This document provides an overview of art history from 1965-1970, focusing on key movements and artists. It summarizes: 1) Minimalism emerged as a rejection of Abstract Expressionism, emphasizing simplicity of form and impersonality. Artists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris created modular, industrial sculptures. 2) Conceptual art developed in the late 1960s, prioritizing ideas over aesthetics. Pioneers like Sol Lewitt created guidelines for works that could be realized by anyone. 3) Site-specific and land art works, like those by Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, explored entropy and challenged boundaries between art and nature.

1. History of 20th Century Art
1965 - 70

2. 1965 - 70
“It is no longer a choice between violence and
nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or
nonexistence.”
-MLK Jr., from I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, read
on April 3, 1968
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
April 4, 1968
John Filo, Kent State University, May 4, 1970
Woodstock festival, August 1969

3. Word Presentations
• Anti-illusionism
• Deskilling
• Other important concepts addressed
today: serial forms, voyeurism, part-object,
entropy

4. 1965: Abstract Expressionism vs. Minimalism
Vs.
Mark Rothko, No. 3/No.13 (Magenta, Black Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965
Green and Orange), 1949

5. 1965: Minimalism Close Read
Group Discussion Questions
(write down answers and hand in at end of class)
• In his article “Specific Objects” (1965), artist and critic Donald Judd outlined
the essential characteristics of Minimalist art. What are these? See pp. 536-
37 in your textbook.
• Fellow artist Robert Morris wrote that this new art shouted “…no to
transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions,
historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual
experience.” What do you think explains this defiance against past art forms?
Do you see the same in other art of 1960s? If so, how?
• Then, review your observations about your assigned focus artwork and be
prepared to share it with the class.

6. Minimalism – “Being in the World” (Merleau-Ponty)
• To reject art made from an “a priori
system” (Judd’s term for a
preconceived idea or concept)
• To “present” not represent
• Tenets of Minimalism outlined by
Donald Judd & Robert Morris
Characteristics of Minimalism
1) radical simplification of shapes
2) abandonment of pedestal
3) “death of the author” – impersonal
quality (no “innerness”)
4) Industrialized, serialized character
(plywood, plexiglas sometimes forged
in a metal shop, acc. to artist’s
instructions
5) No “original” (endlessly reproducible
simulacrum)
6) No distinction between painting and
sculpture (anti-Greenbergian)
7) Anti-illusionist and anti-compositional
8) Context/site important
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963
Judd
Untitled
1982
Marfa
Texas

7. Minimalism – “Just one thing after another” (Donald Judd)
• Sculpture as place
• To resist composition by arranging
objects in a logical, orderly fashion as
dictated by their inherent properties
• Flavin and Andre (also Judd, Morris &
LeWiit) included in Primary
Structures, an seminal Minimalist
exhibition in 1966 at Jewish Museum
in New York
• Reflected a continued movement
away from illusionism, spiritual
transcendence, and beauty in art
• A move away from “heroic scale,
anguished decisions, historicizing
narrative, valuable artifact” (Robert
Morris), all pertinent to Abstract
Expressionism
Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII , 1978
Brancusi, Endless Column, 1937-38

8. Minimalism – “Being in the World” (Merleau-Ponty)
• 3 L’s placed 3 different
ways
• Meaning and form are
relative, different
depending on placement &
perspective (of viewer)
• “Quality of unitariness”
Robert Morris
Untitled (L-Beams)
1965-67

9. Conceptual Art – Duchamp’s Last Word
Duchamp, Etant Donnés (Given: #1 The
Waterfall
2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66,
Philadelphia
Museum of Art

10. Conceptual Art: Duchamp’s Last Word
• Thought to have given up art for chess
• Resurgence in popularity in 1960s (major
retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum in
1963)
• Secretly made this assemblage over 20 yr.
period; intended for it to be unveiled in
Philadelphia one yr. after his death (in 1968)
• Elaborately crafted (consists of brick wall,
mannequin, motorized waterfall, gas lamp,
assorted twigs, hand-painted background)
• Result of numerous drawn and sculpted
studies
• A commentary on the historical nature of art
(the Renaissance window) and its relationship
with its viewer
• Viewer can’t be a detached observer, but a
voyeur (must stare into peephole like peeping
tom)
• Viewer’s gaze aligns with female genitalia
(vanishing point)
Duchamp, Etant Donnés (Given: #1 The Waterfall
2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66, Philadelphia
Museum of Art

12. “Caught
in the Act”
Durer, from Four Books on Human
Proportions, 1528
Gazing at Manet’s Olympia, Musee d’Orsay

13. Postminimalism
Bourgeois, La Fillette, 1968
(above) and Yayoi
Kusama’s Infinity Mirror
Room (1965)
Robert Mapplethorpe
Louise Bourgeois, 1982
• Eccentric
Abstraction
exhibition in 1966
(Lucy Lippard)
• More interested in
the inherent
properties of
materials (industrial
and organic) than in
abstract forms
• Allowing the forms
to be what they want
to be (succumb to
gravity/chance—
Serra)
• Process important
• Often gendered

