1. “a long habit of not thinking a thing
wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of
being right, and raises at first formidable
outcry in defence of custom. But the
tumult soon subsides.
Time makes more converts than reason.”
Thomas Paine
Common Sense
First published 1776

2. End of Modernism
• Movements in art from
the mid to late 60’s
onwards substantially
changed what art
could look like, how it
could be made, what it
could be made from,
how you looked at it,
‘read’ it and ‘interacted
with it.
2

3. Values of Modernity
• Emancipation from mysticism
and superstition
• The power of the rational, the
scientific
• Knowledge based on
objectivity - a solid sense of
truth
• ‘Mans’ ability to engineer for
himself a better tomorrow -
faith in planning - future
utopias
• Belief in the inevitable linear
progress of humanity

4. Crisis of Modernity - 1960’s - the beginning of Postmodernism
• A generational sense of skepticism
regarding the potential for human
social emancipation and material
improvement through scientific
progress
• A generational disillusionment with
the values, authority, morality,
culture and power of those in
‘charge’.
• Political, personal and cultural
dissent. A call for a subversion of the
old order
• Criticisms from the margins - the
return of the repressed, the
excluded.
• A fracturing and fragmentation of
society - a new plurality

5. A Change is Gonna Come

6. If a six was nine - Out with the old in with the new

8. Vietnam

9. Hope Extinguished - a Growing Militancy
Text
Assassination of Martin Luther King

10. Communiqué 9
WE are getting closer.
We are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the oppressive State
machine...
secret files in the universities
work study in the factories
the census at home
social security files
computers
TV
Giro passports
work permits
insurance cards.
Bureaucracy and technology used against the people...
to speed up our work
to slow down our minds and actions
to obliterate the truth.
Police computers cannot tell the truth. They just record our `crimes'. The
pig
murders go unrecorded. Stephen McCarthy Peter Savva, David Owale --
The murder
of these brothers is not written on any secret card.
We will avenge our brothers.
If they murder another brother or sister, pig blood will flow in the streets.
168 explosions last year. Hundreds of threatening telephone calls to govt,
bosses, leaders.
The AB is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their
pockets
and anger in their minds.
We are getting closer.
Off the system and its property.
Power to the people.

11. • 1968
“A year that marked
every generation on
every continent. ..it
was a year of hope,
when those who
accepted the world
as it is were the ones
who felt disinherited,
while the wretched of
the earth, the
dispossessed, began
to discover their
inheritance”
Tariq Ali
Marching on the
Streets

12. May 68 - Student Protests

13. Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni (1970)
13

14. The Dematerialisation of the Art Object
From this to that...
14

15. Typical features of Modernist Art
• Medium specific - the established
time honoured disciplines of painting
and sculpture
• The production of autonomous art
objects
• Purely optical / visual - form over
content
• “The ideal modernist spectator was a
disembodied eye, lifted out of the flux
of life in time and history,
apprehending the resolved
(‘significant) aesthetic form in a
moment of instantaneity” Paul Wood

16. The reaction against..........
• The domination of American
abstract expressionism
• For a younger generation this
works formalism was read as
being academic and by virtue
of its ‘muteness’ complicit with
political power. Impotent and
institutionalised. Foyer
decoration for corporations.
• Lucy L Lippard described post
painterly abstraction as visual
muzak

17. Visual Muzak?
Jules Olitski “Instant Loveland”
1968
Anthony Caro “Early One Morning”
“Silence is assent”
Carl Andre

18. “Changes in art are generally insignificant unless they involve some form of
cognitive change, and unless they presuppose some modification of those
processes of triangulation by means of which a spectator, a work of art, and a
world of practices and referents are located relative to each other.”
Charles Harrison
“Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder”

19. Minimalism
• Cool ‘expression’ over hot ‘expression’
•
Carl Andre Equivalent VIII (1966)
Firebricks, 12.7x68.6x229.2cm
Tate © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006 19

20. Birth of Minimalism - Anti Form / Anti Aesthetic
“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object”
“What you see is what you see” Frank Stella
Frank Stella. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. 1959
Frank Stella. (American, born 1936). The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. 1959. Enamel on
canvas, 7' 6 3/4" x 11' 3/4" (230.5 x 337.2 cm).

