to feature artists associated with minimal art and the Park Place Gallery, including works by Robert Morris and Mark di Suvero.509 An aesthetics of participation was already built into the discourse of large-scale and minimal sculpture. As Morris and many others had argued since 1965, the new sculpture was conceived to compel movement, interaction with the

507 “Pier 45,” memo, attached to John Lindsay, letter to Bethuel Webster, September 1, 1970, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 11, Folder 140, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. This memo includes extended descriptions of the goals, structure, and contents of the exhibition. Much of this information is echoed, although in much less detail, in the press release of September 2, 1970 announcing the festival and Rose’s article in New York Magazine, “Why I Work for the City,” both cited above. 508 “Pier 45,” memo, September 1, 1970. 509 Rose recalled the planned participation of Morris and Di Suvero in a telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015. This section of the exhibition is described in “Pier 45,” memo, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay; and Rose, “Why I Work for the City.” The description of the Pier 45 Festival that follows is drawn from these three sources.

215 surrounding environment, and a heightened consciousness of one’s body moving in space with other bodies.510 The participatory aesthetics of sculpture, and its function as a productive site of social exchange, was further emphasized in a second section of the exhibition devoted to “Works in Progress.” Here, artists would create “sculptural environments” that were designed specifically for Pier 45 and constructed during the festival. Moreover, the public would be invited to participate in the execution of the work. Rose also sought to connect the large-scale, participatory sculpture in “Very Large Sculpture” and “Works in Progress” directly to the material, spatial, architectural, and infrastructural realities of the city. In another section dedicated to “Anonymous Arts,” architectural fragments and sculpture retrieved from razed buildings would have been featured. In her canonical essay of 1965, “ABC Art,” Rose described the impulse to anonymity as one of the defining characteristics of what would become known as minimal art. The blank face and brutal directness of this art, Rose suggested in 1965, could serve as an antidote to the sensorial chaos of American life.511 For the Pier 45 Festival, she located anonymous sculpture in the city and its architectures. The encounter with anonymous sculpture, rescued from architectural oblivion and relocated on the pier, would heighten the public’s consciousness of the city. “People will become more aware of the history of the city, and the work of anonymous craftsmen in the city.”512 This proposal for anonymous sculpture concretely connected minimal art to the city. Both were further contextualized and linked to Lindsay’s broad goal to introduce New Yorkers to the waterfront and to focus on the port’s problems and opportunities in the “New York, New York” section of the pier. Here, in an informal cinema, Rose planned to show slide shows and films that dealt with pressing urban themes of air and water pollution, construction, and traffic. If minimal art, and Morris’s work in particular, was conceived to arouse one’s self-conscious experience of being a sensing body moving through space, the films and slides would have presented the particularly urban impingements on sensation and mobility.

510 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42-44; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20-23. 511 Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (September/October 1965): 69. 512 “Pier 45,” memo, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay.

216 The “Performance Arena” planned for the festival overlapped with the three sections of sculpture. Rose selected a variety of artists to perform, including Robert Whitman, Trisha Brown, Richard Serra, Alex Hay, and others. Robert Rauschenberg signed on to perform Pelican on opening night. But Robert Morris’s proposed work in this section, which combined elements of sculpture and performance, would undoubtedly have stolen the show.513 On Pier 45, Morris planned to reconstruct his Timber Piece, which had been featured in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum earlier in the year. Timber Piece consisted of forty, twenty-six foot long wood beams that were alternately assembled in neat piles and spilled, seemingly haphazardly, on the ground. At the Whitney, the scale of Timber Piece was considered a physical and conceptual challenge to the institution, as it obstructed circulation and tested the structural integrity of the building.514 On Pier 45, it would be incorporated into a sprawling spectacle of American iconography and anti-war politics. Around the beams of wood, Morris planned to include a nude woman leading a team of six horses. The horses were to drag an enormous American flag covered in hundreds of photographs of Vietnam atrocities, which would spill off onto the pier as the performance progressed. A man would periodically make long, linear on the pier in black powder, which would then be lit on fire. A dozen firemen would alternately play poker at a table and conduct demonstrations of fire hoses. There would be acrobats and jugglers, and thirty white rabbits. Six horses and riders would ride, side by side, each playing a Berlioz symphony from a tape recorder. A dozen auto mechanics would dismantle a new car, cut it into small pieces with torches, and distribute the pieces to the audience. A National Guard drill team would perform on an occasional basis while the names of students killed at Kent State and Orangeburg would be read over a public address system. The audience members would each be given a placard

513 Robert Morris, untitled proposal for proposed work at Pier 45, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 11, Folder 140, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 514 On Morris’s 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney and his increasing subscription to the politics of the New Left, see: Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 107-128; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Robert Morris’s Art Strike,” in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 83-125.

217 with a name on it upon entering the pier and, only after the performance, would they be informed that those names belonged to people killed in Vietnam.515 Julia Bryan-Wilson has convincingly argued that Morris’s proposal for Pier 45 represented an “ironic coda to the Whitney show.” The work on the pier was to be a recognition by Morris of the failure of his earlier work to address the entwined politics of labor and war in 1970, as well as an expression of his growing commitment to the New Left. Morris’s proposal for Pier 45, Bryan-Wilson argues, was an attempt to reorient his work to these political contexts.516 The riotous spectacle intended to surround Timber Piece dramatized, one could say, the impossibility of confronting political violence in America and Vietnam with sculpture composed of simple, geometric forms. The muteness and, perhaps, impotence, of minimal art stood in stark contrast to the events that Morris proposed to stage around it. There is some question as to whether or not Morris conceived his contribution to the Pier 45 Festival as a realistic proposal with the possibility of being executed as described.517 Regardless, much of his intentions for the pier seem as much like a knowing engagement with the local and national political priorities of Lindsay as with the revolutionary ambitions of the New Left. Lindsay, for one, was a strident and vocal opponent of American military actions in Vietnam. He directly linked the human and economic expense of the war in Vietnam to the growing sense of social, fiscal, and urban crisis in New York City, which sent billions of dollars in tax revenue to the federal government, thus indirectly paying for the government’s war. “New York City—you and I,” Lindsay argued in a 1969 speech, “have become prisoners of war—prisoners of the war in Vietnam. And we are not going to become the city we should unless we are freed from the bondage that this war has spawned.”518

515 This description is drawn from Morris’s typed two-page proposal, which is preserved in the New York City Municipal Archives. Morris, untitled proposal for proposed work at Pier 45, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Subject Files, Box 11, Folder 140, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 516 Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, (2009), 123-124. 517 Barbara Rose expressed some doubt about whether the Morris proposal could feasibly have been staged. Barbara Rose, telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015. 518 Lindsay gave the speech at Queens College in September 1969. Quoted in Mary Breasted, “Lindsay Woos Students; Puts it to Nixon,” The Village Voice, November 25, 1969,

218 While much of Morris’s performance stood outside the bounds of the conventional political decorum that Lindsay only strained, the artist and the mayor shared a core opposition to the war. Morris also explicitly sought to create a space of social exchange within the performance, addressing one of Lindsay’s key goals for the event. Morris, for example, stipulated the inclusion of one hundred chairs, “…for people to sit in and talk to one another.”519 He also sought to blur the lines between audience and performer and to force an exchange between them. In addition to handing out pieces of the dismantled car and giving each audience member a name of a victim of the Vietnam War, implicating them in both the war and the work, Morris intended to include one hundred people who would assume the role of spectator and performer. First, these one hundred participants would assemble in an area covered with sand, where they would shuffle their feet and sing their favorite songs. They would then leave the area and become part of the audience, only to reassemble periodically to resume singing. Lindsay’s other goal, in addition to organizing a new public on the pier, was to stimulate a heightened consciousness of the waterfront and the city in that public. To that end, Morris intended to set-up six to twelve television sets on the pier and connect them to closed-circuit cameras that were directed to the river, the city’s skyline, and traffic. In these ways, Morris encoded Lindsay’s urban politics and his priorities for the New York City waterfront into the spectacle of performance. The Pier 45 Festival was scheduled to open on September 12, 1970. The local branch of the International Longshoremen’s Association set up a picket on the morning that Lindsay publicly announced his plans for the festival. The union picket prevented artists and workers from completing any preparations. Rauschenberg suggested the procurement of lifeboats to get around the strike by approaching the pier from the water. Rose received death threats.520 By the end of September, Lindsay was forced to cancel almost all of the events that he had planned for the waterfront. Only the ethnic festival planned for Pier 62 survived in limited form when it was moved to Central Park. Lindsay directed his outrage at

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19690925&printsec=fron tpage&hl=en. See also: John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969), 42-43. Lindsay’s antiwar politics are chronicled in Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 422-424, 448-450. 519 Morris, untitled proposal for proposed work at Pier 45. 520 Barbara Rose, telephone conversation with the author, December 14, 2015.

219 the ILA and suggested that they operated against the will of the people and contrary to the recently passed State legislation allowing non-maritime use of the waterfront.521 While Morris and other artists were themselves attempting to unionize, forming the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) in 1969, they operated in solidarity with Lindsay on the piers. This placed the AWC in conflict with the collected workers of the ILA and other unions that were often violently opposed to Lindsay’s antiwar politics and his attempts to transition the city away from its industrial economic base. Lindsay’s program to revitalize the waterfront, shifting it to non-maritime use, was aligned with the private interests that sought to remake New York City as the capital of managerial capitalism. The workers of the ILA recognized this. While Morris and other artists associated with minimal art rhetorically invoked labor, their work served the interests of New York’s ruling elite and the managerial future of Lower Manhattan.

A Better New York Doris Freedman’s use of art in the city was embraced, not just by other departments within the Lindsay administration, but also by private real estate developers who sought to advance the corporate transition of New York and make a claim for control of its public spaces. In the early 1970s, as the city’s fiscal crisis mounted, the Lindsay administration could no longer afford to invest in major sculpture exhibitions in parks, piers, or anywhere else. The cultural management of public space fell largely to the private sector. The urban use of minimal art, which Freedman and the Parks Department initiated in the mid-1960s, was taken up by private real estate developers in the early 1970s. Like Lindsay in the wake of the 1967 riots, private developers turned to minimal art in a time of urban crisis, installing sculpture in streets, plazas and parks as a tangible sign of order and authority. This was, in effect, an extension of the responsibility already codified in the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which defined the plaza as privately owned and managed public space. In the early 1970s,

521 “City Plans for Use Piers as Cultural Playground;” and Edward C. Burks, “Mayor, Scoring I.L.A Pickets, Moves Pier Fete to Central Park,” The New York Times, September 26, 1970, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/09/26/90615730.html?pageNumb er=1; Robert McFadden, “Mayor Yields in I.L.A Pier Dispute,” The New York Times, October 20, 1970, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/10/20/78818735.html?pageNumbe r=38

220 this authority was extended beyond the boundaries of private property and into the streets and parks that were, ostensibly, owned by the city. The Association for a Better New York (ABNY) was founded in 1971 by Lewis Rudin, one of New York’s most powerful real estate owners and developers. As part of its program to promote the security and cleanliness of Lower and Midtown Manhattan, ABNY purchased simple, geometric sculptures and installed them in public spaces with the blessing of the city. ABNY’s explicit goal was the corporate takeover of the city. In 1971, the Lindsay administration was desperate for help in the management of the city. New York’s postwar building boom, which facilitated the transition from industrial manufacturing to managerial capitalism, was fueled by unsustainable levels of civic debt. In addition, the deindustrialization of the city—in which of hundreds of small factories and the entrenched networks of urban manufacturing were replaced with millions of square feet of vacant office space—severely eroded the city’s tax base.522 By 1969, the Lindsay administration found it increasingly difficult to pay for the most basic services and was forced to make deep cuts throughout the city budget. When Lindsay announced a thirty-two percent reduction in city support to cultural institutions, Heckscher vigorously protested, arguing that the very identity of the city would be threatened, as would the health of the public. “To all concerned,” Heckscher wrote to Lindsay, “the sum to be saved seems disproportionate to the damage being done to institutions at the very heart of civilized urban life.”523 In another memo to Lindsay defending his departmental budget, Heckscher pointed specifically to the work of Freedman as a model of bureaucratic ingenuity and efficacy, as well as fiscal restraint relative to the mismanagement in other areas of city government. “The work done by Doris has been quite extraordinary in its employment of small means to achieve widespread public results,” Hecksher reported. “…She has gone out with zeal to bring art into the streets and the artist into contact with the community. I could list a long series of specific undertakings…or call your attention to such conspicuous programs as the

522 Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York (New York, The Viking Press, 1977); William K. Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982). 523 August Heckscher, memorandum to John. V. Lindsay, March 19, 1969, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Confidential Subject Files, Box 14, Folder 164, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records.

221 outdoor sculpture displays…. All this has been done with a minimum of resources, and with a heavy reliance on zeal and a spirit of improvisation.”524 In denying Heckscher’s requests, Lindsay could only point sympathetically to the breadth of cuts across city government and indicate that all services and institutions faced similar reductions, except for the police.525 Lew Rudin and ABNY stepped into the void left by the city and its depleted Parks Department. Rudin founded ABNY in 1971 in response to his growing concern over the physical and economic health of the city. Rudin and his family owned over thirty buildings in Manhattan in the 1970s. Their portfolio was composed primarily of corporate offices and luxury apartments that housed executives and the managerial elite.526 Rudin also enjoyed a close working relationship with the Lindsay administration and was renowned for his ability to get any zoning variance he needed, regardless of community opposition. He was a model member of what Jack Newfield, the legendary muckraker for The Village Voice, described as New York’s permanent government—an unelected and unaccountable group of power brokers who shaped the city in their own image.527 Dozens of New York’s most powerful real estate holders and corporate executives joined ABNY to support Rudin’s efforts. The group is most famous for its self-proclaimed invention of the power breakfast, which remains a major event on the calendars of New York’s ruling elite. The group was equally renowned for bailing out the city budget. When New York was on the brink of default in 1975, Rudin and ABNY convinced major real estate owners to prepay over one hundred million dollars in realty taxes, which allowed the city to meet its payroll obligations.528 This

524 August Heckscher, letter to John V. Lindsay, December 17, 1969, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Confidential Subject Files, Box 14, Folder 164, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 525 John V. Lindsay, memorandum to August Heckscher, March 20, 1969, Papers of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Confidential Subject Files, Box 14, Folder 164, Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records. 526 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Downtown New York Begins to Undergo Radical Transformation,” The New York Times, March 27, 1967; Jack Newfield, “Lindsay & the developers: Rape of the cityscape,” The Village Voice, January 18, 1973, 1, 20-24; Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977) 133-134; 527 Newfield, “Lindsay & the developers,” (1973), 1, 20-24; and Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977), 74, 77, 133-134. 528 Edward Ranzal, “City Aides Count on Prepayment of Realty Taxes to Meet Payroll,” The New York Times, June 6, 1975, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1975/06/06/76558018.html?pageNumb

222 was in some sense merely a prudent investment, since Rudin’s and ABNY’s goal was to facilitate the managerial takeover of the city and extend the private control of public space. In 1965, in a major speech to New York’s real estate board, Rudin had articulated a vision for the corporatization of the city that would become the founding principle of ABNY. “My concern is with the future,” Rudin stated, “the future of New York City as a place in which corporation management and corporation servicing will thrive and prosper.”529 In a press release on June 2, 1971, soon after its founding, ABNY outlined a plan, “designed to keep New York City as the prime corporate headquarters in the world and to improve the economic and cultural life of the city.”530 The corporate future that Rudin described came at the direct expense, according to Jack Newfield, of New York’s working class population. Rudin and his fellow developers convinced Lindsay, according to Newfield, that the city needed to build more luxury housing to accommodate corporate managers and executives if the city wanted to keep corporate headquarters in the city. With the help of zoning variances and tax abatements provided by the city, Rudin and other prominent ABNY members consistently displaced middle- and working-class communities with luxury accommodations.531 In addition to concrete measures easing the path to corporate development, Lindsay and many other public officials backed ABNY’s agenda and its vision for the city’s corporate future. The June 2, 1971 press release included letters and statements of support by Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller, Abraham Beame, and other city and state political leaders. Rockefeller suggested that the New York State and ABNY were working towards the identical goal, to create a healthy vibrant economy in the city. Rockefeller suggested that ABNY’s programs, “…will positively project New York’s many assets, attract new businesses and strengthen the City as the world’s foremost

er=38; Office of Mayor Abraham D. Beame, press release, June 6, 1975, The City of New York, “Fiscal Crisis, 1970s” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. 529 Lew Rudin, speech transcript, Members’ Luncheon, Real Estate Board of New York, February 10, 1965, Association for a Better New York Archive. 530 Association for a Better New York, Press Release with Statements by Public Officials, June 2, 1971, “ABNY: The Very Beginning” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. 531 Newfield, “Lindsay & the developers,” (1973), 1, 20.

223 corporate headquarters.”532 Lindsay, in a letter supporting ABNY’s mission, described New York as “the American corporate capital.”533 Critics of the mayor such as Newfield suggested that Lindsay betrayed his commitment to the working class by supporting elite real estate developers such as Rudin. With Lindsay and other city leaders on board, ABNY announced a seven-point plan to ensure New York’s status as a global corporate headquarters. The plan included long-term lobbying efforts conceived to secure federal funding for transportation and community development, as well as eccentric efforts to nationally expand daylight savings time. The heart of the plan, however, was a multi-faceted effort to improve public spaces in immediate and concrete ways and to make ABNY visible within those spaces. The two centerpieces of the seven-point plan were a “Clean Sweep” campaign and the placement of sculptures in plazas and city parks. For “Clean Sweep,” ABNY enlisted major owners of commercial and residential real estate in Midtown Manhattan to direct their doormen to clean the sidewalks in front of their buildings. By the Spring of 1971, ABNY boasted of agreements with property owners of five hundred and seventy eight buildings between 34th and 59th Streets and Second and Eighth Avenues to clean twenty-three miles of streets and gutters on a daily basis.534 The sculpture program was the most visible aspect of ABNY’s move into public space. On October 18, 1971, ABNY staged a signing ceremony in their offices at Rockefeller Center to celebrate their contract with the city to install large-scale sculpture in plazas and parks. ABNY was represented by Charles Benenson, president of Benenson Realty Company and head of ABNY’s art committee. He was joined by Lew Rudin and several other prominent members of ABNY, including Alton Marshall, president of Rockefeller Center; Rexford Tompkins, chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York; and Preston Robert Tisch, president of Lowe’s Corporation. The City of New York was represented by August Heckscher. Together they announced the gift of six sculptures from ABNY to the

532 Nelson A. Rockefeller, Press Release, February 8, 1971, Executive Chamber, State of New York, attached to Association for a Better New York, Press Release with Statements by Public Officials, June 2, 1971. 533 John V. Lindsay, letter to undesignated recipient, February 9, 1971, attached to Association for a Better New York, Press Release with Statements by Public Officials, June 2, 1971. 534 Association for a Better New York, Press Release, March 23, 1971, “ABNY: The Very Beginning” file, Association for a Better New York Archive.

224 city, including works by Antoni Milkowski, Lyman Kipp, Robert Engman, Roger Bolomey, William Crovello, and Buky Schwartz.535 Several of the artists were associated with minimal art and all of the works featured simple geometric forms fabricated in industrial materials. Milkowski, for example, contributed Skagerrak, a work composed of three modular, rectangular prisms made in Cor- Ten steel, arranged at dynamic angles and standing seven feet tall (Figure 4.10). Kipp’s Grenadine was composed of four large beams of brightly painted steel that stood vertically and two smaller steel beams arranged horizontally at the top of the structure. The works were selected for ABNY by Robert Littman of the Emily Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University. In the early 1970s, Littman was a young curator making a name for himself with exhibitions that persuasively revisited the canonical moments of minimal art from the mid- 1960s.536 At the signing ceremony, Benenson and Heckscher described the gift of sculpture as a means to “uplift the spirit” and “enhance the cultural life and vitality of the city.”537 Yet the sculptures selected by Littman and ABNY were no longer at the vanguard in 1971; rather, the works were examples of a now-conservative and unobtrusive sculptural style, or at least one devoid of any possibility of cultural shock. The ABNY announcement promoted the artists’ academic credentials and the presence of their work in major institutional collections. The works were no longer meant to provoke “howls of shock and scattered grumblings of discontent,” as Heckscher suggested of similar work in “Sculpture in Environment exhibition in 1967.538 ABNY associated itself with a conservative and even retrograde mode of sculpture, not to align itself with some ideal past, but to make a concrete and visible claim to space that was uncontroversial on aesthetic grounds.

535 Association for a Better New York, Press Release, October 18, 1971, “Sculpture Press Release” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. The sculpture program had been announced to the press on June 2, 1971. 536 Barbara Rose, “Homage to the Sixties: The Green Gallery Revisited,” New York, March 20, 1972, 72-73. 537 Association for a Better New York, Press Release, October 18, 1971. 538 Heckscher, foreword, Sculpture in Environment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967).

225

Figure 4.10. Antoni Milkowski, Skagerrak, 1972, as presently installed in Bellevue South Park, New York.

The installation of large, abstract sculptures on privately owned plazas was a firmly entrenched strategy of corporate branding by the early 1970s. However, the installation of sculptures in city parks and sidewalks by private, corporate interests was a largely untested tactic. While real estate developers and executives funded Doris Freedman’s sculpture programs in parks, they were always organized under the auspices of city government. The ABNY’s sculpture installations were, on the other hand, corporate occupations of public space. Four of ABNY’s six sculptures were placed on city streets, squares, or parks. Lyman Kipp’s Grenadine was installed on Duffy Square, near ; Roger Bolomey’s Wingdale was located at Dante Square, near Lincoln Center; Robert Engman’s Untitled sculpture was placed on the corner of Park Avenue and 54th Street; and Antoni Milkowski’s Skagerrak was installed on a busy traffic island between the Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park.

226 These locations were selected both for their centrality to New York’s corporate office districts and for the intensity of activity on the street. ABNY hoped that the sculptures would break through the chaotic urban scene and provide isolated moments of relief for office workers. At the unveiling of the first sculpture, William Crovello’s Cubed Curve, in front of the Time Life Building, Benenson described an imposed space of cultured tranquility around the sculpture that was opposed to the street. “With these donations,” Beneson suggested, “ABNY hopes to bring the peace of the museum to the commercial New York street scene. The City’s busy mind needs quiet contemplation and this sculpture will provide moments of beneficial reflection for all who pass this plaza.”539 The spatial and phenomenological claims of minimal art were effectively instrumentalized by ABNY. As Robert Morris had argued in 1966, there was a shift in sculpture’s significance from the internal articulation of the object to the space and bodies around it. “The better new work,” Morris had suggested, “takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer esthetic.”540 In Doris Freedman’s and Barbara Rose’s urban interventions, this newer aesthetic had been extended into the city. By the early 1970s, the expanding space of sculpture was used by ABNY, not as a means of liberating aesthetics from the tyranny of opticality, but as the moral basis for their expanding control of urban space. The heightened awareness of self that Morris attributed to the new aesthetics became, for ABNY, a means to sharpen the attention of the office worker, provide restorative calm, and eliminate the distractions of the city. For urban critics and theorists such as Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Vince Scully, the seeming chaos of the street was an index of urban vitality. They experienced the plaza as a threat to this chaotic vitality. For the executives and developers of ABNY, this chaos was an obstacle to business and corporate branding. The plaza was their solution. ABNY used sculpture to extend their spatial control of the city from the plaza to the sidewalk and park. This implicit seizure of public space for corporate

539 Quoted in: Association for a Better New York, Press Release, January 20, 1972, “Press Release” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. 540 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 21.

227 use was stated explicitly by Rudin in 1973. “To help the city make major improvements in these parks,” Rudin proclaimed, “is tantamount to beautifying corporate lawns and yards.”541 The installation of sculpture and street cleaning were the first steps in ABNY’s strategy of urban beautification. ABNY also instituted a corporate-adopt-a-park program designed to shift responsibility for city-owned open spaces from the depleted Parks Department to the private sector. The business community financed the maintenance, improvements, and landscaping in several prominent midtown parks, including Bryant Park, Herald Square Park, Greeley Square Park, and Union Square Park. This shift in responsibility came with a shift in assumption about the use of the park, as well as the approved users of public space. “This is a ground floor opportunity,” Rudin argued, “for private industries to become corporate gardeners for the parks that serve their employees. […] This program will change the profiles of these parks and the city significantly.”542 With the landscaping program and the spread of sculpture beyond the privately owned plaza, ABNY effectively treated the city as if it were suburban corporate campus. As ABNY expanded into the city in the early 1970s, their tactics of spatial control extended beyond sculpture and street sweeping. The growing reach of ABNY, with the support of the Lindsay administration, corresponded to declining capacity of the city government to provide basic services as the city spiraled towards financial collapse. On December 21, 1972, with Lindsay at his side, Lew Rudin announced the ABNY would, “marshal its finances and personnel for a direct assault on street crime.”543 The announcement ran on the front page of The New York Times, with a photo of Rudin, Lindsay, and former Mayor Robert Wagner, under the headline “City-Backed Private Drive on

541 Quoted in: Association for a Better New York, Press Release, May 3, 1973, “Press Release 1973” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. 542 Ibid. 543 Association for a Better New York, Press Release, Howard J. Rubinstein Associates, Inc., Public Relations, December 21, 1972, “Press Release 1972” file, Association for a Better New York Archive; Murray Schumach, City-Backed Private Drive on Midtown Crime Opens,” The New York Times December 22, 1972, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/12/22/79485283.html?pageNumb er=56. ABNY’s leading role in the privatization of public security has recently been assessed by historian Joe Merton, who argues for its significance in the emergence of a neoliberal urban order. See: Joe Merton, “John Lindsay, the Association for a Better New York, and the Privatization of New York City, 1969-1973,” Journal of Urban History (April 9, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144218765465.

228 Midtown Crime Opens.” Rudin outlined a multi-faceted anti-crime program in Midtown Manhattan that would be financed and managed by private corporations and real estate owners. ABNY’s anti-crime program mobilized building superintendents and doormen as “block-watchers” trained by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Private security guards were hired to patrol the space around buildings and have direct communication to the NYPD. Building owners were encouraged to identify all moveable items in offices, such as typewriters and mimeograph machines, to deter theft. And ABNY coordinated the financing and installation of high-pressure sodium lamps on all cross streets from 34th to 59th Streets. Less than a year later, in September of 1973, Lindsay announced ABNY’s installation of closed-circuit cameras in Times Square to assist with police surveillance. Lindsay and Rudin again made the explicit connection between activity on the street and the corporate character of the city. “This experimental system, the first of its kind in any major city,” Lindsay contended, “is one more imaginative tool to further this administration’s goal of a prosperous, vital and safe Times Square area.”544 Rudin was more expansive in his comments. “[ABNY] is a non-profit organization dedicated to assuring New York City’s position as the corporate and financial headquarters of the western hemisphere. It is involved in a variety of programs ranging from crime fighting to art to sanitation.”545 As ABNY launched additional layers of control, sculpture remained a central tactic. The advantage of the sculpture program for ABNY was its potential for mobility. At the initial announcement of the program in 1971, Benenson proclaimed, “all of the sculptures are engineered to move…”546 ABNY’s goal, stated at the outset, was to build a collection of sculptures that could be relocated annually to sites in need of aesthetic or social rehabilitation. In 1972, all but one sculpture was installed in Midtown Manhattan. In 1973, the works by Kipp, Bolomey, and Schwartz were moved to street corners in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, while Engman’s sculpture was moved from Park Avenue to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Milkowski’s Skagerrak was moved from the traffic island on 23rd Street to the interior of Madison Square Park.

544 Quoted in: Association for a Better New York, Press Release, September 24, 1973, “Press Release 1973” file, Association for a Better New York Archive. 545 Ibid. 546 Association for a Better New York, Press Release, October 15, 1971, “Sculpture Press Release” file, Association for a Better New York Archive.