14. Postminimalism
Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969, cheesecloth, latex, fiberglass

15. everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.
from a total other reference point, is it
possible? I have learned anything is possible,
I know that. that vision or concept will come
through total risk, freedom, discipline. I will do
it. today another step, on two sheets we put
on the glass. did the two differentlyone was
cast-poured over hard, irregular, thick plastic;
one with screening, crumpled, they will all be
different. both the rubber sheets and the
fiberglass. lengths and widths. question how
and why in putting it together? can it be
different each time? why not? how to achieve
by not achieving? how to make by not
making? it's all in that. it's not the new, it is
what is yet not known,thought, seen, touched
but really what is not. and that is.
Hanging. Rubberised, loose, open cloth. Fiberglass-reinforced
plastic. Began somewhere in November-December, 1968.
Worked. Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill. Statement.
Resuming work on piece,have one complete from back then.
Statement, October 15, 1969, out of hospital, short stay this
time,third time. Same day students and Douglas Johns began
work. MORATORIUM DAYPiece is in many parts. Each in itself
is a complete statement,together am not certain how it will be. A
fact. I cannot be certain yet. Can be from illness, can be from
honestyirregular, edges, six to seven feet long. textures coarse,
rough, changing. see through, non see through, consistent,
inconsistent. enclosed tightly by glass like encasement just
hanging there. then more, others, will they hang there in the
same way? try a continuous flowing one. try some random
closely spaced. try some distant far spaced. they are tight and
formal but very ethereal, sensitive, fragile. see through mostlynot
painting, not sculpture, it's there though. I remember I wanted to
get to non art, non connotive,non anthropomorphic, non
geometric, non, nothing,
From Finch College Museum of Art, 1969
Catalogue statement

16. Postminimalism Hesse
• Hesse also a sculptor
• Identified with Post-
Minimalism due to materials
used (latex, fabric, etc),
anthropomorphic forms
(Eccentric Abstraction
exhibition, 1966)
• Worked with inflexible,
geometric and organic, soft
materials (cheesecloth,
latex, fiberglass)
• Her anthropomorphic forms
seen as expressive of the
human body
• Works read as clever
comments on artistic
conventions and on
manifestations of erotic
desire and longing
• Inspired later Feminist art
Hang-Up
1965-66
Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966

17. Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969
Serra, Close Pin Prop, 1969
Postminimalism
Sculpture as building

18. Postminimalism http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/87
Richard Serra, Splash Piece: Casting, 1969
Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969
http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/audio/107?autoplay=true

19. Site-Specific Art – Being in the “Expanded Field”
• Earthworks a type of site-specific
art
• Took the Minimalist concept
of the “expanded field” into
nature
• Challenged the limits of the
art market
• Explored boundaries
between public and private
realms
• Primarily concerned with the
“law of entropy”
• Akin to Pollock’s drip process
on a large scale extended
into the landscape
Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AmpyiR6kj8

20. Site-Specific Art – Being in the “Expanded Field”
• Matta-Clark
also interested
in entropy
• Encountered
Smithson’s
work at “Earth
Art” exhibition
at Cornell in
1969 while
architecture
student
• Aggression
toward the
built
environment?
• Anarchitecture
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_splitting.html
Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque

21. I967 - Arte Povera
Giuseppe Penone, Eight Meter Tree, 1969, wood

22. Minimalism vs. Conceptual Art
Judd, Untitled, 1982, Marfa, Texas
Vs.
Sol Lewitt, Five Modular Units, 1971

23. Conceptual Art – Art as Idea
• In 1968, first conceptual art exhibitions
organized by Seth Siegelaub including
the first “official” generation of
conceptual artists
• Inspired by Duchamp & the
Readymade (idea over aesthetic),
Johns, Warhol
• The serial image and object (“just one
thing after another”—Donald Judd)
• Not interested in uniqueness, favored
mass-production
• Artist-book and text-based works
• Sol Lewitt (father of conceptual art)
used the serial object in his modular
grids
• Work as set of guidelines anyone can
follow (no artist as auteur)
“What the work of art looks like isn’t too important…The idea becomes a
machine that makes the art…“It is the objective of the artist who is
concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to
the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become
Emotionally dry.” – Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967
Sol Lewitt, Five Modular Units, 1971
Ruscha, from
Twenty-Six
Gasoline Stations
1963
http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari_lewitt.html

24. Sol Lewitt – Something Along those Lines
Sol Lewitt “Something Along those Lines”, 1971,
Boston Museum (left), and Eric Doeringer Wall
Drawing #118, 2009 (right)

25. Conceptual Art – The Spectator Becomes Reader
Lewitt, Red Square, White Letters, 1963

26. Conceptual Art – The Spectator Becomes Reader
• 60s Conceptual art was inherently self-referential—critiquing its own history, process, and form
Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, Black
Blue and Grey, 1920 Lewitt, Red Square, White Letters, 1963