A cold, plain art in a loud year
Much of what people remember about 1967 is colourful and loud: psychedelic posters, light shows and the crowds of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. In the galleries of New York, however, one of the most discussed movements was close to the opposite. Minimalism, as it was later widely called, offered plain boxes, rows of bricks, aluminium and steel units and bare fluorescent tubes. The artists mostly disliked the label, and the work was variously called ABC art, primary structures or literalist art. By 1967 it was established enough to attract both museum attention and a famous attack.
This article is about that movement and the argument over it. The other experiments of the same year, which questioned the art object from a different direction, are a separate story.
What was new about it
Earlier American sculpture, and the painting of the Abstract Expressionists, was generally seen as expressive. A work was understood to carry the artist’s feeling, or to be a composition whose parts were balanced against each other. The artists now grouped as Minimalists rejected both ideas. They used simple, often repeated shapes, industrial materials and fabrication in factories, and they avoided the marks of the artist’s hand. The object was to be exactly what it appeared to be.
Donald Judd, who was also an influential critic, set out his position in an essay of 1965 called “Specific Objects”. He argued that the best new work was neither painting nor sculpture in the old sense, and that it did not need to be defended on grounds of composition. His own work of the period consisted of boxes and “stacks” of identical units, fixed to the wall at equal intervals, in metal, plywood and coloured Plexiglas.
The artists
Carl Andre, who made sculpture from identical units laid directly on the floor, was one of the most radical. His arrangements of firebricks and metal plates were sometimes walked on, and they shifted the emphasis from height to ground. He had shown pieces of this kind in 1966, and they were still being discussed in 1967.
Dan Flavin worked with commercially made fluorescent light fixtures in standard lengths and colours. The result was an art made of light and architecture rather than of a conventional object, since the light changes the room it is in. Many of his pieces were named as tributes or dedications, including a long series for the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.
Sol LeWitt, then in his late thirties, made open modular structures, cubes and grids from simple units, and he was already working out the logic of systems that he would later describe in writing. He is often classed as a Minimalist in these years, though his emphasis on the idea behind the work moved him toward conceptual art, a development covered in a separate article.
Others closely associated with the movement included Robert Morris, who wrote influential essays on sculpture, Tony Smith, whose large black steel forms such as Die were a precedent, and Ronald Bladen. The group was never organised.
Where it was seen
Minimalism reached the public through a sequence of exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. The Jewish Museum’s show Primary Structures, in the spring of 1966, brought many of the artists together for the first time before a wide audience, and a Guggenheim exhibition of what was called systemic painting followed in the autumn of that year. In 1967 the work continued to be shown by New York galleries and discussed in the art press, and in the autumn a Washington exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, titled Scale as Content, put works by Bladen, Barnett Newman and Tony Smith on display. Judd, Flavin and Andre would be given larger museum exhibitions in the following years.
Collectors and critics were divided, and the plain, factory-made look was not to every taste. It is fair to say that the work did not go uncontested.
Michael Fried and “Art and Objecthood”
The sharpest critique came in the summer of 1967, when Artforum published “Art and Objecthood” by the critic Michael Fried. Fried, who admired modernist painting and the sculpture of Anthony Caro, argued that the new work, which he called literalist art, was fundamentally different from modernist art. He claimed that it depended on the viewer’s experience of the object in a room, in time, and in relation to the body, and that this made it theatrical. For Fried, theatricality was a fault, and he argued that art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.
The essay was heavily criticised, including by artists who felt that it misread what they were doing. Artists and other critics answered in print. Yet the essay is still widely read, partly because it identified qualities that the artists themselves had also emphasised, such as the viewer’s presence in the space of the work. Where Fried saw a danger, many of the artists saw the point of what they were doing.
The terms “theatricality” and “presence” became part of the vocabulary used to discuss sculpture.
The art world around it
Minimalism was not the only thing happening. Andy Warhol was producing prints and films, and the colours of psychedelic rock posters were everywhere on the West Coast. The contrast was not accidental: some Minimalists were interested in industrial materials and in the discipline of a system, while the counterculture was drawn to sensation and excess. The movement also coincided with the years of Vietnam War escalation, and many artists were politically active in the late 1960s, though their work was not usually about the war.
In the year itself, Minimalism was a settled and controversial presence in New York, and its leading artists had produced much of their best-known work by the end of 1967.