229 In emphasizing the mobility of the collection and its potential to be delivered to neighborhoods in need, ABNY was capitalizing on an inherent potential of minimal art. In her review of “Sculpture in Environment,” Lucy Lippard called for the city to build a collection of sculpture that could be moved on a temporary basis to neighborhoods impacted by urban renewal. “With buildings cavalierly thrown up and mown down,” Lippard wrote in 1967, “permanent sculpture is often irrelevant.”547 She saw in the simple geometries, modular constructions, and new scale of work by Tony Smith, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris, the potential to impact the way people engage and know their environment. “Most people no longer see their environment once it becomes familiar,” Lippard wrote.548 When consistently moved into new urban contexts, she argued, the new sculpture has the potential to break people out of the hurried routines of everyday life and heighten the public’s perception of the city. ABNY seized on such a potential, activating the mobility of minimal art, even if their favored artists differed. Jack Newfield, writing for The Village Voice, described the erosion of power by elected officials in 1960s and 1970s New York and its arrogation by unelected and unaccountable power brokers. “Ultimate power over public policy in New York,” Newfield argued, along with Paul DuBrul, “is invisible and unelected. It is exercised by a loose confederation of bankers, bond underwriters, members of public authorities, the big insurance companies, political fund-raisers, publishers, law firms, builders, judges, backroom politicians and some union leaders.”549 Newfield assessed large-scale power grabs by private entities in areas such as housing developments and public works, and the impact of debilitating bonds to prop up these projects. Rudin was at the top of Newfield’s list of real estate developers to benefit from his cozy relationship with Lindsay and other local politicians. Rudin, Newfield suggests, enjoyed tax abatements and zoning variances that facilitated his construction of luxury apartments at the expense of Lindsay’s commitment to affordable housing.550 ABNY’s beautification, sanitation, and security programs were a subtler, but no less effective, means by which Rudin and his corporate peers accumulated

547 Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 204, no. 4 (Winter 1967- 1968): 656. 548 Ibid., 656. 549 Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977), 75. 550Newfield, “Lindsay & the developers,” (1973), 1, 20; Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977), 79, 134.

230 power over New York City’s streets. Despite Newfield’s criticism, Rudin and his partners believed they were acting as moral agents, using Lindsay’s own methods to save the city, in the midst of the city government’s deterioration. When Lindsay was inaugurated in 1966, he fueled a wave of enthusiasm in the city. Newfield was convinced of the sincerity of Lindsay’s progressive vision for the city. “This summer Lindsay walked shirt-sleeved through the slums,” Newfield wrote in 1967. “The message is that he cares, the medium is his presence. It doesn’t yet matter that the only change flowing from his visits is that a few vacant lots are cleaned up the next day. It is enough that he comes to bring visibility to invisible people. They know that he is their Mayor, just as the real-estate interests and the fat, contented trade-union leaders knew Robert F. Wagner was their Mayor.”551 In 1967, there was much optimism that the strategies of cultural intervention developed by Freedman and Heckscher could help alleviate the urban problems of segregation and racial violence. Sculpture installed on New York’s streets and parks were, like Lindsay’s embodied presence, tangible signs that the mayor cared for the people. The Lindsay administration devised sculpture programs to address the related problems of race riots, social and racial segregation, and white suburban flight. There was optimism that the public would enjoy a heightened sense of self, others, and environment within sculpture’s expanding space and that a community could cohere around sculptures placed in the city’s public spaces. This was the phenomenological promise of minimal art on which Doris Freedman’s sculpture programs were founded. The urgent questions of race and class that fueled the Freedman, Heckscher, and Lindsay in 1967 were abandoned by ABNY in the early 1970s. One could say that the promise was first rejected by a cohort of New York’s power brokers when it did not serve their immediate interests, as Barbara Rose learned when her pier festival was cancelled in 1970 under union and mafia pressure.552 When it was adopted by ABNY in the early 1970s, the phenomenological promise was not deployed to bring people together in public spaces, to address segregation and violence; rather, it was deployed as moral coverage for extending the corporate control of public

551 Jack Newfield, “John Lindsay Emerges from Summer and Smoke,” The Village Voice, September 7, 1967, 30. 552 Newfield includes the mafia and the unions as influential members of New York’s permanent government. See Newfield and DuBrul, The Abuse of Power, (1977), 251-256.

231 space, by calming the universal and homogenous, and therefore tacitly white male, office worker distracted by the city. By the early 1970s, as Newfield was amongst the first to argue, Lindsay had abandoned his commitments to the public and was surrendering the city to real estate developers and corporate executives. Sculpture was one of the prominent tools through which this transfer of power was made visible.

232 Chapter 5: Dennis Oppenheim’s Road Works

Sometime in 1967, Dennis Oppenheim began to fantasize about infiltrating a highway construction crew. Once on the job, he would work undercover as a sculptor to surreptitiously alter the planned path of a road.553 There are two ways to read this scenario. In one, the artist enters a system to disrupt it, manipulating the intentions of the engineers to produce a new reality. The sculpture would constitute a kind of vandalism—an appropriation of public space and unauthorized manipulation of traffic. Alternatively, one could see the artist occupying the guise of the worker who makes an anonymous contribution to improve the design of the highway. The artist assumes a position within a professional network, collaborating with a team that is ultimately responsible for the shape of public space. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Oppenheim would explore both trajectories—the sculptor as vandal and the sculptor as civil servant—to oppose the autonomy of the work of art and the artist. He produced works that flouted the coherent boundaries of medium, often incorporating in a single work sprawling strategies such as sculpture, photography, documentation, text, and performance, along with driving, walking and perceiving. The surfaces of the city were more than just a field of operations or a context. These urban surfaces were built into Oppenheim’s work. He cultivated a role for the artist that defied the avant-garde ideal of critical detachment and instead sought a place within the networks and systems that shape the infrastructures of everyday life. In executed and planned works, Oppenheim infiltrated and rerouted those infrastructures with sculpture that merged with and disappeared into the street. Oppenheim developed an idea of highway sculpture while his thoughts were immersed in minimal art and its phenomenological polemics. In 1966, he had moved from California to New York, repelled by Bay Area assemblage and funk art and attracted to the work and writings of Andre, Morris, and Smith. When he arrived in New York, he was well

553 The project is listed under the heading, “Sketch Book 1967” in: Dennis Oppenheim, “Catalyst 1967-1970,” artscanada 27, no. 4 (August 1970). Oppenheim also mused about the possibility of an art involved with redirecting traffic in: “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” Avalanche no. 1 (Fall 1970): 64. The description above is principally derived from an unpublished interview with Oppenheim conducted by the architecture theorist and critic Donald Wall. I am grateful to Wall and to Amy Plumb Oppenheim for allowing me to reference his important series of interviews. Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Donald Wall, January 7, 1984, Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archive.

233 versed in Andre’s theory of sculpture-as-place, Morris’s phenomenology, and Smith’s account of aesthetic experience on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike.554 However, he also believed minimal art’s gallery orientation and its pursuit of simple, geometric forms based on Gestalt theories of perception were dead ends. To extend minimal art, Oppenheim pursued two aspects that he viewed as inherent to the work of Andre, Morris, and Smith—its phenomenological orientation and its urban content. By the winter of 1967, Oppenheim suggested, “It was clear, even to the Minimalists, that their idea was reaching ground zero. That’s why phenomenology became a way of expanding the domain—and a valid way at that.”555 The core phenomenological objective of minimal art was to develop sculpture to heighten one’s perception of self and environment. Oppenheim embodied this goal and extended it into the city. “Minimal art made people look at minimal forms,” he argued. “The best minimal forms were outside the gallery.”556 He was, one could say, the urban subject trained by minimal art. Oppenheim directed his hyper-sensorial body at the city and sought to find the best minimal forms on the street. In minimal art, Oppenheim saw a compulsion to engage the city and, specifically, to the surfaces of urban perception and mobility—the sidewalk, the street, the highway, and the body. In a 1981 interview, Oppenheim suggested that his extension of minimal art was, “…prompted by a need to look at the real world: sidewalks, drains, gutters, and other ground-based forms.”557 The real world, for Oppenheim, could be both the place and the

554 Oppenheim’s describes his first encounters with minimal art’s polemics in Artforum and other publications, as well as his move from California to New York, in: Dennis Oppenheim, Oral history interview with Suzaan Boettger, July-August 1995, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral- history-interview-dennis-oppenheim-12924#transcript; and Dennis Oppenheim and Germano Celant, “Conversation between Germano Celant and Dennis Oppenheim,” in Dennis Oppenheim (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1997), 21, 29. 555 Quoted in Alanna Heiss, “Another Point of Entry: An Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” in Dennis Oppenheim: Selected Works, 1967-90, And the Mind Grew Fingers, ed. Alanna Heiss (New York: The Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, 1992), 139. See also: Oppenheim and Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim (Milan (Edizioni Charta, 1997), 24-25; and Dennis Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, Cornell University, 1969, Box 2, Folder 48, Robert Smithson and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 556 Lynn Hershman, “Interview with Oppenheim,” Studio International 186, no. 960 (November 1973): 196. 557 Steve Wood, “Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” Arts Magazine 55, No. 10 (June 1981): 133. Oppenheim makes the connection between the “real world” and minimal art in

234 content of sculpture, as opposed to the artifice and isolation of the gallery. Rather than positioning the highway and the street as models of sculpture and aesthetic experience, and developing forms to approximate them for the gallery, Oppenheim worked directly in and on these infrastructures. He sought to produce a direct and concrete sculptural experience of the street and the highway without the transubstantiating frame of the gallery. At times working covertly on unauthorized sculptures placed alongside the road, and at other times collaborating with highway planners and theorists, Oppenheim developed sculptures to heighten and redirect perception of urban infrastructures amongst those who used those infrastructures. The mid-1960s was a moment of reckoning in the development of the American highway system. Highway discourse had been dominated by the pastoral ideal of the parkway built in harmony with the natural landscape. Robert Moses’s early parkways—the Grand Central, Henry Hudson, and Northern State—served as the exemplars and Siegfried Giedion was a leading spokesperson.558 But by the 1960s, this ideal was untenable, negated by the brutal realities of construction, particularly where the highway met the city, the explosive growth of automobile use, and the monotonous experience of driving that did not match the image of the pastoral model. While the highway system continued to expand rapidly, it also became an object of theory. The aesthetics of the highway were debated at the highest levels of state and federal government, where the need to curtail commercial intrusions in public space were seen as an urgent imperative. Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act in 1965 and its revision and hearings over the subsequent ten years brought the debates over highway form and aesthetics into the public forum. Urban planners and theorists, such as Kevin Lynch, Christopher Tunnard, and Boris Pushkarev, assessed the modes of perception uniquely framed by the highway and proposed new techniques of spatial organization that would heighten drivers’ awareness of the road environment.

numerous other interviews. See, for example: Oppenheim, Oral history interview with Suzaan Boettger; and Dennis Oppenheim and Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim (Milan (Edizioni Charta, 1997), 24-26. 558 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 554-559. Marshall Berman described Giedion as a spokesperson for Moses’s parkway world in: Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 298-302.

235 Sculpture played an important role in their conceptualization of the highway and its relationship to the landscape. Sculpture was also seen, particularly by Tunnard and Pushkarev, as a potential tool to be placed on the side of the road to stimulate drivers’ perception, direct the eye at decisive moments on the road, and mitigate the transition from the highway to the city. Oppenheim found an audience in these urban theorists and worked with Tunnard in 1968 to develop models of highway sculpture. The collaboration introduced Oppenheim to advanced thinking on highway design and urban space, while Oppenheim introduced Tunnard to a way of thinking about sculpture specific to the highway environment and the durational experience of driving. Oppenheim’s road works raise questions of art history, to be sure, but they also raise questions about the city and its infrastructures. If a sculpture doubles as a road, to what history does it belong? Can a sculpture be a part of urban history and can a highway, in turn, find a place in art history? Like Tony Smith, Oppenheim’s engagement with the highway and the street enlarged his view of the formal and spatial limits of sculpture, the scope of aesthetic experience, and the social agency of the artist. The city and the body constituted Oppenheim’s primary media in the 1960s and early 1970s. He employed a wide array of strategies to work between these two fields, including his works on highways, streets, and sidewalks. Oppenheim’s diverse strategies present challenges to art history. It can be difficult, for example, to isolate the temporal, spatial, and material boundaries of a work that might include numerous, often intangible, elements and events—an act of perception, a drive through the city, a place marked on a map, a photograph of a sidewalk, a model of a planned or executed earthwork, or a collection of urban residue. Despite the sprawling nature of his work, there is a tendency in much reception to locate Oppenheim’s contribution solely within the history of sculpture. His work is placed at the start of many major trends in late 1960s and early 1970s art—land art, conceptual art, , body art, performance, and postmodernism. These terms convey the breadth of Oppenheim’s work and his ambition to radically expand the field of sculpture. However, they limit understanding to his art historical significance, even as Oppenheim strove to work against the seclusion of sculpture within disciplinary boundaries. The two most significant contributors to his reception—Jack Burnham and Thomas McEvilley—lauded Oppenheim’s sculptural engagement of the “real world.” Oppenheim plays a central role in Burnham’s conception of systems and post-formalist art and in

236 McEvilley’s theory of postmodernism. According to Burnham, Oppenheim reaches outside of the isolated art world for real world data and his work can be difficult to distinguish from everyday activity.559 Oppenheim’s work is, Burnham writes, “…an example of art without boundaries.”560 Likewise, McEvilley positions Oppenheim as part of a growing tendency in the 1960s to, “…locate the artwork somehow in the reality of life, not merely aesthetic reality, but cognitive and social reality as well.”561 McEvilley, following Burnham, argues broadly that Oppenheim developed strategies to engage and defeat the myth of the modernist artist as creator and the work of art as ideal form, autonomous and independent from the world. For both critics, Oppenheim’s work in the real world is evidence of a break with the formal and institutional autonomy of modernist art. Burnham situates Oppenheim’s break with modernist autonomy in a techno-social paradigm shift effecting all aspects of communication; however, it is unclear if Oppenheim is a symptom or agent of this changing paradigm. Oppenheim was surely engaged in a critique of modernist sculpture and its isolation from the everyday, as Burnham and McEvilley recognize. However, he was also interested in the functional potential of sculpture in the world as an instrument to sharpen and alter perception of the environments, infrastructures, and systems that shape everyday life. Oppenheim sought to infiltrate the real world to redirect it, as in his highway fantasy, if only slightly. It is worth looking specifically, therefore, at where Oppenheim sought to locate his sculpture and how he positioned it to redirect, not only the history of sculpture, but also the spaces of everyday life.

559 Jack Burnham “Real Time Systems” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969): 52-53; Jack Burnham, “Dennis Oppenheim: Catalyst, 1967-1970,” artscanada 22, no. 4 (August 1970): 29; Jack Burnham, “Dennis Oppenheim: The Artist as Shaman,” Arts Magazine 47, no. 7 (May/June 1973): 42-44. 560 Jack Burnham, “The Intelligence of Aesthetic Systems,” in On the Future of Art (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 105. 561 Thomas McEvilley, “The Rightness of Wrongness: Modernism and Its Alter Ego in the Work of Dennis Oppenheim,” in Dennis Oppenheim: Selected Works, 1967-90, And the Mind Grew Fingers, ed. Alanna Heiss (New York: The Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, 1992), 20.

237 Perception—possession

Figure 5.1. Dennis Oppenheim, Site Markers, 1967, in “Scale Models and Plans,” May 1967, Green Gallery, San Francisco. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

In the summer of 1967, shortly after arriving in New York, Oppenheim began to drive around Long Island, New Jersey, and Lower Manhattan, looking for minimal sculpture in the street. He identified existing urban fragments and, through acts of intensive perception, claimed them as sculpture. The sites were marked on a map, carefully described, numbered, and photographed (Figure 5.1). In addition to collecting this classificatory information, Oppenheim had a rectangular stake manufactured in milled, anodized aluminum to designate the site. With this stark object, which calls to mind both a surveyor’s stake used to mark property lines and the machined finish of a Donald Judd sculpture, Oppenheim signified his claim of spatial possession and the continuity of his project with minimal art.562 The aluminum stake and all of the collected materials were then fit into a plastic tube and offered for sale. “I saw them as sculpture and they were as good as anything

562 Oppenheim noted the similarity of his stakes to a surveyor’s stake in: Oppenheim, “Catalyst 1967-1970,” (1970), 30.

238 I could do. […] If people wanted to buy the site markers as sculpture, why fine.”563 Starting in May and working for several months, Oppenheim produced at least ten site markers in the vicinity of the city. In Kearney just off of the New Jersey Turnpike, Oppenheim claimed a set of bleachers as his first site. In Lower Manhattan, a cast iron form attached to a garage entrance was designated a sculpture, as was a recessed rectangular form within a construction site on Fulton Street. In Long Island, while driving along Route 25a and Route 97, Oppenheim marked a simple concrete form found along the side of the road, a set of stairs leading from the street to a yard, and a raised viewing platform in the center of a racetrack. Oppenheim made a clear effort to locate his site markers within the discourse of minimal art and to shift that discourse to the street. He embraced minimal art’s phenomenology, as well as its urban and infrastructural aesthetics. Many of the forms that he selected had obvious reference to minimal sculpture—squares and rectangles are featured in numerous works. And, in his descriptions, Oppenheim emphasized the simple geometry of the sites in a blunt rhetorical style reminiscent of Judd’s criticism. The set of stairs that Oppenheim claimed as Site No. 4 were described simply as a “concrete structure built on sloping terrain.” In Oppenheim’s words, this structure consisted, not of ordinary steps leading to a suburban yard and home, but of, “six rectangular concrete posts juxtaposed, capped at the ends by 6’ concrete beams, running along their ends and perpendicular to the six posts. Exterior is painted white.”564 Such a description has a decontextualizing function, allowing the everyday object to be considered as a discrete sculptural entity. It is no longer a mere set of stairs alongside a driveway but a form invested with all of the conceptual weight

563 Dennis Oppenheim, quoted in Grace Glueck, “An Artful Summer,” The New York Times, May 19, 1968, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/19/88950732.html?pageNumbe r=200. 564 Oppenheim’s site descriptions were typed on documents and placed in plastic tubes along with the stake, photographs, and other materials. At least some of the site markers were produced as multiples and the numbering does not appear to be consistent. The descriptions, quoted herein, have been transcribed by Amy Plumb Oppenheim from the complete set of site markers that resides in the collection of Lille Métropole Musée d’art modern, d’art contemporain et d’art brut. I am immensely grateful to Amy Plumb Oppenheim for sharing her transciptions. The photograph and description of Site # 4 are also reproduced in: Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations (Milan: Edizione Charta, 2001), 36.

239 of a work by Judd or Morris. At the same time, Oppenheim provided the precise cartographic coordinates of the stairs. “Location: heading in a northeasterly direction on Route 25A, site can be found on the north side of the road, 100 feet from the intersection of 25A and North Country Road in Stonybrook, Long Island, New York, August 1967.”565 Oppenheim’s description signaled his association with minimal art. However, his locational specificity signaled his rejection of its meticulously crafted, studio-based objects and the isolating conditions of the gallery. “Energy used in making objects,” Oppenheim reported, “is now used in locating them. This art occupied eight months of my life—I began to travel.”566 If driving could be an aesthetic experience and industrial infrastructures could be identified as sculpture, as Tony Smith proposed in 1966, Oppenheim saw no need for a studio where those forms and experiences had once been approximated as sculpture. Oppenheim viewed his experience driving around New York as essentially similar to Smith’s drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. They were both legitimate aesthetic experiences that did not need to be translated or transformed to fit into the gallery. Oppenheim credited Smith with beginning an, “…intense move away from the object into place and orientation.”567 Moreover, Smith’s identification of the formal and conceptual proximity of minimal art to the urban, in Oppenheim’s reading, allowed sculpture to exist covertly as a latent force within the city. The alternative to studio art, Oppenheim argued, “…would be an art mixed in with the societal process.”568 Following Smith, Oppenheim recognized driving as an aesthetic experience, as well as other forms of urban mobility, especially walking. “I think that when artists began to see walking down the street as having

565 Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 36. The stairs can still be found using Oppenheim’s directions at 1167 NY-25A, Stony Brook, New York. 566 Dennis Oppenheim and Wim Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1974), unpaginated; and Dennis Oppenheim, quoted in Alain Parent, Dennis Oppenheim: Retrospective—Works 1967-1977 (Montreal: Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, 1978), 34. 567 Quoted in Dennis Oppenheim and Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim (Milan: Edizione Charta, 1997), 23-24. Oppenheim has also pointed to the importance of Andre’s theory of sculpture as place. See: “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” Avalanche no. 1 (Fall 1970): 62; and Oppenheim, Oral history interview with Suzaan Boettger, Archives of American Art, 1995. 568 Dennis Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, Cornell University, 1969, Box 2, Folder 48, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

240 an aesthetic or sculptural aspect, things began to open up.”569 An art mixed in with the societal process, for Oppenheim, would be an art of walking, driving, perceiving, and being in the city. It would be an art that collapsed the boundaries between sculpture, street, and body. The site markers reset the boundaries between the work of art and the world around it. Oppenheim moved through the city, by foot or car, and perceived sculptural aspects of everyday forms and spaces. He produced a set of supplementary documents that classified his found objects as sculpture. This was, in part, a Duchampian gesture, as Thomas McEvilley has argued.570 However, rather than moving a readymade to the studio or gallery where it would be validated as art, as did Duchamp, Oppenheim left the found object, now classified as sculpture, in the city. With the site markers, Oppenheim suggested, “…the object was entering into a field, a field of unspecified spatial definition. All of a sudden this notion of sculpture as place was manifest.”571 The expanding spatial field was not significant, for Oppenheim, because it was an advancement of the idea of sculpture as place. Rather, the expanding field was significant because it allowed sculpture to assume an operative function in the real world. The city bled into the work of art and the work of art was embedded in the city. There is no information in the site markers that would support a clear delineation between these two fields. The site markers, in Oppenheim’s words, “…started in a sense a journey: art is travel, art is the artist as a catalyst within, inside the media, the media being the society and he was no longer dealing so much with artifice.”572 A sculpture inserted or located in the infrastructure of society was an opportunity, for Oppenheim, to heighten one’s perception of everyday life and, potentially, to redirect one’s experience of it. The crucial moment in the production of a site marker, for Oppenheim, was the act of perception. The act of perception was the basis of his proprietary claim and his aesthetic conversion of an everyday, urban site. “As I walked outside during that time and looked at existing fragments of architecture,” Oppenheim reported, “I was in a sense bombarding these fragments with perceptual sense data.”573 The activity of perception constituted the

569 Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium. 570 McEvilley, “The Rightness of Wrongness,” (1992), 7, 10. 571 Ibid., 29. 572 Dennis Oppenheim, “Interview with Alain Parent,” in Dennis Oppenheim: Retrospective— Works 1967-1977 (Montreal: Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, 1978), 16. 573 Oppenheim, “Interview with Alain Parent,” (1978), 16.

241 work of sculptural production. “…I was almost engaging in the same kind of spirit of invention and the same kind of spirit of making that used to occur within the classical studio but I was inducing this on an exterior situation…”574 Oppenheim locates the power of conversion from the everyday to the aesthetic, not in the institutional frame, but in the act of looking and perceiving—the bombarding of the site with sense data. While the categorical transformation from the everyday to the aesthetic remains Duchampian, the power behind it is resolutely phenomenological, informed by a concept of intentionality that stems from Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception. According to Merleau-Ponty, one does not passively receive sense data from an object that emits this data. Rather, sense data is produced in the intentional action of the subject towards the object. Oppenheim, in his Site Markers, interpreted this idea of sensorial agency as an act of aggression, and used it as the basis of his hostile claim to an object in the world. Merleau-Ponty adopted his theory of intentionality from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. For Husserl, intentionality describes the directedness of all thought towards an object. All thought is thought of. According to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s theory of intentionality assumes a world that precedes and is the condition of consciousness. It stands in opposition to the intellectualist theories of Descartes and Kant, which assume a consciousness that precedes and constitutes the world, and to empiricist and positivist theories of perception that assume a subject passively receiving sense data. Merleau-Ponty extends Husserl’s theory of intentionality by introducing the body as both the field of subjectivity and an object in the world. Intentional perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is therefore the active directedness of the body towards an object in the world. The sensible, Merleau-Ponty argues, “…is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body…so that sensation is literally a form of communion.”575 The action of the perceiving body towards the world, for Merleau-Ponty and Oppenheim, is the basis of knowledge, and, ultimately, the basis of the social and political. “The subject of sensation,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is neither a thinker who takes note of a quality, nor an inert setting which is affected or changed by it, it is a power which is born into, and simultaneous with, a certain existential environment, or

574 Oppenheim, “Interview with Alain Parent,” (1978), 16. 575 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 216.

242 is synchronized with it.”576 To perceive intentionally is to lay the epistemological groundwork for an activist engagement with the world. Robert Morris developed his doctrine of sculptural form based in part on his reading of Merleau-Ponty’s critical reworking of Gestalt psychology. Oppenheim, on the other hand, took up Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intentionality, developing a doctrine of being in the world. Sculpture was the product of that existential and activist stance.577 For Morris, and for Gestalt theorists, the object remained central. The basic form of the object structured perception and mediated the subject and the social world. The subject perceived the object’s edges, patterns, mass, and scale and this primary perception organized one’s capacity to know the object and the environment around it. Merleau-Ponty borrowed aspects of this Gestalt theory but privileged the acting subject over the perceived object. His theory of perception is less concerned with the particular form of the object than with the intentional movement of the subject. The object does not mediate the subject and the world, for Merleau-Ponty and Oppenheim, nor does it determine the direction of perception. Rather, the agency of the mobile subject organizes perception as well as the experience of the environment. As the discourse of perception shifted from Gestalt theory to phenomenology as the 1960s progressed, there was a corresponding shift in the authority of the object and its significance to the structure of perception. In 1965 and 1966, artists such as Morris, Andre, and Smith were committed to a bulky sculptural object around which one moved and perceived. By 1967 and 1968, in the work of Oppenheim, Andre, and Smith, this bulk has

576 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 211. It is worth noting that this interpretation of the activist potential of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intentionality was readily available to readers in 1960s New York. In 1967, Albert Rabil, Jr. published what remains one of the most important accounts of the politics of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In summarizing the political potential of the body as a site of action, as theorized by Merleau- Ponty, Rabil writes, “Revolutionary conditions may be present without leading to a revolution. What actually takes place depends on the intentions, the projects of men. Freedom, then, is to be acted upon by and to act upon the world at the same time.” Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1967), 21. 577 Oppenheim discusses his reading of phenomenology and its significance in his work of the late-1960s in numerous places. See, for example: Heiss, “Another Point of Entry: An Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” (1992), 139; Assumpta Bassas, “Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” in Dennis Oppenheim: Obra 1967-1994 (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1994), 97; Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, (1997), 26; and Oppenheim, Oral history interview with Suzaan Boettger, Archives of American Art, 1995.

