“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 PaineCommon Sense

First published 1776

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.

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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

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

A Change is Gonna Come

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

Vietnam

Hope Extinguished - a Growing Militancy

Text

Assassination of Martin Luther King

Communiqué 9

WE are getting closer.

We are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the oppressive State machine...

secret files in the universitieswork study in the factoriesthe census at homesocial security filescomputersTVGiro passportswork permitsinsurance cards.Bureaucracy and technology used against the people...to speed up our workto slow down our minds and actionsto obliterate the truth.Police computers cannot tell the truth. They just record our `crimes'. The pigmurders go unrecorded. Stephen McCarthy Peter Savva, David Owale -- The murderof 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 pocketsand anger in their minds.

We are getting closer.

Off the system and its property.

Power to the people.

• 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

May 68 - Student Protests

Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni (1970)

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The Dematerialisation of the Art ObjectFrom this to that...

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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

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

Anthony Caro “Early One Morning”

“Silence is assent” Carl Andre

Jules Olitski “Instant Loveland” 1968

Visual Muzak?

“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”

Minimalism • Cool ‘expression’ over hot ‘expression’•

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Carl Andre Equivalent VIII (1966)Firebricks, 12.7x68.6x229.2cmTate © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006

Frank Stella. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. 1959Frank 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).

“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

Birth of Minimalism - Anti Form / Anti Aesthetic

“Looking isn’t as simple as it looks”Ad Reinhardt

Jasper Johns

'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

Key Minimalist artistsDan Flavin (1933-1996)Donald Judd(1928-1994)

Sol LeWitt (b.1928)Robert Morris (.1931)Carl Andre (b.1935)

Dan FlavinMonument for V.Tatlin, 1967

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.

Vladmir Tatlin “Corner Relief” 1915

Untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm) Dan Flavin 1969

Robert MorrisInstallation at the Green Gallery, 1964

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 American culture.

Carl AndreEquivalent VIII1966

Sol LeWittFive Modular Structures1972

Sol LeWitt Modular Floor Structure1966

3. The adoption of anti expressionist forms of making art - artworks that display no signs of touch or the hand.

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 profoundly different kind of artistic consumption.

Robert MorrisUntitled 1965

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.

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

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain ofdevelopment that may eventually find some form. Allideas need not be made physical.

Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, theartist may use any form, from an expression of words(written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.

Sol Le Witts‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”

• 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

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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.

Influences“it’s art because i say it’s art”

The power to ‘name’

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

“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 WoodConceptual Art pg. 11

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

Joseph Kosuth remarked that the ‘purest’ definition of conceptual artwould be that it is an inquiry into the foundationsof the concept ‘art’.

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 exhausted themselves (painting and sculpture).

John Hilliard Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 Speeds, 2 Mirrors) 1971

• 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 ‘expression’.

• 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

“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

John Baldessari

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

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.

“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