21. “Looking isn’t as simple as it looks”
Ad Reinhardt
Jasper Johns

22. 'The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to
clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.'
Ad Reindhardt

23. Key Minimalist artists
Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
Donald Judd(1928-1994)
Sol LeWitt (b.1928)
Robert Morris (.1931)
Carl Andre (b.1935)

24. 1. Minimalism as an
extension of typical
modernist tropes in art (the
reduction of form to its
purest essence) and
simultaneously a reaction
against them.
Dan Flavin
Monument for V.Tatlin, 1967

25. Vladmir Tatlin “Corner Relief” 1915

26. Untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm)
Dan Flavin
1969

27. 2. An embrace of manufacturing
techniques (serialisation, industry
materials and fabrication techniques)
that reflected something about the
realities of post war American
industry culture. As the artist Robert
Morris stated “clear decision rather
than groping craft”. Implicit in this
adoption of standardised industry
material and procedures is rejection
of a European tradition of artisanal
production, which was regarded as
being antithetical to the ideals of
democracy and anti elitism of Robert Morris
American culture. Installation at the Green Gallery, 1964

28. Carl Andre
Equivalent VIII
1966

29. 3. The adoption of anti
expressionist forms of making
art - artworks that display no
signs of touch or the hand.
Sol LeWitt Modular Floor Structure
1966
Sol LeWitt
Five Modular Structures
1972

30. The Spectator in Minimalism
• A decisive shift in the role of the
spectator. In typically Greenbergian
modernism the viewer was taken
out of time and space and history -
a disembodied eye who sought
transcendence through the visual.
In minimalism the viewers
experience of the artwork was
concretely tied to the experience of
the space as a physical being. A
physical self-conscious about
looking at the physical objects of
minimalism was key. It was a Robert Morris
profoundly different kind of artistic Untitled
1965
consumption.

31. Criticisms of Minimalism
1. Minimalism replicated the cold,
impersonal, alienating properties of
capitalist culture.
2. An alienating masculine aesthetic
which despite the claims of the artists
was perfectly suited to be co-opted by an
art market / corporate art market for
furnishing their offices and spaces with an
artistic stamp of approval.
“The face of capital, the face of authority,
the face of the father” (Anna Chave)
3. The critic Michael Fried regarded
minimalism as the ʼopposite of artʼ. For
Fried Minimalismʼs concentration on
making the viewer aware of time and
place was ʻanti-modernʼ and inherently
theatrical.

32. Conceptual Art
“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important
aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form in
art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made
beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair”
Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 1967

33. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of
development that may eventually find some form. All
ideas need not be made physical.
Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the
artist may use any form, from an expression of words
(written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
Sol Le Witts
‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”

34. • Drawing attention to the function of ideas and language within the production
and interpretation of art
• Anti optical - a suspicion about the power of images and the visual
34

35. Greenbergian modernism
had placed too much
emphasis on feelings
generated by art, as well as
a concentration on the how
as opposed to the what - it
had down played the
cognitive aspect of art -
especially the role of
language in creating
meaning and value around
art.

36. Influences
“it’s art because i say it’s art”
The power to ‘name’

37. The dematerialisation of the art object. Resistance to the art market /
to corporate buying power. Critique of the institutions of art
(museums, critics, dealers)

38. “Who has the authority to say whether a
particular configuration of shapes and colours
constitutes a ‘formal harmony’, an ‘aesthetic
totality’ - or whether it fails to do so? In practice
this came down to the word of one artist, or
more pointedly, the art critic. A system
dependent on critical authority is also clearly a
system ripe for lampoon. Hence the early avant
gardist joke of tricking a critic into waxing
lyrical over an ‘abstract painting’ made by a
brush tied to a donkey’s tail”
Paul Wood
Conceptual Art
pg. 11

39. New mediums - the embrace of non
conventional forms for artistic
communication - text, photography,
video, performance- the search for
more democratic forms and sites for
communication

40. Investigation of the status
of the art object -the
ontology of art. A self
consciously reflective
approach to the idea of
‘making art. Exploration
of non-traditional forms
for ‘expression’. The idea
that the old forms had Joseph Kosuth remarked that the
exhausted themselves ‘purest’ definition of conceptual art
would be that it is an inquiry into the foundations
(painting and sculpture). of the concept ‘art’.

41. • A self consciously reflective
approach to the idea of
‘making art’.
• What might an art object
look like? What materials
were viable as art.
Exploration of non-
traditional forms for John Hilliard
Camera Recording its Own
‘expression’. Condition (7 Apertures, 10
Speeds, 2 Mirrors) 1971
• A rejection of the idea that
‘authentic’ art production
was rooted in the acquisition
and learning of traditional
skills
Keith Arnatt “Trouser Word Piece”
1972

42. “Art doesn’t require being able to
draw, or being able to paint well or
know colours, it doesn’t require
any of those specific things that
are in the discipline, to be
interesting”
Bruce Nauman

43. A re-imagining of the
role of the spectator - a
shift from a passive
consumer of aesthetic
objects- to an active
‘reader’ and interpreter.
John Baldessari

44. Idea art becomes Ad men art
• Text art traded in the market
• Idea art becomes ikea art -”you
got to have a good idea” - the
tyranny of the good idea
• Fetish made of ‘being seen to be
sharp and smart’ - chi chi
conceptualism
• Art works become triggers or
signposts to other more
‘interesting’ ’respectable’’
serious’ areas of culture or
philosophy or science.

45. “There is a danger in this rivalry of thinking that art
which is not visually interesting must ipso facto be
clever, or alternatively of discarding visually
interesting art as being ipso facto not clever.”
Dave Beech
Artmonthly