243 given way to an idea of sculpture as horizontal extension, with very little emphasis on the object as a discreet thing. Each of Oppenheim’s site markers indicates a point in space, seized and acted upon by the body. The sites were claimed as sculpture through an intentional act of perception. The sites were also claimed, according to Oppenheim, as property. “I wanted to test the notion,” he suggested, “of whether an existing fragment of an architectural nature in the world could be brought in, successfully possessed by the artist and offered as a credible artwork. […]…I focused on exterior objects…and considered them to be in my possession through the intervention of photography, with the document able to be exchanged, to be sold.”578 Oppenheim’s proprietary claim echoes Andre’s attempt, made two years earlier at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, to claim the space of the gallery as his own. “I wanted very much to seize and hold the space of that gallery,” Andre suggested, “not simply to fill it, but seize and hold that space.”579 Whereas Andre filled the gallery with massive Styrofoam structures, materially occupying the bulk of the room and allowing only scant space for visitors to maneuver, Oppenheim’s claim rested on his own perceptual and physical occupation of space. Oppenheim effectively substituted the presence of his body in the world for the presence of the object in the gallery. He rejected the material and institutional armature of sculpture that remained central to Andre’s claim, while retaining the possessive hold on space. Oppenheim’s proprietary claim was then echoed in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates of 1973. Matta-Clark claimed marginal urban spaces that were relatively insignificant, buying them at a New York City auction. In both cases, a small slice of urban space is transformed from the everyday to the aesthetic through an artist’s act of possession. Like Oppenheim, Matta-Clark employed maps and photographs in his reframing of urban property, only his claim was buttressed by the deeds that he received from the city.

578 Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, (1997), 29. 579 Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre” Artforum 8, no. 10 (June 1970): 55-61. While Andre’s statement was only published in 1970, after Oppenheim had completed his site markers, it was implicit in Andre’s and David Bourdon’s characterization of the Tibor de Nagy exhibition in 1966. Moreover, Bourdon’s essay, ‘The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” included the first published account of Andre’s theory of sculpture as place, which Oppenheim has routinely sited as a touchstone for the site markers, and generally for his work in the late 1960s. See, David Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 15-17.

244 Oppenheim’s privileging of perception as the dominant justification of possession distinguishes his site markers from the Andre’s and Matta-Clark’s proprietary claims. Matta- Clark’s work can be seen to engage the municipal irrationality, bureaucratic inefficiency, and urban decay of mid-1970s New York, as Jeffrey Kroessler has argued.580 Whereas Matta- Clark was interested in the useless quality of the urban slivers that he bought, Oppenheim sought to establish with his site markers a new space of artistic agency and functional aesthetics in the city. This immersive and embodied engagement in the world, through intentional acts of perception, is what Oppenheim sought when he described art and the artist as catalysts within society. Or, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, “I am not a spectator, I am involved…”581 Oppenheim saw at least two of his sites as models for sculptures that could expand the proprietary claim of intentional perception beyond the singular body of the artist and make it available to a wider public. Site No. 1, located in Kearney, near the New Jersey Turnpike, marked an installation of wood and metal bleachers—the type commonly found alongside sports fields. The bleachers, in Oppenheim’s words, “…function as a seating area from which position a viewer can scan what is immediately in front of him.” His description does not identify the bleachers as such, but, rather, “a wood and metal structure with a ground area of 25’ x 60’ lines of parallel boards—parallel to each other at two foot intervals—placed on a sloping metal structure span the length, beginning from the highest point of 18’’, the slope descends to a height of 18”…” 582 Oppenheim’s photograph is closely cropped and faces the bleachers, so it is impossible to determine what type of field they face and what else surrounds them. His description and photograph isolate the act of perception from the context and defamiliarize the object. This was a site that was both designated as sculpture through Oppenheim’s act of perception and a site that he selected because its function is defined by the activity of perception. The bleachers exist, in other words, so that the audience can see. Likewise, for Site No. 7, Oppenheim designated a two-story wooden

580 Jeffrey A. Kroessler, “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Moment,” in Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. Jaffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005), 34. See also: Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 227-228. 581 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 304. 582 Dennis Oppenheim, Site No. 1, description transcribed by Amy Plumb Oppenheim, Dennis Oppenheim Estate. The photograph and description of Site # 1 are also reproduced in: Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 36-37.

245 structure located on the C. W. Post College campus, off of Route 25A, in Brookville, Long Island. The structure, which included benches and windows, served as a place to view activities taking place on the open field that it faced. For Oppenheim, the structure, “…provided for the act of viewing outward.”583He identified another viewing platform built of concrete, sod, and wood at the center of racetrack in Westbury, Long Island. The bleachers and the viewing platforms exist to accommodate and direct specific acts of viewing.

Figure 5.2. Dennis Oppenheim, Viewing Station #1, blue line print, May 1967. Text: Units constructed to view from. Top view. 1” = 1’. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

While Oppenheim continued to survey the city’s peripheries and produce site markers, he also began to work on a series of sculptures that would isolate and

583 Dennis Oppenheim, Site No. 7, description transcribed by Amy Plumb Oppenheim, Dennis Oppenheim Estate. The platform at C. W. Post College is identified as Site No. 3 in the exhibition catalogue of Oppenheim’s 1974 retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, where Oppenheim’s photograph and description of the site were first reproduced. See Dennis Oppenheim and Wim Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1974), unpaginated. C. W. Post College is now known as the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

246 accommodate an act of perception akin to the bleachers and viewing platforms. From the summer of 1967 and continuing into 1968, Oppenheim produced plans, models, and fully executed viewing stations, as well as numerous related works. In Viewing Station #1, Bleacher System (For Viewing a Gallery Space), Dead Furrow, and Structure for Viewing Land, amongst others, Oppenheim conceived of sculpture as a structure from which to view the surrounding environment and to concretely experience the act of perception. They were, according to Oppenheim, “objects constructed, not to be viewed, but to view from.”584 All of the structures included a raised platform to which the viewer could ascend and perceive the interior space of a gallery or a landscape. Viewing Station #1 consisted of a truncated built in wood, with a seven-and-a-half foot square base (Figure 5.2). A single step led to a platform, two-and-a-half feet off the ground, and surrounded on three sides by a rail. One viewer could comfortably inhabit the space to survey the immediate vicinity from above. Bleacher System (For Viewing a Gallery Space) consisted of four units of three-sided pyramids. Each unit was closed on two sides and open on the third, where stepped platforms allowed for climbing, sitting, and looking. Each of the four units could be placed in the corners of a gallery, so that viewers could look into the center of the space and, one would imagine, at other viewers also in the act of viewing. Alternatively, according to Oppenheim’s schematics, the units could be combined in two pairs or as a single four-part structure to accommodate variations on the directed view.585 Regardless, in Bleacher System and all of the viewing stations, the act of viewing was designated as the content of the sculpture. Even by the standards of mid-1960s minimal art, Oppenheim’s viewing stations encouraged an extraordinary level of physical participation. By 1967, when Oppenheim began to work on his viewing stations, Morris, Andre, and Smith had all exhibited sculptures that encouraged an ambulatory, embodied experience of object and space. However, none

584 Oppenheim and Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim, (1974), unpaginated. See also Dennis Oppenheim, “Bleacher System (For Viewing a Gallery Space” and “Viewing Station #1” in Proposals: 1967-1974 (Brussels and : Lebeer-Hossman, undated), unpaginated. 585 Oppenheim’s diagrams and drawings of Viewing Station # 1 and Bleacher System (For Viewing a Gallery Space), as well as other viewing stations, are included in Dennis Oppenheim, Proposals: 1967-1974 (Brussels and Hamburg: Lebeer-Hossman, undated), unpaginated.

247 had yet produced sculpture that was designed to be entered or trod upon.586 The object may have been becoming less self-important, as Morris argued, but there remained conventions of comportment that clearly delineated the object of sculpture from the body of the viewer. One was obliged to keep one’s distance from the sculpture, not to protect it but to perceive it. “A larger object,” Morris writes, “includes more of the space around itself that does a smaller one. It is necessary literally to keep one’s distance from large objects in order to take the whole of any of any one view into one’s field of vision. […] It is this necessary greater distance of the object in space from our bodies, in order that it be seen at all, that structures the non-personal or public mode.”587 Oppenheim challenged the privileged place of the object, even if only lingering in minimal art, as the source of value and meaning or even as the key to perception. The sculpture was not the object of perception for Oppenheim. It was the armature of perception. The viewing stations, he mused in a 1977 interview, “were in fact platforms that we stand up on and look so I was just toying with the notion of again not making but seeing and, in a sense, the act of pure viewing as being something almost solid.”588 The viewing stations were designed to be climbed, stood upon, and sat on. More importantly, they were designed to view from. While heightened perception was a goal that Oppenheim shared with Morris, Smith, and Andre, amongst others, Oppenheim refused to yoke that goal to an object with specific formal characteristics. While he carefully designed the viewing stations, producing quasi-architectural plans and diagrams for each variation, their appearance was subordinated to their function as platforms for perception. Oppenheim was not driven to produce sculpture that conformed to Gestalt principles of perception. In fact, he had little interest in producing objects to be seen. Committed to the phenomenological theory of intentionality, Oppenheim did not think of perception as essentially grounded in the perceived object but in the intention of the subject towards the object. While the simple geometries of the viewing stations had a clear relationship to the formal orthodoxy of minimal art, Oppenheim was more concerned with the act of viewing, and promoting an

586 Andre’s floorworks, which he conceived to be walked on, were first shown at Dwan Gallery in an exhibition that opened in December 1967. Tony Smith’s Stinger, a large, square sculpture open on one side, which allowed viewers to enter, was first exhibited in the “Art of the Real” show which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in July 1968. 587 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 21. 588 Oppenheim, “Interview with Alain Parent,” (1978), 17.

248 awareness of that act in the mind of the viewer, than he was with the specific object. “It’s as though some of the pressure of being objects was removed from them,” Oppenheim wrote in the margins of a 1971 interview transcript with Willoughby Sharp.589 Oppenheim, likewise, did not recognize the spatial and contextual limitations of sculpture that Morris and others warned of, particularly with the movement of sculpture out of the gallery.590 Rather than worrying over the precise coordinates of scale between sculpture, room, and human body, or whether one could adequately perceive simple geometric sculptures against an architectural background, Oppenheim sought a form of sculpture conducive to heightened perception that would work anywhere. In the same marginal note clarifying his 1971 interview with Sharp, Oppenheim described his viewing stations as “…vehicles from which we would look.”591 In a 1977 interview he again described the works as “…vehicular devices for viewing.” As a vehicle for perception, Oppenheim emphasized the sculpture’s potential to facilitate viewing and to make that sensory experience manifest as content. The designation of sculpture as vehicle also pointed to the potential mobility of the sculpture itself, as well as its automotive origins. The viewing stations could be installed, according to Oppenheim, in a gallery, a landscape, or on the side of a road. And they could be moved. Oppenheim built his first viewing station in the winter of 1967 and placed it on multiple fields and exterior locations in Long Island.592 Another key model for Oppenheim’s viewing stations, in addition to the bleachers and racetrack platforms that he found as he drove around Long Island and New Jersey, was the type of viewing platform used by

589 Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Willoughby Sharp, April 17, 1971, edited transcript, Avalanche Magazine Archives, II.557, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Sharp published an interview with Oppenheim in Studio International in November 1971. The interview transcript cited above would seem to be related to the Studio International version, however, the published interview does not include any discussion of Oppenheim’s work from 1967 and 1968. Willoughby Sharp, “An interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971): 186-193. 590 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” (1966) 21; Hilton Kramer, “The Studio Vs. the Street,” The New York Times October 15, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/10/15/105269339.html?pageNum ber=139; Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 20, No. 4 (Winter 1967-68): 650, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3849578. 591 Oppenheim, interview with Willoughby Sharp, April 17, 1971, edited transcript, Avalanche, II.557, MoMA Archives, New York. 592 Oppenheim and Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim (1974), unpaginated.

249 engineers and foremen to supervise the construction of roads. In his 1967 sketchbook list, published in artscanada in 1970, Oppenheim specifically referenced “viewing stands used by ‘East Coast Light and Paving Company.’”593 The reference conceptually grounded his viewing stations in an experience of the road. In February 1972, Oppenheim submitted a proposal for a viewing station to Doris Freedman’s “ Program.” The proposal gives some indication of the place and social function that Oppenheim sought for sculpture in the city. Freedman had left the Lindsay administration in August of 1970 and subsequently founded the Public Arts Council, as an offshoot of the Municipal Arts Society. For the “Environmental Sculpture Program,” Freedman solicited proposals for an urban sculpture competition in coordination with the neighborhood of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill in Upper Manhattan. The program was billed as a means of uniting community self-determination with the potential of sculpture to foment social and environmental progress. An advisory committee would select twelve sculptors to present scale models to residents and the residents would then vote on the works to be built. It was an opportunity, as suggested in a press release, for the community to “elect their environment.”594 According to the organizers, the selected sculpture would enrich the neighborhood, promote common identity and self-awareness amongst the community, and stimulate social interaction.595 Freedman’s

593 Dennis Oppenheim, “Catalyst 1967-1970,” artscanada 27, no. 4 (August 1970). Oppenheim discussed the viewing stands used by East Coast Light and Paving Company relative to his own Viewing Stations in the unpublished interview with Donald Wall cited above. It is unclear, in both sources, if Oppenheim actually used East Coast Light and Paving Company viewing stands or was simply referencing them as a model. Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Donald Wall, January 7, 1984, Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archive. 594 Public Arts Council of The Municipal Art Society, “Sculpture in the City” Press Release, April 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 12, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 595 These goals are articulated in numerous press releases, letters, and memoranda related to the “Environmental Sculpture Program.” They are particularly well described in letters from the organizers to community residents and to participating artists. See, for example: Peter Schira, Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill Neighborhood Action Program Arts Committee, “Environmental Sculpture Program” Memorandum, December 13, 1971 Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 11, Folder 10, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries; Doris Freedman and Ellie Amel, Memorandum to sculptors interested in the Environmental Sculpture Project, January 18, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 11, Folder 10, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries; Public Arts Council, press

250 call for proposals, which offered artists the chance to make “permanent and substantial environmental changes in neighborhoods throughout the city,” resonated with Oppenheim’s enduring interest to use his sculpture to infiltrate and redirect urban space.596

Figure 5.3. Dennis Oppenheim, Dead Furrow, sepia line print, 1967. Text: Structure for Viewing Land. Scale 1”=1’ Pre-cast concrete pipe. 12’ x 12.’ Scale: 1” = 1’. Pre-cast concrete. To be located on flat land with at least 1 mile clear land on all sides. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

release, “Twelve Artists Selected to Develop Environmental Sculpture Projects,” undated, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 12, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries; and Jordon L. Linfield, The Municipal Arts Society, letter to Community Resident, March 28, 1972 Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 12, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 596 Doris Freedman and Ellie Amel, Memorandum to sculptors interested in the Environmental Sculpture Project, January 18, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 11, Folder 10, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

251 Oppenheim submitted a proposal for Dead Furrow, his largest viewing station, to Freedman (Figure 5.3). The sculpture would feature a raised platform surrounded on all sides by several rows of precast concrete pipes and a one mile square piece of land. The central platform was conceived as a massive trapezoidal prism, built in concrete. It would measure thirty-three feet square at its base with steep, six-foot walls, and three steps rising to the platform. Dead Furrow was first designed in 1967 as a structure for viewing an open landscape. The title of the work refers to a technique of plowing, in which a wide and deep furrow is plowed at the edge of a large field to aide in drainage. Oppenheim’s orderly rows of concrete pipes mimic, one could say, the agricultural systematization of the land. Oppenheim had stipulated a location with at least one mile or five acres of open, flat land on all sides but he indicated that he would make an exception for Freedman’s project.597 In his initial letter and proposal, Oppenheim sought to install Dead Furrow at the center of Dyckman Street and 10th Avenue, a major intersection at the start of the Harlem River Drive in the Inwood neighborhood. Ultimately, however, a site was selected in Riverside Park, between the Henry Hudson Parkway and the Hudson River, near the George Washington Bridge.598 What seemed crucial to Oppenheim, given both locations, was that Dead Furrow be installed with a view of the road. Freedman received over seventy submissions from a wide variety of sculptors. The advisory selection committee chose twelve finalists, including Oppenheim’s Dead Furrow, to

597 These spatial stipulations are noted in the original design and in Oppenheim’s letter to Freedman. See, respectively: Oppenheim, “Dead Furrow,” in Proposals: 1967-1974, unpaginated; and Dennis Oppenheim, letter to Doris Freedman, February 15, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 9, Folder 7, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 598 The respective locations are described in Oppenheim’s original proposal and his subsequent artist’s statement. In his initial letter and proposal to Freedman, Oppenheim stipulated the center of Dyck Street and 10th Avenue as the location for Dead Furrow. As there is no Dyck Street in Manhattan, I have proceeded under the assumption that Oppenheim intended the installation at Dyckman Street, which intersects prominently with 10th Avenue in Inwood, a Manhattan neighborhood that neighbors Washington Heights and was part of the original scope of Freedman’s program. Dennis Oppenheim, “Statement by the Artist: Site: Riverside Park Near George Washington Bridge,” undated; and Dennis Oppenheim, letter to Doris Freedman, February 15, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 9, Folder 7, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

252 be presented to the community for a final vote.599 The finalists were asked to produce scale models of their sculptures and additional materials that could help neighborhood residents visualize the relation of sculpture to site. All of the models and visual materials were assembled into a “mobile unit” and loaded onto a bus, along with members of the Upper Manhattan Artists’ Cooperative and the Neighborhood Action Program Arts Committee. On April 15 and 16, 1972, the “mobile unit” toured Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill, stopping for forty-five minute presentations at twelve major intersections. The first day of the tour culminated in a block party at 164th Street between Edgecombe and Amsterdam Avenues. Ballots were cast on the street and at auxiliary locations, including the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a local bank, and several neighborhood libraries.600 The eight sculptures to receive the most community votes were to be constructed and permanently installed—the first five over the summer and the next three as soon as funds were secured. One thousand ballots were cast in the community and Dead Furrow came in eighth place.601 Oppenheim promptly came to an agreement with Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation to construct and install the massive cement sculpture.602

599 In addition to Oppenheim, the list of twelve finalists included Tom Doyle, Terry Fugate- Wilcox, Charles Ginnever, Peter Gourfain, Richard Hamer, Joseph Kurhajec, Inverna Lockpex, Clement Meadmore, Eduardo Ramirez, Richard Serra, and Todd Williams. The advisory selection committee included Kent Barwick and Alanna Heiss of the Municipal Art Society; Doris Freedman and Ellie Amel of the Public Arts Council; Diane Waldman, curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the critic Lawrence Alloway; Samuel Adams Green, a coordinator of “Sculpture in Environment;” Hope Irvine from the Washington Heights Artists Cooperative; Lloyd Goldfarb, Chairman of the Neighborhood Action Program (NAP); landscape architect and playground designer Richard Dattner, and sculptor Kenneth Snelson. Freedman and Amel, Memorandum to sculptors interested in the Environmental Sculpture Project, January 18, 1972; and Public Arts Council, press release, “Twelve Artists Selected to Develop Environmental Sculpture Projects,” undated. 600 Public Arts Council, “Sculpture in the City,” press release, undated; and Jordon L. Lindfield, Neighborhood Action Program, letter to “Community Resident,” March 28, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 12, Folder 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. A basic outline of the program was reported in: Barbara Rose, “Power to the People?,” New York Magazine, July 10, 1972, 60. 601 Doris Freedman and Ellie Amel, memorandum to Advisory Sculpture Committee, May 3, 1972. 602 Herbert Blank, The Arkraft Strauss Sign Corporation, letter to Ellie Amel, March 31, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 9, Folder 7, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

253 Because Freedman intended to install the sculptures permanently, the winning proposals were subject to the approval of the New York City Art Commission. The Art Commission, which was composed of political appointees, architects, artists, and prominent patrons of the arts, oversees and must approve all permanent works of art and architecture planned for city-owned property. It rejected four of the eight sculptures and the entire “Environmental Sculpture Program” subsequently stalled.603 All parties saw the decision, not only as a rejection of individual sculptures, but also as a declaration of control over public space and community. The dispute centered on the assumption of authority to define a community and decide what is in its best interest. Giorgio Cavaglieri, President of the Fine Arts Federation of New York, wrote to Freedman to defend the decision of the city’s Art Commission and assert its authority over the idea of community. “The question arises,” Cavaglieri suggested, “of the definition of the word ‘Community’ or ‘Public,’ and how such entities are actually composed: either in a small geographical sense…or in a larger urban or regional sense. If we confirm our belief in representative government there is no doubt in my mind that the Art Commission is in a way the ‘Community’ because its members are appointed from a list drawn by the ‘Delegates’ representing 20 community groups with a total membership of 10,000 or 12,000 people. […] In my opinion they represent the

603 Rose saw the rejection as evidence of both the city’s bureaucratic intransigence and the Art Commission’s elitist conservatism. See: Rose, “Power to the People?,” 60. However, the commission in 1972 was more diverse than the “grab-bag of academic artists, upper-echelon art educators and…political appointees” that Rose described in her column. Much of the Commission, to be sure, was made up of New York’s patrician cultural elite but it also included diverse and progressive artists and architects. Giorgio Cavaglieri was an architect and a prominent proponent of historic preservation, widely knwn for his restoration of the Jefferson Market Courthouse. Philanthropists Brooke Astor and Alice Kaplan were joined by Francis Day Rogers and Muriel Silbersetin-Storfer, both members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees, and the art historian Russell Lynes. The artists on the commission were Theodore Roszak, an expressionist sculptor most prominent in the immediate postwar period; theatre designer Donald Oenslager; and the painter and Harlem resident Charles Alston, a distinguished muralist and teacher most celebrated for his work during Harlem Renaissance. The architect members of the commission were notably progressive landscape architect and playground designer M. Paul Friedberg and advocate of pedestrianism Simon Breines. The mayor’s office was represented by Lindsay and Alexander Cooper, an architect and Director of the Urban Design Group in Lindsay’s Department of City Planning. Only six members were present when the Art Commission voted on Freedman’s “Environmental Sculpture Program.” Lindsay and the representatives from the mayor’s office supported the project. The details of the vote were reported in: Roberta B. Gratz, “Community Loses to Art Council,” New York Post, June 14, 1972.

254 Community and its broad interest more effectively than many of the self appointed or even politically elected militant local individuals…”604 Without denying the Art Commission’s status as a community, Freedman countered Cavaglieri’s argument by pointing to the three other “communities” that evaluated the “Environmental Sculpture Program”—the Public Art Council’s expert advisory committee, the Visual Arts Committee of the Mayor’s Cultural Council, and the over one thousand neighborhood residents that voted on the proposals. To the extent that this debate was covered in the local media, critics and journalists tended to side with Freedman over Cavaglieri, championing grassroots community control and direct democracy over the hierarchical and remote power of the Art Commission. Barbara Rose, who described the dispute in her New York Magazine column, suggested that it was “the first instance of a major confrontation between elitist and popular values in terms of public art.”605 Rose argued that the Commission was an essentially conservative, unaccountable, and out-of-touch bureaucracy while Freedman was, “…out to democratize art and make it a more vital direct experience of residents of a particular neighborhood.”606 Likewise, a columnist in the New York Post described the stakes in terms of property rights and community identity. The “Environmental Sculpture Program” was characterized as “…the first by any community to esthetically enhance its own environment with art.”607 Lindsay and his administration also supported Freedman and continued to work with the Public Arts Council in an effort to find a way to resurrect the project, even as Lindsay’s own appointees to the Art Commission were responsible for derailing it.608 However, their joint efforts failed and one could see this as a last gasp of the Lindsay’s use of art in the city to promote his progressive, community-oriented agenda. Oppenheim conceived and proposed Dead Furrow as a sculpture from which to view the land around it. He sought to position it in sight of New York’s massive infrastructures of

604 Giorgio Cavaglieri, letter to Doris Freedman, June 19, 1972, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 21, Folder 6, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 605 Rose, “Power to the People?,” (1972), 60. 606 Ibid., 60. 607 Gratz, “Community Loses to Art Council,” New York Post, June 14, 1972. 608 Lindsay’s support is described in: Gratz, “Community Loses to Art Council,” 1972. See also Public Arts Council, “Art Commission Vetoes Sculpture Chosen By Community,” press release, undated, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 21, Folder 6, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

255 mobility—first at the intersection of Dyckman Street and 10th Avenue, at the start of the Harlem River Drive, and then in Riverside Park, abutting the Henry Hudson Parkway with a view of the George Washington Bridge. The phenomenological function that Oppenheim first associated with the viewing stations in 1967 was explicitly keyed to the city in his 1972 proposal to Freedman. The central platform acts, Oppenheim wrote in his proposal, “as a point from which to view, to scan the site—bridge, bay, park, etc. […] Therefore, I submit a work that is not about itself, but about bombarding pre-existing visual forms with perceptual sense data.”609 In his Site Markers, Oppenheim made clear that the idea of bombarding urban fragments with sense data constituted an aggressive, even hostile, claim of ownership. With this in mind, the title of Dead Furrow, would seem to imply a violent marking of the land as much as a benign agricultural technique. “…I focused on exterior objects…and considered them to be in my possession…”610 In his viewing stations, including Dead Furrow, Oppenheim sought to make this proprietary claim available to the public. The act of perception as a form of ownership would have resonated with the politics of grassroots community control and direct democratic authority over the neighborhood’s public spaces. The expression of these politics, however, was restricted to a model of Dead Furrow on two- day bus tour of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill. The entrenched bureaucracies that maintained control of city property foreclosed any hold on space that Oppenheim associated with the act of perception. While it was never constructed, Dead Furrow provoked a view, not of the physical and spatial aspects of the city that Oppenheim had in his sights, but of New York’s elite power centers and bureaucratic infrastructures of control.

Urban Earth Works In the summer and fall of 1967, while Oppenheim was still working on the site markers and building the earliest versions of viewing stations, he eagerly sought a meeting with Robert Smithson. Oppenheim was motivated by Smithson’s publication of “Towards

609 Underlining in the original. Dennis Oppenheim, “Statement by the Artist: Site: Riverside Park Near George Washington Bridge,” undated, and “Dead Furrow,” undated, Doris Freedman Papers, Public Art Fund Archive, MSS270 Box 9, Folder 7, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 610 See above. Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, (1997), 29.

256 the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” in the Summer 1967 issue of Artforum.611 In this essay, Oppenheim recognized a shared sensibility towards the potential of the real world as both a site and source of sculpture. Smithson described, for example, the aesthetic merit of “pavements, holes, trenches, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads, terraces, etc.” and mused about “art forms that would use the actual land as a medium.”612 These were the same surfaces that Oppenheim sought to claim as sculpture. He wrote a letter to Smithson describing his methods of working in the world and enclosed a mock-up of a site marker rolled in a plastic cylinder.613 The meeting took place that same winter and it confirmed Oppenheim’s commitment to real world sculpture. “When I finally made contact with Smithson and drove into the city, the whole atmosphere was quite intense,” Oppenheim recalled. “The overwhelming idea we shared was that art really operated outside, in the real world.”614 Over the next two years, Oppenheim developed his approach to an operative sculpture of the real world that was increasingly inseparable from the body that experienced it and the space it inhabited. Smithson became a crucial interlocutor and advocate. He included Oppenheim in the foundational “Earth Works” exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in October 1968, which Smithson organized with Robert Morris. And Oppenheim and Smithson debated the conceptual principles of real world sculpture at Cornell’s “Earth Art” symposium in February 1969. Yet Oppenheim’s earthworks differed from Smithson’s in important ways. Oppenheim, for example, had little interest in positioning sculpture as a means of dialectic exchange between an exterior site and the gallery. Whereas Smithson pursued a sculptural method of transferring materials, information, and bodies between site and nonsite, Oppenheim largely abandoned the gallery and sought to unambiguously locate his work outside. Oppenheim was less interested in transplanting fragments of the real world to the gallery and more invested in relocating sculptural experience to the street. Nor did Oppenheim subscribe to the idea that earthworks or real world sculpture had to be located in the desert, the relative wilderness of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, or any of the remote

611 Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, (1997), 27. 612 Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 38. 613 Dennis Oppenheim, to Robert Smithson, undated (circa 1967), Box 2, Folder 19, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 614 Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 24-25.

257 places that Smithson identified in his writings.615 According to Oppenheim, earthworks could just as easily be made in the city and, in so doing, the artist could further avoid the financial entanglements of the gallery system and open the work out to a wider audience. “I didn’t have to go to the desert to address the ‘sublime,’” Oppenheim stated bluntly. “I think that my Land Art was political in the sense that I didn’t want this activity to require a great deal of money. I wanted it to be available to an artist who lived in an urban environment and who had minimal means for equipment and minimal means of access.”616 Accessibility was a key aspect of Oppenheim’s operative, real world sculpture. If sculpture could alter or disrupt the way people viewed their environments, it had to be placed in environments that people used in everyday life. The desert and the gallery were equally remote according to this logic. While Oppenheim did occasionally work in remote areas, his earliest earthworks were built in the city and the urban fringe. However, an idea of remoteness has dominated both the imaginary and historiography of earthworks, including Oppenheim’s. Works such as Annual Rings and Boundary of 1968, for which Oppenheim cut lines into the icy St. John River at the border of the United States and Canada, play a primary role in the understanding of his work. Yet Oppenheim’s first large-scale outdoor work, Landslide, was located just off of exit 52 of the Long Island Expressway (Figure 5.4). Oppenheim constructed Landslide in June 1968 in an undeveloped area bounded by an otherwise densely populated section of central Long Island. The work was installed in an abandoned gravel pit surrounded by numerous other gravel and sand pits and the massive cloverleaf interchange connecting the expressway with the Sagtikos Parkway. On the steeply sloping wall of the pit, Oppenheim arranged several dozen wood boards that were painted silver. Each unit contained two boards, assembled at right angle. The boards resembled steps descending the sloped wall and, on the flat basin of the pit, the units seemed to protrude from the ground to form small peaks. The units were arranged in a triangular formation one thousand feet in length. A single board formed the apex of the work and panels were placed in descending, parallel rows that progressively increased in breadth as well as in the distance between individual panels and rows. From a vantage point at the top of the hill, the work seemed to spread, occupying an ever-expanding territory as it progressed down the hill and into the basin of the gravel pit. Oppenheim suggested that the work could conceivably continue to

615 Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” (1967), 38. 616 Bassas, “Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” (1994), 98.

258 expand. “Economics were the only deterrent, creating a breakdown at the 1000’ mark,” he wrote in a letter to Willoughby Sharp, “…in spirit it carries the extent of the globe—much the same way as do our lines of latitude.”617 This conceptual expansion of the sculptural territory is implied in numerous maps on which Oppenheim marked the location of Landslide but circled an area often far in excess of the land on which the panels were placed.618

Figure 5.4. Dennis Oppenheim, Landslide, 1968, Long Island, New York. Location: Long Island Expressway, Exit 52. Materials: Right angled boards/earth. Dimensions: 1000’ long. Photo documentation: Black and white and color photos, map, text. 60” X 40.” Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

617 Dennis Oppenheim, letter to Willoughby Sharp, December 19, 1968, Avalanche, II.557, MoMA Archives, New York. 618 See, especially the map and photomontage reproduced in: Oppenheim and Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim, unpaginated.

259 With Landslide, Oppenheim claimed a sprawling environment as sculpture. Only now his claim rested on a physical and conceptual occupation of the site, rather than a perceptual act or any apparent authorization or permitting. The silver panels, placed on a raw surface of dirt and stone, constituted a material, spatial, and conceptual inversion of the most immediate realities of the gravel pit. Landslide imposed a rigid geometric order on an otherwise formless area marked by erosion and random outgrowths of weeds. And a space that had little use for the surrounding community, at least at the time of installation, was recovered as a site of aesthetic experience. Landslide, Oppenheim suggested, “activates the existing acreage with negatively charged parallel bands…”619 At the same time, Landslide represents something of an extension of the orderly logic of suburban subdivisions that surrounded the gravel pit, evident in the maps and aerial photographs on which Oppenheim documented the work. If Landslide were to extend beyond its one thousand foot limit, it would have extended onto the highway and into neatly arranged, repetitive housing developments. In that environment, it is not clear whether the panels would continue to function as “negatively charged” inversions or if they would more closely approximate minimal sculptures that conformed to the logic of the postwar American suburb. Like Landslide, the adjacent suburban developments seemed to have the potential in 1968 to spread indefinitely.620 Regardless, Oppenheim claimed, with Landslide, both a leftover industrial space and the suburban development as the space of sculpture, eroding the boundaries between the everyday and the aesthetic. Oppenheim located this boundary, not in the isolated wilderness that earthworks are most commonly associated with, but on the urban fringe. The distinction between Oppenheim’s real world sculpture and what was rapidly emerging as earthworks’ parameters of remoteness was on display in the Dwan Gallery exhibition. Much attention was focused on Smithson’s nonsites and the massive and far- flung gestures of Michael Heizer. Oppenheim, on the other hand, exhibited documents related to a work that he executed in a gritty industrial area on the margins of New Haven (Figure 5.5). The “Earth Works” show itself, despite affording an important measure of

619 Oppenheim, letter to Willoughby Sharp, December 19, 1968. A similar description, although without the characterization of the work’s negative charge, appears in: Oppenheim and Crouwel, Dennis Oppenheim (1974), unpaginated. 620 See, for example: Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).

260 exposure for Oppenheim, held little interest as a site of sculpture. In a retrospective interview, he dismissively suggested that, “…the exhibition seemed to be very gallery- oriented. It was not at all necessarily disruptive.”621 In the “Earth Works” show, Oppenheim exhibited photographs of a completed sculpture, as well as a model of a similar work that he planned to execute during the next summer. However, Oppenheim made clear that his sculptural disruption was located in a field on Spring Street in West Haven, Connecticut, not in the Dwan Gallery.622 Just off of Interstate 95, in a small wetland field surrounded by vacant lots and scrap metal dumps, Oppenheim cut four concentric rings out of the swamp grass with a sickle mower. He then filled the circular cuts with aluminum filings. The rhetorical violence of the site markers and Dead Furrow became, in West Haven, a physical act of aggression. No longer content with bombarding a site with sense data, Oppenheim now used a blade to cut into the land. As with Tony Smith, there is a constant interplay of hospitality and hostility. The viewer is invited to a heightened experience of the environment but the body is put at risk in a field now strewn with sharp scraps of metal. Likewise, a leftover, useless plot of land is made visible but this new visibility is a product of Oppenheim’s incision and deposit of industrial waste. The work, which covered a total area of one hundred fifty by two hundred feet, was completed in July of 1968. In descriptions and gallery lists in the “Earth Works” show, Oppenheim indicated that the sculpture was not present in the gallery. “Work is a flattened spiral in swamp grass covered with aluminum filings.” The photograph depicted, according to the gallery list, a “spiral work already executed in New Haven, Connecticut.”623 With these definitive descriptions placing the work in a field of swamp grass in Connecticut, the photograph in the gallery was just as definitively defined as a supplement to the work, not a

621 Oppenheim and Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, (1997), 32. 622 The Dwan Gallery exhibition records, the documentary photomontages with text panels in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and most scholarly accounts of the work identify the location as New Haven. However, the aerial photographs of the area on which Oppenheim marked the spot of the sculpture clearly place it just south of the West River in West Haven. 623 Dwan Gallery, “Earthworks Exhibition” price list, Box 3, folder 18, Dwan Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/dwan-gallery-los-angeles-california-and-new-york-new- york-records-6056.

261 surrogate. Oppenheim foreclosed the physical movement between gallery and site that Smithson implied in his nonsites, limiting the transfer instead to a conceptual movement of documents.

Figure 5.5. detail: Contour Lines Scribed in Swamp Grass, 1968 Color photo. Location: West Haven, CT. Text on photo documentation: New Haven, Connecticut. Contour lines from neighboring mountain enlarged and plotted on land area. Aluminum filings form concentric circles on swamp grass. Diameter: 150’. Complete project is submerged in water, 12:00 noon (high tide). Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

There was, however, a suggestion of movement between exterior sites in Oppenheim’s West Haven sculpture. The concentric rings referred to the contour lines of a

262 nondescript hill near Timmerman Creek, just south of Oppenheim, New York.624 A clever conceptual signature was, therefore, transferred to West Haven along with the cartographic information. However this register of meaning would have been unavailable to anyone driving or walking past the sculpture; neither was it available to gallery goers in New York City. From the vantage point of the road, Oppenheim’s transcribed contour lines would have more closely resembled strange circular paths paved with scrap metal. The point, for Oppenheim, was to disrupt the site by imposing material and information inverse to the physical and conceptual nature of the West Haven site. The description at the Dwan Gallery defined the work of the sculpture as follows: “alien contour lines oppose reality of existing landmass.”625 At the most basic level, Oppenheim transcribed the cartographic indication of a small hill in New York onto a flat field in Connecticut. The rings of aluminum filings, which called to mind the heaping masses of scrap metal in the surrounding salvage yards, would also have made the field of tall swamp grasses temporarily traversable. Oppenheim, at least, was as intrigued by this new, ambulatory experience of the field, as he was the conceptual transplant of cartographic information.626 In an interview with Willoughby Sharp published in 1971, Oppenheim described the embodied experience of the work in West Haven as a revelation. “Then the sense of physically spanning land, activating a surface by walking on it, began to interest me. When you compare a piece of sculpture, an object on a pedestal, to walking outdoors for ten minutes and still being on top of your work, you find an incredible difference in the degree of physicality and sensory immersion. The idea that the artist is literally being in the material, after spending decades manipulating

624 A magnified fragment of contour map is included in the photomontage owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/Dennis- Oppenheim-New-Haven-Project-1968. 625 Dennis Oppenheim, “Detail view of mountain contour lines,” July 1968 Box 3, folder 18, Dwan Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/dwan-gallery-los-angeles-california-and-new-york- new-york-records-6056. 626 The idea of the transplant from one spatial or conceptual territory to another is a major theme in Oppenheim’s work and his been assessed by numerous scholars. See, particularly: David Bourdon, “Far Out & Far In, Uptown & Down,” The Village Voice, January 20, 1975, 94; Jonathan Crary, “Dennis Oppenheim’s Delirious Operations,” Artforum 17, no. 3 (November 1978): 36-42; Alain Parent, Dennis Oppenheim (1978); and McEvilley, “The Rightness of Wrongness, (1992), 16-17.

263 it, appealed to me.”627 Or, as he put it in the 1969 “Earth Art” symposium, the experience of sculpture that he first realized in West Haven was an experience of “walking through.”628 The experience of sculpture, for Oppenheim, could no longer be confined to looking at objects in the gallery but of being in and moving through a space claimed or marked as sculpture. In his site markers and viewing stations Oppenheim claimed urban objects as sculpture through an isolated act of intentional perception. In West Haven, Oppenheim claimed an urban space as sculpture by moving through the environment with the same degree of intentional perception. As with Landslide, this claim was grounded in an individual act of perception and, seemingly, not in any official municipal authorization. Sculpture was becoming increasingly inseparable from the environment and the body that moved through it. The idea that moving through and perceiving an environment constituted a sculptural experience was shared by a group of highway planners and theorists working at Yale, just a short drive away from Oppenheim’s West Haven work. While Oppenheim was creating erratic concentric circles of aluminum filings in a field just off of Interstate 95, Christopher Tunnard was assembling an interdisciplinary team to study driver perception and highway experience. Tunnard’s Highway as Environment project sought new methods to organize and control drivers’ perception, incorporate aesthetics into design, and integrate the highway with the surrounding landscape and city. Sculpture was positioned as both an analogue to highway construction and as a potential tool to be placed alongside the road to advance these goals. Tunnard, or someone from his team, visited the “Earth Works” exhibition at the Dwan Gallery and recruited Oppenheim to join the Highway as Environment project. The collaboration proved productive for both parties. Oppenheim expanded Tunnard’s conception of sculpture and introduced him to the new scales, construction techniques, and durational experiences of earthworks. And Tunnard’s project gave Oppenheim the opportunity to devise sculptures that would be specific to and integrated

627 Sharp, “An interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” (1971): 186. 628 Dennis Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, Cornell University, 1969, Box 2, Folder 48, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Excerpts of the transcript are published in: Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, , Gunther Uecker, , Richard Long, and Thomas Leavitt, “Earth,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 177.

264 within a highway design. Just a few months after working with Tunnard, Oppenheim stated his interest in an art “closely knit with a societal framework.”629 Against the idea of artist as an authorial genius working in isolation on singular sculptures, Oppenheim sought a place for the artist as part of a group, working in near anonymity on sculptures built into social systems. “I see the aspect of a large art,” Oppenheim suggested, “which would involve the artist in organizations, which would allow him to be part of the process, to be part of a vaster interlacing of complexes…”630 For Oppenheim, Tunnard’s project represented a way into a societal framework at the moment of its conception. Tunnard was the founder of Yale’s Department of City Planning and an important contributor to postwar debates on urbanization, historic preservation, and highway design. He was also an advocate for the role of the artist, particularly the sculptor, in the planning of the city and its infrastructures. Tunnard made this case in influential books such as The City of Man, first published in 1953, and Man-Made America of 1963, co-authored with Boris Pushkarev, which won a National Book Award. In proposing a role for the artist in urban planning, Tunnard’s goal was not to increase the quantity of public art in the city but to fundamentally alter the way that cities are conceived. The American city and its infrastructures, Tunnard suggested, were ugly, inhuman, and incoherent. These were not planned environments but sprawling developments that emerged through, “…an entropic form of growth, the characteristics of which are chaos and sameness.” 631 The artist could offer, not only works of art to decorate public spaces, but also a unique way of perceiving, moving through, and being in the city.632 “The painter and sculptor have seen the city as no one else can,” Tunnard insisted.633 The aesthetic sensibility of the artist could be built into the process of urban planning, Tunnard argued, thereby humanizing the city and giving it

629 Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium; and Oppenheim, et al., “Earth,” 182. 630 Ibid., 184. 631 Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1963), 3. 632 Christopher Tunnard, The City of Man (1953), second edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 27, 291, 298-299, 324, 349; and Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 3-4, 8-9. 633 Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 282.

265 meaning and intelligible form.634 “It is now quite obvious,” he wrote, “that the hand of the artist has become necessary in order to remove from the city areas of ugliness as well as misery and to replace them with the useful and the beautiful or the city will not function in the way that we now desire.”635 Fifteen years before Oppenheim mused about an organizational role for the artist, working as part of a team within a societal framework, Tunnard argued for a collaborative art of urban space in which the artist worked alongside the architect, planner, engineer, and economist. The artist possessed a unique sensibility, according to Tunnard, but the work of art should not be confined to a unique, exclusive, or elite space. Influenced by the aesthetic theory of John Dewey, Tunnard argued that the space of aesthetic experience was the space of everyday life.636 “Public buildings, streets, parks and urban development projects all need the inspired hand of the artist,” Tunnard argued in 1953.637 He called for new patronage to “put the artist back into the streets” and restore the role of “the artist an inspired creator of cities.”638A decade later Tunnard wrote, “Any action that humanizes the landscape or puts it to the highest productive use may contain esthetic values…”639 His definition of aesthetics was essentially grounded in the social. “The physical and economic relations of our large- scale man-made environment, in spite of their inherent order, are incapable of producing beauty by themselves. Here, beauty can only emerge from a deliberate effort to express the encounter between society and environment in significant form.”640 While referencing the

634 Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 27, 291, 298-299, 324, 349; and Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 3-4, 8-9. 635 Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 349. 636 Tunnard began his academic career teaching at Harvard in 1939, a few years after Dewey gave the lectures there that would become Art and Experience. Dewey’s influence is unmistakable in Tunnard’s conception of the combinatory art of urban design and in his idea of aesthetic experience as a heightening or clarification of ordinary experience. While Tunnard does not reference Dewey directly in Man-Made America, he does so repeatedly in The City of Man. In that earlier text, Dewey is positioned as a theoretical foundation for the fusion of architecture with sculpture and painting. See: Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 253, 262, and 291. It is also worth noting that, in the 1950s, Dewey’s aesthetic theory was seen as essentially similar to Merleau-Ponty’s. On the latter, see: Van Meter Ames, “John Dewey as Aesthetician,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12, no. 2 (December 1953): 161. 637 Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 299. 638 Ibid., 291, 298. 639 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 8. 640 Ibid., 9.

266 terminology of Clive Bell, Tunnard rejected Bell’s formalist idea that aesthetics constituted a special domain of emotion isolated from the ordinary or the everyday. Instead, channeling Dewey, Tunnard argued that the artist, when integrated into the urban planning team, could produce an urban form that both expressed the encounter between society and environment and heightened the experience of the everyday.641 There is no gap between art and life in Tunnard’s view of the city. The place with greatest need for significant urban form, according to Tunnard, was the highway. While he presented a largely positive and optimistic account of the highway, almost everything that Tunnard wrote on the subject could be considered an implicit rejection of the methods of Robert Moses.642 In Man-Made America, Tunnard and Pushkarev argued for a careful integration of the highway with the social and environmental landscapes through which it was built. Their argument stood in stark contrast with Moses’s brutal construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which was being completed at the same time that Tunnard and Pushkarev were writing. Tunnard’s and Pushkarev believed that humanizing the city was the imperative of the urban planner. Regarding highway construction specifically, they stated, “The question is essentially that of integration with the social environment.”643 Moses, on the other hand, suggested, “…when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”644 Tunnard and Pushkarev suggested that the highway, when planned as an aesthetic entity, had the potential to become a “cultural asset” and “an all-around community asset.”645 As such, the highway would also become “a work of art, not merely of utility.”646 The highway planner could achieve this aesthetic elevation of the everyday environment, according to Tunnard and Pushkarev, by approximating sculpture.

641 On Dewey’s similar use of Bell’s terminology but rejection of its formalist and isolationist connotations, see: Paul Guyer, “Dewey,” in A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 316-322. 642 Tunnard wrote several articles explicitly attacking Moses in the 1940s. They are described in: David Jacques and Jan Woudstra, Landscape Modernism Renounced: The Career of Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 59. 643 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 220. 644 Robert Moses, quoted in Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 849. 645 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 159. 646 Ibid., 159.

267 The postwar American highway, Tunnard and Pushkarev argued, had been thoughtlessly and brutally constructed. The problem, as Pushkarev put it in his chapter on “The Paved Ribbon,” stemmed from “…a definite lack of concern with the esthetic theory of highways.”647 This lack of aesthetic concern resulted, not simply in ugly and mundane roads, but in urgent problems of perception that constituted an obstacle to safe driving. Because the road was not carefully integrated with the landscape and city that it traveled through, the driver lacked the necessary clues to adequately perceive space. Highway planners could address this problem by approaching the design and construction of the road as if it were a sculpture. “The moving eye perceives the form of the highway not as an engineering problem but as an esthetic entity,” Pushkarev wrote, “a piece of sculpture or architecture, built of earth, asphalt, concrete, shrubs, and trees. The highway is seen before it can be traveled upon—being seen is an integral part of its purpose.”648 The reference to architecture was promptly dropped and Pushkarev settled on sculpture as both an analogic model of highway construction and a potential tool to be placed alongside the road to heighten driver perception and organize the experience of the road. The highway sits in “the total sculpture of the landscape,” Pushkarev wrote, and “the paved ribbon assumes qualities of an abstract composition in space…”649 He suggested further that, “certain forms of sculpture, built of steel rods or plastic strips, exhibit a visual quality reminiscent of the paved

647 Ibid., 169. Pushkarev was primarily responsible for the research and writing on the highway presented in Man-Made America, although the core arguments of the book are essentially collaborative. The chapter “The Paved Ribbon: The Esthetic of Freeway Design” was based on Pushkarev’s study of European highway construction and design conducted in the late 1950s. Pushkarev maintained close contact with Tunnard as he studied highways in German, , and elsewhere. The collaborative research, including Pushkarev’s travel, was funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant. Pushkarev’s travel and research is described in several letters to Tunnard held in: Christopher Tunnard Papers (MS 1070), Box 16, Folder 248, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Pushkarev is identified in several letters in the late 1950s as a Design Coordinator working in the Graduate Program in City Planning at Yale. The funding of the book and Pushkarev’s primary authorship of “The Paved Ribbon” chapter are noted in: Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, x-xi. Much of Pushkarev’s research, and many of the quotes cited herein, were first published in: Boris Pushkarev, “The Esthetics of Freeway Design,” Landscape 10, no. 2 (Winter 1960-1961): 7- 15. 648 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 170; Pushkarev, “The Esthetics of Freeway Design,” (1960-1961), 8. 649 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 176-177.

268 ribbon. Such forms are significant owing to the plastic harmony of their flowing lines. The same plastic harmony applies to the geometry of the freeway.”650 In thinking about the highway through sculpture, Pushkarev envisioned a heightened, aesthetic experience of the road. The driver of the highway-as-sculpture would have a greater awareness of his or her body moving through time and space.651 At the heart of Pushkarev’s argument was the same phenomenological theory of intentional perception that Oppenheim embraced in his site markers and viewing stations. The American highway, as presently constructed, organized driving as a passive experience. The next generation of highway planners, Pushkarev insisted, must conceive of a road environment that encouraged active perception. The highway, he argued, “is not only passively seen, but actively traversed by the driver, who experiences visual as well as kinesthetic sensations of tilting, turning, dropping and climbing.”652 Sculpture, likewise, was seen to organize an experience of intentional perception that resulted in heightened awareness of body and environment. According to Pushkarev, when a sculptural mode of thought is built into highway design and the road is conceived as an object of aesthetics, driving would become safer and more enjoyable. When Tunnard and Pushkarev were writing Man-Made America in the early 1960s, their idea of highway sculpture prefigured sculptors’ aesthetic interest in the highway and its infrastructures. Tony Smith may have driven on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the late 1950s but his experience only cohered as a recognizable aesthetic when it was published in Artforum in December 1966.653 By 1960, however, Tunnard and Pushkarev envisioned highway driving as an aesthetic experience and anticipated a scenario in which a sculptor would be involved in all aspects of highway design and construction.654 The artist would be part of the team. But they could only point to existing sculptures by Max Bill and Henry Moore as potential supplements to be added to the side of an already completed road.655 In

650 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 177. 651 Ibid., 171, 174-175,177, 265. 652 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 177; Pushkarev, “The Esthetics of Freeway Design,” (1960-1961), 9. 653 Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. “Talking to Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, No. 4 (December 1966): 19. 654 Pushkarev, “The Esthetics of Freeway Design,” (1960-1961), 15; Tunnard, The City of Man, (1970/1953), 349. 655 Photographs of sculptures by Max Bill and Henry Moore are reproduced in Man-made America. And a mock-up of Bill’s Tripartite Unity is incorporated into an imagined highway

269 other words, the idea of highway sculpture and infrastructural aesthetics emerged in the discourse of urban planning before it emerged in the discourse of sculpture. The authors could not yet identify sculptors whose work would suggest a productive collaboration in the process of highway design and construction. Yet, their embrace of phenomenological theories of perception and embodied awareness would be echoed throughout the mid-1960s in the writings and interviews of Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and others. Moreover, Tunnard’s and Pushkarev’s recognition of the common perceptual and aesthetic function of giant sculptures and industrial forms found alongside the highway would be explicitly reiterated by Smith and embraced by many of his peers. Perhaps most significantly, the rhetoric of earthworks that emerged among artists in 1967 and 1968 was already part of highway discourse in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The idea of building sculpture on an epic scale in the American landscape, using the land itself as a medium, had been clearly articulated by Tunnard and Pushkarev, as well as by others in architecture and urban planning. Pushkarev described the process of building a highway as a “refined sculpturing of land masses” and imagined “giant sculptures” on the side of the road.656 He described New Jersey’s Interstate 78, just south of Manhattan, as a “new totality of urban sculpture, experienced from the freeway…”657 The process of highway construction was described by Tunnard, Pushkarev, and others, as an essentially sculptural engagement with the land—cutting stone, moving and shaping earth, manipulating and organizing the environment to create heightened perceptual experiences. Before Oppenheim thought of about an art of paving in 1967, Pushkarev and Tunnard thought of the highway as a sculpture “built of earth, asphalt, concrete…”658And already in 1957, a photo essay in Architectural Forum documented new highway construction, including sections of the New Jersey Turnpike, under the heading: “The bulldozer and its progeny are pushing earth sculpture into the art of architecture.”659 So, in the mid and late 1960s, when Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Dennis Oppenheim turned to the highway as site of sculpture and design to demonstrate the way that a freestanding sculpture, when placed in median strip of alongside a road, could be used to direct the eye of the driver. See: Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 177, 266-267. 656 Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 227, 265. 657 Ibid., 276. 658 Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Donald Wall, January 7, 1984, Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archive; Tunnard and Pushkarev, Man-Made America, (1963), 170. 659 “A New Approach to Landshaping,” Architectural Forum 106 (January 1957): 96-103

270 aesthetics, they turned into a readymade discourse of urban planning. Before these artists envisioned the bulldozer and dump truck as the tools of the new sculpture, these massive machines had already been invested with the potential to create infrastructural sculpture by moving and reshaping the earth. While Tunnard and Pushkarev utilized the discourse of sculpture to frame the highway as an aesthetic form, Smith, Smithson, Oppenheim, and other artists adopted the discourse of highway construction to ground their work in the real world and to theorize sculpture on a new civic scale. The discourses of sculpture and highway merged in 1968, following the “Earth Works” exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. In November of 1966, Tunnard and his highway research team at Yale received federal and state funding to study driver perception and highway aesthetics.660 The project, entitled Highway as Environment, developed key ideas about the impact of the road and its immediate surroundings on the experience of the driver that had been articulated by Tunnard and Pushkarev in the early 1960s. In Highway as Environment, Tunnard and his team pursued the idea of highway sculpture and sought to bridge the gap between the analogic idea of the highway as a sculptural form and the potential use of sculpture on the side of the road to direct the driver’s eye. Oppenheim was recruited from the “Earth Works” exhibition to work on Highway as Environment and produced at least seven scale models for highway sculptures. Oppenheim’s contribution to the Highway as Environment team expanded Tunnard’s view of sculpture beyond the modernist monuments of Max Bill and Henry Moore. The idea of sculpture that cohered in the study was no longer limited to a single object on the side of the road or an analogue to highway. Rather, as

660 Their research was funded by the U. S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and the Connecticut Department of Transportation, Bureau of Highways. It resulted in the book: Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment (New Haven, CT: Department of City Planning, Yale University, 1971). The Highway Research Team worked under the auspices of Yale University’s Department of City Planning and included Christopher Tunnard, Geoffrey Baker, William Hamilton, David Reed, and Herbert S. Levinson. It was published under the collective author heading of “Highway Research Team.” None of the authors’ names appear in the study. However, Tunnard is listed as the principal researcher on internal documents at Yale and the other researchers are listed in archival records. For authors names, see: “The Impact of Highways Upon Environmental Values,” proposal to Highway Research Board, National Academy of Sciences, April 18, 1968, Christopher Tunnard Papers (MS 1070), Box 24, Folder 36, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; and “Highway as Environment,” report to 48th Annual Meeting of Highway Research Board, January 15, 1969, Christopher Tunnard Papers (MS 1070), Box 7, Folder 113, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

271 conceived by Oppenheim and Tunnard, highway sculpture could encompass the total environment of the road and the durational experience of driving. Sculpture, in other words, could become the road itself. The basic argument of Highway as Environment is that a driver’s perception can be organized and controlled through the deliberate design and placement of stimuli. A well- designed road, the study asserted, would encourage the driver to actively perceive the highway environment and traverse it with intention. “Perception,” they wrote, “is an active process demanding a constant change of stimulation.”661 Referencing the Gestalt theory of James J. Gibson, Tunnard and his team developed an empirical method to assess drivers’ experience of and attention to objects, sites, and spaces within the visual field of existing roads. On the urban and rural highways surrounding New Haven, they studied drivers’ perception of natural landscape features such as trees, rock outcroppings, and bodies of water; man-made objects such as industrial facilities, overpasses, and signs; and the drivers’ view of the city. The research team assessed the ways in which natural and man-made stimuli prepare the driver for moments of transition, interchange, and decision.662 To the extent that these stimuli already existed in the highway environment, Tunnard and his team considered them to be fortunate accidents of location rather than deliberate aspects of design.663 A road conceived as a series of stimuli that aided the drivers’ embodied consciousness of movement through space and time would become safer and more enjoyable.664 Tunnard’s Highway as Environment project was part of a wider, national debate on infrastructural aesthetics instigated by the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. In this federal legislation, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, a concrete idea about the right to public space cohered. The act was primarily concerned with the removal of billboards and

661 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 95. 662 On methodology, see: Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 7-11. Tunnard’s method explicitly followed the empirical model developed by Kevin Lynch and his team in their foundational study of highway design and perception, The View From the Road. Lynch, along with Donald Appleyard and John Myer, studied drivers’ perception of the road and orientation within the general environment, with particularly attention to the ways that landmarks prepare the driver for a spatial consciousness of the destination. See: Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer, “The View from the Road,” Highway Research Record no. 2 (1963): 21-30; and Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964). 663 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 94. 664 Ibid., 6-8, 15-16, 94.

272 other forms of private advertising from interstate highways and other roads financed by the federal government. Junkyards, also, would be eliminated from the side of the road. And Lady Bird Johnson, the force behind the Highway Beautification Act, famously called for the planting of wildflowers and native vegetation to realign the highway with its natural habitat. At the heart of the legislation was the belief in the public ownership of a perceptual space funded, built, and maintained by the government. Private intrusions, in the form of proliferating billboard advertisements and dumps, were considered an unacceptable appropriation of a visual space paid for by the public.665 With the claim of ownership over the visual field of the road, a basic right to aesthetic experience was implied. The people paid for the highway, in other words, so they should be able to enjoy the space of the road and the natural beauty of landscape around it without the intrusive presence of private interests. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal and state governments funded research on highway aesthetics, including Tunnard’s Highway as Environment, and held public forums throughout the country to debate the future of the road.666 Tunnard believed that more could be done to cultivate highway aesthetics than the removal of billboards and dumps and the haphazard planting of trees and shrubs along the road. He continued to believe that the road could and should become a sculpture. At the end of 1968, when the Highway as Environment project was completed, Tunnard’s idea of sculpture had been substantially expanded by his work with Oppenheim and his exposure to earthworks. In place of the abstract, modernist objects that he envisioned on the side of the road in Man-Made America, Tunnard and his team now saw sculptors working on the total highway environment. The road and the sculpture are inseparable in Highway as Environment,

665 Highway Beautification Act: Public Law 89-285: An Act to Provide for Scenic Development and Road Beautification of the Federal Highway Systems, 89th Congress, October 22, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965). 666 Tunnard and Geoffrey Baker, a local town planner and member of Tunnard’s highway research team, testified at the hearings before the Commission on Highway Beautification, held in Meriden, Connecticut on April 17, 1972. The Chairman of the Commission, Rep. James C. Wright, Jr. of Texas, requested a copy of Highway as Environment and included the study in the published record of the Public Hearings of the Highway Commission. United States Commission on Highway Beautification, Highway Beautification: Hearings before the Commission on Highway Beautification, Pursuant to Authority of Sec 123 Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970 Public Law 91-605, (84 Stat. 1713: 91st Congress, December 31, 1970, Volume 2, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), 103-114, 262-303, https://books.google.com/books?id=7jBSAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs _ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

273 emerging from the same process of conceptualization and construction. “Giant earth sculptures can be formed by the same machines that are carving out the highway itself,” the researchers suggested. “Controlled blasting of rock may bring to light new forms and colors.”667 The sculpture was not a supplement, according to Tunnard. It was part of the road itself. “The actual process of construction may be directed by a sensitive artist to reveal a new and yet inherent beauty. […] The precision and power of modern heavy construction equipment makes such artistry feasible with little if any additional cost.” 668 Lady Bird Johnson’s ideal road framed with wildflowers would be supplanted on Tunnard’s highway with a more muscular intervention. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, highway builders could imagine the use of bulldozers and heavy machinery as the tools for a sculptural reshaping of the land. By the end of 1968, that imaginary could include an actual sculptor operating the construction equipment and directing the project. “Coincidentally,” the research team wrote after a visit to the “Earth Works” show at Dwan, “a group of modern American sculptors has become interested in the sculptural opportunities of manipulating large areas of earth and rocks into forms charged with emotion.”669 It is unclear why Tunnard and his team chose to work with Oppenheim, rather than other artists in the “Earth Works” show, or if they were familiar with Oppenheim’s work in West Haven beyond the documentation exhibited at the Dwan Gallery. Regardless, Oppenheim was invited to join the highway research team and produced a series of seven scale models of highway sculpture. These models, which were photographed from aerial and motorist perspectives and reproduced in Highway as Environment, included sections of road, median, and the surrounding landscape (5.6-5.9).670 In each of the seven models, Oppenheim conceived massive sculptural forms built into the median that separated traffic flows. There was no clear delineation between the road, the landscape and the sculpture. Some of the works were envisioned as mounds of sculpted earth, shaped in irregular, organic formations that seem to accentuate the natural contours of the landscape. Other models featured

667 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 74. 668 Ibid., 74-75. 669 Ibid., 75. 670 The models are reproduced in Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 6- 79; and United States Commission on Highway Beautification, Highway Beautification: Hearings before the Commission on Highway Beautification, (1970), 291-294.

274 geometric mounds and slabs that imposed a rigid, man-made logic on the land. All of the models employed sequential forms, some with numerous elements extending one thousand, five hundred feet along the road. For example, undulating, hill-like forms arranged in a protracted S-curve would abruptly rise and fall in a sinuous progression as the driver advanced through the work. Two other models featured several massive triangular prisms, built of earth and sod, positioned at oblique angles to the road. The vertical faces of the prisms would grow increasingly steep, seeming to press ever closer to the road, before abruptly reverting to the natural contours of the landscape. A similar model featured two sets of three elliptical arcs, arranged concentrically. The first set of arcs, which seemed to grow out of the side of the road, increased dramatically in height, while the second set, facing away from the driver, progressively decreased. The last model reproduced in Highway as Environment, and perhaps the most dramatic, employed what seem to be massive slabs of reinforced concrete. The slabs are wedged into the ground, starting with acute angles relative to the road, moving sequentially towards ninety degrees, and then falling away from the road at increasingly obtuse angles. The research teamed warned that many of Oppenheim’s proposals would have to be modified to satisfy safety requirements.671

Figure 5.6. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

671 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 75.

275

Figure 5.7. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

276

Figure 5.8. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

277

Figure 5.9. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

Oppenheim’s works organized the entire highway environment as a space that the driver would move through. The sculpture was conceived, not as a static and singular object, but as a spatial, temporal, and embodied experience that was specific to driving. As a means of testing and promoting new designs for highway environments, Tunnard and his research team built extensive scale models of street and highway sections. The scale models included cars fitted with 16mm film and closed circuit TV cameras to simulate the temporal and spatial experience of the road from the viewpoint of the motorist.672 Oppenheim’s models were incorporated into a mock-up of Route 44, which traverses Connecticut along its East- West axis, and the team filmed a driver’s perspective moving through the highway sculpture. The durational aspect of Oppenheim’s thinking impressed Tunnard and his team. They repeatedly noted Oppenheim’s acknowledgement of the dimension of time and implied movement in his highway sculptures, which they suggested could, “enrich perception” and “enrich a perceived environment.”673 The largest of the sculptures, the authors reported, would take fifteen seconds to drive through at normal highway speeds.674 While the films are now lost, one can imagine that Oppenheim’s dramatic models would have heightened the sense of driving as a quasi-cinematic unfolding of carefully composed scenes. Tunnard and his team believed that the highway, when considered solely as an engineering process, was not integrated in nor had it adequately designed the surrounding visual field. The highway, conceived by engineers, had simply been cut into and paved over

672 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 80-89. 673 Ibid., 75, 76. 674 Ibid., 75.

278 whatever landscape or city it traveled through. The resulting road, they argued, isolates the driver from the surroundings and from his or her own body. “Kinesthetic space and visual space are insulated from each other so that they are no longer mutually reinforcing. […] The road itself heightens this sense of apartness by its uniform corridor which sweeps through the countryside more often than not immune to any characteristic local differences.”675 The isolated and disembodied experience of highway driving was exacerbated, according to Tunnard and his team, by homogenous landscaping and seemingly endless woodlands that create a hypnotic and monotonous effect. “The eye,” the wrote, “is offered no inducement to alter direction or focus.”676 Their plan for Oppenheim’s highway sculptures was not to decorate the road. Rather, it was to organize areas of stimuli strategically, so as to heighten the driver’s perception and restore an embodied awareness of the environment. If deployed in areas of little visual interest, the research team suggested, sculptures such as Oppenheim’s could revitalize the driver’s full-body sense of space before crucial moments of decision and interchange.677 Therefore, the highway reconceived as a durational sculpture, would promote safer, more attentive and intentional driving. “The real problem,” Oppenheim stated in his only published comments on his work with Yale, “is trying to find new ways of thinking about the highway as a visceral experience.”678 Oppenheim’s collaboration with Tunnard and the highway research team was brief. The sculptures were never built and the films and models are now lost. Oppenheim’s work with the Yale city planning team barely registered in the critical account of earthworks, briefly alluded to in Howard Junker’s Saturday Evening Post article, “The New Sculpture: Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty.” The article, published on November 2, 1968, took the Dwan Gallery’s “Earth Works” show as a point of departure and referred vaguely to Oppenheim’s work with engineers and city planners at Yale on “an environmental highway project.”679 When Geoffrey Baker, a town planner and member of Tunnard’s research team, testified before the Commission on Highway Beautification in 1972, he implored the

675 Highway Research Team, Highway as Environment, (1971), 96. 676 Ibid., 76. 677 Ibid., 74-76, 94-96; United States Commission on Highway Beautification, Highway Beautification: Hearings before the Commission on Highway Beautification, (1970), 106-107, 112. 678 Dennis Oppenheim, quoted in Howard Junker, “The New Sculpture: Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty,” Saturday Evening Post, November 2, 1968, 44. 679 Ibid., 44.

279 commission to consider the highway as more than an object of engineering. Instead, he argued, “it becomes a conceptual process in the creation of the human environment.”680 As such, Baker suggested, an effective design team should include town planners, architects, engineers, economists, political scientists, and sculptors. Alfred Bloomingdale, a member of the Commission, promptly dismissed Baker’s suggestion, asserting that it was impractical and unlikely to result in any agreement between the competing consultants. Regardless, after the Highway as Environment project was completed in 1968, Oppenheim continued to explore the road as a site of sculpture. He drove around New York City, culling information from streets and plotting spaces on maps, from which he produced sculptures. His thoughts on the road as a visceral experience, initiated in his work with Yale, continued to inform Oppenheim’s work in New York and elsewhere.

Body—City—System While working in New Haven and Long Island in 1968, Oppenheim began to read about ecological systems and came into contact with the writings of Jack Burnham.681 Burnham, whose essay “Systems Esthetics” was published in Artforum in September 1968, was beginning to articulate his theory of a post-object systems art at the same time that Oppenheim was developing his first earthworks and highway sculptures.682 A year later, Burnham prominently listed Oppenheim alongside Hans Haacke and Les Levine as artists working against an art world system that is increasingly isolated from the real. In “Real Time Systems,” which appeared in Artforum in September 1969, Burnham argued that Oppenheim refused the isolationism of the art world by reaching into systems that collect and process information in real time. Oppenheim, Burnham wrote, “is using the untapped energy and information networks of the day-to-day environment.”683 Over the next few years Burnham would

680 United States Commission on Highway Beautification, Highway Beautification: Hearings before the Commission on Highway Beautification, (1970), 106. 681 Oppenheim discusses his intensive reading about ecological systems in: Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Willoughby Sharp, April 17, 1971, edited transcript, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder II.557, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 682 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 30-35. On the enduring significance of Burnham’s theory of systems esthetics, see: Caroline A. Jones, “System Symptoms,” in Artforum 51, no. 1 (September 2012): 113-116. 683 Italics in original. Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969): 52.

280 become a major advocate of Oppenheim’s work. Oppenheim, in turn, embraced Burnham’s rhetoric of real time systems and, in interviews over the next thirty years, referred to it as a lens into his work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In “Systems Esthetics” and “Real Time Systems,” Burnham argued that artists such as Oppenheim moved towards real-time data- processing systems, bringing new content into the realm of aesthetics to critique the isolation of the art world system. Much of Oppenheim’s work from this period can, and has been, read as an assault on the gallery as sanctuary. However, Oppenheim’s engagement with real time systems and real world infrastructures was also directed at those systems and infrastructures themselves. Beginning early in 1968, Oppenheim worked to infiltrate real time systems in order to disrupt and redirect those same systems. He did not just bring this new informational paradigm of the city into the gallery. His goal was to find a space for the body to register within systems that reduce the human to abstract information and data. In Oppenheim’s work of 1968 to 1970, the city comes to be read as a field of overlapping systems— cartographic, infrastructural, and economic. Within that systemic urban field, Oppenheim created a place for the body to move and, in turn, forced those systems to tangibly register on the body. The skin of the body and the surface of the street are increasingly conflated in Oppenheim’s work and both are positioned as sites of physical exchange with abstract informational systems. At “Language II,” an exhibition held at Dwan Gallery in the summer of 1968, Oppenheim exhibited a photocopy of a map of New York. The map measured twenty-nine by twenty-three inches and was listed for sale for two hundred dollars. It did not provoke a response in reviews of the exhibition or even in the gallery’s installation photographs. Regardless, the entry in “Language II” was a pivotal work for Oppenheim. The map was just one piece of a larger project through which Oppenheim began to engage the city as an informational system and to assert the body as an agent of mobility and perception within that system. The work remained at the forefront of Oppenheim’s thoughts when he participated in the “Earth Art” symposium at Cornell University in early 1969. There, he positioned it as a model of “an art mixed in with the societal process” with the potential to

281 change the structure of society or change the way people think about societal structure.684 The complete work, which Oppenheim titled City as a Sheet of Poetry, consists of numerous elements in excess of the map shown at Dwan. First, the work originated in weeks of driving around New York City with a map. Oppenheim looked for words on business signs that had some appeal, such as “space” and “needle.” He would then continue driving around the city, locating additional words in different areas and on different signs, marking their locations on the map and forming sentences of found poetry. Once he was satisfied with his collection of words, he connected the dots of each sentence on his map, drawing shapes on the grid of streets.685 He then cut the shapes out of a rigid plastic sheet and assembled them along two central spines to form a small sculpture (Figure 5.10).

Figure 5.10. Dennis Oppenheim, City as a Sheet of Poetry, 1968. Scale model. Plastic sheet. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

684 Oppenheim’s comments about the work came in response to an untranscribed question from the audience. This section of the discussion appears in the full transcript of the symposium but not in published excerpts. Dennis Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, Cornell University, 1969, Box 2, Folder 48, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 685 This description is derived from: Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Don Wall, February 12, 1985, Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archive; and Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, 1969. The locations of the original map and the content of the poems are presently unknown.

282

The final sculpture, which was not exhibited at Dwan, was an abstract system of Oppenheim’s conception derived, paradoxically, from his concrete and embodied engagement with the city. Oppenheim’s idiosyncratic movements gave the sculpture and the found poems their form. They drew upon the map of the city but without regard to existing cartographic, economic, or social boundaries. The underlying urban grid and the cartographic notation of the city constituted the ground of both the sculpture and Oppenheim’s travels through the city. But the form emerged from Oppenheim’s concrete physical and perceptual movements through the city, superimposed on the abstract urban system. In his account of the work at Cornell, Oppenheim described himself as a mobile, embodied agent tapping into a city conceived as a system of dynamic, readymade information. “I see Manhattan as a kind of grid of poetry in a sense,” Oppenheim stated. “Where there are these strata of words, where there is this tremendous interchange of moving type on trucks and this complex grid of message units and frequent permutation probably. Well, I can go to a corner and poetry is just reading the passing vehicles and this is the artist within the pages of type. This is the artist condensing himself into a book, into an area of infinite novels where he can just travel through alleys where he can treat words and a sentence which is not confined to a page but which is confined to a tremendous grid of millions of square feet. This is a kind of involvement with the Manhattan grid in which you are using location and time, distance, whereas these weren’t factors a few years ago.”686 As Smithson had in his “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” Oppenheim used his chance encounter with street signs to organize urban experience.687 In City as a Sheet of Poetry, Oppenheim sought to establish the work of art as a way of being in the city through the body. To have an embodied consciousness of the environment was a way to both recognize the city as a systemic field and to find a place to move within that system—to reorganize its points of data and to find form and meaning within the city conceived as a network of information. The idea of social intervention is similar, in some ways, to the Situationist method of détournement, where an artist infiltrates the media-saturated urban field, appropriating the terms of capitalist culture and subverting them through acts of

686 Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, 1969. 687 Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 49- 50.

283 recontextualization. However, Oppenheim’s intervention is motivated less by a radical Marxist media critique and more by a comparatively innocent phenomenological stance. Oppenheim’s end goal was not to use the city as an instrument of critique directed at the gallery system. Rather, he sought to position the work of art in the city in order to redirect perception and consciousness of the urban environment. Just as he and Tunnard sought to build sculpture into the highway infrastructure as a way to stimulate perception, Oppenheim saw potential for works such as City as a Sheet of Poetry to function as catalysts within society. “Well, I would hope eventually to have some feed-back,” he explained, “to establish an effect, to enter into the ecological process, the aspect of society that does spark change and follows its aesthetic criteria. Like weather. That’s a nice way of effecting change.”688 Oppenheim sought, one could say, to naturalize the work of art within the city, where, “like weather,” it would become something like an invisible agent of change. The network of information continues to move around the artist as he stands on a street corner reading signs and trucks. The flow of information is not interrupted but data is extracted and reformed on new scaffolding, which can then be reinserted into the city to form the basis of new patterns of meaning. The map of the city, hanging on the wall at Dwan, was redrawn based on Oppenheim’s perception and rerouting of the flow of information around him. In an extended footnote in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that the task of historical materialism is, or should be, to locate concrete human significance within abstract economic forces.689 He recognizes an essential conflict between the abstract and abstracting systems of meaning, such as economy, and concrete human significance. They are equally relevant and mutually informing factors of existence. Historical materialism, Merleau-Ponty argues, should not just recognize the subject as a factor in production or as anonymous agent of class struggle. It should also recognize the living subject, human relationships, and social existence, which are irreducible to economic relations. “…Economic factors are effective only to the extent that they are lived and taken up by a human subjects,” Merleau-Ponty writes. “Neither the conservative nor the proletarian is conscious of being engaged in merely an economic struggle, and they always bring a human significance to their action. In this sense there is never any pure economic causality, because

688 Oppenheim, Transcript of Earth Art Symposium, 1969. 689 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 171-173.

284 economics is not a closed system but is part of a total and concrete existence of society.”690 The economy, Merleau-Ponty argues, provides the background on which the living subject moves, finds form, and produces meaning. To insist on the intersubjective and social body is a way to resist the abstracting force of the economic system without denying or rejecting the system as a field of meaning. In other words, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the body moves within a system that provides structure to that movement but meaning and experience cannot be contained solely within or reduced to an abstract order. Rather, the movement of the body and the accrual of the social continuously reroute the contours of significance and experience proscribed by the system. In City as a Sheet of Poetry and subsequent works, Oppenheim makes this reciprocal impression of abstract systems and concrete bodies the subject of his work. In early 1969, Oppenheim produced another work that similarly used a system of abstract information as the ground for the body and the social. Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange took place in two locations on two days (Figure 5.11).691 Both events were recorded in photographs taken by Oppenheim and a film directed by Douglas Collins. On the morning of Thursday, January 30, before the start of trading and with the permission of the New York Stock Exchange’s public relations department, Oppenheim worked with a waste disposal company to collect the transactional data from the prior day. When Oppenheim and the workers he had hired from the Bay City Rubbish Collection Company met on the trading floor at 5:30am, the room remained littered with ticker tapes and paper records of day-old trades. They swept the scraps of paper into piles, filled eighty trash bags, and loaded the material onto a truck. For Oppenheim, the paper records constituted a

690 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1962), 172. 691 There is some confusion regarding the dating of this work. In a portfolio of prints that Oppenheim produced in 1973, which is owned by numerous museums, Removal Transplant— New York Stock Exchange is dated 1968. The work is also dated 1968 in the catalogue of Oppenheim 1991 exhibition at PS1, which occupies a prominent position as a source of Oppenheim’s early work. However, the film documenting the work is dated 1969 and an invitation to the second part of the work, held on a rooftop of an office building is dated Sunday, February 2, which corresponds to the calendar of 1969 and not 1968. Dennis Oppenheim and Douglas Collins, Stock Exchange Transplant, 16mm film transferred to DVD (New York: The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1969); and Dennis Oppenheim, ticket to Removal Transplant New York Stock Exchange, 281 Park Avenue South, New York, NY, 10016, Sunday, February 2 from 2 to 4 pm, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder II.557, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

285 symbolic form representing an abstract economic system that imperceptibly and instantly spans the globe. The materials were caught between this collapse of time and space and the concrete architectural boundaries of the trading floor. “The paper becomes free-moving architectural fuel, undirected yet responding to the imposition of preexisting bounds,” Oppenheim explains in a monologue towards the end of Collins’s film. “The exchange floor is an architectural mold for symbols representing distant locations. Transactions involving the span of three thousand miles take place on this floor. The residue at the end of the day carries a vestige of the distance between two points—the points at which matching buy and sell orders have been issued. Though it lies dormant on the floor, it holds a quiver of activity. A spatial transaction is implicitly contained in the material—a web of components interacting within a continental grid.”692 While Oppenheim insisted on the abstract content of the collected papers, the material also constituted a concrete surface of embodied experience. In the film, the physical manipulation of the materials is recorded while Oppenheim narrates the flattening of space and time encoded on each scrap of paper. Oppenheim and his custodial team are seen wandering around the trading floor, disrupting the layer of material. The manual labor of collection is also recorded in numerous shots of workers moving around the room with push brooms and stuffing piles of paper into large bags. When the collection was complete, the materials were trucked to an old office building at 381 Park Avenue South, at the corner of East 27th Street. In the new location, Oppenheim continued to narrate the movement between the abstract and concrete registers of meaning, as well as the potential of the materials to frame both conceptual and physical experience. “We housed the data for a few hours,” Oppenheim states in the film. The garbage bags were filled, he implies, not so much with tangible material but with information that remained connected to a global financial network. Nevertheless, someone needed to physically move the eighty bags off the truck, across the sidewalk, into the building, onto the elevator, and up to the 15th floor penthouse, where they would remain stored for a few more days. All of this work was meticulously recorded by Collins, narrated by Oppenheim, and accompanied in the film by a boisterous Vivaldi soundtrack.

692 Quoted in Oppenheim and Collins, Stock Exchange Transplant, (1969).

286

Figure 5.11. Dennis Oppenheim, Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange, 1969, Black and white photos, text. Text: Four tons of paper data from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is removed and this residue is transplanted to Park Avenue South where it will be housed in an area defined by the specifications of a roof perimeter. The spatial limits of the clearing house floor dictates the manner in which the paper residue organized itself. In the same way, a cyclone fence directs the accumulation of wind-blown matter, thus functioning as an aesthetic block. The paper becomes free-moving architectural fuel, undirected, yet responding to the imposition of pre-existing bounds. The exchange floor is an architectural mold for symbols representing distant locations. Transactions involving a span of three

287 thousand miles take place on the stock exchange floor. The residue at the end of the day carries vestiges of the distance between two points; the point at which a buy order and the point at which a sell order has been issued. Though it lies dormant on the floor it is conceptually still active. A spatial transaction is implicitly contained in the material; a web of components interacting within a continental grid. At 2 PM the clearing house floor is filled with the highs and lows of stock transactions, the permutations a stock has undergone during a four hour period. By removing this data from a ground level and carrying it up sixteen stories, I am raising the level of residue that was actively housed on a lower plane. The material will be held at the top of a building; the building forms a base for the piece. The roof is viewed as a terminal strata for passive information. The Manhattan skyline becomes a complex of core samplings of varying depths. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

On Sunday, February 2nd, the bags were moved again, dragged up a flight of stairs and onto the roof, where the papers were subsequently dumped. A thick layer of ticker tape, shredded documents, requisition forms, and other transactional records were distributed across the entire surface of the roof. On this field of spatial and temporal abstraction, now swirling in the breeze above Park Avenue and 27th street, Oppenheim scheduled a party from two to four o’clock in the afternoon. A few dozen invited guests are recorded in Collins’s film, initially milling about awkwardly, smoking cigarettes, taking pictures, and chatting in pairs with little regard to the paper floor. As the party begins to cohere, guests start to play, seemingly spontaneously, in the paper as if children in leaves, running and jumping through piles, dumping armfuls on friends, and erupting in paper fights. The frolicking captured on film is overlaid with Oppenheim’s monologue, cited above, about the transactional abstraction of time and space encoded on the paper. This field of abstract data becomes a physical surface of the social. Perhaps this is not exactly what Merleau-Ponty had in mind when he called for an historical materialism buoyed by phenomenology. Yet Oppenheim, likewise, sought to acknowledge the concrete bodies and social relationships that form against the background of abstract systems. In Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange the body is made to register in the most literal sense on the informational residue of an economic system while, at the same time, the data forms the ground for the body and the occasion for social exchange. Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange imagines the city as the field of exchange between the body and the system. In a portfolio of lithographs published in 1973, Oppenheim represented Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange with a zoning map of Manhattan, south of 37th Street, superimposed with targets indicating the “removal area” and

288 “transplant area.” The targets claim a conceptual space of several square blocks respectively, far in excess of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the roof at 381 Park Avenue South that appear in the photographs below the map.693 The surrounding streets and buildings also figure prominently in Collins’s film. The first scene on the roof focuses on the spire of Cass Gilbert’s New York Life Insurance Building, which occupies the neighboring block and towers over 381 Park Avenue South. Towards the end of the party, guests also began to throw streams of ticker tape off the roof, onto adjacent buildings and into the street below. If, as Oppenheim claimed, the transfer of material from the stock exchange could be used to “activate a new location,” then this activating gesture was extended as the materials were spread from the roof to the city.694 As the paper flew from the roof, the work of art disappeared into the street but its capacity to transform the everyday into the aesthetic was not lost. Even as the scraps and streams of paper mixed in with litter, Oppenheim suggested that they remained encoded with a conceptual content and social potential. “The ultimate transference of this kind of aesthetic,” he explained in the middle of the film, “would begin to precipitate when the viewer wouldn’t be aware that he is viewing art.”695 Similar to Oppenheim’s highway sculptures, Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange was seamlessly integrated with the city, built of the same materials as the surrounding environment but reorganized in a way to heighten perception and stimulate embodied, intersubjective experience. Whether using slabs of concrete, scraps of paper, or intentional acts of perception, Oppenheim sought means to activate the surfaces of everyday life and to orient the body on those surfaces. Highways, streets, sidewalks, and roofs were claimed as aesthetic spaces through sculptural interventions and, ostensibly, made more accessible to the body. Yet there remained a clear line between those urban surfaces and the bodies that perceived and moved across them. Even as Oppenheim blurred the boundaries between sculpture and the space around it, the dematerialized object of sculpture remained the armature of aesthetic

693 Dennis Oppenheim, “Removal—Transplant New York Stock Exchange 1968,” in Projects (New York: Landfall Press, , and Multiples Inc., 1973). The complete portfolio of lithographs is held in several collections including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. See, for example: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/166089. 694 Quoted in Oppenheim and Collins, Stock Exchange Transplant, (1969). 695 Ibid.

289 experience. To achieve a heightened perception of the environment, one still had to stand on a viewing station, drive through a highway sculpture, or manipulate piles of paper. The object of sculpture, as an intermediary between land and body, served as incessant reminder that one was viewing a form of art that was separable and autonomous from the world around it. As he produced earthworks and transplanted data and materials from one place to another, Oppenheim became increasingly interested in the concrete imprint of the body on the land and, in turn the physical traces made by the land on the body. “I like the idea of envisioning my body as an ingredient, as sculptural material,” he explained. “My concern for the body came from constant physical contact with large bodies of land. This demanded an echo from the body…”696 Just as Tony Smith grew dissatisfied with the autonomous sculptural object and conceived of the body as a plastic element in Project for a Parking Lot, Oppenheim sought ways to eliminate the boundaries between body and city. Beginning in 1969, Oppenheim pursued strategies to conflate the surfaces of city and body. The physical contact between those surfaces, and the residual traces of that contact, supplanted the object of sculpture. Arm & Asphalt is a six minute, black and white film that Oppenheim made in 1969 with Bob Fiore. It is part of what Oppenheim called the “Wound” series, in which his skin was correlated with the surface of an exterior location. “When my body met the land,” Oppenheim explained, “the scar which was formed became a permanent record of the transaction.”697 In the film, an extreme close-up of Oppenheim’s forearm fills the frame. The arm is seen slowly rolling back and forth over a soft mound of asphalt. As the film progresses, the asphalt is continuously reshaped by Oppenheim’s movements and the asphalt, in turn, leaves an indexical mark on Oppenheim’s skin. While working in New Haven, Oppenheim made notes in his sketchbook about the sculptural potential of asphalt. In his Yellow Sketch Book of April 1968, published in artscandada in 1970, he lists: “asphalt basins,” “piled and formed asphalt,” “rippled asphalt surface,” and “asphalt spread.”698 Arm & Asphalt is directly related to Oppenheim’s physical experience of the road. However, in 1969, he was less interested in producing a sculpture on the road than

696 Quoted in Douglas Davis, “Artist Under Stress,” Newsweek (May 25, 1970): 119. 697 Willoughby Sharp, “An interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971): 188. 698 Dennis Oppenheim, “Catalyst 1967-1970,” artscanada 27, no. 4 (August 1970): 30.

290 he was in imprinting the road directly on his body. Arm & Asphalt is a record of an essentially private, even intimate, exchange between body and material. In Parallel Stress, Oppenheim pursued the reciprocal imprint of body and city in a more public forum (Figure 5.12 & 5.13). In early May 1970, Oppenheim built two temporary cinder-block walls on a dilapidated pier between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Each wall stood six courses tall and seven or eights blocks long. Their rigid and modular geometry invoked the formal protocols of minimal art but Oppenheim did not seek to erect a static monument to that aesthetic order. Two days after building his walls, Oppenheim returned to the site and hung between the walls, face down and dangling from the tips of his hand and feet. He repeated the performance numerous times, widening the distance between the walls at every interval. Once satisfied that he had reached the maximum position of physical stress, he drove to an abandoned sump or gravel pit in Long Island and repeated the performance, only he lay directly on the ground between two hills. The contours of the ground forced his body to match the parabolic form of the original pose. The body was made to experience, remember, and perform, not just the form of a bridge, but also the social history of the pier. Parallel Stress first organized the body and the bridge as homologous forms, with Oppenheim’s slackened body echoing the bridges’ suspension cables. His strain to the point of collapse, likewise, echoed the immediate area on which he worked. Oppenheim built his walls around a section of collapsed decking, so that his body was made to span a hole in the pier. His physical exhaustion mirrored the structural exhaustion of the pier, as well as the infrastructural exhaustion of New York City’s waterfront, which by 1970 was in a general state of disrepair and vacancy. Oppenheim described his attraction to the long history of the site in an interview with Willoughby Sharp. “I saw this old concrete dock and…I was concerned…about the…vestiges of history that could be contained in one area of land…I was interested in the fact that the dock collapsed at a specific time in history.”699 In a subsequent interview, he described more succinctly his interest in engaging the long history of a site. “Land holds traces of a dynamic past, which

699 Dennis Oppenheim, interview with Willoughby Sharp, transcript, Avalanche, III.8, MoMA Archives, New York. This discussion, which also includes Terry Fox and Vito Acconci, formed the basis of a published interview in Avalanche 2, although the quote passage does not appear in the published version.

291 the artist may allow to enter his work if he so wishes.”700 In Parallel Stress, Oppenheim transferred the history of structural and infrastructural collapse to his body as a readymade content and then transferred that history again to another site through his body.

Figure 5.12. Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel Stress, 1970 (as published in Newsweek, May 25, 1970). Photograph by Robert McElroy.

700 Willoughby Sharp, “An interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971): 188.

292

Figure 5.13: Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel Stress, May 1970. Photo documentation. Text: A 10 minute performance piece. Photo taken at greatest position prior to collapse. Location: Masonry-block wall and collapsed concrete pier between Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Bottom Photo: Stress position reassumed. Location: Abandoned sump. Long Island. Photos: Robert McElroy. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

293 In Arm & Asphalt, the conflation of body and city was essentially private. In Parallel Stress, Oppenheim ensured its publicity. As he performed Parallel Stress, Oppenheim was accompanied by Douglas Davis, the resident art critic for Newsweek, and two of the magazine’s staff photographers. Davis featured the work in his column of May 25, 1970, alongside Robert McElroy’s photograph of Oppenheim spanning the walls with Brooklyn Bridge looming behind him.701 While McElroy’s image emphasized the formal echo of bridge and body, Davis described the deteriorating conditions of Oppenheim, the pier, and the surrounding city. “When he is finally satisfied,” Davis writes, “Oppenheim stops, panting, sweating, the tips of his fingers skinned down.”702 The pier and its immediate vicinity are in an analogous state of disrepair. The dock collapsed a few years ago, Davis reports, and it is “surrounded by deserted warehouses with broken windows.”703 The social and political life of the city seems to be on the brink of collapse as well. Davis notes the presence of a dozen policemen across the street from the pier, shortly after describing the swarms of protesters that Oppenheim and the team of journalists drove past on the way to the site. “Fleets of students are marching in the streets around us, shouting and waving signs,” Davis reports at the outset of the column. “The marchers are still in full cry as we return to the city,” he assures at the end of the article.704

701 The photograph of Parallel Stress published in Newsweek included a view of the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, as if framing the performance. Davis emphasized this formal echo of body and bridge in his article. However, when assembling his photo documentation of Parallel Stress, Oppenheim deemed this published image too scenic and selected instead an alternate photo taken by McElroy in which only the access ramp of the Manhattan Bridge is visible. See Figure 5.13. 702 Douglas Davis, “Artist Under Stress,” Newsweek (May 25, 1970): 119. 703 Ibid., 119. 704 Ibid., 119. Davis does not identify the protests. However, there were numerous significant antiwar protests in New York City in early May 1970 in response to the shooting of students at Kent State and Nixon’s public acknowledgement of the invasion of Cambodia. There were also counter-protests in support of Nixon’s policies, including the notorious Hard Hat Riot of May 8, in which a large group of construction workers attacked an even larger antiwar protest of high school and college students. Parallel Stress was produced in conjunction with Oppenheim’s solo exhibition at John Gibson Commissions, which opened on April 11, 1970 and continued in three parts through the end of May. Parallel Stress was included in the third part of the exhibition at John Gibson Commissions, which ran from May 12 to May 30, so it is likely that Davis is referring to the unrest in the days immediately following the Hard Hat Riot and the reverberations of that event.

294 There is no suggestion, by Davis or Oppenheim, that Parallel Stress was performed in response to the local political climate or the antiwar movement. Rather, these politics were part of the urban field into which Parallel Stress was inserted, along with the city’s deteriorating industrial infrastructures and iconic architectures. Likewise, the media was part of the urban field into which Oppenheim inserted Parallel Stress. There are no clear boundaries between the work of art and the social and material realities of the city and, similarly, there are no clear boundaries between Parallel Stress and the media landscape through which it was publicized. The meaning of the work was generated and circulated as much by Douglas Davis, Robert McElroy, and Newsweek, as it was by Oppenheim. McElroy’s photographs were one part of a sprawling work that included Oppenheim’s sculpture and performance, as well as two urban sites with dynamic histories. Oppenheim’s work between 1967 and 1970 was by no means limited to the urban excursions described above, nor was it geographically bound to the New York area. He produced crucial and well-documented earthworks, body art, conceptual art, and performances around the country and in major capitals throughout Europe. He dusted the curbs and sidewalks in Paris with rat poison and sterilized others with bleach in 1969. In 1972, he used red magnesium flares to plot enlargements of the earliest drawing of his daughter and the last drawing of his father in a field in Bridgehampton, NY. Two years later, on landscapes that he deemed too pastoral for sculptural infiltration, he spelled out words such as “Radicality,” “Poison,” and “Typhoid” in nitrate or magnesium flares. He magnified his own and his son’s fingerprints and hired a truck to reproduce them in hot tar sprayed on the side of a road in the Lewiston Artpark in 1975. He built a spiraling highway ramp, entitled Exit for the South Bronx. It was conceived to connect a Bronx building to a vacant lot but it was installed in Kunsthalle in 1979. His final executed work, Radiant Fountains, was installed in 2010 on the median strip of the access road leading to ’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (Figure 5.14). The sculpture is composed of three sixty-foot tall steel structures, each shaped like a coronet to resemble a splash, as in Howard Edgerton’s famous photographs. Oppenheim’s coronets are equipped with LED lights to animate the appearance of s splash. It is evidence of the distance that Oppenheim moved away from the formal concerns of minimal art. However, it is equally clear that the phenomenological lessons of his earliest highway sculptures—from Viewing Stations, Landslide, and Parallel Stress to his work at Yale with Christopher Tunnard—

295 continued to resonate. In his statement accompanying Radiant Fountains, he connected the work to his childhood memory of a neon sign advertising Sherwin Williams on a California highway. “The sign showed the world globe being slowly covered with paint in an animated display of light,” Oppenheim recalled. “I can easily recall my childhood astonishment with the action repeating itself over and over while being driven on the Mayshore Freeway outside of Berkeley, California. The sign captivated everyone. It was a spectacle near an expressway of fast moving cars but never did it cause distraction or disturb oneʼs driving. It could be brought into consciousness quickly and understood, an experience always welcomed by the daily commuters on the Bay Area Freeway.”1 Oppenheim saw sculpture as a means of infiltrating the city and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his career. The street remained a primary surface of work and he continued to build sculptures into, onto, and out of urban infrastructures, finding paths between those infrastructures and the bodies that traverse them.

Figure 5.14. Dennis Oppenheim, Radiant Fountains, 2010. Location: Freeway to international airport, Houston. Steel, acrylic, programmed lighting. Each tower, 75’. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

705 Dennis Oppenheim, Radiant Fountains artist’s statement, 2010, Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archive.

296 Conclusion: Speculations in Real Estate and Sculpture

On May 24, 1971, at 11:45am, John Lindsay set off from City Hall in Manhattan for a ceremonial promenade across the Brooklyn Bridge. He was scheduled to meet Sebastian Leone, Borough President of Brooklyn, halfway across the bridge just after noon. Lindsay’s walk was the highlight of the three-day Brooklyn Bridge Festival, celebrating the bridge’s eighty-eighth birthday. The goal of the festival, at least for Lindsay and organizers in Manhattan, was to promote pedestrian use of the bridge and recreational use of the open spaces framing the waterfront.706 While Lindsay was walking across, a group of artists were devising sculptures, performances, and installations on two condemned piers directly beneath the bridge. Organized by Alanna Heiss, the Brooklyn Bridge Event was an adjunct of the wider Brooklyn Bridge Festival. Heiss invited a range of artists to contribute work, including Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Jeffrey Lew, , and Tina Girouard. However, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt were the featured participants. Their work, already critically and institutionally validated, provided an air of credibility and prominence to Heiss’s event. Despite their proximity, Lindsay and the artists under the bridge were now working on divergent trajectories, with little of the mutual recognition that they shared in 1967. A new generation of artists and patron institutions emerged in the early 1970s to synthesize minimal art’s promise of phenomenological enlightenment with the spatial methods of speculative real estate. These new institutions effectively privatized the use of minimal art as an instrument of urban revitalization. This was evidence, first and foremost, of the shifting authority over urban space. At the same time, privatization afforded new

706 McLandish Phillips, “‘Epitome of Knowledge’ (Brooklyn Bridge) is 88,” The New York Times, May 23, 1971, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/05/23/91286110.html?action=clic k&contentCollection=Archives&module=LedeAsset®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article &pageNumber=81; McLandish Phillips, “Brooklyn Bridge Birthday Marked with Champagne,” The New York Times, May 25, 1971, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/05/25/79703207.html?action=clic k&contentCollection=Archives&module=LedeAsset®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article &pageNumber=41.

297 visibility to artists at the edges of minimal art, particularly women, who were working in and with the city but outside the margins of civic patronage. By the late 1960s, the Lindsay administration approach to the city’s public spaces was beginning to fray. The city’s attempts to use sculpture and other cultural resources to revitalize derelict industrial sites and deteriorating parks were contested by existing communities who saw such sculpture as an intrusive presence and a tool of spatial appropriation. Perhaps more importantly, the Lindsay administration’s progressive policies of public space were subsumed by the city’s growing debt crisis. In Midtown Manhattan, Lindsay’s policies of public space, and the use of sculpture to promote them, were overtaken by private entities, such as ABNY. Elsewhere, especially in Lower Manhattan, new types of private arts organizations emerged to occupy the cultural void left by the retreating Lindsay administration and to support artists who sought to work in the city. Some of these private entities, such as the Public Arts Council, which was founded by Doris Freedman after she left the Office of Cultural Affairs, were modeled on city agencies. However, others, such as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (IAUR), which Alanna Heiss founded in early 1971, adopted the guise and methods of a speculative real estate venture.707 While artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Tina Girouard sought new ways to infiltrate urban space with sculpture, often leveraging their bodies as a physical and mobile presence in the street, these emergent institutions sought to develop an essentially new relationship between the private art venue and the city it inhabits. This conclusion assesses some of the reverberations of minimal art’s urban history in the early 1970s, as the Lindsay administration became increasingly constrained and new patron institutions emerged to negotiate the boundaries between art and city. As minimal art was incorporated into institutional narratives of modern sculpture, its urban significance registered, albeit briefly, in the ways that those institutions viewed their position relative to the city. For example, as part of its late embrace of minimal art, the Museum of Modern Art

707 Alanna Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources (IAUR) was distinct and unrelated to the similarly named Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), which was founded by Peter Eisenman in 1967. Heiss suggests that she was unaware of Eisenman’s group at the time that she founded IAUR. Interview with the author, September 20, 2016. Heiss’s IAUR encompassed numerous overlapping venues and projects including: Idea Warehouse (December 1970); Workspace (1972); The Condemnation Blight Sculpture Workshop (1973); Clocktower Gallery (1972); New Urban Landscapes (1975); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. P.S.1 merged with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000.

298 (MoMA) briefly acknowledged the urban and social significance inherent to this mode of sculpture. And, compelled by minimal art’s urban significance, MoMA even more briefly embraced Lindsay’s politics of community empowerment and engagement. At the other end of the institutional spectrum, one finds the contemporaneous rise of alternative exhibition spaces, including Heiss’s, and the increasingly raw aesthetics cultivated within them. The history of the alternative space needs to be assessed alongside the history of gentrification. Despite their shared territories, the alternative space and gentrification remain largely isolated and opposed in historiography. To Sharon Zukin, for example, artists are anonymous and unwitting instruments in the narrative of SoHo’s gentrification. They produce the loft as a marketable style, according to Zukin, without ever knowing that they are working for New York’s power brokers. “Artists who think that they are pushing into niches here and there,” Zukin writes, “are really activating a mechanism for revalorization that destabilizes existing uses and their markets.”708 For most chroniclers of the alternative space, on the other hand, artists in 1970s Lower Manhattan were working with the spatial and material residue of deindustrialization and cultivating self-contained communities.709 But this narrative is disconnected from speculative real estate. Rosalyn Deutsche has persuasively assessed the connection between gentrification and the opening of commercial galleries the Lower East Side, as well as the broader significance of conventional public art as an instrument of spatial control in redevelopment projects.710 Deutsche has done more than any other art historian to assess the role of art within capitalism’s processes of shaping and reshaping urban space. Yet, her attention to the commercial gallery implicitly leaves the alternative space outside of the narrative of

708 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, paperback edition (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 178. First published in 1982. 709 See for example: Douglas Crimp, “Action Around the Edges,” in Before Pictures (Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press & Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 147-182; Richard Kostelanetz, SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (New York: Routledge, 2003); Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: a Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (New York: The Drawing Center; Minneapolis & London: Press, 2002); and Robyn Brentano and Mark Savitt, ed., 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street: History, Artists & Artworks (New York: New York University Press, 1981). 710 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The of Gentrification,” October 31 (Winter 1984): 91-111; Rosalyn Deutsche, “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,” October 47 (Winter 1988): 3-52; and Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996).

299 gentrification. And, at times, Deutsche explicitly assigns a critical potential to artists associated with alternative spaces, such as Gordon Matta-Clark, as agents of resistance working against capitalism’s reorganization of the city.711 This is, of course, partly true. Matta-Clark and many of his peers produced work that resisted commodification and was not easily coopted by the city’s power brokers or conventional galleries. However, institutions such as IAUR and 112 Greene Street, which emerged in the wake of minimal art and to which Matta-Clark and his peers contributed, were knowing agents of gentrification and embraced their role in speculative real estate. Halting attempts were made by some of the city’s major art institutions to occupy the cultural void left by the Lindsay administration. In the 1970 “Sculpture Annual,” for example, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored the installation of two works in the city. Richard Serra’s To Encircle a Base Plate, Right Angles Inverted, was embedded in the pavement at 184th Street and Webster Avenue, deep in the heart of the Bronx. installed an untitled sound work on the roof of his loft at 105 Mulberry Street. With Robert Smithson’s , which was also included in the 1970 exhibition, Serra’s and Sonnier’s were the first works ever to be included in a Whitney Annual but located outside the architectural boundaries of the institution.712 At the Museum of Modern of Art, also, there was a tentative attempt to broaden the institution’s reach into the city and beyond its Midtown base. This desire to move into the city corresponded closely to the brief tenure of John Hightower, who served as MoMA’s director from May 1970 to January 1972, and the institution’s belated embrace of minimal art. MoMA had pivoted towards minimal art in 1968 with the hiring of Kynaston McShine, who curated The Jewish Museum’s “Primary Structures” show in 1966, and William Agee, who organized Donald Judd’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1968. MoMA also promoted Jennifer Licht, a key interlocutor with many of the younger artists associated with minimal art, from assistant to associate curator. When Hightower assumed leadership of

711 Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Threshole of Democracy,” in Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s, ed. Lydia Yee and Betti-Sue Hertz (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), 94-101; Rosalyn Deutsche, “Alternative Space,” in If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler, edited by Brian Wallis (, WA: Bay Press, 1991), 45-66. 712 James K. Monte and Marcia Tucker, Whitney Museum Sculpture Annual 1970 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970).

300 MoMA in 1970, he saw a compulsion to the city inherent to minimal art. MoMA’s embrace of the new sculpture, according to Hightower, compelled the museum to rethink its relationship with the urban surround. Like Doris Freedman and August Heckscher, Hightower believed that the participatory and phenomenological aesthetics of minimal art could heighten the public’s consciousness of self and environment, which could, in turn, help address urban alienation. “It may be,” Hightower mused in a museum pamphlet, “that the Museum’s relationship to the community is probably best defined by those contemporary artists who insist on pushing our notions beyond a belief that art stops at the frame of a painting or the exit to a gallery. The emphasis, once on the object, is increasingly found to be in the process by which the product is created. Many artists even require the active participation of the viewer in order for the work to be complete.”713 Hightower saw in the new sculpture an institutional charge of “translating visual awareness into positive action to improve our environment as well as our sense of ourselves become pressing concerns for the 1970’s.”714 Hightower made the case even more bluntly in a polemical essay published in Art in America in September of 1970. There he rehearsed the alienating effects of Robert Moses’s urbanism and championed the ameliorative effect of participatory art. “Should we really be surprised,” Hightower asked, “that the ghettos of all our major cities have erupted in riots and violence in recent years when they have been the object of intensive impermanence through the legalized vandalism of slum clearance, urban renewal and highway construction for almost two decades?”715 He positioned the phenomenological foundation of sculpture to act as a curative. “Those artists who see the viewer as a participant in actually experiencing a work of art in order for it to be completed are provoking profound implications. They are suggesting that we are all constantly involved in a process of making artistic choices—that

713 John Hightower, “New Directions for the Future,” April 1970, The Museum of Modern Art, Reports and Pamphlets, 6.5, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Before coming to MoMA, Hightower had worked as Executive Director of the New York State Council on the Arts, so he was likely familiar with the Lindsay administration’s pioneering arts policies. 714 Ibid. 715 John B. Hightower, “From Class Art to Mass Art,” Art in America 58, No. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1970): 25.

301 the esthetic consequences of what happens to our surroundings are a result of the degree of human involvement in the process of living. The end product is life.”716 Despite Hightower’s progressive rhetoric of community engagement and his positing of an urban function for the museum, there were no institutional changes in this direction during or immediately after his eighteen months as director. Hightower was forced out of the museum primarily over his support for McShine’s 1970 “Information,” to which David Rockefeller, a powerful trustee, stridently objected on political and aesthetic grounds.717 However, according to Hightower, it would seem that his attempt to pivot MoMA to the city played at least some role in his departure. Just a few months after he was fired, Hightower published an essay in the Saturday Review of the Arts in which he repeated many of the arguments about the urban significance and function of art that he had made while director. However, he coupled these with a fierce critique of the museum’s ruling elite. “The museum can no longer continue to be a private club that caters to the tastes and interests of an elite…. […] The arts are going public,” he wrote.718 “The appearance of our environment,” Hightower argued, “will have to become more of a museum concern. Despite the aesthetic deterioration of America—from main-street neon to the junkyards of built-in obsolescence—the museum, which is supposed to educate the public into keener esthetic perceptions, has done almost nothing to arrest this blight.”719 He then placed the responsibility for this failure squarely in the hands of the trustees who had just fired him. “As a public institution, the museum will have to move its concern literally and figuratively into the streets. […] These museum responsibilities—translating visual awareness into positive action to improve our environment and encouraging the artistic activities of a wider public—will never be accomplished until the make-up of museum boards has changed.”720 The changes that Hightower sought were foreclosed by MoMA’s board. These changes

716 Hightower, “From Class Art to Mass Art,” (1970), 25. 717 Hightower discusses the exhibition and his firing in: John Hightower, interviewed by Sharon Zane, April 18, 1996, MoMA Oral Histories, http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/archives/transcript_hightower. pdf. See also: Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). 718 John B. Hightower, “Public Money and a Public Mission for American Museums,” Saturday Review of the Arts 55, no. 33, August 12, 1972: 49. 719 Ibid., 49. 720 Ibid., 49.

302 would require the emergence of alternative institutions with the flexibility, ingenuity, and inclination to work with artists in and on the city. The alternative space emerged, in part, in response to conventional institutions’ failure to negotiate the connections between sculpture and urban space.

The Proprietary Claims of Sculpture and Alternative Spaces It was not inevitable that the Brooklyn Bridge Event would become the basis for Alanna Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. Nor was it obvious that the spatial and material methods of minimal art could be reconciled with those of real estate speculation. The Brooklyn Bridge Event began innocently enough. Alanna Heiss was a program director for The Municipal Art Society, one of the primary organizers of the overarching Brooklyn Bridge Festival. Under the auspices of the Municipal Art Society, but working largely independently, Heiss invited approximately twenty artists to produce work on two piers on the Manhattan side of the East River. For the “Performance Pier,” located on Pier 14, adjacent to the South Street Seaport fish market, Heiss invited Philip Glass and his company, the Mabou Mines Company, and Rudy Burckhardt to plan an evening of theatre, music, and film. The “Sculptors’ Pier” would occupy the two level pier immediately below the decks of the bridge and include the work of, perhaps, eighteen artists.721 Heiss’s core claim for the event was informed by Lindsay’s playbook, echoing Freedman and Heckscher’s “Sculpture in Environment” and Rose’s “Pier 45 Festival.”722 However, there were also crucial conceptual differences. “It is hoped,” the event flyer read, “that this opportunity will demonstrate New York City’s ability to draw on the resources of

721 An annotated list of artist notes the inclusion of: Carl Andre, , Bill Bolinger, Dieter Froese, Tina Girouard, Anne Healy, Jene Highstein, Jeffrey Lew, Sol LeWitt, Richard Nonas, Dennis Oppenheim, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, George Trakas, and Jill Reineking. MoMA PS1 Archives, I.A.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The list of artists evolved during the planning of the event and the work of most artists is documented in installation photographs. However, it is not clear if Oppenheim participated. All of the images of Oppenheim’s work in the Brooklyn Bridge Event folders of the PS1 archive are stock photographs of Parallel Stress, taken by Newsweek photographers one year before Heiss’s event. There is also no evidence of his participation in the Dennis Oppenheim Estate archive. 722 Heiss has some recollection of the Rose’s plans for the Pier 45 Festival, although it is not certain to what extent she was familiar with the arrangements and their failure. Interview with the author, September 20, 2016.

303 its artistic community. By allowing its artistic community involvement in the urban landscape, disused and abandoned areas can become meaningful space.”723 Heiss shared with the Lindsay administration the goal of revitalizing leftover urban space. The “Sculptors’ Pier” was, in fact, condemned and would be razed a few weeks after the event. However, city agencies were no longer organizing or even facilitating this type of sculptural reclamation. For the Brooklyn Bridge Event, they would only be granting permission to use city space. Moreover, it was ambiguous for whom, precisely, this area would be made meaningful. It is not clear if Heiss sought to revitalize the pier for the city, to attract new users to a potential recreational amenity, for artists as a space of work and exhibition, or for some other purpose. The distance of the Brooklyn Bridge Event from “Sculpture in Environment” and the “Pier 45 Festival” is evident in the bureaucratic subterfuge that Heiss had to perform to host her event. In 1967, the full weight of the city government was behind “Sculpture in Environment.” When major obstacles arose, such as the problem of insuring sculpture installed on city streets, Freedman and Heckscher were able to draw on considerable administrative resources to facilitate the exhibition.724 In 1971, on the other hand, Heiss had to work between the lines of city government to even get a permit. Because the pier directly under the Brooklyn Bridge was condemned, Heiss could not get permission to open the pier for a public festival. Instead, she sought permission to film on the pier. The participants described on her permit were listed, not sculptors or performers, but a group of fifty people “dressed as artists.”725 The potential spectators were classified as extras. Heiss’s bureaucratic ingenuity matched Freedman’s. However, whereas Freedman was working with and for the city government, Heiss was working around it. The sculptors, likewise, would no longer be placing discrete objects in the city’s public spaces, as they had for “Sculpture in Environment.” Instead, as the Brooklyn Bridge Event flyer claimed, artists would be directly involved with reshaping the urban landscape. For the most part, this meant that those “dressed as” artists would construct their work with

723 “Brooklyn Bridge event,” flyer, PS1, I.A.2, MoMA Archives, New York. 724 Doris Freedman, Oral history interview with Laurin Raikin and Barry Schwartz, May 24, 1971, Archives of American Art. 725 Motion Picture-Television Permit No. 000391, Economic Development Administration, Dept. Of Commerce & Industry, City of New York, May 11, 1971, PS1, I.A.2, MoMA Archives, New York.

304 material found on site. If a principle critique of “Sculpture in Environment” was directed at the discordance of studio-based sculpture placed on the street, this confusion of boundaries between art and city would not be a problem under the Brooklyn Bridge.726 Previous efforts by the Lindsay administration had sought to place sculpture in the everyday space of the city as an ameliorative gesture. The Brooklyn Bridge Event took place in a decidedly more marginal, unredeemable space. Lindsay’s progressive intention to foster new users and uses of urban space was, likewise, curtailed. Even though it was part of a much wider and high profile event, Heiss’s flyer made clear that her “Sculptors’ Pier” would not be open to the public. Instead, access would be granted by invitation only. Existing users of the space, already marginalized, would also be displaced by the sculptors. Local residents had once used the pier as an informal picnic area. However, by 1971, it was used primarily as a dumping ground for junked cars and scrap metal—a place where hobos lived and junkies shot up. These materials became the armature of sculpture and, in some cases, the social identities of the piers’ existing public would be appropriated and aestheticized. Gordon Matta-Clark was, after Heiss, a prime instigator of the event. Working under the bridge overnight, Matta-Clark roasted a whole pig, which he hoped would be the centerpiece of a feast for the insular community of participants. He had scattered bundles of twigs on the pier in preparation for the event, using them as fuel for his roast. Leftover bundles were then deployed as sculptures to adorn the rusted cars. The roast was conceived as a performative event inspired by the conditions of the pier. “The whole situation was sort of witch-like,” Matta-Clark recalled, “in the sense that the large space was dominated by the cars and the fire and the pig roasting, something that I tended all night long—a night vigil. The twigs were used as kindling. What didn’t get used as kindling was just thrown into the cars. Also, just the whole space. Before I got there it was scorched by fire. So there was something that had to do with fire and a raped environment.”727

726 Hilton Kramer, “The Studio Vs. the Street,” The New York Times October 15, 1967, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/10/15/105269339.html?pageNum ber=139; Lucy Lippard, “Beauty and the Bureaucracy,” The Hudson Review 20, No. 4 (Winter 1967-68): 650. 727 Gordon Matta-Clark, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978, PS1, III.B.93, MoMA Archives, New York. Interviews and questionnaires with many participants were conducted in the mid- to late-1970s. It is not clear who conducted the interviews or when, exactly, they took place.

305 Matta-Clark made clear that this event was a of work he had already been doing, “vacationing” in homeless camps under the Manhattan Bridge and using burnt out cars as a sculptural medium.728 He carefully framed this work as an art activity, distinguishing his sculptural contribution from the everyday junk from which it was derived. When asked about his collaboration with Heiss, Matta-Clark described her work as an organizer, while he worked as a “reorganizer of the property, always as a sculptor.”729 He also implicitly positioned his sculptural production as a logical extension of minimal art. His work on East River piers in 1971 involved, Matta-Clark suggested, “taking the existing mood or situation and transforming it into very simple things…”730 Carl Andre rhetorically invoked the vagabond in characterizing his own scavenging of materials the streets of Lower Manhattan, which he refined and brought to the gallery. Matta-Clark pushed this method to an extreme. “I was doing performances, installations, things that would amount to hoboism as an art experience…”731 The distance between real hobos and Matta-Clark’s hoboism can be measured, one could say, by the capacity of the latter to afford whole pigs to roast. Hoboism as an art experience, not only appropriates a social identity but also in a most concrete sense, forecloses a spatial claim made by the city’s homeless population. Andre also grounded his contribution to the Brooklyn Bridge Event in both the found character of the site and in his method of collecting urban detritus. Less than a year after his triumphant retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Andre suggested that his main activity involved roaming the street and scavenging for materials.732 For the Brooklyn Bridge Event, Andre collected thick lengths of aluminum wire that he found on the pier. Then, occupying an abandoned building near the bridge’s base, he

728 Carol Goodden’s photographs of Matta-Clark propping up and manipulating cars under the Manhattan Bridge were published in: Gordon Matta-Clark, “Jacks: The auto Demolition Debris Zone Rip Off Imitation Neighborhood Group Action Cars Abandoned Raised Propped Dismantled and Removed 24 Hour Service,” Avalanche no. 3 (Fall 1971): 24-29. He refers to his presence in homeless camps as “vacationing” in: Matta-Clark, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978. 729 Matta-Clark, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978. 730 Ibid. 731 Ibid. 732 Unknown, notes from a conversation with Carl Andre appended to Brooklyn Bridge Event questionnaire, ca. 1978, PS1 Archives, III.B.93, MoMA Archives, New York. In numerous published interviews, particularly in the early 1970s, Andre describes his regular practice of scavenging in the streets of Lower Manhattan. See chapter two.

306 arranged the wires in various tangled and linear formations, filling the floor of the room. Despite the understated nature of his sculpture, Andre was, with Sol LeWitt, the star attraction of the event. LeWitt’s contribution was even less obtrusive—a small square drawn in wax crayon on a pier wall.733 Nevertheless, Richard Nonas testified to the importance of Andre’s participation to younger artists, such as himself, who had little or no prior exposure or publicity. “That’s why Andre was important,” Nonas recalled. “The nature of his piece was very interesting; in fact, it was a very smart piece to make in that space, but what was important was that he was there, and that he lent his presence… and support to that show.”734 The significance of Andre’s work, as much as Matta-Clark’s, was in its formation and support of a small, selective community of like-minded artists. They were working in and with the social and material margins of the city but disconnected from the progressive vision of Lindsay’s early years as mayor, when sculpture held the promise of spatial reclamation for the public. “Basically,” Nonas suggested, “we were making work for each other.”735 Nonas, like Andre and several other participants, used scrap metal that he found on site to build his sculpture, Roebling’s Toe. He assembled a sprawling form with rusting sheets of corrugated tin, which he joined with wire (Figure 6.1). Nonas formed a large circle, perhaps twelve feet in diameter, with walls standing two or three feet tall. A jagged opening was left in the wall, so that one could enter the circle, and a long, twisting sheet of metal was attached to the exterior of the circle, extending some fifteen or twenty feet. Like Tony Smith’s Stinger and Andre’s floorworks, Nonas created a traversable sculptural space with a clearly delineated interior and exterior. The sculptural space was both of the city, built from urban scraps, yet isolating as an aestheticized urban form. “What I was interested in was the relationship of the inside space to the outside space, plus the relationship of both of those to the Bridge.”736

733 LeWitt recreated the drawing in 1999, now titled Crayola Square, in boiler room of P.S.1. http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/177. 734 Richard Nonas, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978, PS1, III.B.47, MoMA, New York. 735 Ibid. 736 Ibid.

307

Figure 6.1. Richard Nonas with Roebling’s Toe at the “Brooklyn Bridge Event.” May 24, 1971. “Sculptors’ Pier (under the Brooklyn Bridge),” New York; organized by the Municipal Art Society. MoMA PS1 Archives, II.A.1. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Courtesy of the Artist. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Yet the move to produce this refined spatial experience came at the expense of existing structures. According to Nonas, he pulled the corrugated tin off of sheds that he

308 found on the pier.737 These sheds would presumably have provided shelter for the homeless population that served as the most immediate contextual model for Matta-Clark’s aesthetics of hoboism. Once repurposed as sculpture, the tin sheets would have been alien to the former users of those structures. The careful delineation of inside and outside space that interested Nonas would have seemed relatively abstract and intangible for someone seeking a roof on a rainy day. Schooled on Andre’s razed sites, as Bourdon had described them in 1966, Nonas returned minimal art’s logic of spatial and material appropriation to the street. However, he was no longer working to upend the elite and neutral space of the gallery, as Andre had. Instead, Nonas temporarily displaced the city’s most marginal population, before they were permanently displaced once the pier itself was razed a few weeks later. Social displacement is the first order of gentrification. This was built into the Brooklyn Bridge Event, both in works such as Nonas’s and Matta-Clark’s, as well as in the overall structure of the exhibition. Jeffrey Lew, a participating sculptor and founder of 112 Greene Street, celebrated this connection.738 Lew contributed two works to Heiss’s event: a floating garden, which he released in the East River, and pieces of Plexiglas that had been treated with an absorbent material and hung from the pier. “My piece dealt with the rising of the tides and the ecological aspect of dirty water,” he explained. 739 Lew described the exhibition as whole, on the other hand, as a clear expression of gentrification. “I have to hand it to Alanna for always creating something that brings people together, that uses an environment, that uses the city—that urban resource. I just remember meeting Alanna and knowing she had a lot of good ideas about utilizing things around the city, giving them to the artist to use so that it becomes public property. In other words, if the artists don’t get it, usually nobody gets it. If the artists get it first, then usually someone else gets it next, and then someone else—it’s a continuum.”740 Sculpture could be, according to Lew, the first move in the reclamation and valorization of urban space.

737 Nonas, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978. 738 112 Greene Street was an influential alternative space founded by Lew in October 1970, with Rachel Wood and Alan Saret. Many of the artists that participated in the Brooklyn Bridge Event regularly exhibited at 112 Greene Street. 739 Jeffrey Lew, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978, PS1, III.B.37, The MoMA, New York. 740 Lew, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978.

309 Lew and his business partner at 112 Greene Street, Alan Saret, recognized that alternative spaces, such as their own and Heiss’s IAUR, were well positioned at the earliest stages of gentrification. What Jane Jacobs had once described as a ring of stagnation and decay around Lower Manhattan was, for Lew, Saret, and Heiss, a real estate opportunity.741 Lew and Saret explicitly tied the development of sculpture to their control and ownership of real estate. In a private gallery, they suggested, the artist was bound by the limitations of architecture and the prerogatives of property owners. In an alternative space owned and operated by artists, on the other hand, sculpture could develop new relationships with the architectural and environmental surround. “I think that space is always involved with the work that goes in it,” Saret suggested in an interview devoted to the founding of 112 Greene Street.742 “Now at Bykert’s that’s not possible because the tenant is bound by what the landlord says he can do. Whereas I have a free hand to alter things. For sculpture, especially, you can’t have a static kind of space. It always changes, no matter what. But an uptown environment resists that.”743 Lew, who owned the 112 Greene street building with his wife, Rachel Wood, agreed that direct control of real estate allowed him to produce sculpture on a new scale that was incompatible with the conventional gallery.744 Moreover, spaces such as 112 Greene Street, according to Lew, could serve as catalysts in the formation of a community of artists. “I’m doing this because it’s time for action and clear thinking,” Lew stated. “I think artists are really untogether as a group, but very together as individuals. The things which make you an artist can make you a revolutionary, can make you change your environment.”745 Lew and Saret drew a direct line connecting real estate, sculpture, and community. In some real sense, they embraced and fulfilled Jane Jacobs’s vision for active, grassroots neighborhood revitalization. 112 Greene Street was, in many ways, the immediate model for Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. While Heiss founded IAUR as a decentralized institution, rather

741 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 155. 742 Quoted in Willoughby Sharp, “An Interview with Alan Saret and Jeffrey Lew,” Avalanche No. 2 (Winter 1971): 12. 743 Ibid., 12. Saret had recently shown work at the Bykert Gallery, which was a notable uptown gallery located on East 81st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. 744 Ibid., 13. 745 Ibid., 13.

310 than one grounded in a single building, she shared many of the principles of sculpture, community, and real estate that were set forth by Lew and Saret. She also supported many of the same artists who exhibited at 112 Greene Street. Heiss looked to the city’s growing stockpile of vacant, underutilized, and deteriorating buildings—Jacobs’s ring of stagnation— as a potential resource for the community of artists. Her goal was to establish new spaces of exhibition, performance, and artists’ residencies and, simultaneously, to revalorize the derelict properties that she occupied. The potential to revalorize real estate was a central aspect of her appeal to property owners. Heiss was inspired, not only by existing spaces such as 112 Greene Street, but also by Hans Haacke’s landmark work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. With one hundred and forty two photographs of apartments in Manhattan, along with corresponding documents describing ownership and transactional data, Haacke exposed the derelict living conditions in the city’s tenements and the abusive protocols of the property owners.746 The rejection of the work by Thomas Messer, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the subsequent cancellation of Haacke’s 1971 solo exhibition, has rightly been positioned as a catalytic moment in the emergence of . It was also a crucial moment in Heiss’s consciousness of the shared space of art and real estate. Haacke’s rejection from the Guggenheim was evidence, according to Heiss, of the “critical need for greater understanding of the problems of urban land values and land management.”747 “My true love is real estate,” Heiss recently claimed.748 “I developed a kind of manual of how to use buildings for art shows. I would develop a building that was in different kinds of ownership.”749 In early 1971, as IAUR was beginning to take shape, Heiss consulted with

746 The best account of the work’s urban significance remains: Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum,” in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 20-37. 747 Alanna Heiss, early IAUR notes, ca. 1972, PS1, I.A.7, MoMA Archives, New York. 748 Alanna Heiss, interview with David Carrier, Joachim Pissarro, & Gaby Collins-Fernandez, The Brooklyn Rail, December 18, 2014, https://brooklynrail.org/2014/12/art/alanna-heiss. 749 Ibid.

311 real estate agents and city agencies to identify properties to work in.750 She directed her attention, primarily, to vacant spaces of industrial manufacturing, with particular attention to lofts, warehouses, and factories. She was less interested in ownership than in occupying properties on a short-term basis to revitalize them. She thought that property owners would ultimately benefit from occupancy and artists would benefit from living, working, and exhibition space at little to no cost. With her collaborator Brendan Gill, an architecture critic and preservation advocate, Heiss also believed that her strategy could protect significant buildings that had fallen into disrepair. “We would become involved, Heiss stated, “in the preservation of environments because that is the work we perceive not being preserved by museums.”751 The first base of IAUR was established at 10 Bleecker Street, in Manhattan’s Bowery neighborhood. Heiss signed a two-year lease on a loft building owned by Mrs. Oliver Bivins. The building had recently been damaged by a fire and was, by all accounts, in an extraordinary state of disrepair. Nevertheless, with a small loan from Robert Rauschenberg and renovation services of Richard Nonas, Heiss opened Workspace in the building in 1971.752 The first two floors would feature exhibitions and the top two floors would host studios.753 The idea of Workspace, according to Heiss, was to provide artists with the kind of flexible space to work and exhibit that Lew and Saret had established at 112 Greene Street, only without the burdens of property ownership. IAUR would act as an intermediary,

750 Interview with the author, September 20, 2016. IAUR was still technically working under the auspices of the Municipal Arts Society until August 7, 1972, when it was formally incorporated as an independent entity directed by Heiss. 751 Alanna Heiss, interview transcript, 1979, PS1, III.B.100, MoMA Archives, New York. Brendan Gill served as IAUR’s longtime Chairman of the Board and worked with Heiss at the founding moments of the institute. He was a noted preservationist and an architecture critic for The New Yorker. Heiss discusses Gill’s role in: Heiss, interview with David Carrier, Joachim Pissarro, & Gaby Collins-Fernandez, The Brooklyn Rail (2014). 752 Nonas, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978. 753 The condition of the building and the delineation of its functions are described in: Grace Glueck, “Brightening Up the Bowery,” The New York Times, July 23, 1972, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/07/23/91337592.html?action=clic k&contentCollection=Archives&module=LedeAsset®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article &pageNumber=148; and Barbara Rose, “More About the Care and Feeding of Artists,” New York Magazine, August 28, 1972, 50. There is no definitive record of the shows held at 10 Bleecker Street, nor the artists who worked there. It seems, at least, that Philip Glass and Charlemagne Palestine occupied studios there and Richard Nonas held the first show. Heiss, interview transcript, 1979.

312 renting space from property owners at below market rates and then subletting to artists with no markup in cost. As at 112 Greene Street, the deteriorated condition of the building was seen as both sympathetic and conducive to the type of work that would be produced within it. “The sort of work that artists are doing today,” according to Heiss “offers much greater opportunity for exhibitions outside of the normal context of art shows—with enormous return to both the artists and the viewer.”754 While artists would receive much needed space to work, Heiss also intended the arrangement to benefit the property owners. Bivins, the owner of 10 Bleecker Street, planned to rehabilitate the building eventually. In the meantime, Heiss offered a short-term source of revenue without requiring substantial renovations and promised that artists would vacate the property as soon as Bivins was ready to rehabilitate the building.755 10 Bleecker Street was conceived as a prototype to demonstrate the viability of IAUR as a real estate intermediary to both property owners and artists. Between 1972 and 1976, Heiss pursued numerous properties that could function as space for studios, residencies, exhibitions, performances, installations, and administration. Working closely with the City of New York’s Downtown Development Administration and Economic Development Administration (EDA), Heiss secured two underutilized floors in a city-owned building at 22 Reade Street in Lower Manhattan. On the floors immediately above the offices of the City Planning Commission, she established Idea Warehouse and a second iteration of Workspace. Heiss made a similar arrangement with the city for unused space in 108 Leonard Street, known as the Clock Tower Building. Designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1894 for the New York Life Insurance Company, the building was owned in the 1970s by the city, housing the Summons Court on the lower floors. Heiss leased the unused top floor and established the Clocktower Gallery, which served as an IAUR exhibition space from 1972 to 2003 and then as a home to Heiss’s radio station from 2003 until 2013, when the building was sold to a private developer.756

754 Glueck, “Brightening Up the Bowery,” (1972). 755 Ibid., (1972). 756 Heiss’s radio station, WPS1, was founded in 2004 and bills itself as the first internet-based radio station devoted exclusively to art. Since the closing of the Clocktower Gallery in 2013, the station has broadcast out of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn under the name Clocktower Radio. For more info, see: http://clocktower.org/about.

313 Heiss also worked with the city to lease a derelict industrial warehouse on Coney Island. Motivated in part by Lindsay’s politics of decentralization and community empowerment, Heiss actively sought to expand beyond her base in Manhattan and into the outer boroughs.757 The Coney Island site, owned by the EDA, was the former home of the Neptune Beverage Company. At the southern tip of Brooklyn, the building was surrounded by a mixed-use neighborhood of residences, warehouses, and light industry. Rechristened by Heiss as the “Condemnation Blight Sculpture Workshop,” the building and its grounds were used by Jene Highstein as a sculpture studio for much of 1973, culminating in an exhibition that October. Highstein’s sculpture, which at the time consisted of simple forms made from telephone poles and hollow iron tubing, was promoted for its material relation to the industrial neighborhood and for its capacity heighten one’s perception of the surroundings. “Highstein’s sculpture provides a perfect foil for this area,” the press release stated. “His tall, vertical forms…reflect the industrial quality of the neighborhood and draw the eye to other, like forms in the immediate environment.”758 Highstein’s sculpture was not just formally related to the minimal art of the mid 1960s; it was also rhetorically linked to the foundational texts of Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and others who connected sculpture to the industrial landscape. While this link between industrial and sculptural form was no longer novel in 1973, Heiss could now position it within EDA’s long-term plan to develop the industrial potential of the site.759 Sculpture was not used in Coney Island to organize a new use or users of a site, as it had in New York City’s parks, piers, and plazas in the 1960s. There was no question of converting the old Neptune Beverage Company to a park or playground. Instead, Highstein’s sculpture was explicitly positioned as an instrument to revalorize the property. Heiss’s real estate coup—the long-term lease of P.S.1 in Long Island City—was motivated by many of the same connections between sculpture and the marginal areas of the city. The huge red brick schoolhouse, which had been unoccupied since 1963 and was slated for demolition, was brought to Heiss’s attention by Donald R. Manes, Borough President of Queens in 1975. Within a year, Heiss had secured a twenty-year lease and completed

757 Interview with the author, September 20, 2016. 758 “Condemnation Blight Sculpture Workshop,” Press Release, October 1, 1973, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, PS1, I.A.3, MoMA, New York. 759 Ibid.

314 “minimal” renovations—the wordplay authored by Grace Glueck, conflating Heiss’s favored mode of sculpture with the raw state of the building when it reopened in 1976.760 The city’s original budget of $1.5 million for renovation was cut to $150,000 by Heiss. As the consulting architect Shael Shapiro explained, “Wherever we can do nothing, we’re doing it.”761 As with previous sites, Heiss positioned herself as an intermediary, working to address the needs of artists and the needs of the existing neighborhood. Artists would benefit from flexible exhibition space that was more suited to their work and studio space that was offered at a small fraction of the rents compared to prices in SoHo. At the same time, Heiss promoted P.S.1 as “focal point for community revitalization.”762 As in Coney Island, Heiss saw the mixed-use neighborhood in Queens, home to residences, light industry, and myriad warehouses, as essentially sympathetic with the art that would be produced and exhibited in the newly established institutional space. P.S.1’s inaugural exhibition opened in June 1976. The “Rooms” show included the work of over seventy artists and featured minimalists and their legatees. The participating artists included Carl Andre, Ronald Bladen, , Jene Highstein, , Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Richard Nonas, Walter de Maria, Fred Sandback, Alan Saret, Mary Miss, Jeffrey Lew, Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, Marjorie Strider, and many others. Artists were assigned discrete spaces and given very little, if any, constraints regarding their use of that space. Practically, the entire building—schoolrooms, closets, bathrooms, hallways, and stairwells, as well as the auditorium, schoolyard, boiler room, roof, and the exterior walls—was occupied with works of art, the vast majority of which were made on site. Many of the artists—fifty, by Artforum’s count—engaged the building directly, ripping up floorboards, gouging plaster, puncturing walls, and other violent interventions.763

760 Grace Glueck, “Abandoned School in Queens Lives Again as Arts Complex,” The New York Times, June 10, 1976, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1976/06/10/75620397.html?pageNumb er=79. The same joke was repeated in: Nancy Foote, “The Apotheosis of a Crummy Space,” Artforum 15, no. 2 (October 1976): 29. 761 Quoted in Glueck, “Abandoned School in Queens Lives Again as Arts Complex.” 762 Press Release, 1976, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, PS1 Archives, II.A.78, MoMA, New York. 763 Foote, “The Apotheosis of a Crummy Space,” (1976) 30.

315 “Rooms” occupies an important place in the development and institutionalization of minimal art, , anti-form, conceptual art, and post-minimalism. The exhibition was equally significant in Heiss’s synthesis of sculpture with speculative real estate and gentrification. Heiss toyed with two alternative titles for the exhibition: “Rooms: The Reality of Real Estate” and “Rooms, or where is the I in Realty” in a draft of a letter to Brian O’Doherty seeking funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.764 The subtitles were abandoned but the logic of real estate remained central to the exhibition. In the same draft letter, Heiss suggested that the opportunity to work at P.S.1 might expand artists’ conception of space. “The individual New Yorker’s concept of space in crowded Manhattan is a fairly restricted one,” Heiss wrote, “dependent entirely upon his immediate concerns. Certainly as far as the ‘art’ community goes, the conception of space is fairly removed from that of the construction company’s or the developer’s.”765 Artists had been pulling up floorboards and cutting holes in museum and gallery walls since the late 1960s. At P.S.1, in 1976, Heiss reframed these anti-institutional acts as a kind of training in the art of architectural redevelopment and revitalization. If Heiss founded IAUR with Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. in mind, her reclamation of P.S.1 begged the question of what lesson she learned from that work’s critique of negligent property owners. Shortly after P.S.1 opened, the underground newspaper Artworkers News accused IAUR of embracing the slumlord tactics that Haacke had exposed in tenement owners. In multiple columns, Artworkers News authors derided the conditions that artists were forced to work in and IAUR’s lack of investment to improve facilities. Artists often worked, according to Daniel Grant, “in burnt-out, unheated, slumlike conditions.”766 With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the

764 Both titles appear as handwritten notes in the margins of a draft letter from Alanna Heiss to Brian O’Doherty, undated (ca. 1976), PS1, I.A.7, MoMA Archives, New York. O’Doherty was at the time severing as Director of Visual and Media Arts at the NEA. He also participated in the “Rooms” exhibition under the pseudonym Patrick Ireland. 765 Alanna Heiss, draft letter to Brian O’Doherty, undated (ca. 1976). 766 Daniel Grant, “The High Cost of Cheap Space,” Artworkers News 6, no. 8 (March 1977): 1-2. Artworkers News was published by the National Artworkers Community, an offshoot of the Art Workers’ Coalition. For more details on this periodical, see: Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2011), 142, 240.

316 Arts, and numerous powerful art dealers, Grant argued, IAUR should at least provide safe working conditions. Artworkers News also criticized the detachment of Heiss’s institution, both from the wider community of artists and from the immediate neighborhoods in which IAUR established outposts. Grant suggested that P.S.1 was, not just isolated from the surrounding neighborhood, but essentially opposed to its needs. As evidence, he pointed to the long-term efforts by local residents to convert the vacant schoolhouse into a community center— efforts that were precluded when Heiss leased the space. Grant further noted that the vast majority of studio spaces at P.S.1 were rented to artists who resided in Manhattan and not to artists living in Long Island City or even in greater Queens.767 According to Grant and his fellow columnist, Katherine Weber, P.S.1 catered, not just to any Manhattan-based artists, but specifically to minimalists and conceptualists.768 Both authors considered this preference to be evidence of a conflict of interest, at the very least, as prominent dealers and collectors of minimal and conceptual art sat on IAUR’s board or otherwise funded Heiss’s projects.769 IAUR’s shows, Weber, concluded, “benefitted a select few, and used public money to enhance the value of private art.”770 If the Lindsay administration used public art to enhance the value of private space, Heiss effectively turned this strategy on its head, at least according to Artworkers News.

Women’s Work in a Boy’s Club Tina Girouard was an active participant in the emergence of alternative spaces and the formation of a community of artists in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s. She produced work for Heiss’s Brooklyn Bridge Event and “Rooms” exhibition. She regularly showed at 112 Greene Street from 1971 through 1974 and was a founding member of the Anarchitecture collaborative, which formed in 1973. And, with Matta-Clark and Carol

767 Grant, “The High Cost of Cheap Space,” (1977), 2. 768 Ibid., 2; and Katherine Weber, “Friends of the Institute,” Artworkers News 6, no. 8 (March 1977): 2. 769 Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy sat on IAUR’s board of directors, while Virginia Dwan, John Weber, and the collectors Herbert and Ethel Vogel contributed funds to Heiss’s projects. Alanna Heiss addresses the critique of her inclusion of dealers on IAUR’s board in: Heiss, interview with David Carrier, Joachim Pissarro, and Gaby Collins-Fernandez, The Brooklyn Rail (2014). 770 Weber, “Friends of the Institute,” (1977), 2.

317 Goodden, Girouard founded Food, a restaurant at 127 Prince Street that served as an incubator of both art and community in early 1970s SoHo. Yet Girouard’s work stands apart in key ways from that of her peers. Her work also points to the enduring problem of gender in the historiography of minimal art, including this dissertation’s attempt to write its urban history. Girouard worked within the formal and material protocols of minimal art, privileging simple sculptural forms and the remnants of industrial manufacturing. Yet Girouard eschewed the power tools and scraps of metal through which Andre, Morris, Serra, Nonas, and Matta-Clark evoked manual labor and industrial production. Instead, Girouard built simple, geometric sculptures and organized performances around textile production, food preparation, and housekeeping—all forms of labor associated implicitly with women’s work. While Richard Nonas was repossessing tin sheds under the Brooklyn Bridge, Girouard was working to engage the local community that used the pier. Girouard arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge Event equipped only with a broom. She sought an intimate space in which to work and occupied a room inside one of the bridge’s main stanchions. For her work, Swept House, Girouard delineated a rectilinear space by sweeping lines on the floor in what she imagined to be the outlines of a ranch house (Figure 6.2). She then proceeded to tidy up the area and identify interior spaces, such as a kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room, inside her neatly piled lines of dust and debris. After she established the perimeter of her house, Girouard enlisted the help of the neighborhood kids that regularly hung out on the pier. The kids, who had offered to help Girouard with her work, were sent to retrieve any domestic-type items that they could find on the pier. They returned with Jene Highstein’s chocolate cake and Matta-Clark’s soda. “They went around and got me this food,” Girouard recalled. “I’m sure they thought that they were ripping off the others; they didn’t consider me part of the group.”771 Overnight, the same group of kids vandalized much of the work in the show but, according to Girouard, “they didn’t even step on one of my little swept up lines.”772 The day of the opening, at Girouard’s request, the kids brought a stove that they had found on the pier to Swept House and made torches and a fire to light the space. A few dusty carpets and runners, as well as some broken chairs and makeshift beds were added to

771 Tina Girouard, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978, PS1, III.B.21, The MoMA Archives, New York. 772 Ibid.

318 fully furnish the space. “It turned out to be a mutual performance,” Girouard concluded. The homey scene was captured in Girouard’s photographs of the kids sitting around a table complete with plates and utensils, all drawn on the ground with chalk.

Figure 6.2. Tina Girouard, Swept House, “Brooklyn Bridge Event.” May 24, 1971. New York. Photograph by Tina Girouard. MoMA PS1 Archives, 2464. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Like Andre and Nonas, Girouard produced a work by rearranging debris that she found on the pier. She was interested, also, in shaping an aesthetic space within the context of the surrounding urban environment. However, whereas most of the other artists made work that was blind, isolated, or even hostile to the local users of the pier, Girouard produced a work that was open, inclusive, and welcoming. She did this, paradoxically, by superimposing an archetypal form of suburban private property—the ranch house—on the marginal urban space under the bridge. While Swept House was clearly framed by tropes of domesticity and gendered labor, it also engaged in the rhetoric of clean streets and urban order. When planning for the Brooklyn Bridge, Girouard did not originally intend to construct an imaginary house in

319 outlines of dust. Instead, she reported, “I thought I was just going to clean the Bridge and…really tidy up.”773 Whether or not she did so consciously, Girouard participated in the politicized discourse of street sweeping. In late 1960s and early 1970s New York, the act of street sweeping was conspicuously associated the social condition of the city and, moreover, who claimed authority over urban space. In April 1967, for example, in response to a sanitation strike, residents of the Greenwich Village organized the Third Street Sweep-In to clean up the neighborhood. As part of his push to “cleanup” Times Square in 1968, Lindsay promoted his “Operation Big Sweep” by waving a broom over the sidewalk in an unconvincing photo-op.774 To celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, Lindsay again took his broom to Union Square and publically swept the streets while news cameras and journalists recorded the scene.775 As discussed in chapter four, the Association for a Better New York assumed this rhetoric of urban hygiene in 1971 when they unveiled their “Clean Sweep” campaign in Midtown Manhattan. For the architect and theorist Bernard Rudofsky, writing in 1969, the act of street sweeping amounted to a public performance of civic responsibility and urban order. “No doubt we have here the ritual of faith that places cleanliness among moral virtues,” Rudofsky claimed, in the midst of an extended polemic on sweeping. “What seems to us a morbid preoccupation with keeping clean is nothing short of a state of grace.”776 In the same year, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her feminist “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” in which she argued for the recognition and cultural elevation of private, domestic work performed by women. Girouard’s Swept House is part of this social history of sweeping, in which household chores are promoted to the realm of the politics and aesthetics of public space. Her pursuit of a tidy area in the midst of a landscape of urban detritus was a counterpoint to the entropic aesthetics embraced by Andre, Nonas, Lew, and Matta-Clark under the Brooklyn Bridge. In several exhibitions at 112 Greene Street, Girouard continued to engage with the gendered realties of labor, domestic and industrial, as well as the formal and material

773 Girouard, Brooklyn Bridge Event interview transcript, ca. 1978. 774 Sam Roberts, ed., America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2010), 100. 775 Paul Cunningham, “First Earth Day: Interview with NYC Mayor John Lindsay,” NBC Today Show, April 22, 1970 (New York: NBC Universal), https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=41371. 776 Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1969), 54.

320 protocols of minimal art. Her first work at 112 Greene Street, Live House, was shown in May 1971, the same month as Heiss’s Brooklyn Bridge Event. Occupying the main gallery space, as well as the basement, Girouard invited several friends to “perform a room in a house.”777 Sheets of fabric were hung between the columns and the walls to demarcate distinct areas for the performers. Carol Goodden selected the basement and decided to perform a back porch there. She bought crickets from a local pet store, built a screen box in which they could sit in the window and chirp, and then spent the rest of the performance reading a book in a hammock that she had strung between two columns.778 Girouard performed the kitchen. In the main exhibition space, directly on the floor, she made a large square with flour, sugar, water, cayenne pepper, and coffee. Girouard then drew table settings into her field of ingredients.779 If the material and performative aspects of Live House appear remote from the concerns of minimal art, the simple geometry of Girouard’s piece, as well as her use of the floor, would seem to refer implicitly to the Carl Andre square floorworks. Andre had, in fact, exhibited a floorwork at group show at 112 Greene Street in April 1971, just a month before Girouard staged Live House. Likewise, a reference to Andre seemed to lurk just below the surface of Girouard’s subsequent exhibition at 112 Greene Street, Four Stages, held in December 1972. For that show, she created four large squares of patterned textiles, each composed of twelve-by-three foot fabric strips. Once assembled, the textile squares had the exact measurements—twelve- by-twelve feet—of the floorworks that Andre had shown at Dwan Gallery in 1969. Girouard’s hung one square from the ceiling, two suspended between the columns and wall, and one placed directly on the floor. She exhibited similar twelve-foot square works, made of patterned fabric and linoleum and installed directly on the floor, in shows held at 112 Greene Street in September 1973 and January 1974. Like Andre, Girouard used sculpture as a means of proprietary spatial intervention. However, Girouard has an essentially different expectation of comportment within her sculptural space. While Andre floorworks compel a

777 Tina Girouard, quoted in Robyn Brentano and Mark Savitt, ed., 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street: History, Artists & Artworks (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 16. 778 Goodden describes her performance in: Jessamyn Fiore and Louise Sørensen, ed., 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) (New York: Radius Books and David Zwirner, 2012), 53. 779 Brentano and Savitt, ed., 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street, 16; Fiore and Louise Sørensen, ed., 112 Greene Street, 52.

321 physical engagement, he has made clear that his sculptures are not stages for performance.780 Instead, they are conceived as spaces of hushed contemplation and heightened perception of pure materiality. In contrast, Girouard positioned her works as sculptures and frameworks for performance. After installing Four Stages, she invited and encouraged troupes, including Mabou Mines and Grand Union, to perform within her reconfigured architectural setting. Whereas Andre remained the singular author of the sculptural field, Girouard created the conditions for an essentially collaborative work. One of the core concerns of minimal artists, and Andre especially, was the repurposing of industrial materials for sculpture. These materials, arranged in simple geometric and modular forms were conceived to heighten one’s sense of space, self, and environment. Girouard has never been considered part of the minimalist canon, yet the work that she produced in the early 1970s shared the formal, material, and theoretical constraints championed by Andre and his peers. One could say that Girouard was even more direct the way that she configured material history to be physically experienced. Like Andre, Girouard produced works that could be walked on. In so doing, she created an interventional sculptural space within an existing architectural surround. However, Andre’s work involved a dislocation of materials, from their origins in Lower Manhattan—salvage yards and the sidewalks in front of machine shops—to the ostensibly pure and neutral space of the gallery. Girouard’s fabric squares, likewise, engaged the remnants of industrial manufacturing in Lower Manhattan but she kept the materials that she used in the spaces tied to their manufacture. Before it became alternative exhibition and work space in 1970, 112 Greene Street had housed a textile waste storage and processing facility. And, before it was used to process textile waste, it would very likely have housed some kind of factory for fabric production or printing. The area that became known as SoHo in the 1970s had been dominated by textile production and processing from the late 19th century up until the 1960s. Many loft buildings, such as 112 Greene Street, were gradually converted from fabric manufacturing to waste processing over this span, before ultimately becoming vacant or occupied by artists’ lofts.781

780 Carl Andre, interview with the author, December 3, 2014. 781 On the identity of SoHo as a site of textile production, see: Chester Rapkin, The South Houston Industrial Area: An Old Loft Section in Lower Manhattan (New York: New York City Planning Commission, 1963), 12-16.

322 Rather than refining and dislocating the remnant materials of New York’s former industrial base, as had Andre, Girouard relocated her textile squares to their former site of manufacture. In a 1973 interview published in Avalanche magazine, Girouard made clear that this engagement with material history was an important part of her work. “The materials are chosen because they have some vibrance of their own,” Girouard stated, while preparing for her “Patterns” show, “they have a history; they come to me as part of my history.”782 Like Andre, Girouard insisted that she altered her materials as little as possible, so that one could directly experience the material’s long history. “In Wall Space Stage, the fabric was hung in complete lengths and clothespinned. It was presented to the audience in a very direct way because I felt that it was already a statement in itself. I’m collaborating with the fabric or the linoleum or the wallpaper, not trying to transform it in any way. […] I’m continuing the history of the material that I use, maintaining it. My work becomes a museum and holds, extends the objects that it’s made of—some of life’s garbage that is being recycled.”783 Even the title of the Girouard’s Avalanche interview—“If I’m Lyin’ I’m Dyin’—calls to mind Andre’s and his critical advocates’ claim that his sculptures make the truth of materials accessible to embodied experience.784 Girouard shared many of the formal, material, and spatial concerns as peers such as Andre, Morris, and Smith. These men form the center of the canon of minimal art. Girouard also worked in some of the same spaces and within the same social circles as her male counterparts. Yet she is entirely absent from the historiography of minimal art. It is true the Girouard only began to show her work in the early 1970s and she was not, therefore, included in the first exhibitions of the mid-1960s in which the idea of minimal art emerged. The same is true, however, of Richard Nonas and Gordon Matta-Clark, who repeatedly worked alongside Girouard. It is also true for Richard Serra, who first exhibited in New York City in 1969, or Mel Bochner, who held his first solo show at 112 Greene Street in

782 Tina Girouard, “‘If I’m Lyin’ I’m Dyin’: A Dialogue with Liza Béar,” Avalanche 8 (Summer Fall 1973): 50. 783 Girouard, “‘If I’m Lyin’ I’m Dyin,’” 50. 784 The claims of truth to materials made accessible in Andre’s floorworks are discussed in chapter two. For a few key examples, see: Philip Leider, “To Introduce a New Kind of Truth,” The New York Times, May 25, 1969, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/05/25/110093041.html?pageNumb er=190; Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum 8, No. 10 (June 1970): 57.

323 March of 1971, just two months before Girouard’s debut. Yet the links between the work of these men and the formative minimalist work of the mid-1960s is secure, while the work of Girouard and many of female peers remains outside of the historiographical margins. If we accept Judith Butler’s feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and the implied masculinity of its conception of body and subjectivity, than one can say that a structural bias was written into the development of minimal art’s historiography from its first word. If Merleau-Ponty’s universal subject is implicitly male, as Butler argues, and this universal subject is theorized anew around the sculptures of Andre, Morris, and Smith, there remains little room in this space for women’s work.785 An inherent part of our understanding of this period of sculpture, as Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued, is grounded in images of Robert Morris driving forklifts and chomping cigars, Andre dressed in workman’s overalls and moving piles of metals plates of beams of wood, and Richard Serra heroically casting molten lead.786 It is difficult to reconcile these muscular acts in a single, coherent discourse with Girouard’s arrangement of flowery textiles or her simple act of sweeping. Yet, fundamentally, they are of the same aesthetic order. Alternative spaces and institutions, such as 112 Greene Street and IAUR, opened new opportunities for women to work in and with the city. Yet the city itself remained a hostile place and the experience of the street is always gendered. Women were confronted with obstacles of visibility, accessibility, and safety that male artists did not face. addressed challenges of visibility and safety stemming from the gendered experience of both the street and minimal art in an impromptu performance, Birdcalls, of 1971. Lawler and her friend, Martha Kite, had been working long hours on the “Pier 18” show, based on a decrepit structure in the Hudson River. The show, organized by Willoughby Sharp, featured performances and projects by twenty-seven artists, all men. Many of the standard-bearers of minimal and post-minimal art were featured, including Vito Acconci, Robert Morris, Robert Barry, Richard Serra, Dennis Oppenheim, Keith Sonnier, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, and Michael Snow. Lawler devised Birdcalls as a way to protest the invisible contribution of

785 See chapter one. Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85-100. 786 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 85-100.

324 women on Pier 18 and to insure their safety on the dark walks home. “The women involved were doing tons of work,” Lawler recalled, “but the work being shown was only by male artists. Walking home at night in New York, one way to feel safe is to pretend you’re crazy or at least be really loud. […]…we’d sing off-key and make other noises. Willoughby Sharp was the impresario of this project, so we’d make a ‘Willoughby Willoughby’ sound, trying to sound like birds. This developed into a series of bird calls based on artists’ names.”787 Lawler’s locating of repetition in nature offered an ironic coda to male minimalists’ pursuit of modular form in industrial production, architecture, and pure geometry. Despite the greater threat, women did work in the street and other potentially hostile urban environments, as Girouard’s example makes clear. Rosemarie Castoro and Trisha Brown, likewise, worked on the margins of minimal art’s canon and produced numerous works directly in the city. In 1969, in conjunction with the “Street Works” exhibitions organized by John Perreault and Lucy Lippard, Castoro produced multiple spatial interventions and fantastical proprietary claims to New York City’s public space. On March 21, 1969, for example, Castoro attached four gallons of white enamel paint to her bicycle, and punched a hole in the bottom of the cans. She then rode up and down 52nd Street leaving a splattered trail behind her until the supply of paint was exhausted. A month later, she affixed aluminum tape to sidewalks and streets, delineating a coherent area between 13th and 14th Streets and 5th and 6th Avenues. Castoro imagined that area inside her line would fill with water and designated the space outside of the tape as her Atoll.788 Castoro, like Girouard, used minimal means to make her spatial claim to the city. Trisha Brown, on the other hand, developed protocols of repetition and simple form for the

787 Louise Lawler, quoted in: Douglas Crimp, “Prominence Give, Authority Taken: An Interview with Louise Lawler,” in Louise Lawler: An Arrangement of Pictures (New York: Assouline, 2000), unpaginated. Lawler’s Birdcalls are further discussed in: Rosalyn Deutsche, “Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum,” in Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back), ed. Helen Molesworth (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2006), 130-132; and Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press & Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 163. 788 Rosemarie Castoro, interview with Alex Bacon, The Brooklyn Rail, October 5, 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/10/art/rosemarie-castoro-with-alex-bacon. For more on the “Street Works” exhibitions, see: John Perrault, “Street Works,” Arts Magazine 44, no. 3 (December 1969-Janaury 1970): 18-20; and Lucy Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time: A Survey of Street Works Downtown” in New York—Downtown: SoHo, ed. René Block (Berlin: Akademie der Künste—Berliner Festwochen, 1976), 181-210.

325 performing body. She then deployed this body on rooftops, streets, and parks in New York City. In Roof Piece, first performed in 1971, minimal and repeated gestures became a mechanism for communication among eleven dancers who were distributed on roofs across a twelve-square-block in SoHo. Brown, standing on the roof of 53 Wooster Street, initiated movements, which were then repeated sequentially by dancers on adjacent buildings, until the last performers who occupied the rood of 381 Lafayette Street completed the movement. In Roof Piece, Brown explained, “the emphasis was on immediate and exact duplication of the observed dance and the silent passing of this dance to a series of performers down the line.”789 The repetitive form of chimneys, water towers, and other mechanical structures on the roofs of SoHo were as much a part of the performance as the dancers. Recently, there have been concerted efforts to reinstate the work of Brown, Castoro, and other women in the historiography of minimal art.790 Yet there remain structural obstacles to this revisionist project, particularly in the writing of an urban history of their work. The artists’ archives remain largely inaccessible or closed to research. More

789 Trisha Brown, “Three Pieces,” The Drama Review 19, no. 1 (March 1975): 27. Roof Piece was first performed in November 1971 and again, to wider acclaim, in June and July of 1973. 790 This is true particularly for Brown. See, for example: Maurice Berger, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2002; Susan Rosenberg, “Trisha Brown’s Minimalism,” in A Different Way to Move: Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980, ed. Marcella Lista (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 136-143; and Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 65-150. Carrie Lambert Beatty’s work has been a catalyst for this revisionist effort. See: Carrie Lambert Beatty, “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Studies in the 1960s,” in A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 103-110; Carrie Lambert Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Amanda Jane Graham has recently published a compelling counter-argument that assesses Trisha Brown’s engagement with the architecture of Lower Manhattan. Graham, however, disputes the conscription of Brown to the historiography of minimal art and uses, as evidence, Brown’s dismissal of any affiliation with minimalism. While Graham’s argument has much merit, she does not account for the fact that virtually all of the artists whose work has been described as “minimalist” have rejected that classification. Amanda Jane Graham, “Space Travel: Trisha Brown’s Locus,” Art Journal 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 26-45. Castoro’s place in the context of Minimal art’s development is the subject of the exhibition, “Rosemarie Castoro: Focus at Infinity,” organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Her work was included in E. C. Goossen’s important 1966 exhibition “Distillation” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. See: E. C. Goossen, “Distillation: A Joint Showing,” Artforum 4, no. 3 (November 1966): 31-33; and Tanya Barson, et al., Rosemarie Castoro: Focus at Infinity (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Comtemporani de Barcelona, 2017).

326 importantly, however, the majority of women working along the margins of minimal art had no gallery representation and lacked the robust institutional support that benefitted their male counterparts. The work of Castoro, Girouard, and Brown barely registers in the records of galleries and museums that served as minimal art’s earliest patron institutions. Likewise, women’s work was not often featured in major municipal exhibitions organized by the Lindsay administration. So, when women such as Castoro, Girouard, and Brown worked in the city, they typically did so independently or in conjunction with small, guerilla-style exhibitions. Documentation and record keeping were rarely high priorities. Regardless, a comprehensive urban history of minimal art would have to account for the work of women who have long been kept outside the margins of historiography.

*

The revitalization of New York’s derelict spaces was a core part of John V. Lindsay’s project. It began in 1967 with Tony Smith in Bryant Park and, when the city government could no longer fund the work, this project was taken up by private entities, including alternative spaces. Empowered by Lindsay’s image of the city, artists and their patrons were active and conscious participants in New York’s spatial transition from industrial manufacturing to managerial capital, even when they were not immediately beholden to the city’s power brokers. The connective threads linking sculpture and gentrification are as much a part of the legacy of minimal art as are its reverberations in an ostensibly autonomous history of sculpture. As capitalism consolidated urban space in late 1960s and early 1970s New York, artists and organizers such as Matta-Clark, Girouard, Lew, and Heiss sought to assert their agency over the city. They were motivated by Lindsay’s progressive politics of public space and, simultaneously, by the opportunities of private property in economically precarious urban territories. While resisting sculpture’s instrumental role in the concentration of power over the city, these legatees of minimal art positioned their work as a proprietary counterclaim to urban environment. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which by the early 1970s was sublimated in the discourse of sculpture, remained a guiding theoretical foundation for sculpture’s enduring claim to urban space. “The body,” Merleau-Ponty wrote,

327 “is our general medium for having a world.”791 This generative idea, once filtered through Andre’s and Oppenheim’s assertions of spatial seizure, became available as a broader proprietary claim. For subsequent artists, the embodied engagement of the environment became a means of asserting a right to the city. Minimal art’s urban footing and the Lindsay administration’s policies of public space opened new areas of work and visibility for artists of the 1970s, even as the Lindsay administration’s support for sculptural renewal eroded. In fact, the waning force of the municipal government opened a space for bodies that did not conform to Lindsay’s image of the city. Formerly invisible and suppressed bodies, including both Girouard’s and the children who occupied her Swept House, came to occupy urban spaces that were temporarily vacated by the city’s power brokers. However, artists emerging in the wake of minimal art, such as Girouard and Oppenheim, would no longer be bound by the surrogacy of sculptural presences, nor its gallery oases. Likewise, the city would not have to be reduced, refined, and brought to the gallery to become aesthetic. Instead, the artists of the 1970s worked with real bodies and real spaces. The path expanding out from minimal art, for many artists, was a path into a direct engagement with the city and the bodies that occupied it. The work of Gordon Matta-Clark and Tina Girouard represent two models that extend sculpture’s claim to the city—the former is appropriative and obstructive and the latter is inclusive and open to existing communities.

791 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 146.

328 Illustrations

Figure 1.1. John V. Lindsay diving into a swimming pool on the campaign trail, Coney Island, 1965. Photograph by Katrina Thomas. Katrina Thomas/Museum of the City of New York. 2011.8.7.

Figure 1.2: Lyman Kipp, Boss Linco, Central Park 1967. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 1.3: Antoni Milkowski, Diamond, Kips Bay Plaza, 1967. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 1.4: Tony Smith, Night, 1966, Philadelphia. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 1.5: Claes Oldenburg measuring Placid Civic Monument, 1967, Central Park. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 2.1. Carl Andre, Untitled (Pizza), 1961-62. Photo by Hollis Frampton. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.2. Carl Andre, Timber Piece, 1965 (reconstruction 1970). © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.3. Carl Andre, Timber Piece, 1965 (reconstruction 1970). © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.4. Carl Andre, Crib, Coin, and Compound, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1965. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.5. Dow, “Remember Styrofoam. O.K. Now forget it.” As advertised in Progressive Architecture 46, no. 7 (July 1965).

Figure 2.6. Carl Andre, Equivalents I-VIII, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1966. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.7. Carl Andre, 144 Steel Square & 144 Aluminum Square. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.8. Figure 2.8. Carl Andre, Photograph by Larry Fried containing installation views of Carl Andre’s 144 Magnesium Square & 144 Lead Square at Dwan Gallery, 1969. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.9. Carl Andre, 37th Piece of Work, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1970. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

329 Figure 2.10. Carl Andre, Fall, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1970. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.11. Carl Andre, Fermion, Seagram Building Plaza, 1981. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.12. Carl Andre, Stone Field Sculpture, 1976. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 3.1. Tony Smith overseeing installation in Bryant Park, January 20, 1967. Photograph by New York City Parks Department. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.2. Tony Smith, The Elevens Are Up, 1963. Photograph by New York City Parks Department. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.3. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.4. Tony Smith, Amaryllis, 1965. South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.6. Tony Smith, Cigarette, 1966, Tower Plaza, Hartford, Connecticut. Photograph by Edward Saxon. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.7. Tony Smith exhibition, 1967, Bryant Park, New York City. Photograph by David Gahr. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.8. Tony Smith, The Snake is Out & Marriage (foreground), Amaryllis & Spitball (background), 1967, Bryant Park, New York. Photograph by David Gahr. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.9. Tony Smith sitting on Willy, with Amaryllis, The Snake is Out, and Spitball, 1967, Bryant Park. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.10. Tony Smith, Cigarette, 1967, Bryant Park. Photograph by John A. Ferrari. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.11. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, South Orange, New Jersey. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.12. Tony Smith, Stinger, 1968, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.13. Tony Smith, Photomontage with Hubris, 1969. © 2017 Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 4.1. Figure 4.1. Alexander Calder, Photograph by Fred McDarrah of Alexander

330 Calder’s Little Fountain and Triangle with Ears at Lenox Terrace, New York, 1967. Fred W. McDarrah, All Rights Reserved. © 2018 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 4.2. Antoni Milkowski, Diamond, Kips Bay Plaza, 1967, Kips Bay, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.3. David Von Schlegell, Untitled, 1967, Union Carbide Building Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.4. Les Levine, All Star Cast, 1967, Time & Life Building Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.5. Bernard Kirschenbaum, Untitled, 1967, Central Park, New York. Photograph by Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.6. Lyman Kipp, Boss Linco, 1967, Central Park, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure. 4.7. Paul Frazier’s, Cuboid Shift # 2, 1967, City Hall Plaza, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.8. Charles Ginnever’s Midas and Fog, 1967, Charles Schurz Park, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.9. Tony Smith, Snake, 1967, Lincoln Center, New York. Photograph by Fred McDarrah, All Rights Reserved.

Figure 4.10. Antoni Milkowski, Skagerrak, 1972, as presently installed in Bellevue South Park, New York.

Figure 5.1. Dennis Oppenheim, Site Markers, 1967, in “Scale Models and Plans,” May 1967, Green Gallery, San Francisco. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.2. Dennis Oppenheim, Viewing Station #1, blue line print, May 1967. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.3. Dennis Oppenheim, Dead Furrow, sepia line print, 1967. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.4. Dennis Oppenheim, Landslide, 1968, Long Island, New York. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.5. detail: Contour Lines Scribed in Swamp Grass, 1968 Color photo. Location: West Haven, CT. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.6. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

331 Figure 5.7. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

Figure 5.8. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

Figure 5.9. Dennis Oppenheim, Model for Highway as Environment, 1968.

Figure 5.10. Dennis Oppenheim, City as a Sheet of Poetry, 1968. Scale model. Plastic sheet. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.11. Dennis Oppenheim, Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange, 1969, Black and white photos, text. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.12. Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel Stress, 1970 (as published in Newsweek, May 25, 1970). Photograph by Robert McElroy.

Figure 5.13: Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel Stress, May 1970. Photo documentation. Photos: Robert McElroy. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 5.14. Dennis Oppenheim, Radiant Fountains, 2010. Location: Freeway to international airport, Houston. Steel, acrylic, programmed lighting. Each tower, 75’. Image courtesy of Dennis Oppenheim Estate.

Figure 6.1. Richard Nonas with Roebling’s Toe at the “Brooklyn Bridge Event.” May 24, 1971. “Sculptors’ Pier (under the Brooklyn Bridge),” New York; organized by the Municipal Art Society. Brooklyn Bridge Event, New York. MoMA PS1 Archives, II.A.1. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Courtesy of the Artist. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 6.2. Tina Girouard, Swept House, “Brooklyn Bridge Event.” May 24, 1971. New York. Photograph by Tina Girouard ©. MoMA PS1 Archives, 2464. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

332 Archives

Association for a Better New York archive.

Avalanche Magazine Archives. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

Barbara Rose papers, 1940-1993. Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 930100.

Barbara Rose papers, 1962-cicra 1969. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Betty Parsons Gallery records and personal papers, ca. 1921-1991. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Christopher Tunnard Papers, MS 1070. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

David Bourdon Papers, 1941-2000. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

David Bourdon Papers. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

Dennis Oppenheim Estate Archives.

Department of Painting and Sculpture Projects Index. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, California and New York, New York) records, 1959-circa 1982. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Dwan Gallery Archives. MSS.002. Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives. Bard College.

Exhibition records of the Contemporary Study Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art, 1943-1975. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Institute of Contemporary Arts records, 1963-2007, Ms. Coll. 777. Kislak Center for Special Collections, rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

John B. Hightower Papers. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

John Vliet Lindsay Papers, MS 592. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Kevin Lynch papers, MC 208. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lucy R. Lippard Papers, 1930s-2010. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

MoMA PS1 Archives. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

333 Office of the Mayor, John V. Lindsay records. Municipal Archives, City of New York City. Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. records and records, 1961-2006. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Public Art Fund Archive, MSS 270. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

Public Art project files. New York City Parks.

Reports and Pamphlets. The Museum of Modern art Archives, New York.

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, 1905-1987. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Samuel Wagstaff papers, 1932-1985. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives.

Seth Siegelaub Papers. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Tibor de Nagy Gallery records, 1941-1993. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Tony Smith Estate Archives.

Wadsworth Atheneum archives.

Whitney Museum of American Art Archives.

334 Bibliography

Newspapers and magazines:

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335 Arnold, Martin. “Luxury Housing Limited by City.” The New York Times, March 6, 1962. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/03/06/90136249.html?pag eNumber=1.

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336 Burks, Edward C. “Mayor, Scoring I.L.A Pickets, Moves Pier Fete to Central Park.” The New York Times, September 26, 1970. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/09/26/90615730.html?pag eNumber=1.

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